This book results from the Slought Foundation conference on artist Osvaldo Romberg, held at the University of Pennsylvania in Spring 2001. Contributors to this volume include Gregory Flaxman, Reinaldo Laddaga, Robert Mahoney, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Osvaldo Romberg, and Marjorie Welish. This means in some way (we must try) to sense again the pleasure of painting, to paint the painting, to try to define again and again in each work, what is the essence of painting. Art is unverifiable, we can merely approach it through exercises, which sometimes surmount their own limits and provides us with a mystique of expression if we are artists, and a mystique of perception if we are observers. - Osvaldo Romberg, pp. 129 "Romberg’s work has passed through quite a number of stages, from the more analytic moment of the famously didactic chromatic value tables presented as so many "explicitations" of famous paintings, to a more synthetic and architectonic moment with the modelizations of churches and sacred spaces, and its dynamism has not stopped. Without attempting to foresee where it will go so as to expand and engage with our "post-medium" condition, to take up Krauss’s useful category, a category, let us note, elaborated in a discussion of a multi-media artist like Marcel Broodthaers, I would simply like to pause and stress the subjective position that both enables and frames this type of work. It is in this selfless or egoless egotism of the work as work that I can become one not with the artist, not with the Romantic myth of the genius, who from Picasso to Pollock still seduces once in a while, but with the work as it presents itself in its simplicity, purity and elegance. Then and only then can I "accompany" it, like for instance by humming once more, in a slightly lower scale: "Non.... Rrien, rrien de rrien, je ne rregrette rrien... Ni le bien, ni le mal, Tout ça m’est bien égal! ... Et demain je rrecommence à zéro...." - Jean-Michel Rabaté, pp. 54-55

Searching for Romberg: Art and Interactivity in the Work of Osvaldo Romberg

Arts & Photography

Slought Books

This new publication, the third in our Contemporary Artist Series, engages work by conceptual artist William Anastasi in relation to literary and artistic predecessors and contemporaries including Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp, and Cage. This publication is edited by Aaron Levy and Jean-Michel Rabaté, with contributions by William Anastasi, Joseph Masheck, Thomas McEvilley, and Steve McCaffery, and an introduction by Osvaldo Romberg. In addition, nearly 40 manuscript pages from William Anastasi's manuscripts "me innerman monophone" and "du jarry," engaging Joyce and Duchamp via Jarry, are reproduced in the book, alongside 10 pages of reproductions of Anastasi's work from the 1960s. By showing concretely that many passages in Finnegans Wake contain buried allusions to Jarry's characters and vocabulary and personality, Anastasi is not simply annotating Joyce's masterpiece; he provides a new way of reading all avant-garde literature. If Jarry is shown to be somewhere in Joyce's texts, how can we be sure that he is not everywhere?

William Anastasi's Pataphysical Society: Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp, and Cage

Aaron Levy

William Anastasi

Jean-Michel Rabaté

This new publication, the second in our Theory Series, engages metaphors of the hive in contemporary cultural life and encompasses an interdisciplinary approach that spans contemporary art, curatorial studies, and literary criticism. This publication is edited by Aaron Levy and Thaddeus Squire, with essays by Anthony Grafton and Thomas Keenan and audio and visual contributions by Michael Zansky. The publication also includes a complimentary companion DVD, "in which the thinking man finds himself in a gigantic orphanage...," directed by Aaron Levy, with a monologue adapted from Thomas Bernhard's Gargoyles and read by Gary Indiana, which explores the archive in disarray. "The Revolt of the Bees artfully celebrates a set of images and associated practices that dominated the world of high culture for centuries. [...] This collection of evidence and the imaginative and sometimes subversive way in which it is displayed make a distinctive contribution to the new field of history of books and reading—an interdisciplinary study currently in an explosive phase of expansion." - Anthony Grafton "The hive is a living organism, and the living organism is a metaphor for the American organization, which is both the embodiment of and emblem for contemporary cultural practice. Every hive is constituted of thousands of bees: small organisms of finite lifespan subject to an inexorable cycle of life and death. The hive as a whole, however, provides an architecture for overcoming death by possessing a different sustainability-one wrought through continuous cycles of generational passing and reemergence, for which death is not a consideration. Extending the metaphor of the hive into the cultural realm suggests new and more hopeful visions of the cultural organization. Can we imagine our organizations operating without consideration or fear of fragility and sustainability as they envision their futures?" -- Aaron Levy and Thaddeus Squire

The Revolt of the Bees: Wherein the Future of the Paper-Hive is Declared

Anthony Grafton

Thomas Keenan

Thaddeus Squire

"Rrrevolutionnaire: Conversations in Theory, Vol. 1" is edited by Gregg Lambert and Aaron Levy, with contributions by distinguished theorists and cultural critics including Branka Arsic, Eduardo Cadava, Rebecca Comay, Gregg Flaxman, Gregg Lambert, Thomas Y. Levin, Catherine Liu, Dorothea Olkowski, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Avital Ronell, Keith Sanborn, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Anthony Vidler. The volume includes photographs by Argentinean artist Julio Grinblatt documenting the physical space in which these conversations were staged.

Rrrevolutionnaire: Conversations in Theory, Vol. 1

Ex-Cities (Contemporary Artist Series, No. 5)

Hélène Cixous

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