Hal Foster

Leah Dickerman

Yve-alain Bois

Benjamin Buchloh

George Baker

Foster's concise analysis of art practices over the past three decades traces important models at work in art and theory, with special attention to the controversial connections between the two during this period. The author includes a new narrative of the historical avant-garde and concludes with an original reading of our contemporary situation--and what it portends for future practices of art, theory, culture, and politics. 90 illustrations.

The Avant-garde at the End of the Century

The Return of the Real

Jacob Needleman

Mary Stein

In the spiritual language of the 20th century few names raise such varied reactions as that of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866-1949). Much of what is considered New Age spirituality can be attributed to Gurdjieff. This book is a tribute not only to the scope and power of Gurdjieff's ideas, but to the special "atmosphere" that surrounded his work with pupils.

Essays and Reflections on the Man and His Teachings

Gurdjieff

Jean Brèche

The Composition Or Making of the Moste Excellent and Pretious Oil Called Oleum Magistrale

"This 449-page collection of essays on the life of the famous (or infamous?) George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff could serve as the definitive tome on the eccentric and enigmatic teacher."

Hito Steyerl

Geoffrey Batchen

Carol Squiers

George Thomas Baker

Organized by ICP Curator Carol Squiers, 'What Is a Photograph?' will explore the intense creative experimentation in photography that has occurred since the 1970s. Conceptual art introduced photography into contemporary art making, using the medium in ways that challenged it artistically, intellectually, and technically and broadened the notion of what a photograph could be in art. A new generation of artists began an equally rigorous but more aesthetically adventurous analysis, which probed photography itself - from the role of light, color, composition, to materiality and the subject. 'What Is a Photograph?' brings together these artists, who reinvented photography.

What is a Photograph?

A new theory of the readymade via a new reading of Picabia and a new writing of Dada. The artist Francis Picabia—notorious dandy, bon vivant, painter, poet, filmmaker, and polemicist—has emerged as the Dadaist with postmodern appeal, and one of the most enigmatic forces behind the enigma that was Dada. In this first book in English to focus on Picabia's work in Paris during the Dada years, art historian and critic George Baker reimagines Dada through Picabia's eyes. Such reimagining involves a new account of the readymade—Marcel Duchamp's anti-art invention, which opened fine art to mass culture and the commodity. But in Picabia's hands, Baker argues, the Dada readymade aimed to reinvent art rather than destroy it. Picabia's readymade opened art not just to the commodity, but to the larger world from which the commodity stems: the fluid sea of capital and money that transforms all objects and experiences in its wake. The book thus tells the story of a set of newly transformed artistic practices, claiming them for art history—and naming them—for the first time: Dada Drawing, Dada Painting, Dada Photography, Dada Abstraction, Dada Cinema, Dada Montage. Along the way, Baker describes a series of nearly forgotten objects and events, from the almost lunatic range of the Paris Dada “manifestations” to Picabia's polemical writings; from a lost work by Picabia in the form of a hole (called, suggestively, The Young Girl) to his “painting” Cacodylic Eye, covered in autographs by luminaries ranging from Ezra Pound to Fatty Arbuckle. Baker ends with readymades in prose: a vast interweaving of citations and quotations that converge to create a heated conversation among Picabia, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. Art history has never looked like this before. But then again, Dada has never looked like art history.

Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris

The Artwork Caught by the Tail

The History and Antiquities of the County of Northampton

Medical Tracts, Read at the College of Physicians Between the Years 1767 and 1785

Throughout the modern era, photography has been enlisted not only to document but also to classify the world and its people. Its status bolstered by a popular belief in the scientific objectivity of photographic evidence, photography has been used, from the earliest days of the medium, to produce and organize knowledge about the external world. Published to accompany the exhibition The Order of Things: Photography from The Walther Collection, this catalogue investigates the production and uses of serial portraiture, vernacular imagery, architectural surveys and time-based performance in photography from the 1880s to the present, bringing together works by artists from Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. Setting early modernist photographers Karl Blossfeldt and August Sander in dialogue with contemporary artists such as Ai Weiwei, Nobuyoshi Araki, Richard Avedon, Zanele Muholi, Stephen Shore and Zhuang Huan, The Order of Things illustrates how typological methods in photography have developed around the globe. Edited by Brian Wallis, The Order of Things includes texts by Geoffrey Batchen, Tina Campt, Christopher Phillips, George Baker, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Michael Jennings, Ulrike Schneider, Allan Sekula and Joel Smith.

Photography from the Walther Collection

The Order of Things

This is the moving story of George, his years in China from his birth in 1934 up to 1957 and his quest to be reunited with his family whom he had not seen for many years. He drifted from one place to another and his unusual upbringing with distant relatives, strangers, and the time he spent alone in a charity run boarding school, taught him that he had to fight to survive. The images of what he saw would haunt him for the rest of his life but nothing could prepare him for the upheaval and upset ahead, when his daring plan to escape from the wars being raged around him to freedom, became reality. Blinded by the passion of youth and his need to be wanted, to belong and be loved, his miraculous journey to find his family meant he had to grow up fast and leave behind the people who had meant so much to him, including his first love. This is my story and I hope that readers will forgive me for some of the language used but it was necessary in order to express the iniquity of the events that occurred.

George Baker

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