Dada Presentism: An Essay on Art and History

Dada is often celebrated for its strategies of shock and opposition, but in Dada Presentism, Maria Stavrinaki provides a new picture of Dada art and writings as a lucid reflection on history and the role of art within it. The original (Berlin-based) Dadaists' acute historical consciousness and their modern experience of time, she contends, anticipated the formulations of major historians such as Reinhart Koselleck and, more recently, François Hartog. The book explores Dada temporalities and concepts of history in works of art, artistic discourse, and in the photographs of the Berlin Dada movement. These photographs―including the famous one of the First International Dada Fair―are presented not as simple, transparent documents, but as formal deployments conforming to a very concrete theory of history. This approach allows Stavrinaki to link Dada to more contemporary artistic movements and practices interested in history and the archive. At the same time, she investigates what seems to be a real oxymoron of the movement: its simultaneous claim to the ephemeral and its compulsive writing of its own history. In this way, Dada Presentism also interrogates the limits between history and fiction.

Arts & Photography

Stavrinaki, Maria

History & Criticism

Stanford University Press

This lavishly illustrated volume documents the first public presentation of a recent monumental sculpture by Richard Serra, one of the most significant artists of his generation.\nRichard Serra has produced large-scale sculptures for architectural, urban, and landscape settings spanning the globe. This volume, published to coincide with a 2021–22 exhibition at Gagosian Le Bourget in Paris, presents a recent sculpture by the artist: Transmitter (2020). Made of weatherproof steel, Transmitter is monumental in scale, measuring approximately 4 meters in height and 18 meters in width and length. Here, immersive installation views of the sculpture within the vast exhibition space of Gagosian Le Bourget in Paris are accompanied by plate photography of fourteen recent works on paper by the artist. A new text by art historian Maria Stavrinaki (in English and French) reads Serra’s long sculptural practice through three formal, temporal, and political moments.\nRichard Serra was born in 1938 in San Francisco, and lives and works in New York. His work is held in major museum collections around the world. Since 1983, Gagosian has presented thirty-seven exhibitions of Serra’s work in the United States and Europe.

Richard Serra: Transmitter

Humor & Entertainment

Gagosian / Rizzoli

Review\n"From Cézanne to Smithson via Paleolithic mandibles, Stavrinaki mobilizes an unlikely group of artifacts to explore the core hermeneutic questions of an Anthropocene epoch in which the symbolic and the geological have become intertwined, if not indistinguishable. Through readings that are not just anecdotally rich and methodologically exemplary but also utterly compelling formally, Transfixed by Prehistory delivers a stunning reconceptualization of the relationship between time and technology in industrial capitalism."―Devin Fore, Princeton University\nAn examination of how modern art was impacted by the concept of prehistory and the prehistoric\nPrehistory is an invention of the late nineteenth century. In that moment of technological progress and acceleration of production and circulation, three major Western narratives about time took shape. One after another, these new fields of inquiry delved into the obscure immensity of the past: first, to surmise the age of the Earth; second, to find the point of emergence of human beings; and third, to ponder the age of art. Maria Stavrinaki considers the inseparability of these accounts of temporality from the disruptive forces of modernity. She asks what a history of modernity and its art would look like if considered through these three interwoven inventions of the longue durée. Transfixed by Prehistory attempts to articulate such a history, which turns out to be more complex than an inevitable march of progress leading up to the Anthropocene. Rather, it is a history of stupor, defamiliarization, regressive acceleration, and incessant invention, since the “new” was also found in the deep sediments of the Earth. Composed of as much speed as slowness, as much change as deep time, as much confidence as skepticism and doubt, modernity is a complex phenomenon that needs to be rethought. Stavrinaki focuses on this intrinsic tension through major artistic practices (Cézanne, Matisse, De Chirico, Ernst, Picasso, Dubuffet, Smithson, Morris, and contemporary artists such as Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Hirschhorn), philosophical discourses (Bataille, Blumenberg, and Jünger), and the human sciences. This groundbreaking book will attract readers interested in the intersections of art history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, mythology, geology, and archaeology.

Transfixed by Prehistory: An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time

Zone Books

Saisis par la préhistoire - Enquête sur l’art et le temps des modernes

Presses Du Reel

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Books by Stavrinaki, Maria