ART

Isabelle Graw - Three Cases of Value Reflection: Ponge, Whitten, Banksy

Sternberg Press 2020 ISBN 9783956795251 Acqn 31122
Pb 12x19cm 64pp ills £10.50

In response to recent discussions about the value assigned to artworks, art critic and theorist
Isabelle Graw introduces the term "value reflection." Rather than an objective quality, value
reflection is the potential for the specific artistic labor expended for artworks to be found in them.
She argues that an artwork can actually reflect on its value despite being defined by it. This book
focuses on the artistic production of three individuals-writer Francis Ponge and artists Jack
Whitten and Banksy-and engages with the different types of value reflection detected in their
work. Graw distinguishes between an explicit (Ponge), immanent (Whitten), and seemingly
destructive (Banksy) approach to value.

Three Cases of Value Reflection extends the themes found in Graw's seminal book High Price, in
which she questioned the dichotomy between art and the market as well as the notion that market
value is equal to artistic value. By carefully combining a contextual, sociohistorical approach with
close readings of the work of each case study, Graw demonstrates how art-historical and
theoretical ambitions can, and must, go hand in hand.

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(W)archives - Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art

Sternberg Press 2021 ISBN 9783956794568 Acqn 31123
Pb 15x21cm 416pp col ills £21

Digital and data technologies are actively transforming the archives of contemporary warfare.
Bringing together a range of scholarly perspectives and artistic practices, (W)archives
investigates digital archiving as an integral technology of warfare and how artists respond to
these changes. Throughout the book, the (w)archive emerges as a term to grasp the extended
materiality of war today, wherein digital archiving intersects with images, bodies, senses,
infrastructures, environments, memories, and emotions. The essays explore how this new digital
materiality of war reconfigures the archival impulses that have shaped artistic practices over the
last decades, and how archives can be mobilized to articulate political demands, conjure new
forms of evidence, and make palpable the experience of living with war.

Contributions by Daniela Agostinho, Heba Y. Amin, Ariella Azoulay, Svea Braunert, Anthony
Downey, Sophie Dyer, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Solveig Gade, Cristian Gomez-Moya, Sofie
Lebech, Aimee Zito Lema, Kathrin Maurer, Kevin McSorley, Anders Engberg Pedersen, Dima
Saber, Oraib Toukan, Sarah Tuck, Louise Wolthers, Arkadi Zaides.

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Elisabeth Wild – Fantasias

Sternberg Press 2020 ISBN 9783956795794 Acqn 31036
Hb 17x24cm 152pp col ills £24.95

This beautifully designed monograph exhibits Elisabeth Wild's kaleidoscopic and vibrant collages.
Using cutouts of commercial imagery from glossy magazines, Wild composes a dimensionless
reality that is witty yet menacing, ancient yet immortal. Imagining figures that are structural and
anatomical, her work presents a shimmering dream logic. Wooden totems and stone altars,
woven rugs and precious stones are the cosmic architectural inhabitants that unveil the artist's
fantasies.

Wild began her prolific collage production in her seventies while living in Basel shortly before she
moved to Guatemala-another in a series of significant transatlantic crossings undertaken in her
life. In 1938, at the age of sixteen, her family fled Vienna to Buenos Aires to escape the Nazi
threat. She continued her fine-art studies in her new home, later working as a textile designer. In
1962, Wild and her family traveled back across the Atlantic, to Basel, to escape the Peron
dictatorship. There she ran an antique shop. In 1996, she left for Panajachel, Guatemala, where
she lived with her daughter, the artist Vivian Suter, and continued working on her collages until
her death in 2020.

Along with Wild's collages, this publication includes contributions by poet Negma Coy, curator
Adam Szymczyk, art educator and writer Barbara Casavecchia, art historian and critic Noit Banai,
and gallerist Karolina Dankow of Karma International, all which frame the importance of this
singular artist's work and life.

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Jesse Ash - Avoidance-Avoidance

Sternberg Press 2021 ISBN 9783956794285 Acqn 31146
Pb 17x24cm 208pp col ills £18.95

"Jesse Ash's multifaceted project Avoidance-Avoidance imagines fictional encounters between

two former lovers who meet again years after their break-up and reminisce about their failed
relationship. For each iteration Ash adapted the dialogues and settings and created a new body
of works to act as both backdrops and props for the unfolding site-specific performances. It now
takes the form of a book assembling traces of these events [and] intends to make visible forms of
emotional, material and political concealment."
-Elsa Coustou

"In the top layers, painting can feel much more like applying make-up when fine-tuning light and
shade. [ ] The adding of highlights and deep shadows or the adjustment of temperature of shade
(warmth or coolness) comes closest to the pleasure of a viewer stepping in and out of illusion."
-Daniel Sinsel

"Well, what art does at a good, very high level, propaganda does at a very dirty and unethical
level. But it's still a similar dance."
-Peter Pomerantsev

"Lies? That's a tricky word for an actor, as I guess it is for any artist. As an actor you're always
trying to convince the audience that everything you're doing is real, but we're in cahoots, we have
an agreement-you, the audience, have come to see us tell you a story, and the more real it feels,
the better affected you'll be by it."
-Ansu Kabia

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Cybernetics of the Poor

Sternberg Press 2021 ISBN 9783956795930 Acqn 31169
Pb 13x20cm 264pp col ills £17.50

Cybernetics of the Poor examines the relationship between art and cybernetics and their
intersections in the past and present. Since the late 1940s, the term cybernetics has been used to
describe self-regulating systems that measure, anticipate, and react in response to changing
conditions. Initially relevant mostly in the fields of administration, planning, criminology, and early
ecology, under digital capitalism cybernetics has become an economic factor (see: big data). In
such a cybernetic totality, art must respond to the new situation: as a cybernetics of the poor.

This publication, like the exhibition it accompanies, presents works that use the powerlessness of
art-its poverty- vis-a-vis the cybernetic machine to propose countermodels. In addition, it gathers
recent and historical works by artists who believed in cybernetics as a participatory, playful
practice or who were pioneers in delineating a counter-cybernetics. How much of the
"counterforce" (Thomas Pynchon) exists within art when it is conceived as a cybernetics of the
poor?

Texts by Sabeth Buchmann, Mercedes Bunz, Diedrich Diederichsen, Oier Etxeberria, Harun
Farocki, Alexander R. Galloway. Foreword by Clara Montero and a forward by What, How & for
Whom. With artistic contributions by Agency, Ana de Almeida, Alicja Rogalska & Vanja Smiljanic,
Eleanor Antin, Cory Arcangel, Elena Asins, Paolo Cirio, Coleman Collins, Hanne Darboven, Jon
Mikel Euba, Michael Hakimi, Douglas Huebler, Gema Intxausti, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Mike
Kelley, Ferdinand Kriwet, Agnieszka Kurant, Mario Navarro, Adrian Piper, Lili Reynaud-Dewar,
Heinrich Riebesehl, Pedro G. Romero, Constanze Ruhm, Jorg Schlick, Camila Sposati, Kathrin
Stumreich, Isidoro Valcarcel Medina, Tanja Widmann, Robert Adrian X.

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