Quaderns portàtils
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Quaderns portàtils (Portable Notebooks) is a collection that is distributed free of charge on the internet. In general, the texts are based on lectures and seminars that have been held at MACBA, as well as exhibition catalogues that are currently out of print. The texts are published in downloadable ePUB and printable PDF format.
Series Titles
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Spectralization of History, Spectralization of the Image, Spectralization of Europe Quaderns portàtilsIn the context of the relation between history, activism, the image and capital, Marina Grzinic outlines some topics that deal with capital, gender and positioning, i.e. with theory and history. The principal question is what kind of changes we can detect today in these paradigms, and, if possible, to rethink some old and new relations between theory, art practice and political activism. On February 2001, Marina Grzinic was invited to give a conference at MACBA in the context of the seminar Phantom History. Image, Politics, History celebrated as part of the film maker Pere Portabella’s exhibition Histories without a Plot. The ... -
Contemporary aesthetic practices operate with the fabric of reality as interferences that open up interstices of problematization and place the world in work. The singularity of a proposal lies in the part of reality in which it is inscribed and in the procedures of its inscription: the more subtle and precise these are, the greater its critical power and the greater the impact of its effects. This is the perspective in which Lygia Clark’s final and most radical work, Estruturação do self (Structuring of the Self), is focused. An experimental practice that is inscribed in the spectator’s subjectivity and, more ... -
Jo Spence (London, 1934-1992) played a crucial role in the debates about photography and the criticism of representation of the 70s and 80s. Drawing inspiration from Bertold Brecht and John Heartfield, she focuses on the construction of an image. Her work explores the ways that social identities are constructed through the still image, and proposes a subjective reappraisal of the dominant and popular uses of the photographic medium. As both author and model, Spence uses photography as a catalyst of rebellion and therapy in the face of the epistemic and symbolic violence that results from the dominant images produced by ... -
Diedrich Diederichsen (Hamburg 1957) lives and works in Berlin. In the eighties, he was an editor of music magazines such as Sounds and Spex and in the nineties, he taught at art academies and universities in Germany, the United States and Austria. He teaches at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart. He has published many books and is a regular contributor to magazines such as Art Forum, Texte zur Kunst, Tageszeitung and SüddeutscheZeitung. On 1998, Diedrich Diederichsen was invited to give a conference at MACBA in the context of the seminar Out of Actions celebrated as part of the Out of Actions exhibition. This ... -
In 2004 the MACBA rethought one of its main means of communication with the public: the Agenda. This quarterly publication, which began as a mere means of communicating the Museum’s activities and programs, has evolved into a compendium of relevant texts and works as a short treatise, the objective of which is to contribute to the reflection on and the articulation of the Museum’s thematic axis. In this issue of Quaderns portátils we have compiled Agenda texts from the past two years in order to present a record of the lines along which our most recent projects have developed. -
Néstor García Canclini (Argentina, 1939) has been a professor and researcher at the Mexico’s Autonomous Metropolitan University, Iztapalapa Unit, where he directs the Cultural Studies Program. He has traveled to many Universities as a visiting professor, among them Naples, Austin, Stanford, Barcelona, Buenos Aires and São Paulo, and has published more than 20 books on Cultural Studies, globalization and Urban Imagination, many of which has been translated to other languages. Among those, important titles are Hybrid Cultures(1995), which won the Latin American Studies Association’s award for best book about Latin America, and Las culturas populares en el capitalismo (1981), which ... -
Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he served as founding director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society (1998-2003). He chaired the Department of Germanic Languages from 1986-92 and again as of 2005. He is one of the founding editors of New German Critique, the leading journal of German Studies in the United States (1974-) and he serves on the editorial boards of October, Constellations, Germanic Review, Transit, Key Words (UK), and Critical Space (Tokyo). In 2005, he won Columbia’s coveted Mark van Doren teaching award. His research and teaching ... -
Jonathan Crary received his Ph.D. from Columbia 1987 having previously graduated with a B.A. from Columbia College, where he was an art history major. He also earned a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute where he majored in film/photography. He has taught full-time at Columbia since 1989, and has also been a visiting professor at Princeton and Harvard. He has written widely on contemporary art and culture for publications and has also written critical essays for over 25 exhibition catalogs. In 1986 he was one of the founders (and continues to be co-editor) of Zone Books, a press now ... -
A recipient of a CAA/Luce Foundation fellowship from 1995 to 1998 and a fellow at the Clark Art Institute in 2004, Blake Stimson is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches postwar and contemporary art, critical theory, and the history of photography. Stimson earned his PhD in art history in 1998 from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, his MFA in sculpture in 1992 at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, and he was a fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York from ... -
Art Historian Kaja Silverman, a specialist in Film theory, is a key player in the re-vamping of the field. She earned her PhD in Philosophy from Brown University and is currently a professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Rhetoric and in their Film Studies Program. She has written numerous articles and published works, among which you will find The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford University Press, 1983), The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1988), Male Subjectivity at the Margins (Routledge Press, 1992), The Threshold of the Visible World (Routledge Press, 1996), Speaking About Godard ... -
Hélène Cixous is one of the best-known contemporary French writers and thinkers and has a huge influence within the world of postmodernism and gender studies. Since the end of the 1960s, Cixous has published more than sixty books of essay, fiction and theatre, questioning the borders that exist between those genres. Her famous essay The Laugh of the Medusa is a fundamental work of feminist theory. It is also one of the one of the principal theories of the differences that exist between the sexes and the creator of the first research center in that field in Europe (Centre d’Études ... -
Rosalyn Deutsche is a professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Feminist Theory, and Urban Theory at Barnard College (New York). Her analytical materia prima are the concept of the public sphere, discrepancies in development, and models of public art (public art criticism), such as that done by Krzysztof Wodiczko. One of her most important works is Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusets, 1996). This volume includes the essay Agoraphoobia, which we publish here in a new, revised version of the Spanish translation done by in a new, revised version of the Spanish translation by Jesús Carillo ... -
Linda Williams teaches courses on popular moving-image genres (pornography, melodrama, and “body genres” of all sorts). She has recently taught courses on Oscar Micheaux and Spike Lee, Luis Buñuel, eastern and western melodrama, film theory, and selected “sex genres.” Her books include a psychoanalytic study of Surrealist cinema, Figures of Desire (1981), a co-edited volume of feminist film criticism (Re-vision, 1984), an edited volume on film spectatorship, Viewing Positions (1993), the co-edited Reinventing Film Studies (with Christine Gledhill, 2000). She has also edited a collection of essays on pornography, Porn Studies, featuring work by many U.C. Berkeley graduate students (Duke, ... -
Terreno de lucha. El impacto de la sexualidad y la huella del sida en algunas prácticas artísticas performativas Quaderns portàtilsJuan Vicente Aliaga is a lecturer in the Fine Arts Faculty of the Valencia Polytechnical University (UPV). He is the author of Bajo vientre. Representaciones de la sexualidad en la cultura y el arte contemporáneos (Lower abdomen. Representations of sexuality in contemporary culture and art, 1997), Arte y cuestiones de género. Una travesía del siglo XX(Art and gender issues. A journey through the 20th century, 2004), and Orden fálico. Androcentrismo y violencia de género en las prácticas artísticas del siglo XX (Phallic order. Androcentrism and gender violence in the artistic practices of the 20th century, 2007), and co-author of Identidad ... -
Stephen Melville is Professor of History of Art at the Ohio State University and has published widely on contemporary art as well as on issues in contemporary theory and historiography. With Philip Armstrong and Laura Lisbon he curated the major exhibition of contemporary painting As Painting: Division and Displacement (Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, 2001). His publications include As Painting: Division And Displacement (exhibition catalogue, MIT Press 2001), and Seams: Art As A Philosophical Context (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1996). He is currently completing a book on Hegel and contemporary art. In 2007, Stephen Melville was invited to ... -
José Antonio Sánchez is a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cuenca, where he lectures in Performing Arts History and Contemporary Art and Literature. He is the author of numerous texts on the theory and history of the performing arts, as well as the books Brecht y el Expresionismo (1992), Dramaturgias de la imagen (1994, 1999, and 2002) and La escena moderna. Antología de manifiestos y textos sobre teatro de la época de vanguardias(Akal, Madrid, 1999). He is also the editor of Desviaciones (1999), El arte de la danza y otros escritos de Isadora Duncan (2003), Cuerpos sobre ... -
Suely Rolnik is a psychoanalyst, writer and teacher of clinical psychology at the Catholic University of São Paulo, where she co-ordinates the Centre for Research on Subjectivity (Núcleo de Estudios de la Subjetividad). She lived in exile in Paris from 1970 to 1979, where she graduated in philosophy, social sciences and psychology. During this time, she forged a relationship with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze—some of whose work she translated into Portuguese—and Guattari. Rolnik’s friendship with the artist Lygia Clark, whose last work Estructuraçaõ do self, was the subject of her thesis in France (1978) as well as of the research ... -
Through the diversity of her work (photography, installation, performance, video, essays and fiction), Martha Rosler has created a series of cutting analyses on the myths and realities of patriarchal culture. Expressed with an unruffled sense of irony, Rosler’s work explores the socio-economic realities and political ideologies that dominate our daily life. In October 1999, the MACBA held a retrospective exhibition on the American artist Martha Rosler that Elizabeth A. Macgregor had prepared for the Ikon Gallery in New York. The catalogue, which has since sold out in bookstores, includes articles by Alexander Alberro, Silvia Eiblmayr, Annette Michelson, Jodi Hauptman and Catherine ... -
In this Quadern portàtil, Anne Rorimer addresses and contextualises the work of conceptual artist Ian Wilson. It is the Catalan version of a text that was published in Spanish and English in the book Ian Wilson. The Discussions (MACBA, 2009). The text is an adaptation of the essay: Anne Rorimer, New Art in the 60’s and 70’s. Redefining Reality. London, 2004, pp. 89-93, 110-111. -
T. J. Clark was born in Bristol, England, in 1943, and educated at Bristol Grammar School, Cambridge University, and the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He has taught at various places in England and the U.S., since 1988 at Berkeley, where he is at present George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair, and Professor of Art History. His books include The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-51 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, (both 1973); The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, 1985; Farewell ... -
"Every letter I write is not a love letter": Inventing sociality with Ray Johnson's postal system Quaderns portàtilsIna Blom is a Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo, where she also got her Ph.D (The Cut Through Time. A Version of the Dada/Neo-Dada Repetition. UiO, 1999). Her fields of research and teaching are modernism/avant-garde studies and contemporary art and aesthetics, with a particular focus on media art practices and media aesthetics. A former music critic, she has also worked extensively as an art critic and curator, contributing to Artforum, Parkett, Afterall, Frieze and Texte zur Kunst. Recent books include On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Television ... -
Hervé Joubert-Laurencin is a professor of Film Studies in the Arts Faculty at the University of Amiens. He is also a translator and specialist in Pier Paolo Pasolini, about whom he has organised several congresses. Other specialisations include animation film and the film writings of André Bazin. Among other works, he has published Pasolini, portrait du poète en cinéaste (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1995), Le Dernier poète expressionniste. Écrits sur Pasolini (Besançon: Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2005) and La Lettre volante. Quatre essais sur le cinéma d’animation (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1997). Opening Bazin, a significant collaborative book – ... -
Peter Watkins (Norbiton, United Kingdom, 1935) gained critical recognition in the sixties as a result of the scandal arising from the BBC’s boycott against his film The War Game. Nevertheless, although he continued to produce a series of essential, radical works that did not fit within conventional film or adhere to the timing standards of mainstream cinema, his films where no longer mentioned or taken into account as key works in debates on political commitment and the cinematic image. Peter Watkins’s last work, La commune (1999) represents, among many other things, a curious rereading of the relationship between film and ... -
Costas Douzinas is Professor of Law, Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and Pro-Vice Chancellor at Birkbeck College, University of London. Educated in Athens, London and Strasbourg, Costas has taught at the Universities of Middlesex, Lancaster, Prague, Athens, Griffith and Nanjing.Costas is a founding member of the Critical Legal Conference; founding member of the Birkbeck Law School and the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities; managing editor of Law and Critique: The International Journal of Critical Legal Thought; managing director of the publishing house Birkbeck Law Press. Costas has written extensively in legal and political philosophy, human rights, aesthetics and ... -
Georges Didi-Huberman is a lecturer at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He is the author of more than 30 books on the history and theory of images, including L’Image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (2002), Gestes d’air et de pierre. Corps, parole, souffle, image (2005), Ex-voto: image, organe, temps (2006), La Ressemblance par contact (2008), Survivance des lucioles (2009) and L’Œil de l’histoire (2010). As part of the Writing art history. Dialogues in the present continuous conference held for the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory 2010, Didi-Huberman ... -
"Fragment, experiment, dissonant prologue": modernism, realism and the photodocument Quaderns portàtilsJohn Roberts is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton. He is the author of a number of books including The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday (Manchester University Press, 1998), The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (Verso, 2008) and The Necessity of Errors (Verso, 2011). He has also contributed to various journals including Radical Philosophy, New Left Review, Oxford Art Journal, Historical Materialism, New Literary History, Third Text and Manifesta. In 2008 John Roberts was invited to give a lecture at MACBA in the context of the seminar The ... -
"We can’t promise to do more than experiment.": Experimental film and beyond in Yugoslavia in sixties and seventies Quaderns portàtilsAna Janevski is currently Associate Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. From 2007 to 2011 she held the position of curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland, where she curated, among many other projects, the large-scale exhibition As Soon As I Open My Eyes I See a Film on the topic of Yugoslav experimental film and art from the sixties and seventies. She also edited a book with the same title. Janevski has also co-curated with Pierre Bal-Blanc the performance exhibition The Living Currency and the first extensive show about experimental film in Yugoslavia ... -
In April 2012 Peter Osborne was invited to give a seminar at MACBA called Whatever happened to theory II. Periodising Contemporary Art (or, What Happened to ‘Postmodernism’?). Within this context he gave the lecture entitled “October and the Problem of Formalism.” Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University London, and an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. His books include The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (1995; 2011), Philosophy in Cultural Theory (2000), Conceptual Art (2002), Marx (2005), Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory ... -
This text by Wolfgang Ernst is the keynote lecture of the conference The Anarchival Impulse in the Uses of the Image in Contemporary Art, organised by the University of Barcelona. In “Aura and Temporality: The Insistence of the Archive.” the author analyses how the archive in the traditional sense, based on rigorous classification and secrecy, must be redefined in the light of the enormous potential for dissemination and organisation that arises from the digital media: archives are now ephemeral, adapted to various supports and, for the first time, more than a specific space, they occupy time. Wolfgang Ernst is Professor of ... -
Walter Mignolo (1941, Córdoba, Argentina) is a semiotician and professor at Duke University, who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality. In “Enacting the Archives, Decentring the Muses,” Mignolo reads through the Museum of Islamic Art and of Asian Civilizations Museum, attempting to decolonize the single story of western museums by showing how de-westernization works. The author’s argument will be that the de-colonial story of western museums through the appropriation of the museum model ... -
Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden took over Art & Language’s practice in 1977, maintaining its essayist and self-critical nature. From 1969, the publication Art-Language offered public access to the multitheoretical field in which Art & Language developed their initiatives during the sixties, seventies and eighties. The most recent positions adopted by the artists Baldwin and Ramsden take up the perception of their own collective past. Carles Guerra is an artist, art critic and independent curator. He holds a PhD degree from the Universitat de Barcelona, where he completed a doctoral thesis about the dialogical aspects of the practice of Art ... -
Max Andrews (1975) and Mariana Cánepa Luna (1977) are the co-founders of Latitudes, an independent curatorial office based in Barcelona, which works internationally within the field of contemporary art. Informed by an initial focus on ecology, Latitudes is especially interested in site, process and context. In this text, originally written in English, Latitudes gives us the clues to understand the first experimental videos by the artist José Antonio Hernández-Díez (b. Caracas, Venezuela, 1964), along with his other early works using screens and vitrines. The exhibition shows what the artist termed as a “New Christian Iconography,” and as the curators claim, “neither ... -
MACBA Portable Notebooks Series, #33 comprises two essays, both in French, by Pierre Restany. 1. Miralda ! «Une vie d’artiste» (1981) 2. Dix ans sont passés: le Mont-Serré donne sur la Terrasse (1991) -
A pioneer of installation art, Francesc Torres (Barcelona, 1948) puts forward a critical reflection on the different manifestations of culture, politics, memory and power. He also sets out an explicit statement about the position of the artist in society: the relationship between the individual and the community, the role of political discourse in relation to social action and the set of received beliefs. Memory as a territory of political construction is a consistent theme in his work. This publication presents a series of vital, iconographic and objectual referents that allow us to delve into the essential and critical universe of the ... -
Between the 1950s and seventies, Oscar Masotta (Buenos Aires, 1930 – Barcelona, 1979) was a key figure in the transformation of Argentina’s cultural scene. However, to date his work as a disseminator of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and his active links with the counterculture during the four years he lived in Spain have been less obvious. His multiple and polymorphic interests included art, literature, comics, politics and psychoanalysis. From ideas such as the avant-garde, dematerialisation, discontinuity and the environment, Masotta constructed the tools for thinking about the categorical turn taking place in contemporary art. Perhaps the most relevant appropriation is the term ... -
In the Open or in Stealth, curated by Raqs Media Collective at MACBA (31 October 2018 to 17 March 2019), was a site of discovery in which multiple histories and geographies were brought into dialogue towards contemplating the future with a plurality of possibilities and queries. It wove in 30 artists. Shveta Sarda is a translator and editor based in Delhi. From 2001 to 2014, she worked at Sarai with the Cybermohalla Ensemble, whose writings she translated from Hindi into English. She is editor of their publications, including Trickster City (Penguin-India, 2010, translated from Bahurupiya Shehr, Rajkamal, 2007) and co-editor of ... -
In this text, Maite Garbayo-Maeztu seeks to think some of the first performances taking place in the 1970s in Spain, along with occupations of the street by feminist activism at the time. Artists like Dorothèe Selz, Fina Miralles, Àngels Ribé and Olga L. Pijoan would use veils, occultations and alterations that invited viewers to go beyond visuality. -
This Quadern portàtil includes a text by the critic and philosopher Christoph Cox, as well as fragments of a selection of works by Tony Cokes on the occasion of the MACBA exhibition, where some of his major works are on display. Cokes has deployed a visual style marked by the use of animated text, images, monochromatic slides and videos, with which he assembles a biting criticism of capitalism using colour theory, sound, music and literal quotes from voices as diverse as Louis Althusser, Malcolm X, David Bowie, Public Enemy and Donald Trump.
