Clinic Of Phantasms

Artist, gallerist, and writer Giovanni Intra’s inventive approach to art writing provides a guide to the New Zealand and Los Angeles art scenes of his era. Everything you read about Los Angeles is true. The city adapts to its own mythology. It’s such a ludicrously discussed place that I always feel slightly idiotic in my attempts to produce a serious discourse about it. Raves in the desert, however, are superb. And ecstasy is a great drug. Also, if you hadn’t heard, music sounds better when you’re high. And the desert surrounding LA is wondrous. —Giovanni Intra, “LA Politics” Before his early death in 2002, Giovanni Intra enjoyed a rollercoaster ride through the art world. He was an artist and gallerist—cofounding two legendary galleries, the artist-run space Teststrip in Auckland and China Art Objects Galleries in Los Angeles—as well as a writer. Clinic of Phantasms provides a guide to the New Zealand and Los Angeles art scenes of the day, including texts on key artists from New Zealand (John Hurrell, Fiona Pardington, Denise Kum, Ava Seymour, Ann Shelton, Gavin Hipkins, Daniel Malone, and Slave Pianos) and Los Angeles (Charles Ray, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Dave Muller, Evan Holloway, John McCracken, and Julia Scher). What makes Intra’s work of enduring significance is his inventive approach to art writing, which was informed by his interest in punk, surrealism, and Daniel Paul Schreber, the famous case study in paranoia and hallucination. This volume features writing on Intra from Chris Kraus and Mark von Schlegell, Andrew Berardini, Roberta Smith, Tessa Laird, Will Bradley, Joel Mesler, and Robert Leonard. “He emerged the radically elegant punk, whip-crack smart and charming as hell . . . The hilarious honesty and sharp intelligence of Giovanni was to me a breeze, a knife, a wonder.” —Andrew Berardini, “Everything You Read About Giovanni Intra is True” Published by Bouncy Castle and Semiotext(e).

As Freud predicted, there has always been great anxiety about the place of psychoanalysis in contemporary life, particularly in relation to its ambiguous and complicated relationship to the realm of science. There is also a long history of widespread resistance, in both academia and medicine, to anything associated with the world of the supernatural; very few people, in their professional lives, at least, are willing to admit a serious interest in occult phenomena. As a result, paranormal traces have all but vanished from the psychoanalytic process - though not without leaving a residue. This residue remains, the author argues, in the acceptably "clinical" guise of projective identification, a concept first formulated by Melanie Klein, and widely used in contemporary psychoanalysis to suggest a different variety of transference and transference-like phenomena between patient and analyst that seem to occur outside the normal range of the sensory process.

A personal journey leads a celebrated critic to discover “knights of the medium,” contemporary artists who battle the aesthetic meaninglessness of the post-medium condition. In Under Blue Cup, Rosalind Krauss explores the relation of aesthetic mediums to memory—her own memory having been severely tested by a ruptured aneurysm that temporarily washed away much of her short-term memory. (The title, Under Blue Cup, comes from the legend on a flash card she used as a mnemonic tool during cognitive therapy.) Krauss emphasizes the medium as a form of remembering; contemporary artists in what she terms the “post-medium” condition reject that scaffolding. Krauss explains the historical emergence of the post-medium condition and describes alternatives to its aesthetic meaninglessness, examining works by “knights of the medium”—contemporary artists who extend the life of the specific medium. These artists—including Ed Ruscha, William Kentridge, Sophie Calle, Harun Farocki, Christian Marclay, and James Coleman—reinstate the recursive rules of a modernist medium by inventing what Krauss terms new technical supports, battling the aesthetic meaninglessness of the post-medium condition. The “technical support” is an underlying ground for aesthetic practice that supports the work of art as canvas supported oil paint. The technical support for Ruscha's fascination with gas stations and parking lots is the automobile; for Kentridge, the animated film; for Calle, photojournalism; for Coleman, a modification of PowerPoint; for Marclay, synchronous sound. Their work, Krauss argues, recuperates more than a century of modernist practice. The work of the post-medium condition—conceptual art, installation, and relational aesthetics—advances the idea that the “white cube” of the museum or gallery wall is over. Krauss argues that the technical support extends the life of the white cube, restoring autonomy and specificity to the work of art.

The first study of Deleuze's critical and clinical project. Aidan Tynan addresses Deleuze's assertion that 'literature is an enterprise of health' and shows how a concern of health and illness was a characteristic of his philosophy as a whole, from his earliest works to his groundbreaking collaborations with Guattari, to his final, enigmatic statements on 'life'.He explains why alcoholism, anorexia, manic depression and schizophrenia are key concepts in Deleuze's literary theory, and shows how, with the turn to schizoanalysis, literature takes on a crucial political and ethical role in helping us to diagnose our present pathologies and articulate the possibilities of a health to come.

"Avital Ronell has put together what must be one of the most remarkable critical oeuvres of our era... Zeugmatically yoking the slang of pop culture with philosophical analysis, forcing the confrontation of high literature and technology or drug culture, Avital Ronell produces sentences that startle, irritate, illuminate. At once hilarious and refractory, her books are like no others.”--Jonathan Culler, Diacritics For twenty years Avital Ronell has stood at the forefront of the confrontation between literary study and European philosophy. She has tirelessly investigated the impact of technology on thinking and writing, with groundbreaking work on Heidegger, dependency and drug rhetoric, intelligence and artificial intelligence, and the obsession with testing. Admired for her insights and breadth of field, she has attracted a wide readership by writing with guts, candor, and wit. Coyly alluding to Nietzsche’s “gay science,” The ÜberReader presents a solid introduction to Avital Ronell’s later oeuvre. It includes at least one selection from each of her books, two classic selections from a collection of her early essays (Finitude’s Score), previously uncollected interviews and essays, and some of her most powerful published and unpublished talks. An introduction by Diane Davis surveys Ronell’s career and the critical response to it thus far. With its combination of brevity and power, this Ronell “primer” will be immensely useful to scholars, students, and teachers throughout the humanities, but particularly to graduate and undergraduate courses in contemporary theory.

"Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary takes up the problems of drugs and addiction in numerous ways, which Ronell unpacks and presents as exemplary of the contemporary fascination with extreme danger. For Ronnell, Emma Bovary represents the first addict, embodying a yearning that calls from the bottom of her depleted soul, and which places her in a chronic state of dissatisfaction."--BOOK JACKET.