RESHAPE: A Workbook to Reimagine the Art World

This book proposes a provocative interpretation of the relationship between the normative imagination defined as a cognitive mode characteristic of the era of affective capitalism. Porta analyzes gender, fashion, artistic creation, and surveillance from the perspective of a regulatory drive, a continuously renovated and imperative push for normalcy that now comes not from the state or mass media, but from citizens themselves. These, united in a spontaneous popular court, armed with smartphones, and driven by a juridical compulsion, become the axes of societies of control. In this way, the distinctive pathology of our times gives rise to a globalized game: normopathy for all.

Celebrating ten years of Barnes’ White Rabbit.

He makes everyone smile on a miserable day,

And does lots of things in his own unique way,

He loves art and performance and sometimes he’ll sing,

His outlook on life is a wonderful thing.

He’s quite a celebrity and travelled afar,

He’s met famous people some of them stars,

New countries, new culture and so much more,

To live life to the full is what he aims for.

Around his home town he’s a familiar sight,

With his bright coloured clothes and Japanese bike.

He cycles around shouting hello as he goes,

This is White Rabbit who everyone knows.

Let’s Pretend None of This Ever Happened documents neon, LED and other text works by the British artist Tim Etchells. The book creates a compelling and comprehensive investigation of Etchells’ projects in public space and galleries, leading with images of key works installed in sites all over the world.

Alongside its wide-ranging image survey, this work features an extended conversation between the artist and Jule Hillgärtner, director of Kunstverein Braunschweig, as well as a text by curator Ben Borthwick.

Surveying the full range and approaches of Etchells’ sculptural work with text, Let’s Pretend None of This Ever Happened creates dialogue across the artist’s works spanning sixteen years, as well as exploring the complex relation between individual works and the different contexts in which they have been installed over the last several decades.

Dinner with America is the second in a trilogy of performance installations addressing the complexities of cultural identity in the 21st Century. Where the first piece in the trilogy, Mr Quiver (Nuffield Autumn 07), explored Indian and English stereotypes, this piece questions what America means to us.

As the performance space shifts and transforms around the audience, it gently uncovers themes of consumerism, rights, ownership, voices, hopes, harvest and division in a visually compelling and unusual piece of work.

This booklet was published in November 2008 to accompany the touring production of Dinner with America by Rajni Shah Theatre. All images, films and texts were made during and as part of the creative process. They are designed to illuminate both the core and outlying ideas that inhabited the artists’ thinking at the time of making the show, between February 2007 and November 2008.

This work is in French.

Take Me To Your Favourite Place is an audio and written journal that starts with artist Maria Sideri’s trip to Brussels. The work suggests a subjective geography that observes and reinvents the city and its miscellaneous facts, in order to create movements between the spaces of a metropolis in constant transition.

Celebrating the first-ever retrospective exhibition of performance art icon Jess Dobkin, this book reflects on the internationally acclaimed artist’s playful and provocative practice as a performer, curator, and community activist, and asks: How do archives perform? With contributions by more than twenty renowned performance scholars, archivists, and creative collaborators and a riot of full-colour photographs, Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective provides unparalleled access to Dobkin’s artistic process and production from the last thirty years.

This book is in Italian.

“Italian Performance Art” embarks on the adventure of rendering the unspeakable in performance through text, the revelation of a tension of being in a discursive and communicative mode that is like putting into words Lucio Fontana’s Gesture on canvas or John Cage’s Silence in music. Structured with contributions from leading researchers (Brunelli, Fontana, Frangione, Lupieri, Rossini, Sullo) and a substantial historical and bibliographical apparatus (Fontana, Merega, Rossini), the work is the first publication to comprehensively address the situation of performance art in Italy, offering a comprehensive framework and tracing the main historical reference points. Starting with Futurism, through the action poetry of the twentieth-century neo-avant-garde and Body Art, it defines the most recent relationships between creative gesture and new technologies. The volume includes a collection of theoretical and critical essays and a section of color monographic notes illustrating the work of those artists continuously involved in the field of performance art.

This is the first collection of writings by Sarah Boulton and brings together her happenings, encounters and happening-upons.

The first half of this collection is a series of texts that describe encounters and happening-upons, which are two directions of experiencing. Encounters are what happens to [her] and happening-upons are what [she] find happening. [She’s] made them into happenings by way of writings.

The second half of texts are happenings that [she’s] made since 2012 that [she has] now documented into words.

Throughout the collection, there are texts that Boulton has written in respinse to some of these writings, which are continuations that circle back and move forward the ideas and actions over time.

Beauty Kit is an on-going project by the Belgian-Chilean artist Isabel Burr Raty, a hands-on research on the human body as a territory for sustainable agriculture. Isabel Burr Raty’s BK Female Farm is a mobile farm where she and other females harvest their bodily juices to produce beauty care products, which are used for treatments in her BK Spa and critically discussed in her BK Focus Group. Through a playful, embodied and participatory art practice, Beauty Kit tackles radical questions on ecology and exploitation, sexuality and agency.

What position does America occupy in the recent history of western philosophy?

At a time when the syntagm “America” has come to crystallize a certain understanding of the world order, interrogating the place that it occupies in our intellectual and haunted tradition is also a way to engage critically with the violence attached to it. America’s self-understanding involves violence, but this violence may well be different from what we imagined.

In this short book, the leading German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen puts forward a fresh and original account of pop music. He argues that pop music is not so much a form of music as a constellation of different media channels, social spaces and behavioural systems, of which music is only a part. Its own logic of attraction is based less on compositions and the expression of subjectivity and more on indexicality, real or psuedo-involunatary effects as recorded by sound technologies, and on studio discipline and staging, and hence on performance.

By elaborating his innovative account of pop music as a constellation, Diederichsen develops a theory that distinguishes itself from sociology, cultural studies, media studies and ethnography, while at the same time drawing on and encompassing them all.

This book is a philosophical essay on the sun. It draws on Georges Bataille’s theories of the solar economy and solar violence and demonstrates their relevance to a world affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.

Taking a step from solar economy to solar politics, Timofeeva locates the grounds for it in solidarity with nature, treated neither as a master nor as a slave, but as a comrade.

The book will appeal to students, academics, artists, and other readers interested in the philosophy of nature, ecology, social and political theory, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and the humanities generally.