Urbanomic / Art Editions – serie

An artist examines the plethora of Europe Squares, Europa Places, Places de l'Europe, and Europaplatzes and what they tell us about the ideality of “Europe.”

If the built environment is a record of our modes of organization and the compromises we make in order to live together, then what are we to make of the plethora of Europe Squares, Europa Places, Places de l'Europe, and Europaplatzes? Public spaces that connect numerous disparate towns and cities through a “supersite” called Europe, they may appear as avatars of an idea in crisis, as “eurocentric values” and the concept of Europe as a unified political space are attacked and eroded from all sides.

Atlas Europe Square documents a body of work by Swiss artist Yves Mettler who, since 2003, has engaged in an ongoing mapping and documentation of these sites, along with a series of projects triangulating between particular squares, interrogating their differing architectural, environmental, and public functions, and what they tell us about the ideality of “Europe” and the (im)possibility of its concrete instantiation.Here this work is extended into reflections on the relationship between art and public space, site-specificity, and the artist's own implication in the imaginary of Europe as he becomes enmeshed in a network of projects, funds, and public bodies that seek to promote "European culture" through art.Alongside extensive photographic documentation, Atlas Europe Square contains texts by the artist alongside essays by Reza Negarestani, Teresa Pullano, Laurent Thévenot, and Stephen Zepke, discussing Mettler's work.

How one of the leading artists of Neo-Concretism Hélio Oiticica presaged the unique trajectory of Brazilian contemporary art with his intensive color-architectures.“The IMAGE-grip is dislocated and a more fundamental element emerges: in short, IMAGE is not the work’s supreme motive or unifying end.”—Hélio Oiticica  At the turn of the 1950s–1960s, one of the leading artists of Neo-Concretism, Hélio Oiticica, presaged the unique trajectory of Brazilian contemporary art with his intensive color-architectures. In the wake of this vivência of “time-color,” which subordinates the aesthetic to the sensorimotor powers of color, Oiticica’s transcategorial, transmedia works critically and clinically undermine physical and social architecture, while semiotically subverting the forms of domination exerted by the image. In this culmination of their reassessment of the relation among art, philosophy, and the contemporary, Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne show how these works are exemplary not only of a truly diagrammatic thought and practice, but also of the South’s resistance against the coldly indifferent globalism endemic to the pacified institutions of contemporary art. Oiticica’s tropicalization of the commonplaces of sixties art signals the latent potential of a marginal dissidence from both the aesthetic form of art and the conceptual form of anti-art.

A beautifully produced anthology of crypto-artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers's pioneering blockchain art, along with a selection of her essays, reviews, and fictions.DAO? BTC? NFT? ETH? ART? WTF? HODL as OG crypto-artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers searches for faces in cryptographic hashes, follows a day in the life of a young shibe in the year 2032, and patiently explains why all art should be destructively uploaded to the blockchain. Now an acknowledged pioneer whose work has graced the auction room at Sotheby’s, Myers embarked on her first art projects focusing on blockchain tech in 2011, making her one of the first artists to engage in creative, speculative, and conceptual engagements with "the new internet." Proof of Work brings together annotated presentations of Myers’s blockchain artworks along with her essays, reviews, and fictions—a sustained critical encounter between the cultures and histories of the artworld and crypto-utopianism, technically accomplished but always generously demystifying and often mischievous.  Her deep understanding of the technical history and debates around blockchain technology is complemented by a broader sense of the crypto movement and the artistic and political sensibilities that accompanied its ascendancy. Remodeling the tropes of conceptual art and net.art to explore what blockchain technology reveals about our concepts of value, culture, and currency, Myers’s work has become required viewing for anyone interested in the future of art, consensus, law, and collectivity.

A reevaluation of Matisse that reveals the complex function of his work and thought in contemporary art's escape from the image, from traditional forms of art, and even from the art form itself.