Garage and Ad Marginem Press collaborate to create new publications
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Garage Center for Contemporary Culture announced the launch of a joint publishing program with Ad Marginem Press, specializing in texts on contemporary culture. The new series will include publications on contemporary art and architecture, new media, photography, theater, cinema, sociology and cultural marketing.
Published texts will include theory and criticism, fiction, diaries and collections of interviews and will encompass well-known classical texts by 20th century thinkers, together with new publications such as Jonathan Littell’s Triptych: How To Look At Francis Bacon (2012). The first publications will be Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema and John Seabrook’s Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture. Also this year, the first publications in Russian of Politicians of Poetics, a selection of collected essays from the earlier Art Power and Going Public, by Boris Groys; History of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Bento’s Sketchbook by Booker Prize winner John Berger will be published. These titles contribute to delineating the notion of the ‘contemporary’, and they allow the reader to shape an individual outlook on contemporary culture.
Dasha Zhukova, founder of Garage, commented, ‘We would like to bridge the gap in terms of knowledge and information on contemporary culture. Russia is developing a new community of artists, curators and contemporary art lovers, but there are virtually no books in Russian which comment on contemporary culture, so this is a chance to make a difference.’
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema
Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema is the second title in a new series of publications by Garage Center for Contemporary Culture and Ad Marginem Press. The Russian edition will bring together both volumes of the French philosopher’s in-depth philosophical treatise on cinema – Cinema 1: The Movement Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time Image (1985) – which is neither film history nor theory, but an exercise in ‘cine-philosophy’. In both texts, Deleuze explores cinema as a new framework for thinking, whose influence in the 20th century extended to theater, dance, painting, photography and philosophy.
It is not sufficient to compare great film directors with painters, architects or even musicians. They must also be compared with thinkers. Their thinking is based not on concepts, but on images: the movement-image and time-image. There are no illustrations in this book: I would like the text itself to become an illustration to the great films that have left their mark on our memories, to the films that excited us or even taught us something.
Gilles Deleuze
In Cinema, Deleuze demonstrates the way in which the medium can think, show, conceal, doubt and even argue in its own purely cinematic terms via its specific duration and movement. He identifies and analyses the four major pre-war schools of montage – Soviet, American, French and German – as tools for expressing various ideologies, histories, social codes and relationships between humanity and nature.
Cinema teaches us new ways of seeing and thinking, and it offers an alternative experience to that of everyday life. Deleuze’s Cinema facilitates our understanding of the medium. It is addressed not just to philosophers and film critics but to anyone who wishes to grasp modern life and the multiple moving images that permeate it.
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was a French philosopher, whose writings address philosophy, literature, film and fine art. He graduated from the Sorbonne in Philosophy in 1948 and went on to teach philosophy in various Paris lycées until 1957. From 1969 to 1987, he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII where he met Félix Guattari, his writing partner on many influential texts. Deleuze’s writings include monographs on philosophers and 20th century cultural figures, such as Nietzsche, Bergson, Foucault, Spinoza, Proust, Kafka and Francis Bacon. His most well-known texts written in collaboration with Guattari include Anti-Oedipus (1977), A Thousand Plateaus (1987) and What is Philosophy? (1994).
John Seabrook, Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture
For more than a century, the elite in the United States distinguished itself from consumers of popular, or mass, culture. Highbrow vs. lowbrow was the language through which culture was translated into status – the pivot upon which distinctions of taste became distinctions of caste. Then the old distinction between the elite culture of the aristocrats and the commercial culture of the mass public was torn down, and in its place was erected a hierarchy of hotness. Nobrow is not culture without a hierarchy, but in Nobrow commercial culture is a potential source of status, rather than the thing that the elite defines itself against.
John Seabrook
The opposition between high and low culture, good and bad taste, can no longer be applied to contemporary culture. Cultural production today is governed by the same marketing criteria of fashion and commercial worth that are applied to commodities ranging from cars to clothing and interior design. The traditional hierarchical relationship between high (elite) and low (mass) culture has been replaced by a common, horizontal field of the ‘nobrow’.
In his book, Seabrook identifies the new cultural landscape of the ‘nobrow’. In his terms, society today is dominated by MTV music culture, George Lucas and Star Wars, the media – in particular The New Yorker – Kurt Cobain and Snoop Dog, where what is ‘good’ means popular.
John Seabrook
John Seabrook has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace (Simon & Schuster, 1997), Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture (Knopf, 2000) and Flash of Genius and Other True Stories of Invention (St. Martin’s, 2008). His work has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Travel+Leisure and The Village Voice. Seabrook has taught non-fiction writing at Princeton University. He lives in New York City.