ART & ARCHITECTURE DESIGN CULTURAL STUDIES NEW AND RECENT TITLES THE MIT PRESS Muriel Cooper David Reinfurt and Robert Wiesenberger Foreword by Lisa Strausfeld Afterword by Nicholas Negroponte Muriel Cooper (1925–1994) was the pioneering designer who created the iconic MIT Press colophon (or logo)— seven bars that represent the lowercase letters “mitp” as abstracted books on a shelf. She designed a modernist monument, the encyclopedic volume The Bauhaus (1969), and the graphically dazzling and controversial first edition of Learning from Las Vegas (1972). She used an offset press as an artistic tool, worked with a large-format Polaroid camera, and had an early vision of e-books. Cooper was the first design director of the MIT Press, the cofounder of the Vis- ible Language Workshop at MIT, and the first woman to be granted tenure at MIT’s Media Lab, where she developed software interfaces and taught a new generation of design- ers. She began her four-decade career at MIT by designing vibrant printed flyers for the Office of Publications; her final projects were digital. This lavishly illustrated volume documents Cooper’s career in abundant detail, with prints, sketches, book covers, posters, mechanicals, student projects, and photographs, from her work in design, teaching, and research at MIT. A humanist among scientists, Cooper embraced dynamism, simultaneity, transparency, and expressiveness across all the media she worked in. More than two decades after her career came to a premature end, Muriel Cooper’s legacy is still unfolding. This beautiful slip-cased volume, designed by Yasuyo Iguchi, looks back at a body of work that is as contemporary now as it was when Cooper was experimenting with IBM Selectric typewriters. She designed design’s future. “Take all the strands that define contemporary media, technology, and design, and follow them back in time to their source. To your astonishment, you will find all the strands converge in a single person: Muriel Cooper. This book will dispel any doubts: if today’s ever-expanding information universe began with one big bang, Muriel Cooper stood squarely at the center of it.” —Michael Bierut, Partner, Pentagram Design David Reinfurt is a Lecturer at Princeton University. Robert Wi- esenberger is Critic at the Yale School of Art, and PhD candidate at Columbia University. September 2017 | Hardcover | $60.00/£4700 | 240 pp. | 10 x 14 202 color illus., 137 b&w illus. | 9780262036504 Learning From Las Vegas Facsimile Edition Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour A fascimile edition of the long-out-of-print large-format edition designed by design icon Muriel Cooper. September 2017 | Hardcover | $100.00/£77.00 | 216 pp. | 10 1/2 x 14 | 180 color illus., 358 b&w illus. | 9780262036962 Cover art: From Russian Cosmism, edited by Boris Groys Gustav Klucis, illustration for A. Kruchenykh’s Chetyre fonetich- eskikh romana [Four phonetic novels], 1927, lithograph. Greek State Museum of Contemporary Art — Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki. Art Russian Cosmism Toward Fewer Images Edited by Boris Groys The Work of Alexander Kluge Cosmism emerged in Russia before the October Revolution Philipp Ekardt and developed through the 1920s and 1930s; like Marx- Alexander Kluge (born 1932) is a German filmmaker, au- ism and the European thor, television producer, theorist, and digital entrepreneur. avant-garde, two other Since 1960, he movements that shared has made four- this intellectual moment, teen feature films Russian Cosmism and twenty short rejected the contempla- films and has tive for the transforma- written more than tive, aiming to create thirty books—in- not merely new art or cluding three with philosophy but a new Marxist philoso- world. Cosmism went the pher Oskar Negt. furthest in its visions of His television transformation, calling production com- for the end of death, the pany has released resuscitation of the dead, more than 3,000 and free movement in features, in which cosmic space. This vol- Kluge converses ume collects crucial texts, many available in English for the with real or fic- first time, by the radical biopolitical utopianists of Russian tional experts or Cosmism. creates thematic Cosmism was developed by the Russian philosopher montages. He Nikolai Fedorov in the late nineteenth century; he believed also maintains a website on which he reassembles segments that humans had an ethical obligation not only to care for from his film and television work. To call Kluge “prolific” the sick but to cure death using science and technology; would be an understatement. This is the first English-lan- outer space was the territory of both immortal life and guage monograph devoted to the full scope of Kluge’s work, infinite resources. After the revolution, a new generation from his appearance on the cultural scene in the 1960s to pursued Fedorov’s vision. Cosmist ideas inspired visual his contributions to New German Cinema in the 1970s and artists, poets, filmmakers, theater directors, novelists (Tolstoy early 1980s to his recent collaborations with such artists as and Dostoevsky read Fedorov’s writings), architects, and Gerhard Richter. composers, and influenced Soviet politics and technology. In Toward Fewer Images, Philipp Ekardt offers both In the 1930s, Stalin quashed Cosmism, jailing or execut- close analyses of Kluge’s individual works and sustained ing many members of the movement. Today, when the investigations of his overarching (and perpetual) produc- philosophical imagination has again become entangled with tion. Ekardt discusses Kluge’s image theory and practice scientific and technological imagination, the works of the as developed across different media, and considers how, in Russian Cosmists seem newly relevant. relation to this theory, Kluge returns to, varies, expands, Contributors: Alexander Bogdanov, Alexander Chizhevsky, and modifies the practice of montage, including its recent Nikolai Fedorov, Boris Groys, Valerian Muravyev, manifestations in digital media—noting Kluge’s counterin- Alexander Svyatogor, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan Wood tuitive claim that creating montages results in fewer images. Kluge’s production, Ekardt argues, allows us to imagine a Boris Groys is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New model of authorship and artistic production that does not York University, Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Design in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Professor at the European Graduate rely on an accumulation of individual works over time but School in Saas Fee, Switzerland. rather on a permanent activity of (temporalized) reworking and redifferentiation. A copublication with e-flux, New York March 2018 | Hardcover | $27.95/£22.00 | 264 pp. | 6 x 9 | 1 illus. Philipp Ekardt is affiliated with University of London’s School of 9780262037433 Advanced Study/The Warburg Institute. June 2018 | Hardcover | $45.00/£35.00 | 400 pp. | 7 x 9 212 b&w photos | 9780262037976 October Files Series mitpress.mit.edu/art 1 Art 2016 Deaccessioning and Its Discontents in Museums, Money, and Politics A Critical History Andrea Fraser Martin Gammon Foreword by Jamie Stevens Museums often stir controversy when they deaccession 2016 in Museums, Money and Politics examines the intersection works—formally remove objects from permanent collec- of electoral politics and private-nonprofit art institutions tions—with some in the United critics accusing States at a them of betraying pivotal historical civic virtue and moment. It the public trust. documents the In fact, Martin reported politi- Gammon argues cal contributions in Deaccessioning made by trustees and Its Discontents, of over 100 art deaccession has museums, rep- been an essential resenting every component of state in the na- the museum ex- tion, in the 2016 periment for cen- election cycle. turies. Gammon With campaigns offers the first featuring attacks critical history of on vulnerable deaccessioning populations, the by museums from vilification of the the seventeenth media and “cultural elites,” and calls to curtail civil rights to the twenty-first century, and exposes the hyperbolic and liberties, the 2016 election cycle transformed national extremes of “deaccession denial”—the assumption that politics. It was also the most expensive election in American deaccession is always wrong—and “deaccession apology”— history, with over $6.4 billion raised for presidential and when museums attempt to blame the object for its remov- congressional races combined. Over half of this money al—as symptoms of the same misunderstanding of the role came from just a few hundred people—many of whom also of deaccessions to proper museum practice. He chronicles a support cultural institutions and serve on their boards. series of deaccession events in Britain and the United States 2016 in Museums, Money and Politics is organized like a that range from the disastrous to the beneficial, and propos- telephone book. Contribution data laid out in dense, col- es a typology of principles to guide future deaccessions. or-coded tables alphabetically by name of donor. With this Gammon describes the liquidation of the British Royal data filling approximately 1000 pages, the book physically Collections after Charles I’s execution—when masterworks materializes the massive interface between cultural philan- were used as barter to pay the king’s unpaid bills—as es- thropy and campaign finance in America while providing an tablishing a precedent for future deaccessions. He recounts, exhaustive resource for exploring the politics