Texte Zur Kunst stands for controversial discussions and contributions by internationally leading writers on contemporary art and culture. Alongside ground-breaking essays the quarterly magazine, founded in Cologne in 1990 by Stefan Germer (†) and Isabelle Graw and published in Berlin since 2000, offers interviews, roundtable discussions and extensive reviews on art, film, music, market and fashion as well as on art history, theory and cultural politics. Since 2006 the comprehensive main section section, each time devoted to a different topic, and selected reviews are published in both German and English. With every issue internationally renowned artists support the magazine with exclusive artists’ editions.

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Sounds Like Silence. John Cage – 4’33” – Silence Today. Spector Books

The title of this book and the exhibition it documents—Sounds Like Silence—is ambiguous. On the one hand, silence effectively “sounds”—or as Cage put it, “There is no such thing as silence.” On the other hand, sound needs silence in order to be heard. Even if complete silence does not exist, every sound implicitly conveys the notion of silence: there is no presence without absence. The double meaning of Sounds Like Silence therefore touches upon the central issues at stake in this project: what do we hear when there is nothing to hear; to what extent do we long for silence; and how much silence can we cope with—provided it even exists?

John Cage’s 4’33” (four minutes, thirty-three seconds) premiered on August 29, 1952. This book presents new theoretical writings and artistic works referring to this groundbreaking work, together with original scores and the composer’s own variations, derivatives, and sequels of the “silent piece” in the years from 1962 to 1992.

ISBN: 978-3-940064-41-7

28 €

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Yesterday’s Sun. Uri Gershuni. Sternthal Books.

Yesterday’s Sun is a book by photographer Uri Gershuni that returns to the origins of photography in order to meditate upon its future. Gershuni traveled to the home of photography’s inventor, William Henri Fox Talbot, in Lacock, England, where he photographed Talbot’s home and its environs. Gershuni used a digital pin-hole camera that he made by replacing the lens with a tiny hole. The long exposures that resulted re-capture a materiality eluded by the ‘reproducibility’ of digital photography. Gershuni’s frames capture elements of surprise – stains of light – amongst other motifs, that resemble the remains of some invisible ghost. Interspersed amongst these grainy epitaphs are a series of nude photographs featuring a young man posing in a stark room.

ISBN: 978-0-9864835-8-5

40€

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Still Damp

Silkscreen book, 24 pages incl. cover, 22 x 28,8 cm, edition of 130 ex, hand-bound, numbered and signed.

39€

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Monochrome

DASE is an Ukrainian graphic designer, illustrator & character designer. Works & lives in Kiev.

1 colour silkscreen on heavy paper. 28 pages incl cover, 29,4 x 24 cm, edition of 120 ex, hand-bound, numbered & signed.

25€
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Ghosthunter

Vicente B. Ballestar, born in Barcelona in 1929, is a Spanish illustrator known worldwide for his genre-defining dark pulp and supernatural realist illustrations. Throughout his long career, he has been beloved by aficionados of the genre worldwide, especially for his cover illustrations for Geisterjäger, John Sinclair (Ghosthunter, John Sinclair). From the beginning of the series in the 70s to his retirement in 2007, Ballestar created almost one thousand striking scenes in his preferred medium watercolour, giving the adventures of John Sinclair their unmistakable graphic character and certainly greatly contributing to its cult status. In the horror detective fiction series, published weekly since 1973, Scotland Yard chief inspector John Sinclair is the eponymous protagonist of the German pulp fiction written by Helmut Rellergerd under the pen name Jason Dark.

Full colour booklet, cover 300g paper, inside 170g paper
28 pages incl. cover, 20,8 x 14,5 cm
English text
Published by Re:Surgo ! 2012

5€
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Bauhaus Magazine #3
Die Bauhausfotografie steht im Mittelpunkt der vierten Ausgabe der Zeitschrift bauhaus, die von der Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau herausgegeben wird. Parallel zur Ausstellung „Das Bauhaus im Bild. Die Fotosammlung Thomas Walther“, die vom 5. Dezember 2012 bis zum 24. Februar 2013 in Dessau zu sehen ist, widmet sich das Heft der lichtkünstlerischen Hinterlassenschaft des Bauhauses. Da sind die bildgebende Fotografie eines László Moholy-Nagy, für den die Arbeit mit der Kamera die Verbildlichung einer Idee war und eben nicht die Abbildung einer Wirklichkeit. Seinem Antipoden Walter Peterhans ging es hingegen um nichts anderes als die präzise Vermessung der Wirklichkeit. T- Lux Feininger wiederum interessierte sich für den sozialen Augenblick, Umbo für das Porträt und die Reportagefotografie. Das von Moholy ausgerufene Neue Sehen kannte viele Facetten, ungewöhnliche Blickwinkel und Perspektiven.

The fourth issue of the new Bauhaus Dessau Foundation’s new journal is dedicated to photography at the Bauhaus and exclusively features twenty-six works from Thomas Walther’s collection that one day will expand the collection in Dessau. An interview with the collector Thomas Walther and an accompanying essay by Rolf Sachsse on the history of collecting Bauhaus photography open the issue. Wolfgang Thöner describes the Dessau masters’ home for László Moholy-Nagy and Lyonel Feininger as the nucleus of Bauhaus photography, and Torsten Blume devotes himself to the photo albums of students and teachers at the Bauhaus that have shaped its identity. Gottfried Jäger remembers Moholy-Nagy as the “Leonardo of the twentieth century,” and Franziska Brons writes about the early days of aerial photography. Plus a magazine section: Fifty years of Gropiusstadt, gleanings from documenta from the perspective of the Bauhaus, and Marcel Breuer and eroticism. Forthcoming

Ausgabe 4 Dezember 2012
160 Pages

8€
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Notes towards a Critique of Money

The analysis in Notes towards a Critique of Money highlights the functions of money both in the organization of the capitalist symbolic order and in the constitution of subjectivity in the market.

Combining Lacanian psychoanalysis and Baudrillardian structuralism, the book creates a universe where price and sign are entangled, giving rise to the dominant organizing form of capitalism. The fantasmatic management of desire enforces this structural principle on the subjective level and encourages the libidinal investment in the dominant representations of social reality as they are produced by the combined principles of signification and economic valuation. Here, money signifies the particular content that hegemonizes the universal ideological construction of capitalism providing a particular and accessible meaning to economic value, which colours the very universality of the system of prices and accounts for its efficiency.

Being conscious of the limitations of the theoretical analysis, the book employs along with rational arguments a series of artworks that are used both to illustrate the argument and to challenge the unconscious links between the market and the subject, as it is mediated by money and ideology. Notes towards a Critique of Money does not only aspire to raise a theoretical challenge against capital and to open up possibilities of emancipation, but to point towards a new aesthetic of political analysis.

2011
English
142 pages
Paperback
Edition: 600

15€
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Stefanie Seufert
Die vorliegende Publikation vertieft die Debatte um Formen der visuellen Reduktion in aktuellen fotografischen Projekten. Es beginnt sich eine Bildsprache zu formieren, die sich explizit gegen Narration wendet und im Gegenzug eintritt für den Eigenwert der fotografischen Materialität: Bilder von ephemeren Erscheinungen und Zuständen, die sich in einem fremdartigen und doch emblematischen Moment zu einer spezifischen Form verdichten. Nicht die Offenlegung oder die Ästhetisierung des Wirklichen steht dabei im Zentrum, sondern die Bearbeitung der Frage des Verhältnisses von Sichtbarkeit und Wirklichkeit.

Softcover
48 Pages
German

18€
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This Calender was created using snapshots and image retouching.

Made during a workshop held by Maxi T.R. Körner Union Image Union, assisted by Luise Gagliardi.

Printed in offset duotone by Benjamin Plantier

ECAL / University of art and design Lausanne, 2012

D 15€
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