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In this book, Brian Dillon explores images and artists he is drawn to and analyzes the attraction. What does it mean to claim affinity with a picture? What do feelings of affinity imply about the experience of art and of the world? Affinities is a critical and personal study of a sensation that is not exactly taste, desire, or solidarity, but has aspects of all three.(...)
Affinities: on art and fascination
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In this book, Brian Dillon explores images and artists he is drawn to and analyzes the attraction. What does it mean to claim affinity with a picture? What do feelings of affinity imply about the experience of art and of the world? Affinities is a critical and personal study of a sensation that is not exactly taste, desire, or solidarity, but has aspects of all three. Approaching this subject via discrete examples, Dillon examines works by artists such as Dora Maar and Andy Warhol, Rinko Kawauchi and Susan Hiller, as well as scientific or vernacular images of sea creatures and migraine auras. Written as a series of linked essays, "Affinities" completes a trilogy, with "Essayism" and "Suppose a Sentence", about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking.
Art Theory
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This book features eleven internationally acclaimed artists, including Jan Albers, Michael Borremans, Marc Brandenburg, Fernando Bryce, Kate Davis, Monika Grzymala, David Haines, Kim Hiorthoy, Sandra Vasquez de la Horra, Garrett Phelan and Naoyuki Tsuji. As a group, their work represents a vast range of possible interpretations of drawing, from meticulously rendered(...)
The end of the line: attitudes in drawing
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This book features eleven internationally acclaimed artists, including Jan Albers, Michael Borremans, Marc Brandenburg, Fernando Bryce, Kate Davis, Monika Grzymala, David Haines, Kim Hiorthoy, Sandra Vasquez de la Horra, Garrett Phelan and Naoyuki Tsuji. As a group, their work represents a vast range of possible interpretations of drawing, from meticulously rendered quotidian scenes to three-dimensional drawings that merge with and respond to architectural space. Though drawing foundered in art schools during the 1970s, tainted by academicism, recently it has undergone a resurgence of popularity, partly because of its accessibility as a tool for communicating personal visions and ideas.
Group Exhibitions
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Compiled in association with author and U.K. editor of Cabinet magazine Brian Dillon, this book explores objects, artworks and narratives drawn from a variety of disciplines--scientific, occult, anthropological and aesthetic--taking as its guide a sensibility that developed in Europe in the early modern period and tracing it at work in disparate historical and contemporary contexts.
Curiosity: art and the pleasures of knowing
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Compiled in association with author and U.K. editor of Cabinet magazine Brian Dillon, this book explores objects, artworks and narratives drawn from a variety of disciplines--scientific, occult, anthropological and aesthetic--taking as its guide a sensibility that developed in Europe in the early modern period and tracing it at work in disparate historical and contemporary contexts.
Art Theory
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Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name means a trial, effort or attempt. An ancient form with an eye on the future, a genre poised between tradition and experiment. The essay wants above all to wander, but also to arrive at symmetry and wholeness; it nurses competing urges to integrity and disarray, perfection and fragmentation, confession and(...)
Essayism
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Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name means a trial, effort or attempt. An ancient form with an eye on the future, a genre poised between tradition and experiment. The essay wants above all to wander, but also to arrive at symmetry and wholeness; it nurses competing urges to integrity and disarray, perfection and fragmentation, confession and invention. How to write about essays and essayists while staying true to these contradictions? "ESSAYISM" is a personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and contemporary possibilities. It's an example of what it describes: an essay that is curious and digressive, exacting yet evasive, a form that would instruct, seduce and mystify in equal measure. Among the essayists to whom he pays tribute - from Virginia Woolf to Georges Perec, Joan Didion to Sir Thomas Browne - Brian Dillon discovers a path back into his own life as a reader, and out of melancholia to a new sense of writing as adventure.
Literature and poetry
Suppose a sentence
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In ''Suppose a sentence,'' Brian Dillon, whom John Banville has called ''a literary flâneur in the tradition of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin,'' has written a sequel of sorts to ''Essayism,'' turning his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence—from Shakespeare to James Baldwin, John Ruskin to Joan(...)
Suppose a sentence
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In ''Suppose a sentence,'' Brian Dillon, whom John Banville has called ''a literary flâneur in the tradition of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin,'' has written a sequel of sorts to ''Essayism,'' turning his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence—from Shakespeare to James Baldwin, John Ruskin to Joan Didion—this new book explores style, voice, and language, along with the subjectivity of reading. Both an exercise in practical criticism and a set of experiments or challenges, ''Suppose a sentence'' is a polemical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature.
Literature and poetry
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This fictional work about the construction and decay of a late modernist building can also be read as an essay on our contemporary unease with modernism in general. Author Brian Dillon, UK editor of Cabinet magazine, based it on research into St. Peter's Seminary, a college complex commissioned by the Catholic Church in the 1950s, completed in 1968, and abandoned by 1980.(...)
Sanctuary
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This fictional work about the construction and decay of a late modernist building can also be read as an essay on our contemporary unease with modernism in general. Author Brian Dillon, UK editor of Cabinet magazine, based it on research into St. Peter's Seminary, a college complex commissioned by the Catholic Church in the 1950s, completed in 1968, and abandoned by 1980. On the outskirts of Glasgow - itself a city with a vexed relationship to Le Corbusier-esque modernism - the building is rich with histories: of its architects, its residing student priests, the drug addicts it once housed and treated, and the local teenagers for whom it is a kind of Gothic recreation center. This book takes the material remains of modernism and treats them from a literary point of view.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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Psycho Buildings: Artists and Architecture marks the fortieth anniversary of London's Hayward gallery--itself an architectural icon, and one of the few remaining examples of the 1960s Brutalist style. The exhibition brings together the work of artists--including Atelier Bow-Wow, Michael Beutler, Los Carpinteros, Gelitin, Mike Nelson, Ernesto Neto, Tobias Putrih, Tomas(...)
August 2008, London
Psycho Buildings: Artists Take On Architecture
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Psycho Buildings: Artists and Architecture marks the fortieth anniversary of London's Hayward gallery--itself an architectural icon, and one of the few remaining examples of the 1960s Brutalist style. The exhibition brings together the work of artists--including Atelier Bow-Wow, Michael Beutler, Los Carpinteros, Gelitin, Mike Nelson, Ernesto Neto, Tobias Putrih, Tomas Saraceno, Do-Ho Suh and Rachel Whiteread--who create habitat-like structures and architectural environments that are mental and perceptual spaces as much as physical ones. The works in this book revisit and reanimate the history of Modernist design while reminding us that built spaces can be defined in social, political, psychological, physical and aesthetic terms. An invaluable exploration of this contemporary trend, the volume includes essays by Hayward Director Ralph Rugoff, Jane Rendell and Brian Dillon. In addition, each artist profile includes a text by a different author, including Francis McKee, Tumelo Mosaka, Midori Matsui, Brian Dillon, Paulo Herkenhoff, David Greene, Francesco Manacorda, Tom Morton, Miwon Kwon and Iain Sinclair.
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The "ruins" of the modern era are the landmarks of recent art’s turn toward site and situation, history and memory. The abiding interest of artists in ruination and decay has led in particular to the concept of the modern ruin - an ambiguous site of artistic and architectural modernism, personal and collective memories, and the cultural afterlife of eras such as those of(...)
Ruins
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The "ruins" of the modern era are the landmarks of recent art’s turn toward site and situation, history and memory. The abiding interest of artists in ruination and decay has led in particular to the concept of the modern ruin - an ambiguous site of artistic and architectural modernism, personal and collective memories, and the cultural afterlife of eras such as those of state communism and colonialism. Contemporary art’s explorations of the ruin can evoke on the one hand diverse experiences of nostalgia and on the other a ceaselessly renewed encounter with catastrophes of the recent past and apprehensions of the future. For every relic of a harmonious era or utopian dream stands another recalling industrial decline, environmental disaster, and the depredations of war. This anthology provides a comprehensive survey of the contemporary ruin in cultural discourse, aesthetics, and artistic practice. It examines the development of ruin aesthetics from the early modern era to the present; the ruin as a privileged emblem of modernity’s decline; the relic as a portal onto the political history of the recent past; the destruction and decline of cities and landscapes, with the emergence of "non-places" and “drosscape”; the symbolism of the entropic and decayed in critical environmentalism; and the confusing temporalities of the ruin in recent art - its involution of timescales and perspectives as it addresses not just the past but the future.
Art Theory
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Objects in This Mirror presents a polemical defense of intellectual and cultural generalism and curiosity. The collection of essays rewardingly navigates diverse subjects ranging from the writings of W. G. Sebald and Roland Barthes to the history of manuals for tying a cravat and the search for a cure to the common cold. Staying true to the idea of the essay as a(...)
Objects in this mirror: essays
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Objects in This Mirror presents a polemical defense of intellectual and cultural generalism and curiosity. The collection of essays rewardingly navigates diverse subjects ranging from the writings of W. G. Sebald and Roland Barthes to the history of manuals for tying a cravat and the search for a cure to the common cold. Staying true to the idea of the essay as a self-aware but generous literary and critical form, this book explores the variety of topics within the rubric of art writing or criticism.
Art Theory