Surveying almost 6,500 American campgrounds through their online reservation sites, Martin Hogue mapped the small differences and mass uniformity of this distinct landscape.
MIT Press
Posted inBooks
Japan, in from the Wilderness: Reiko Tomii’s Expanded Modern-Art History
The Japanese-born art historian Reiko Tomii is one of those researchers who is both passionate about her subjects and recognized among her peers for her meticulous mapping of the cultural-intellectual terrain from which they emerge.
Posted inBooks
An Anthology of Queer Art Theory Puts Artists First
Whitechapel Gallery and the MIT Press recently published Queer, the latest addition to Documents of Contemporary Art, a popular series of anthologies on major themes and ideas in contemporary art.
Posted inBooks
Topless but Far From Helpless: Charlotte Moorman’s Avant-Garde Life
So-called revisionist art history has made room for numerous, formerly overlooked or ignored artists in Western Civ’s recognized canon, but what is that establishment narrative to make of a big-boned Southern gal who played avant-garde cello in the nude while submerged in a Plexiglas tank filled with river water?
Posted inBooks
What Is an Object?
Before even opening The Object, Whitechapel Gallery and the MIT Press’s latest installment in the Documents of Contemporary Art series, the book’s title stares back, interpolates itself, asking questions: What is an object? Which object?
Posted inArt
Muriel Cooper, ‘Messages and Means’ at Columbia University
By Muriel Cooper’s hand, a charismatic, digitally transmuted Bauhaus aesthetic came to grace the covers of some of the twentieth century’s most influential scholarly books on design, architecture, economics, biology, computer science, and sociology.
Posted inBooks
Digging Into Ai Weiwei’s Online Diary
Reading through detained Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s blog, recently translated by Lee Ambrozy and published as an eponymous book by MIT Press, isn’t fun, and it’s not for the faint of heart. A carefully selected culling of the artist’s massive production of posts between 2006 and 2009, the volume is a guts-and-all portrait of the man who is in all likelihood the most important artist working in the world today. That he remains arrested without charge by the Chinese government only heightens the strained urgency of Ai’s posts, an avalanche of “writings, interviews and digital rants,” as the book’s tagline puts it, that range through political philosophy, aesthetic inquiry and simple documentation of daily life.