As you may be aware, The
Gallery is hosting This is Now: Film and Video After Punk
(1978-85), which was opened last week by exhibition curator
Nicole Yip, Director of LUX Scotland.
As a direct result of the exhibition,
the Library has purchased a number of books which highly influenced the work of
the Artists on display. The books are available to borrow from the Library.
"While the eyes may
lead to the soul, the mouth exposes the vitality of the body. Examining the
movements of the mouth, or what LaBelle terms "micro-oralities,"
Lexicon of the Mouth considers the relation of voice and mouth, suggesting that
the importance of voicing is inextricably bound to the exertions of the oral.
Laughter, whispering, singing, burping and self-talk, among many others,
feature as choreographies by which to gauge the exchange of self and
surrounding. LaBelle argues for a more attentive view onto voice by expanding
appreciation for how whistling links us to animals, coughing ruptures all
possibility for speech, and the inner voice, or "unvoice", operates
as a shadow-body. Subsequently, assumptions around voice are unsettled, reminding
discourses surrounding the performativity of the body, and the politics of
speech, of the acts of the tongue, the lips and the glottis as primary
negotiations between interior and exterior"-
A groundbreaking
contribution to debates on women's oppression and consciousness, and the
connections between socialism and feminism. Examining feminist consciousness
from various vantage points - social, sexual, cultural and economic - Sheila
Rowbotham identifies the social conditions under which it developed, showing
how the roles women take on within the capitalist economy have shaped ideas
about family and sexuality.
In this first
installment of acclaimed music writer David Toop's interdisciplinary and
sweeping overview of free improvisation, Into the Maelstrom: Music,
Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom: Before 1970 introduces the philosophy
and practice of improvisation (both musical and otherwise) within the
historical context of the post-World War II era. Neither strictly
chronological, or exclusively a history, Into the Maelstrom investigates a wide
range of improvisational tendencies: from surrealist automatism to
stream-of-consciousness in literature and vocalization; from the free music of
Percy Grainger to the free improvising groups emerging out of the early 1960s
(Group Ongaku, Nuova Consonanza, MEV, AMM, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble); and
from free jazz to the strands of free improvisation that sought to distance
itself from jazz. In exploring the diverse ways in which spontaneity became a
core value in the early twentieth century as well as free improvisation's
connection to both 1960s rock (The Beatles, Cream, Pink Floyd) and the era of
post-Cagean indeterminacy in composition, Toop provides a definitive and
all-encompassing exploration of free improvisation up to 1970, ending with the
late 1960s international developments of free music from Roscoe Mitchell in
Chicago, Peter Brotzmann in Berlin and Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg in
Amsterdam.
This is a superb
collection of interviews with some of the most significant and influential
names in art, architecture, film, music, history, literature and philosophy
from the 20th and 21st centuries. Since 1993, renowned curator, writer,
cultural instigator, professional conversationalist - and currently Co-director
of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the
Serpentine Gallery in London - Hans Ulrich Obrist has been conducting
interviews with some of the most significant architects, artists, filmmakers,
historians, musicians, philosophers, and writers of the 20th and 21st
centuries. "Interviews Volume 2" brings together 70 interviews, taken
from an archive of nearly 2,000 hours of recordings that reveal an intellectual
geology of the last 100 years. Encyclopaedic in scope and intimate in tone,
these exchanges produce an array of biographical trajectories, cultural
experiments, theoretical adventures, unrealized projects, and unknown
epiphanies.
Christine de Pizan
(c.1364 1430) was France's first professional woman of letters. Her pioneering
Book of the City of Ladies begins when, feeling frustrated and miserable after
reading a male writer's tirade against women, Christine has a dreamlike vision
where three virtues Reason, Rectitude and Justice appear to correct this view.
They instruct her to build an allegorical city in which womankind can be
defended against slander, its walls and towers constructed from examples of
female achievement both from her own day and the past: ranging from warriors,
inventors and scholars to prophetesses, artists and saints. Christine de
Pizan's spirited defence of her sex was unique for its direct confrontation of
the misogyny of her day, and offers a telling insight into the position of
women in medieval culture. THE CITY OF LADIES provides positive images of
women, ranging from warriors and inventors, scholars to prophetesses, and
artists to saints. The book also offers a fascinating insight into the debates
and controversies about the position of women in medieval culture.
En Abime explores
listening and reading as creative and critical activities driven by memory and
return, reshaped into the present. It introduces an idea of aural landscape as
a historically defined cultural experience, and contributes with previously
unexplored references to the emerging area of listening as artistic practice,
adopting an expansive approach across poetry, visual art and literature. -
poetic, incisive, grounded in politics and history yet continually pushing at
the edges of what we now consider to be sound. She interrogates notions of
music and the shifting experience that is silence with a freshness and
coherence that is inspiring David Toop, Author of Ocean of Sound, Haunted
Weather and Sinister Resonance - compulsive and fast, rushing with you through
textual territories that seem spoken, direct and contemporary while being
nostalgic - invoking a past that creates the present tense. Salome Voegelin,
author of Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art
Although family values
are frequently lamented for being in decline, our society continues to be
structured around the nuclear family. The Anti-Social Family dissects the
network of household, kinship and sexual relations that is the dominant family
form in advanced capitalist societies. This now classic book explores the
personal and social needs that the family ideally meets but more often denies.
Finally the authors propose a moral and political practice directed beyond the
family towards more egalitarian caring alternatives.
Sex, or the Unbearable
is a dialogue between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, two of our leading
theorists of sexuality, politics, and culture. In juxtaposing sex and the
unbearable they don't propose that sex is unbearable, only that it unleashes
unbearable contradictions that we nonetheless struggle to bear. In Berlant and
Edelman's exchange, those terms invoke disturbances produced in encounters with
others, ourselves, and the world, disturbances that tap into threats induced by
fears of loss or rupture as well as by our hopes for repair. Through virtuoso
interpretations of works of cinema, photography, critical theory, and
literature, including Lydia Davis's story "Break It Down" (reprinted
in full here), Berlant and Edelman explore what it means to live with
negativity, with those divisions that may be irreparable. Together, they
consider how such negativity affects politics, theory, and intimately felt
encounters. But where their critical approaches differ, neither hesitates to
voice disagreement. Their very discussion-punctuated with moments of
frustration, misconstruction, anxiety, aggression, recognition, exhilaration,
and inspiration-enacts both the difficulty and the potential of encounter, the
subject of this unusual exchange between two eminent critics and close friends.
Previously unpublished
script for Robert Morris' installation "Hearing," first exhibited at
Leo Castelli Gallery in 1972.
Dan Graham's Rock My
Religion (1982--1984) is a video essay populated by punk and rock performers
(Patti Smith, Jim Morrison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Eddie Cochran) and historical
figures (including Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers). It represented a coming
together of narrative voice-overs, singing and shouting voices, and jarring
sounds and overlaid texts that proposed a historical genealogy of rock music
and an ambitious thesis about the origins of North America's popular culture.
Because of its passionate embrace of underground music, its low-fi aesthetics,
interest in politics, and liberal approach to historiography, the video has
become a landmark work in the history of contemporary moving image and art; but
it has remained, possibly for the same reasons, one of Graham's least written
about works--underappreciated and possibly misunderstood by the critics who
otherwise celebrate him. This illustrated study of Graham's groundbreaking work
fills that critical gap. Kodwo Eshun examines Rock My Religion not only in
terms of contemporary art and Graham's wider body of work but also as part of
the broader culture of the time. He explores the relationship between Graham
and New York's underground music scene of the 1980s, connecting the artistic
methods of the No Wave bands--especially their group dynamics and relationship
to the audience--and Rock My Religion's treatment of working class identity and
culture.
Little Labors is a
slanted, enchanted literary miscellany. Varying in length from just a sentence
or paragraph to a several-page story or essay, Galchen's puzzle pieces assemble
into a shining, unpredictable, mordant picture of the ordinary-extraordinary nature
of babies and literature. Anecdotal or analytic, each part opens up an odd and
tender world of wonder.
This is Now: Film and Video After Punk (1978-85), which runs
until Wednesday 26 October, also encompasses a programme of free talks and film
screenings that are listed on the listed on the website. Booking for these
events is recommended.
