Aesthetic Politics in Fashion outlines critical studies in the present cross-sections of fashion, art, politics, and global capitalism. Critically examining contemporary collaborations of artists, media, and fashion labels, this groundbreaking anthology locates fashion within ecological and ethical discourses, postcolonial styles, and critical reflections on whiteness. Contributions from a distinguished group of international scholars debate fashion as a cultural phenomenon at the inter- section of artistic, creative, economic, and everyday practices. Aesthetic economies, the production of space, and alternative aesthetic politics are explored from interdisciplinary angles: art history, cultural science, sociology, design, and fashion studies. Aesthetic Politics in Fashion advances theorizing ...

Let’s be clear about something: it is infuriating that most interesting artists are perfectly capable of functioning in at least two or three professions that are, unlike art, respected by society in terms of compensation and general usefulness. When the flexibility, certainty, and freedom promised by being part of a critical outside are revealed as extensions of recent advances in economic exploitation, does the field of art become the uncritical, complicit inside of something far more interesting?

Today, many of us can remember the disappeared indigenous cosmologies as parts of ourselves, lost to colonialism, industrialization, communist revolutions, and capitalist wars. Many names have been given to ideological or historical grand narratives to soothe the pain of loss, to register those losses and render them searchable, but these memorializing mechanisms still fail to register the pain of losing something much larger that cannot be named—a deep relation to the world, to the cosmos, and to ourselves that gives us strength and sovereignty without need for any other earthly power of right or dominion. What if another kind of ...

Border Thinking: Disassembling Histories of Racialized Violence aims to question and provide answers to current border issues in Europe. Central to this investigation is a refugee crisis that is primarily a crisis of global Western capitalism and its components: modernization, nationalism, structural racism, dispossession, and social, political, and economic violence. In this volume, these notions and conditions are connected with the concept of borders, which seems to have disappeared as a function of the global neoliberal economy but is palpably reappearing again and again through deportations, segregations, and war. How can we think about these relations in an open way, ...

“At the heart of this book is a simple and profound proposition: to ‘do’ architecture is to immerse oneself in a conflictual process of material production—participation is not a productive encounter of multiple practitioners and stakeholders, but a set of conflicts, negotiations, maneuvers, and swindles between and within a multiplicity of agents, human and nonhuman alike—equally including architects, clients, financiers, and builders, say, but also silicon, plastic, concrete, each with its conflicting aims and different material means to achieve them. Every building is thus the materialization of such encounter. So, despite the hubris of the field, none of the parties ...

What makes a city successful today? Over the past few decades, artists—and more broadly, clusters of creative people—have become central to narratives of urban revitalization and civic growth in cities around the world. In many locales, artists in search of cheap rent constitute the vanguard wedge of gentrification. Yet the so-called creative class includes whole categories of knowledge workers enjoying far less precarious conditions than artists, and it is their affluence that continually leads to the displacement of both working-class residents and artists alike. In the creative city, the branding of subcultural movements, the translation of the gritty into the quaint, ...

In Design by Accident, Alexandra Midal declares the autonomy of design, in and on its own terms. This meticulously researched work proposes not only a counterhistory but a new historiography of design, shedding light on overlooked historical landmarks and figures while reevaluating the legacies of design’s established luminaries from the nineteenth century to the present. Midal rejects both linear narratives of progress and the long-held perception of design as a footnote to the histories of fine art and architecture. By weaving critical analysis of the canon of design history and theory together, with special attention to the writings of designers ...

Equal parts Borges, Burroughs, Baudrillard, and Black Ops, Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution charts a treacherous landscape filled with paranoid master plans, failed schemes, and dubious histories. Benjamin H. Bratton’s kaleidoscopic theory-fiction links the utopian fantasies of political violence with the equally utopian programs of security and control. Both rely on all manner of doubles, models, gimmicks, ruses, prototypes, and shockandawe campaigns to realize their propagandas of the deed, threat, and image. Blurring reality and delusion, they collaborate on a literally psychotic politics of architecture. The cast of characters in this ensemble drama of righteous desperation and tactical trickery shuttle ...

Dizziness is more than feeling dizzy. In this multidisciplinary reader, artists, philosophers, and researchers from a range of experimental sciences and cultural studies trace dizziness not only as a phenomenon of sensory input impacting our vestibular system, but also as a twofold phenomenon of “sense”—creating meaning and triggering emotions. It is an interdependence of sense and sensing, of cultural constructs and sensuality, of somatic and cognitive knowledge, that can only be conceived of as a complex relation of both formation and dissolution, habituations and transformations, pertaining to our shared reality and our individual experiences. This is further reflected in the ...

Fashion and Postcolonial Critique outlines a critical global fashion theory from a postcolonial perspective. It investigates contemporary articulations of postcolonial fashion critique, and analyzes fashion as a cultural, historical, social, and political phenomenon involved in and affected by histories of colonial domination, anti-colonial resistance, and processes of decolonization and globalization. Stemming from a range of different disciplines, such as art history, textile studies, anthropology, history, literary studies, cultural studies, sociology, fashion media, and fashion theory, the contributions in this book reflect the multidisciplinary and diverse nature of postcolonial fashion research today.

Jalal Toufic is a thinker whose influence in the Beirut artistic community over the past two decades has been immense—notwithstanding that, as he put it, many, if not all of his books, most of which were published by Forthcoming Books, “continue to be forthcoming even after their publication.” In relation to one of these books, he wondered: “Does not a book titled Forthcoming suggest, ostensibly paradoxically, a second edition?” Here’s the revised edition of Forthcoming, a book first published nearly a decade and a half ago by Atelos press. —Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

This publication accompanies FUTURE LIGHT, including the exhibitions “Escaping Transparency” at the MAK Vienna, “Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Loving, Repeating” at Kunsthalle Wien as well as four off-site commissions within the framework of the VIENNA BIENNALE 2015: IDEAS FOR CHANGE (11 June−4 October, 2015).