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We know that celebrities can make great muses: think of the work of Richard Phillips, who has painted an entire series of works inspired by Lindsay Lohan, Robert Pattinson, and Miley Cyrus, or of Urs Fischer, who recently showed a life-sized candle in the shape of Leonardo DiCaprio. Notoriously, the art collector Peter Brant commissioned the wickedly satirical Italian American artist Maurizio Cattelan to make a sculpture of his wife, the supermodel Stephanie Seymour. The work was technically called Stephanie, but became known in the industry as ‘Trophy Wife’. With the sculpture valued at 1.5 million dollars, while Seymour herself is purportedly worth one hundred million dollars, you might be tempted to wonder which has the claim to be the ‘better’ work of art. In this illustrated essay, critic Philippa Snow asks whether all great, or iconic, celebrities can be considered technically self-authored artworks in and of themselves. Drawing on a wide range of cultural references from the past two decades, she proposes that increasingly – as celebrities’ private lives become more visible and thus more art-directed – celebrity itself can be a medium for contemporary art, a form of mythmaking and image-making that is every bit as complex, conceptual, and compelling as the work of a traditional artist., https://www.librarystack.org/trophy-lives-on-the-celebrity-as-an-art-object/?ref=unknown

For the French-Brazilian architect, theorist, and painter Sérgio Ferro, looking at architecture from below means putting the building site and building workers at the centre of architectural enquiry. Instead of new trends or big names, Ferro strives for an approach ‘that enables one to see both head and feet at the same time – the magnanimous ideal and the muck down below’. The process of building rarely features in architectural history and theory. Ferro argues that this persistent dismissal and neglect of building labour is no mere oversight, but instead a structural necessity of capitalist development which serves to deny labour as the source of value, to make capital’s command appear mandatory, and to maintain the profession’s capacity to act ‘on’ and ‘over’ the building site. Written between 1967 and 2019, these ten essays introduce Sérgio Ferro’s vital thinking by confronting architecture with critical theories ranging from Marx to contemporary authors. They draw on concrete cases in different historical and geographical contexts – from Strasbourg to Brasilia, via Dubai – to disclose how capitalist relations of production have transformed architecture and its relations to artistic practices such as painting and sculpture., https://www.librarystack.org/architecture-from-below-an-anthology/?ref=unknown

Pleasure Gardens is an urgent two-part project that investigates the military occupation, land appropriation, and communication blackouts in Kashmir, a region whose heavily militarized borders have frequently been a site of conflict between India and Pakistan. Taking a 213-day blackout in 2019 as its starting point, the project aims to detail the reasoning behind these blockades, seeking a new register of writing and image that makes visible the conditions of occupation and the protracted violence of the blackout. In the book’s first part, Scott and Thomas bring together hundreds of sources, filling in the gaps from Srinagar to the remote Himalayan valleys along the Line of Control between India and Pakistan, to create a unique log of fifteen days under siege, during which Kashmiri constitutional rights were revoked, the state partitioned, and stripped of its special statehood. In the second part, the authors examine Kashmir’s occupied territories and the complex ways in which India’s infrastructure of surveillance and occupation is borrowed from Israel’s occupation of Palestine. This remarkable publication offers a crucial exploration of blackouts, their aftermath, and the twisted logic of crisis on which they rely., https://www.librarystack.org/pleasure-gardens-blackouts-and-the-logic-of-crisis-in-kashmir/?ref=unknown

This intimate, conversational reader transports us to the enchanted world of Alessandra Sanguinetti’s photographic series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda, exploring the evolution of this celebrated work and the themes and questions it raises. Made in the countryside of Buenos Aires Province, Sanguinetti’s series follows the lives of two cousins as they come of age alongside the realities of rural life. From a young age, Guille and Belinda have been Sanguinetti’s collaborators, co-conspirators, and playmates, evoking the unique worlds suspended between dreams and reality that define childhood, adolescence, and eventually adulthood. Here, they reflect with Sanguinetti on the work’s making and their changing relationship to it over time in an extended conversation illustrated with previously unseen images from across the years. This discussion is complemented by a conversation between Sanguinetti and curators Clément Chéroux and Pierre Leyrat, unpacking the ways this work engages with and disrupts conversations around documentary photography, artistic collaboration, and the depiction of the lives of girls and women the world over., https://www.librarystack.org/over-time-conversations-about-documents-and-dreams/?ref=unknown

Following the vast critical acclaim of Stephen Shore’s experimental memoir Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography, we are pleased to present this new and expanded edition, perfect for both new readers and those wanting to learn more from Shore’s invaluable teaching, this edition includes several new essays not included in the hardcover, over forty new images, plus an extensive notes section in which Shore reflects on elements of the original text and expands on themes such as inspiration, gifts, tragedy, and vernacular photography. Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography is an impressionistic scrapbook that documents the rich and surprising touchstones that make up over half a century of ground-breaking work. With essays, photographs, stories, and excerpts that draw on Shore’s decades of teaching, this is an essential handbook for anyone interested in learning more about mastering one’s craft and the distinct threads that come together to inform a creative voice. As much as offering meditation on the influences of a single artist, Modern Instances proposes a new way of thinking about the world around us, in which even the smallest moment can become a source of boundless inspiration – if only we pay attention., https://www.librarystack.org/modern-instances-the-craft-of-photography/?ref=unknown

In an era of climate catastrophe and corporate agribusiness, meat has been decisively made over. Urbanites across the West are called upon to look at the animals we eat, and by looking, learn to treat them with love. We are asked to tenderise our carnal desire for flesh and dignify our relationship with the land. Yet can our appetite for meat be redeemed by this new way of seeing? Can an ‘ethical’ approach to the farming, sale, and consumption of meat really save both the planet and our souls? In Meat Love, Amber Husain deconstructs the beauty, tragedy, and mystery with which our images of meat are embellished, drawing on a range of visual sources from contemporary art and film to Instagram and advertising. Probing the nature of ‘love’ in contemporary human-animal relations, this illustrated essay casts a materialist’s critical eye on the visual culture of meat as it gentrifies and mutates, informing, for better or for worse, our political imaginations., https://www.librarystack.org/meat-love-an-ideology-of-the-flesh/?ref=unknown

The design and research practice Material Cultures assembles here a series of short essays and conversations exploring the cultures, systems, and infrastructures that shape the architectural industry and the de­structive ecologies it fosters. The building practices dominating contemporary architecture are rooted in the exploitation of people and the degradation of our landscapes. Here, Paloma Gormley, Summer Islam, and George Massoud explore how this has come about and how alternative systems, with holistic approaches to the built environment, might be formulated. Material Reform presents a set of instructive and challenging perspectives drawing directly on the dialogues and tensions Material Cultures encounter in their day-to-day work. Texts centred around key concepts including labour, time, maintenance, language, land, and touch are interwoven with a visual essay reckoning with the processes that have transformed industrialised landscapes at different scales of experience and resolution. Through text and visuals, con­cepts and practice, this book explores how developing a direct relationship with materials can help us find new languages with the potential to supersede those we have inherited from a narrow lineage of authors. These discursive threads come together to form a vital sourcebook for rethinking our relationships to materials, land, and development, in all their crucial intersections., https://www.librarystack.org/material-reform-building-for-a-post-carbon-future/?ref=unknown

What makes a good listener? There are a number of commonsensical ideas about what constitutes doing it well — patience, tolerance, availability, responsiveness, lack of moral judgement — but is it really so simple? Is it a skill one can easily learn or more of a quirk or talent? And why do some people seem to be so much better at it than others? Written by a psychoanalyst and a violin maker, Uneasy Listening is a dialogue between two very different kinds of professional listener: the former working with speech, the latter with musical instruments. Beginning as total strangers, Anouchka Grose and Robert Brewer Young embark on an engaging, entertaining, and winding meditation on communication that weaves together wide-ranging references from across psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, contemporary politics and culture. As they discuss the differences, similarities, and resonances between their practices, they run up against some of the illuminating difficulties of dialogue itself. The result is a kind of awkward duet in which two thinkers and practitioners accommodate, interrupt, and perplex each other in an attempt to say something about what listening means., https://www.librarystack.org/uneasy-listening-notes-on-hearing-and-being-heard/?ref=unknown

In a series of written exchanges, David Campany and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa consider the options for photography in resisting the oppressive orthodoxies of racial capital, conservative history, and neoliberal visual culture. How does the essential indeterminacy of photography square with the need to work out alternative practices? How is visibility achieved beyond the consensual categories of the mass media and the commodification of art? What models are there for the making and reception of photographic books and exhibitions that might cultivate an active spectatorship beyond boutique consumerism? These urgent questions and more are discussed in a spirit of speculation and possibility, in the light of signal events that have shaped the recent past., https://www.librarystack.org/indeterminacy-thoughts-on-time-the-image-and-raceism/?ref=unknown

Dark Mirrors assembles sixteen essays by photographer and critic Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa focusing on contemporary fine art photographic and video practices that are principally, though not exclusively, rooted in the United States, written between 2015 and 2021. Wolukau-Wanambwa analyses the image’s relationship to the urgent and complex questions that define our era, through the lens of artistic practices and works which insightfully engage with the ongoing contemporaneity of disparate histories and the ever-changing status of the visual in social life. The book sets out an argument that one of the most dynamic sites of artistic invention in photographic practice over the past decade has been the photographic book, and thus many of the essays in the volume assess artistic works as they are bodied forth in that form. Among the recurrent themes that emerge from these rigorous, probing essays are the complex interrelationship of anti-blackness and visuality, the fragility and complexity of embodied difference in portraiture, the potency of verbal and visual media as social forms, and the politics of attention., https://www.librarystack.org/dark-mirrors/?ref=unknown