In 1978, Zofia Rydet (1911–97) began work on a monumental project that would come to be known as her “Sociological Record”: photographing the people of Poland at their homes, she produced an extraordinary archive of around twenty thousand negatives. The images include faces, interiors, furnishings, and more. The undertaking consumed Rydet so completely that she was never able to give it final shape through a book or an art show.

Object Lessons, a new volume of essays inspired by an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, helps to dispel the myths that have formed around the project in recent years and introduces the photographer to a new global audience. The essays here contextualize and interpret “Sociological Record” from different perspectives, opening up the work to further inquiry as both an object of interpretation and a subject of theoretical interest. Rydet herself remained unresolved over the question of how to define her work, leaving the viewer to ponder whether her magnum opus is a piece of art or science. What does remain undisputed is that “Sociological Record” is a striking testimony of its time.

A fascinating celebration of Rydet’s work that is sure to spur on fresh debate about art as a social practice and a tool of knowledge, Object Lessons reminds us of photography’s incredible power to provide a visual way of thinking and a provocative method for archiving the world.
 

In our architectural pursuits, we often seem to be in search of something newer, grander, or more efficient—and this phenomenon is not novel. In the spring of 1910 hundreds of workers labored day and night to demolish the Gillender Building in New York, once the loftiest office tower in the world, in order to make way for a taller skyscraper. The New York Times puzzled over those who would sacrifice the thirteen-year-old structure, “as ruthlessly as though it were some ancient shack.” In New York alone, the Gillender joined the original Grand Central Terminal, the Plaza Hotel, the Western Union Building, and the Tower Building on the list of just one generation’s razed metropolitan monuments.

In the innovative and wide-ranging Obsolescence, Daniel M. Abramson investigates this notion of architectural expendability and the logic by which buildings lose their value and utility. The idea that the new necessarily outperforms and makes superfluous the old, Abramson argues, helps people come to terms with modernity and capitalism’s fast-paced change. Obsolescence, then, gives an unsettling experience purpose and meaning.

Belief in obsolescence, as Abramson shows, also profoundly affects architectural design. In the 1960s, many architects worldwide accepted the inevitability of obsolescence, experimenting with flexible, modular designs, from open-plan schools, offices, labs, and museums to vast megastructural frames and indeterminate building complexes. Some architects went so far as to embrace obsolescence’s liberating promise to cast aside convention and habit, envisioning expendable short-life buildings that embodied human choice and freedom. Others, we learn, were horrified by the implications of this ephemerality and waste, and their resistance eventually set the stage for our turn to sustainability—the conservation rather than disposal of resources. Abramson’s fascinating tour of our idea of obsolescence culminates in an assessment of recent manifestations of sustainability, from adaptive reuse and historic preservation to postmodernism and green design, which all struggle to comprehend and manage the changes that challenge us on all sides.

Extreme poverty, which intensified in India during colonial rule, peaked in the 1920s—after decades of imperialist exploitation, famine, and disease—a time when architects, engineers, and city authorities proposed a new type of housing for India’s urban poor and industrial workers. As Farhan Karim argues, economic scarcity became a central inspiration for architectural modernism in the subcontinent. 

As India moved from colonial rule to independence, the Indian government, business entities, international NGOs, and intergovernmental agencies took major initiatives to modernize housing conditions and the domestic environment of the state’s low-income population. Of Greater Dignity than Riches traces multiple international origins of austerity as an essential ingredient of postcolonial development. By prescribing model villages, communities, and ideal houses for the working class, this project of austerity eventually reduced poverty into a stylized architectural representation. In this rich and original study, Karim explains the postwar and postcolonial history of low-cost housing as an intertwined process of global transferences of knowledge, Cold War cultural politics, postcolonial nationalism, and the politics of economic development.

One of the most important avant-garde movements of postwar Paris was Lettrism, which crucially built an interest in the relationship between writing and image into projects in poetry, painting, and especially cinema. Highly influential, the Lettrists served as a bridge of sorts between the earlier works of the Dadaists and Surrealists and the later Conceptual artists.

Off-Screen Cinema is the first monograph in English of the Lettrists. Offering a full portrait of the avant-garde scene of 1950s Paris, it focuses on the film works of key Lettrist figures like Gil J Wolman, Maurice Lemaître, François Dufrêne, and especially the movement's founder, Isidore Isou, a Romanian immigrant whose “discrepant editing” deliberately uncoupled image and sound. Through Cabañas's history, we see not only the full scope of the Lettrist project, but also its clear influence on Situationism, the French New Wave, the New Realists, as well as American filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov was a galvanizing figure in Moscow's underground art community, ultimately gaining international prominence as the “leader” of a band of artists known as the Moscow Conceptual Circle. Throughout this time, he created texts that he would distribute among his friends, and by the late 1990s his written production amounted to hundreds of pages.
            Devoted to themes that range from the “cosmism” of pre-Revolutionary Russian modernism to the philosophical implications of Moscow’s garbage, Kabakov’s handmade booklets were typed out on paper, then stapled or sewn together using rough butcher paper for their covers. Among these writings are faux Socialist Realist verses, theoretical explorations, art historical analyses, accompaniments to installation projects, and transcripts of dialogues between the artist and literary theorists, critics, journalists, and other artists.
            This volume offers for the first time in English the most significant texts written by Kabakov. The writings have been expressly selected for this English-language volume and there exists no equivalent work in any language.
 

Throughout human history, people have imagined inanimate objects to have intelligence, language, and even souls. In our secular societies today, we still willingly believe that nonliving objects have lives of their own as we find ourselves interacting with computers and other equipment. In On the Animation of the Inorganic, Spyros Papapetros examines ideas about simulated movement and inorganic life during and after the turn of the twentieth century—a period of great technical innovation whose effects continue to reverberate today.

Exploring key works of art historians such as Aby Warburg, Wilhelm Worringer, and Alois Riegl, as well as architects and artists like Fernand Léger, Mies van der Rohe, and Salvador Dalí, Papapetros tracks the evolution of the problem of animation from the fin de siècle through the twentieth century. He argues that empathy—the ability to identify with objects of the external world—was repressed by twentieth-century modernist culture, but it returned, projected onto inorganic objects such as machines, automobiles, and crystalline skyscrapers. These modern artifacts, he demonstrates, vibrated with energy, life, and desire of their own and had profound effects on people. Subtle and insightful, this book will change how we view modernist art, architecture, and their histories.

Collaborative and collective art practices have proliferated around the world over the past fifteen years. In The One and the Many, Grant H. Kester provides an overview of the broader continuum of collaborative art, ranging from the work of artists and groups widely celebrated in the mainstream art world, such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Superflex, Francis Alÿs, and Santiago Sierra, to the less-publicized projects of groups, such as Park Fiction in Hamburg, Networking and Initiatives for Culture and the Arts in Myanmar, Ala Plastica in Argentina, Huit Facettes in Senegal, and Dialogue in central India. The work of these groups often overlaps with the activities of NGOs, activists, and urban planners. Kester argues that these parallels are symptomatic of an important transition in contemporary art practice, as conventional notions of aesthetic autonomy are being redefined and renegotiated. He describes a shift from a concept of art as something envisioned beforehand by the artist and placed before the viewer, to the concept of art as a process of reciprocal creative labor. The One and the Many presents a critical framework that addresses the new forms of agency and identity mobilized by the process of collaborative production.

For more than two decades, the artist Renée Green has created an impressive body of work in which language is an essential element. Green is also a prolific writer and a major voice in the international art world. Other Planes of There gathers for the first time a substantial collection of the work she wrote between 1981 and 2010. The selected essays initially appeared in publications in different countries and languages, making their availability in this volume a boon to those wanting to follow Green's artistic and intellectual trajectory.

Charting this cosmopolitan artist’s thinking through the decades, Other Planes of There brings essays, film scripts, reviews, and polemics together with reflections on Green's own artistic practice and seminal artworks. It immerses the reader in three decades of contemporary art showcasing the art and thought, the incisive critiques and prescient observations of one of our foremost artists and intellectuals. Sound, cinema, literature, time-based media, and the relationship between art forms and other forms of knowledge are just a few of the matters that Green takes up and thinks through. Sixty-four pages of color plates were selected by the artist for this lavishly illustrated volume.
 

The Other Transatlantic is attuned to the brief but historically significant moment in the postwar period between 1950 and 1970 when the trajectories of the Eastern European art scenes on the one hand, and their Latin American counterparts on the other, converged in a shared enthusiasm for kinetic and op art.
As the axis connecting the established power centers of Paris, London, and New York became increasingly dominated by monolithic trends including pop, minimalism, and conceptualism—another web of ideas was being spun linking the hubs of Warsaw, Budapest, Zagreb, Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Sao Paulo. These artistic practices were dedicated to what appeared to be an entirely different set of aesthetic concerns: philosophies of art and culture dominated by notions of progress and science, the machine and engineering, construction and perception. This book presents a highly illustrated introduction to this significant transnational phenomenon in the visual arts.
 

Explores the intrinsic relation of life to air, and breathing, through contemporary art

In Out of Breath, Caterina Albano examines the cultural significance of breath and air to a wide array of forces in our midst, including economy, politics, infection, and ecological violence. Through a consideration of recent art practices and projects, including the dance project Breath Catalogue, which makes visible the breathing patterns of dancers, and Forensic Architecture’s Cloud Studies video, which investigates eight different kinds of clouds from airstrikes to herbicides to tear gas, Albano focuses on breath as both an intuitive process and a conveyer of meanings.

Conceived in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and systemic inequalities that it has laid bare, Out of Breath shows the potential of artistic practices to mobilize affect as a form of cultural and political critique.

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Since the last century, the relationship between vanguard and self-taught artists has been defined by contradiction. The established art world has been quick to make clear distinctions between trained and untrained artists, yet at the same time it has been fascinated by outliers whom it draws selectively and intermittently into its orbits. For a new exhibition launching at the National Gallery of Art, curator Lynne Cooke explores shifting conceptualizations of the American outlier across the twentieth century, drawing on the inherent sociality of the exhibition in her installation of these works. This companion catalog, Outliers and American Vanguard Art, offers a fantastic opportunity to consider works by schooled and self-taught creators in relation to each other and defined by historical circumstance.

The art works in Outliers and American Vanguard Art come from three distinct periods when the intersections between mainstream and outlier artists were most dynamic and productive, ushering in exhibitions of art based on various degrees of co-existence, inclusion, and assimilation. Works by such diverse artists as Charles Sheeler, Christina Ramberg, and Matt Mullican are set in conversation with a range of works by such self-taught artists as Horace Pippin, Janet Sobel, and Henry Darger. Cooke also examines a recent increase of radically expressive work that challenges what it means to be an outlier today. She reveals how these distinctions have been freighted with a particularly American point of view as she investigates our assumptions about creativity, artistic practice, and the role of the artist in contemporary culture.
 
Outliers and American Vanguard Art is the most comprehensive show ever to examine outliers in dialogue with their established peers.   It is sure to inspire vigorous conversation about how artists and the work they make are represented.

Toward a posthumanist art and ethology

The Owls Are Not What They Seem is a selective history of modern and contemporary engagements with animals in the visual arts and how these explorations relate to the evolution of scientific knowledge regarding animals. Arnaud Gerspacher argues that artistic knowledge, with its experimental nature, ability to contain contradictions, and more capacious understanding of truth-claims, presents a valuable supplement to scientific knowledge when it comes to encountering and existing alongside nonhuman animals and life worlds. 

Though critical of art works involving animals that are unreflective and exploitative, Gerspacher’s exploration of aesthetic practices by Allora & Calzadilla, Pierre Huyghe, Agnieszka Kurant, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Martin Roth, David Weber-Krebs, and others suggests that, alongside scientific practices, art has much to offer in revealing the otherworldly qualities of animals and forging ecopolitical solidarities with fellow earthlings.