A second look at distraction, extracting untold pleasures from its alleged dangers, defending and celebrating the unfocused life for the small and great wonders it can deliver.
This short book takes a second look at distraction, extracting untold pleasures from its alleged dangers, defending and celebrating the unfocused life for the small and great wonders it can deliver. It tracks the paths of writers that built their works around non-linear thinking. Bergson called on distraction to sharpen our perceptions; Proust's greatest epiphany came from stumbling, not walking in a straight line; Nietzsche never trusted a thought that didn't come from perambulation. The wanderings documented in these pages carry none of the stigma of attention deficit. Quite the opposite. In Montaigne's words, there is a marvelous grace in letting thoughts be carried away at the pleasure of the wind. It is time to side with some of the great propagandists of so-called wasted time and cultivate controlled mental mayhem. Come join the ranks of the great hedonists of meandering thought.

The Plenitude of Distraction

Literature & Fiction

Van Zuylen, Marina

Essays & Correspondence

Sequence Press

An obituarist opens his archive to celebrate the obscure and the eccentric.
In Doomed and Famous, an obituarist opens his archive in celebration of the most marginal and improbable characters, creating a meta-fiction of extinction and obscurity. For many decades Adrian Dannatt tracked and dredged the dead, with a macabre disregard for the etiquette of mortality. His specialty, much in demand among even the most mainstream publications, was to memorialize those whose eccentricity or criminality made them unlikely candidates for the fleeting immortality of a newspaper necrology. Dannatt maintained a veritable lust, perverse certainly, for capturing and celebrating such wayward existences. This book is a selection of some of the best―meaning most improbable―of these miniature biographies.
Here are arranged an almost fictive cast of characters including an imaginary Sephardic count in Wisconsin, a sadomasochist collector of the world's rarest clocks, a discrete Cuban connoisseur of invisibility, an alcoholic novelist in Rio, a Warhol Superstar gone wrong, a leading downtown Manhattan dominatrix, a conceptual artist who blew up a museum, and many others. Dannatt terminates this volume with his own putative extinction, performing the difficult if not dangerous task of penning his personal life history and ultimate end.

Doomed and Famous: Selected Obituaries

Dannatt, Adrian

Humor & Entertainment

The eminent French philosopher “dialecticizes” five of the artist Jean-Luc Moulène's objects with five conceptual formations from the history of Western philosophy.
In this unique essay, first delivered as a lecture during a panel discussion with the artist and philosopher Reza Negarestani, Alain Badiou identifies and “dialecticizes” five of the artist Jean-Luc Moulène's objects with five conceptual formations from the history of Western philosophy. Aristotle's complex of matter and form is called to mind to describe the inner logic of a hard foam sculpture. A bronze statue with holes activates Plato's notion of participation of the concrete world in the “injured Idea of the Beautiful.” A small metallic and incomplete “angel” engages Leibniz's affirmation that “everything that exists is composed of an infinity of things.” Badiou's musings go on to pair a broken and repaired plastic chair with Victor Hugo; a terrible hand made of concrete with the Freudian unconscious; and a large-scale “red and blue monster” with rudimentary mechanisms of the Cartesian cogito, the famous “I think, therefore I am,” with unexpected inversions and variations.
Badiou refrains, of course, from claiming that Moulène thinks about any of these philosophers when making his specific works. What he points to, however, in this richly illustrated bilingual volume, is that the artist and his art are “on the side of philosophy.”

Matter and Form, Self-Evidence and Surprise: On Jean-Luc Moulène's Objects

Arts & Photography

BADIOU, ALAIN

Individual Artists

The first in-depth publication on the artist Pieter Schoolwerth's practice.
One of the clear characteristics of our digital age is that all things, even bodies, are suspended from their material substance.. We as living beings are now confronting a structural split between the substance of things and their virtual double. Pieter Schoolwerth attempts to reverse this techno-cultural trend with his series of “in the last instance” paintings, in which the stuff of paint itself reappears only at the end of a complex, multimedia effort to produce a figurative picture. 
Model as Painting is the first in-depth publication on Schoolwerth's practice. Conceived by Schoolwerth as a comprehensive overview of his work leading up to the “Model as Painting” series, and an analysis of the particular processes developed in this body of work, the volume was designed in collaboration with Tiffany Malakooti and offers richly illustrated ideas, critical essays, and documentation. An introductory text by the artist lays out the foundations of his painting processes, and the main essays by art historian Molly Warnock and critic Peter Rostovsky respectively situate Schoolwerth's art produced over the last fifteen years, and set out to define his “practice [as] singular in its focus on language, labor, and the body's dispersal in today's technological landscape.”

Model as Painting

Schoolwerth, Pieter

History & Criticism

An encounter across time and space between Wols, a pioneering artist of the early twentieth century, and Eileen Quinlan, a contempory American artist.
Wols (1913–1951) was celebrated posthumously as one of the pioneering artists of the Art Informel movement. His distinctive early photographic work of the 1930s is, however, very little known. In an unusual connection across time and space his work is discussed in relation to that of contemporary American artist Eileen Quinlan (b. 1972). This book, a companion to the exhibition Always Starts with an Encounter: Wols–Eileen Quinlan, curated by Helena Papadopoulos and organized by Radio Athènes at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, in 2016, further explores the relationship between the work of the two artists.
Spectral and suggestive, but also precise and factual, through an indexical structure, a variety of textual forms and inflections, different registers of images and textures, this richly illustrated book reflects on a circular idea of time as it wanders in the abstruse physicality of the photographic. It includes texts by Olivier Berggruen, Quinn Latimer, Helena Papadopoulos, and Laura Preston, as well as two interviews with Eileen Quinlan.
Copublished with Radio Athènes

Always Starts with an Encounter: Wols-Eileen Quinlan

Monograph covering the last ten years of the artist Blake Rayne's output, a mode of abstract painting irrevocably marked by conceptual art.
Blake Rayne's paintings stem from the generative duplicity of words like Script, Folder, Application, Dissolve, and Screen. These operative terms situate the work between forms of linguistic description and the history of reflexive material practices in art. He begins from an orientation that considers the terms “painter” and “painting” as fictions. They have no stable material definition, but rather are shaped by evolving social, institutional, and physical relations. Conceived as a work, this monograph covers the last ten years of the artist's output and culminates in his first survey exhibition at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas. Shifting sequences of varying material treatments guide us through the linguistic, institutional, and physical relations that have shaped Rayne's painting practice. The book is united under the structuring sign of cinema, with each section existing like a shot in a film, if you will, that is necessarily informed by and in dialogue with those that come before and after it. The main essays by John Kelsey and Jaleh Mansoor respectively situate Rayne's art within the urban cultural circumstances of New York during the last decade, and his specific position as a painter in relation to other painters of his generation, such as Cheyney Thomson. Mansoor further skillfully places the artist in a wider historical context. Shorter texts by gallerist David Lewis, artists Laura Owens and Sean Paul, as well as curator Javier Sánchez Martínez, illuminate other aspects of Rayne's work, and weave together a range of ideas and tones, from the history of corporate design to the rise of automation; from a lighthearted intervention about “The Rule of Blake” to a museum catalogue introduction.

Tense and Spaced Out: Polar Nights, Glacial Chaos, and the Ecology of Misery

Rayne, Blake

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