a kind of forever present that takes the form of a theatrical script to perform a fictitious conversation among cultural theorists that considers what ever happened to postmodernism. The script culls parts of seminal texts by Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Jürgen Habermas, Clement Greenberg and Jennifer Allen and combines them into a discussion about the transformation of postmodernism into a hybrid, constant stream of social media and digital technology that inherently changes our relationship with time.

The time clock is a device for the material worker. It ticks away, minute by minute, hour by hour over the course of each and every day. In the olden days the work completed was equal to the material proof at the end of eight hours. Today, the immaterial worker does not have the same symbiotic relationship with the time clock. The time clock for the immaterial worker is irrelevant because they work continually. And they work on what is most expected of them: the constant flow of ideas. Their time is not measured in concrete things. It is measured ...

Visual artist Binta Oxossi Ayofemi creates urban forms inspired by black abstraction through sound, movement, and space. Her first building as artwork, COMMONS, opens in Oakland in 2020, in collaboration with renowned architect Bonnie Bridges of Studio BBA. Studio BBA transforms buildings with historic fragments into contemporary buildings. COMMONS began with Oxossi’s strategic cuts into the building as performance, next shaped as an opening or flow between form and function in dialogue with Studio BBA. The space transforms a formerly vacant music building in downtown Oakland, into a portal for gathering, sound, and sustenance. Inspired by both Black Panthers and Black ...

“An Argument about Beauty” by American writer and cultural theorist Susan Sontag serves as a basis for examining relationships between contemporary art and a historical responsibility for painting to portray beauty through representation. Calling Beauty is organized around four conventional pillars of reflection: still life, landscape, nude and portraiture. It includes work that draws on these traditional genres and their associations with beauty only to emphasize the retreat from that tradition and thus renewed engagements with a history of art and painting today. Sontag’s essay is reprinted in full in this book.

Consumption Junction is about the paradoxical intersection of environmentally sustainable activity and daily acts of consumption. The works of art gathered together for this exhibition and book share a conceptual language that addresses a range of topics from excessive spending, pollution, and urban infrastructure to alternative transportation, suburban sprawl, and recycling. They offer insightful cultural criticisms and whimsical, imaginative alternatives set somewhere between reality and fiction. In all cases they suggest the need for a worldwide environmental movement that responds to our ecologically precarious moment.

Descent to Revolution draws on a discourse of revolutionary action, revolutionary language and revolutionary theory to thread together and situate revolution in the present moment. It features interviews, commissioned texts and work by five international artist collectives that use urban spaces and social spheres as primary means of engagement. It examines how slow, incremental shifts in social behavior generate knowledge and action that lead to long-term changes in how we engage with one another and our environments. The publication includes a commissioned text by Claire Fontaine and extensive interviews with Red76 and REINIGUNGSESELLSCHAFT.

Documenta 11: An Exhibition in Three Acts was collectively written and performed by graduate students enrolled in James Voorhies’s spring 2018 graduate course Binding Agents: Toward an Aesthetic of the Postcolonial in Contemporary Exhibition at California College of the Arts. The script was written by culling parts of seminal texts on the discourse around Documenta 11, Magiciens de la Terre, postcolonial studies, and critical theory. Documenta 11 unleashed a discourse led by artists, curators and institutions in contemporary art to re-write and re-address colonial histories. The exhibition as a delineable thing, a form, with political potential to change perspectives and increase ...

Exact Imagination is about the experience of art, however one may have it, via gallery exhibitions, social encounters, books, reproductions, academics, or simply by being alive. Taking its inspiration and title from the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno and his analysis of aesthetic experience in which he argues that subjective and objective forces collide to determine a viewer’s perceptual reception of art—how it makes them feel, what they take away from it, what they draw up inside of them to relate to it—it includes art that encourages both concrete and immaterial aesthetic explorations. With this in mind, Exact Imagination investigates the ...

At UNTITLED, ART San Francisco 2020, Withersworldwide presented a lively conversation titled, “Fresh Perspectives on Collecting; What New Collectors Need to Know.” Beginning the process of collecting art can often be challenging for new collectors. Listen to a distinguished panel of experts discuss methods and tips on building an art collection with topics that range from current market trends and art financing to conservation and art insurance. Panelists include Kimberly Almazan, Special Counsel at Withersworldwide and Chair of the San Francisco Bar Association’s Art Law Section, Sophia Kinell, Regional Lead for the San Francisco Bay Area at Phillips, and Paul Becker, ...

I was happy then is a book and film that unites the cinematic spaces of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1962 L’eclisse and the present-day reality of Siena, Italy. Through the framework of a tourist guide that focuses on topics of alienation, architecture, economy, love and urbanization, I was happy then is a critical reflection on cities that renounce the contemporary in exchange for a re-presentation of key historical periods. It expands possibilities for dissemination of written and visual content by bringing together complementary qualities of printed matter and film into a singular work.

Last Year at Marienbad redux takes the form of an expanded exhibition guide to communicate the visual continuities, subtle overlaps and conceptual intersections among the works of art, design and architecture experienced in the exhibition of the same title. This book is part one in a combined two-volume publication produced as part of the project.

(Originally performed live as part of the exhibition ‘Last Year at Marienbad Redux’, curated by James Voorhies/Bureau for Open Culture at EFA Project Space, New York City, 2013.) Musician James Brown would fine any member of his band if they could not provide him with a new and entirely comprehensive interpretation of ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ before going on stage. Thus, it is a little known fact that most of the major scholarship surrounding the film was pioneered by Bootsy Collins. (140 springs, 8-10 degrees Celsius, carbonated, used in the treatment of renal, urological, respiratory, rhinitic, asthmatic, digestive, endocrinal and metabolic problems ...