An insider's account of the art and artists of the most interesting Russian artistic phenomenon since the Russian Avant-Garde. In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of “unofficial” artists in Moscow—artists not recognized by the state, not covered by state-controlled media, and cut off from wider audiences—created artworks that gave artistic form to a certain historical moment: the experience of Soviet socialism. The Moscow conceptualists not only reflected and analyzed by artistic means a spectacle of Soviet life but also preserved its memory for a future that turned out to be different from the officially predicted one. They captured both the shabby austerity of everyday Soviet life and the utopian energy of Soviet culture. In History Becomes Form, Boris Groys offers a contemporary's account of what he calls the most interesting Russian artistic phenomenon since the Russian avant-garde. The book collects Groys's essays on Moscow conceptualism, most of them written after his emigration to the West in 1981. The individual artists of the group—including Ilya Kabakov, Lev Rubinstein, and Ivan Chuikov—became known in the West after perestroika, but until now the artistic movement as a whole has received little attention. Groys's account sheds light not only on the Moscow Conceptualists and their work but also on the dilemmas of Soviet artists during the cold war.

A brand-new, comprehensive history of world animation

"This is an anthology of essays that first appeared in The Artist as Curator, a series that occupied eleven issues of Mousse from no. 41 (December 2013/January 2014) to no. 51 (December 2015/January 2016). It set out to examine what was then a profoundly influential but still under-studied phenomenon, a history that had yet to be written: the fundamental role artists have played as curators. Taking that ontologically ambiguous thing we call "the exhibition" as a critical medium, artists have often radically rethought conventional forms of exhibition making. This anthology surveys seminal examples of such exhibitions from the postwar to the present, including rare documents and illustrations. It includes an introduction and the twenty essays that first appeared in Mousse, a newly commissioned afterword by Hans Ulrich Obrist, and two additional essays that appear here for the first time."

Ever since its first publication in 1992, the New York Times bestselling The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. "Profoundly realistic and important...supremely timely and cogent...the first book to fully fathom the depth and range of the changes now sweeping through the world." —The Washington Post Book World Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.

A TLS Book of the Year 2017 In this, the first anthology of Russian contemporary art writing to be published outside Russia, many of the country’s most prominent contemporary artists, writers, philosophers, curators and historians come together to examine the region’s contemporary art, culture and and theory. With contributions from Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Boris Groys, Dmitri Prigov, Anton Vidokle, Keti Chukhrov, Oxana Timofeeva, Pavel Pepperstein, Arseny Zhilyaev and Masha Sumnina amongst many others, this definitive collection reveals a compelling portrait of a vibrant and complex culture: one built on a contradicting dialectic between the material and the ideal, and battling its own histories and ideologies.

In Writing After War, John Limon develops a theory of the relationship of war in general to literature in general, in order to make sense of American literary history in particular. Applying the work of war theorists Carl von Clausewitz and Elaine Scarry, John Limon argues that The Iliad inaugurates Western literature on the failure of war to be duel-like, to have a beautiful form. War's failure is literature's justification. American literary history is demarcated by wars, as if literary epochs, like the history of literature itself, required bloodshed to commence. But in chapters on periods of literary history from realism, generally taken to be a product of the Civil War, through modernism, usually assumed to be a prediction or result of the Great War, up to postmodernism which followed World War II and spanned Vietnam, Limon argues that, despite the looming presence of war in American history, the techniques that define these periods are essentially ways of not writing war. From James and Twain, through Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and even Hemingway, to Pynchon, our national literary history is not hopelessly masculinist, Limon argues. Instead, it arrives naturally at Bobbie Ann Mason and Maxine Hong Kingston. Kingston brings the discussion full circle: The Woman Warrior, like The Iliad, appears to condemn the fall from duel to war that is literature's endless opening.

This book is an ambitious and expansive examination of the visual language of self-injury in performance art from the 1960s to the present. Inspired by the gendered nature of discussion around self-harm, the book challenges established readings of risk-taking and self-injury in global performance practice. The interdisciplinary methodology draws from art history and sociology to provide a new critical analysis of the relationship between masculinity and self-inflicted injury. Based upon interviews with a range of artists around the world, it offers an innovative understanding of the diverse meanings behind self-injury in performance, and delves into the gendered coding of self-harming bodies. Individual chapters examine the work of Ron Athey, Günter Brus, Wafaa Bilal, Franko B, André Stitt, Pyotr Pavlensky, and Yang Zhichao, offering a new perspective on the forms and functions of self-injury in performance art. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, performance studies, gender studies, and cultural studies.