AGENCE „X‟ PRESS RELEASE October 18, 2011 Gavin Keeney, "Else-where": Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). Cloth (w/ dust jacket), 358 pages. ISBN 978-1-4438-3359-2 I am pleased to announce the release of "Else-where": Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The essays were written over the past ten years and are presented in two parts, closing with "Ten Theses on Architecture as Art," an essay written this past June-July proposing a reinvigorated sense of responsibility on the part of the discipline of architecture to counter its selfinflicted complicity with neo-liberal capitalism. ABSTRACT "Else-where" is a synoptic survey of the representational values given to art, architecture, and cultural production from 2002 through 2011. Written primarily as a critique of what is suppressed in architecture and what is disclosed in art, the essays are informed by the passage out of poststructuralism and its disciplinary analogues toward the real Real (denoted over the course of the studies as the "Real-Irreal" or "Else-where"). While architecture nominally addresses an environmental ethos, it also famously negotiates its own representational values by way of its putative autonomy (autonomy as self-interest, versus selflessness); its main repression in this regard is "landscape," figure of the Other and figure of the Real. Engaging forms of spectrality, and not necessarily speculative intelligence per se, architecture is also "conscious" of its own complicity in capitalist orders, a complicity that in part underwrites its avant-garde forms of agitation since the onset of modern architecture. As a result, and over the course of the twentieth century, architectural vanguards have successively been depleted such that they return only as reified half-measures in the late-modern production of difference. As such, the essay "Actually Existing Ground" (2008) examines the failed promise of Landscape Urbanism. Since the 1960s, as with the allied arts, architecture has evacuated many of the utopian gestures given to modernism and embraced a form of ultra-contingency in a direct alliance with the post-modern and post-Marxist concession to markets and to cultural production as principal means of establishing formal hegemony. This recourse or surrender to the economic-determinist ethos of post-modernity, regardless of attempts to problematize it and/or critique it through types of what Manfredo Tafuri has called "operative criticism" (works of architecture as criticism), has, arguably, all but failed, and with the suggestive return circa 2011 of new forms of resistance an exit from the accommodating spirit of the times is indicative of the expectation of strenuous, yet highly formal and non-discursive operations within artistic and architectural production. The essays collected in "Else-where" cross various disciplines, inclusive of landscape architecture, architecture, and visual art, to develop a nuanced critique of an emergent formal regard in the arts that is also an invocation of the highest coordinates given to the arts – formal ontology as speculative intelligence itself – or the return of the universal as utopian thought "here-and-now." "ELSE-WHERE" 2 CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: The "History" of Art History Part I: 2002-2005 1. A Refracted History of the Twentieth Century (2002) 2. The Coming Philosophy (2003) 3. The Affective Sublime (2003) 4. Discours naturel (2004) 5. Thought Itself (2004) 6. Infinity Doubled (2004) 7. Blurring the Real (2004) 8. Kant Nietzsche Undo Lacan (2005) 9. The Existential Draft/Draught (2005) 10. The Sayable and the Unsayable (2005) 11. The Way Out (2005) Part II: 2006-2011 1. Forms of Nothingness: An Elective "Communism" (2006) 2. The Cosmogonic Parousia (2006) 3. Living Midnight (2006) 4. Actually Existing Ground (2008) 5. Notes on the Artistic Ego (2008) 6. The (Dis)loyal Subject (2008) 7. Affective Regimes (2009) 8. The Silence: Non-discursive Agency in Photography (2010) 9. The Origin of the Arts (2011) 10. The Literary Work of Art (2011) 11. La Présence: The Stigmata of the Irreal (2011) Conclusion Ten Theses on Architecture as Art (2011) Appendices Notes on Milieu & Anti-milieu (2004) Notes on Sinister Perspectives (2006) Bibliography Index Thanks go to: Jean-Louis Cohen for facilitating the time spent at NYU‟s Institute of Fine Arts in 2010 where the essays "The Silence: Non-discursive Agency in Photography," "The Origin of the Arts," "The Literary Work of Art," and "La Présence: The Stigmata of the Irreal" were produced; José Vela Castillo, Palmyra Stefania Geraki, and Parsa Khalili for their conversation and insightful comments throughout the construction of the concluding essay, "Ten Theses on Architecture as Art"; Carol Koulikourdi, Amanda Millar, and Soucin Yip-Sou, the Three Graces at CSP, for their exquisite patience and support throughout the production of the book; and Gerhard Richter for kindly permitting the use of the stunning images of Sils Maria on the cover. GK Cover image – Gerhard Richter, Atlas Plate 692: Sils Maria. © Gerhard Richter, 2011. Courtesy of Atelier Richter. http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/-Else-where---Essays-in-Art--Architecture--and-Cultural-Production-2002-20111-44383359-2.htm