« Art Critics' Reading List
CHRISTOPH COX
 |
Christoph Cox teaches philosophy and art theory at Hampshire College and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He is the author of Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (1999) and co-editor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (2004). Cox has curated exhibitions at the Kitchen, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and other venues. His essays on philosophy, art and music have appeared in October, Artforum, the Journal of Visual Culture, the Journal of the History of Philosophy and other journals and magazines. Cox is currently working on two books, a philosophical book about sound art and experimental music, and an anthology examining the impact of new realist and materialist philosophies on artistic discourse and practice. |
 |
Manuel DeLanda. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997 DeLanda’s book doesn’t say a word about art, music or sound. But I’ve found it to be a crucial resource for thinking about those things. The author— a Mexican-born autodidact who began his career as an experimental filmmaker—is a brilliant synthesist, drawing material from geology, history, biology, linguistics, economics, and countless other fields to produce evidence for his central thesis: that all of nature and culture must be conceived as a collection of material and energetic flows operating at various speeds and scales. We are inclined to think in terms of things (bodies, artworks, compositions, buildings, books). But DeLanda encourages us to think of these as temporary coagulations of material currents that are both more elusive and more important. The book also anticipates the recent turn to realism and materialism in philosophy and cultural theory.
|
 |
Chris Cutler. File Under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music. 2nd edition. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1992 Those who know Chris Cutler tend to know him as the percussionist for avant rock bands such as Henry Cow and Pere Ubu, and as key player in the international free improvisation scene. But he is also an extraordinarily acute and intelligent theorist of music. Though Cutler has written a few additional essays over the past two decades, File Under Popular (first published in 1984 and revised in 1992) is his only book. I am continually astonished and dismayed by how little-known the book is, even among the cognoscenti of experimental music and sound art. In 16 pages, the essay “Necessity and Choice in Musical Forms” offers a significantly more compelling and prescient history of music than Jacques Attali’s celebrated book Noise. The essays on musical politics and the “popular” in popular culture extend and outstrip Theodor W. Adorno’s writings on those subjects. The book is due for a third edition, revised and expanded to include more recent material.
|
 |
Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn, eds. Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966-1973. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011 Lucy Lippard’s celebrated anthology Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 ably captured the wild profusion of postminimalist and conceptualist practices that reconfigured the very notion of “art” in this volatile and seminal period. During exactly those years, a kindred and allied revolution was taking place in music via composers such as Alvin Lucier, Annea Lockwood, Max Neuhaus, and Dick Higgins. This revolution was documented in real time in the pages of Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, a gorgeous, small-edition artist’s publication that included experimental scores (some notated in fur, printed on Plexiglas, or riddled with bullet holes), circuit diagrams, descriptions of sound installations, manifestos, interviews, concrete poems and magnificent 10” thick-vinyl LPs. I am lucky enough to live near two libraries that have complete runs of the journal. But for those not as lucky, this new anthology is the next best thing.
|
