Category Archives: theory
Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein
John Corbett (1994)
Using obscure and familiar figures from around the world as touchstones for portraits, interviews, and essays, Corbett roams an incredible breadth of musical territory: blues and jazz, contemporary classical, funk and rap, free improvisation, rock, and reggae. His true talent becomes clear as he exits surface terrain to guide the reader through a labyrinth of philosophical and intellectual thought amid the musical landscape. His interview techniques (particularly with Cage), breadth and depth of knowledge and understanding, and use of words in a way that imparts wisdom and provokes deep thought all shine. This work shows Corbett to be an important writer of our time; recommended for serious musicians and all others who enjoy the “outside.”
Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America
Lucy Lippard (1990)
In America today there is a little-known explosion of creative art by women and men from many different ethnic backgrounds. Mixed Blessings is the first book to discuss the crosscultural process taking place in the work of Latino, Native-, African-, and Asian-American artists. Rich with illustrations of artworks in many different mediums, and filled with incisive quotes and unsettling reports, it is more than a book about art, it is a complex meditation on the relationships of people to their cultures.
Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse
Katherine and Michael McCoy (1990)
A book that documents Cranbrook’s Design Department faculty, student, and alumni work from 1980-1990. Although not defined by a style, the Cranbrook design philosophy has been influential in product, graphic and furniture design. Products have been treated as sensual objects to be interpreted. “We’ve tried to recognize that products carry the mythology of the culture,” said Michael McCoy, chairman of the design department with his wife, Katherine.
Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising
Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson (1996)
Contemporary ads are a symbol of competition as much as a bid for new customers: that’s the contention of authors who suggest that the “sign wars” represent a consequence of a disjoined media culture. Insights on media, advertising strategy, and business blend in a strong consideration which uses signs and symbols from recent campaigns to provide a critical view of ad culture results.
Ways of Seeing
John Berger (1972)
John Berger’s, The Ways of Seeing, based on the groundbreaking BBC television series of the same name, challenges us to rethink the ways in which we view the world and the many images that surround it. Every image that confronts us embodies a way of seeing (i.e. the photographer’s, the painter’s, etc) but it is the way in which we see that image – the perspective of the beholder – that is of especial interest to Berger. Before the invention of the camera, which ushered in an “age of reproduction,” the spectator’s perspective in relation to the work of art was dominant. Now, instead of the “spectator traveling to the image” the “image travels to the spectator.” Through the means of reproduction, the meaning of art was indelibly changed.
Mythologies
Roland Barthes (1975)
Mythologies illustrates the beautiful generosity of Barthes’s progressive interest in the meaning (his word is signification) of practically everything around him, not only the books and paintings of high art, but also the slogans, trivia, toys, food, and popular rituals (cruises, striptease, eating, wrestling matches) of contemporary life . . . For Barthes, words and objects have in common the organized capacity to say something; at the same time, since they are signs, words and objects have the bad faith always to appear natural to their consumer, as if what they say is eternal, true, necessary, instead of arbitrary, made, contingent. Each of the little essays in this book wrenches a definition out of a common but constructed object, making the object speak its hidden, but ever-so-present, reservoir of manufactured sense.
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
Judith Butler (1989)
In a new introduction to the 10th-anniversary edition of Gender Trouble–among the two or three most influential books (and by far the most popular) in the field of gender studies–Judith Butler explains the complicated critical response to her groundbreaking arguments and the ways her ideas have evolved as a result. Nevertheless, she has resisted the urge to revise what has become a feminist classic (as well as an elegant defense of drag, given Butler’s emphasis on the performative nature of gender). The book was produced, according to Butler, “as part of the cultural life of a collective struggle that has had, and will continue to have, some success in increasing the possibilities for a livable life for those who live, or try to live, on the sexual margins.” An attack on the essentialism of French feminist theory and its basis in structuralist anthropology, Gender Trouble expands to address the cultural prejudices at play in genetic studies of sex determination, as well as the uses of gender parody, and also provides a critical genealogy of the naturalization of sex.
The Ruin of Representation in Modernist Art and Texts
Jo Anna Isaak (1986)
An investigation of the relationship of painting and literature, and the emergence of abstraction in art and writing, discussing figures such as James Joyce, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and Wyndham Lewis.
The Subcultures Reader
Edited by Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (1997)
First coined in the 1940s, the term “subculture” has been applied to society’s most interesting, and, often, most inventive elements. Through a collection of articles written over the last 50 years, this book traces both the history of the academic study of subcultures and the history of subcultures themselves. While you’ll find the usual assortment of articles on punk rock, street gangs, and Star Trek fans, what is perhaps most interesting are the articles from the early days of “subculture studies.” Two of the highlights include a piece by Paul G. Cressey on 1930s taxi dancers and their opinions on race and class, and an article by Howard Becker on the language and attitudes of jazz musicians in the early ’60s. The 55 selections in this volume offer a rich spectrum of subcultures and the academic responses they have evoked.
Image, Music, Text
Roland Barthes (1978)
Roland Barthes, the French critic and semiotician, was one of the most important critics and essayists of this century. His work continues to influence contemporary literary theory and cultural studies. Image-Music-Text collects Barthes’s best writings on photography and the cinema, as well as fascinating articles on the relationship between images and sound. Two of Barthes’s most important essays, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” and “The Death of the Author” are also included in this fine anthology, an excellent introduction to his thought.