Book Description
This radical new aesthetic vision from the founder of Adbusters Magazine looks unflinchingly at contemporary art and graphic design and implicates their seemingly innocuous practitioners in crimes against our culture and our planet. Design Anarchy pioneers a hybrid graphic/text language that is by turns intimate, anarchic, abstract and accusatory, to explore the responsibility of the visual designer and artist in the pollution and redemption of our mental and physical commons. It makes an urgent call for artists, graphic and industrial designers and architects to reengage with the world. And it includes work from some who have already heard that call: Jeff Wall, Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ryan McGinley, Gregory Crewdson and Barbara Kruger. Kalle Lasn is the founder of Adbusters Media Foundation, and as its head has launched international social marketing campaigns such as Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week, and has pioneered the spoof ads, billboard liberations and TV mind-melters featured here. In the battle for a new kind of meaning, Design Anarchy is a 400 page mind bomb without precedent.
Customer Reviews:
Change Your Paradigms.......2007-05-29
Awesome book, if you're just curious about it, it makes you more aware of what surrounds you, if you work with propaganda, publicity, marketing or is an graphic designer or something similar, it makes you think about the road you're taking, where you are and where you wanna be, or if it's all worth it.
is it what it seems to be?.......2007-02-19
in this book there are a lot of things i agree with. its a hard time right now for a graphic designer, if you really want to do interesting things and at the same time you have to manage to work for the right people and to be somehow "politically correct".
apart from the huge format and the shiny pages that are used (which are not really ecological) - without any doubt a pure design question... maybe i am just a young graphic design student without much experience, but the last page let me think:
"printed in china"
this fact just changes the sense of the whole book. credibilty is gone. kalle lasn is taking himself serious?
or did he eventually pay them the same wages as in western countries?
Purposeful Design.......2007-02-07
A book that reminds the artist or designer the importance of design, its purpose, and its message. The total collection of adbusters purposeful imagery is a wonderful treat, especially for those of us who are in agreement with all the anti-consumer, and anti-media campaigns.
Design Anarchy is a must have, its not a poster book, or just another graphic design book, since each image provides a pool of creative idea's that will keep you both politically and artistically active.
"Undesign".......2007-02-04
Design Anarchy- is one of those books which reminds a Graphic Designer's actual duty; how to speak visually?, how to make cool things uncool and vice-versa, how we "graphic designers" are helping our brothers and sisters to live a totally false life...an Uncool one!
DA is an eye opener and mind opener aswell. When i was a design student i used to love Tibor Kalman's philosophy and Adbusters activism... Now when i am teaching my students, DA is my weekly guide to breathe the air of Creative Activism towards Corporate Culture amongst my students and fellows!
If "Art of Looking Sideways" was the Design Bible for me... Design Anarchy is the [Resurrection of Designers] for me.
How to react when you accept reality..........2006-11-27
While I agree with an earlier reviewer that the title is in itself amusing, I would say that this bit of ironic self-reference is in keeping with the idea of detournment pioneered by Guy DeBord to which a chapter is dedicated. In an era when everyone wants to tell you what is going wrong with the world a perspective that offers suggestions as to what you might do right in it is indispensable. For making the attempt alone Kalle Lasn achieves 5 stars, but when you add to that the visual delights and practicality the book offers, one need not turn to the background to find a reason to give this work the highest possible rating.
Book Description
This is the sixth book in Creation's highly-acclaimed Persistence of Vision film book series. Alejandro Jodorowsky remains one of cinema's most controversial and influential film-makers. In 1968 his scandalous debut, Fando & Lis, caused a riot in Mexico, forcing the Chilean-born director into exile in France. The following year, his ultra-violent underground smash hit El Topo inagurated the Midnight Movie phenomenon, transforming its creator into a counter-culture icon championed by John Lennon and, latterly, Marilyn Manson. Anarchy and Alchemy features • Exclusive interviews • Rare images • Exhaustive chapters on all Jodorowsky's films including the mesmerising cine-trip The Holy Mountain, the award-winning Oedipal circus show Santa Sangre • The aborted Dune project with Salvador Dali, Pink Floyd and H R Giger • Texts on Jodorowsky's 60s terror-theatre outfit The Panic Movement • His world mime tour with Marcel Marceau • His graphic novel collaborations with Moebius
Book Description
From New York to San Francisco, Times Square to the Tenderloin, graffiti artists, young people, radical environmentalists, and the homeless clash with police on city streets in an attempt take back urban spaces from the developers and "disneyfiers". Drawing on more than a decade of first-hand research, this lively account goes inside the worlds of street musicians, homeless punks, militant bicycle activists, high-risk "BASE jump" parachutists, skateboarders, outlaw radio operators, and hip hop graffiti artists, to explore the day-to-day skirmishes in the struggle over public life and public space.
Customer Reviews:
URBAN AESTHETICS FOR EVERYDAY LIFE.......2007-05-21
One of the most important books I have read for the reclaiming of social space in an increasingly controlled and legislated urban landscape. His discussion of hotel cleaning women working on a Sunday morning in different rooms while singing Gospel music with each other is alone worth the cost of the book. The book is mandatory reading for anyone doing public art or performance, writing about it, or just trying to figure out why the Paris Commune is so important to understanding life in the city.
Book Description
Grant Morrison's The Invisibles was the most ground-breaking and controversial comic book series of the last decade. A must-have for comics fans, this Guide features exhaustive, detailed analysis of the full six-year series as well as all-new, exclusive interviews with Morrison and many of the series' artists and editors.
Already featured in Disinformation: The Interviews and the accompanying TV series and DVD, Grant Morrison has been heavily promoted as a contemporary pop culture star, the first comics writer to be included as one of Entertainment Weekly's top 100 creative people in America. We will market the book aggressively to Morrison fan sites and comics, skate and punk zines.
Journalists and Invisibles fanatics
Patrick Neighly and
Kereth Cowe-Spigai reside in Bethesda, Maryland, and Orlando, Florida, respectively.
Customer Reviews:
Chemical=anthropoid .......2006-02-10
"Anarchy For The Masses swims the living body junk brain universe of a chemical=anthropoid by Grant Morrison's era respiration-byte modem=cardiac. Grant Morrison ill-treats on the digital-chimpanzee's gene archive which was raped by this abolition world with the biocapturing mode." - Kenji Siratori, author of Blood Electric
Needs more critical depth.......2005-09-01
This guide is better than no guide at all, given the (probably intentionally) confusing nature of many chapters within Grant Morrison's non-linear magnum opus. However, the page-by-page annotations are repetitive (I don't need *constantly* to be told that "Life as film is a recurring theme") and often assume the readers have spent their entire lives in a cave (I *know* who Ringo Starr and Richard Nixon are, thanks!). At the same time, missing from the annotations is any serious discussion (beyond brief mentions) of chaos magic, anarchist theory or other key themes and influences. The authors' one-paragraph reviews of each issue occasionally contain genuine insight, but more often focus on praising or nitpicking the artists' work, fanboy-style. Surely in such a profound work as *The Invisibles* it's the writing that's of primary importance?
This guide merits two extra stars: one for the helpful, editorially neutral issue-by-issue plot summaries which clear up many ambiguous moments in the series; and one for the engrossing Morrison interview at the end. Interested readers should consult the Invisibles section of Barbelith online and the Grant Morrison pages on Disinformation online; you'll find much more intelligent discussion than found in this guide.
Awesome!.......2003-09-09
If you're a fan of THE INVISIBLES, you have to get this book! It really made sense of the maze that was the series. It's fun seeing the original creators comment on the entire series in the interviews. One of the better series guides I've seen.
All and nothing at all.......2002-09-17
...or almost.
Fact is, this very well-designed book is divided up in small chapters - one for each Invisibles issue. Every chapter is in its turn composed of small interviews (the bulk of them being with artist Jimenez), two separate fan-like comments from the curators and an occasional small quote from Grant Morrison himself.
Finally, in the sidebars of each page, there is a very detailed comment to each relevant panel or phrase. "Very detailed" meaning that the authors even go to the lenghts of reminding the reader that "Marylin Monroe was a big sex symbol in the late Fifties and onward..." etc etc.
I actually liked this "take nothing for granted" approach, but with it come a number of problems. First and foremost, there are no visual references, so you have to keep the orginal Invisibles book at hand to follow the notes. Then, this much detail means lots of text, which in turn had to be printed very small to fit on the sidebars - reading it might be tiring to many.
The final interview with Grant Morrison is priceless, altough it replicates much stuff that you can easily find on the sites devoted to The Invisibles.
So is this book worth the buying? My answer is maybe not if you're already heavily into fringe counterculture, as you'll already know about everything there's to know. In any other case, go for it as it can make your Invisibles reading experience much more layered and interesting.
Almost too shallow, but so necessary.......2002-07-27
A bit too shallow at times, but the amount of information in the book make it a definite must-read for anyone planning to crash-land into The Invisibles. The annotations are fabulous, the interview with Grant Morrison is a head trip and a half, and, generally, it's a delight of a book.
Product Description
The third incendiary collection of stencils and graffiti from Banksy (after Banging Your Head Against a Brick wall and Existencilism), presented and bound in a handy pocket sized high quality format. Full color, and including some of most famous/notorious works to date, including exhibiting his work at the Tate Gallery in London. Quite superb.
Book Description
arsenalpulp.com :
One of the powers of art is its ability to convey the human aspects of political events, ranging from war to revolution to sexual liberation. Art can also transform society, a theme that pervades this fascinating survey on art, artists, and anarchism since the nineteenth century.
In numerous essays, Allan Antliff interrogates moments of engagement when artists, poets, philosophers, and critics have confronted pivotal events over the past 140 years. The survey begins with artist Gustave Courbet and writer Emile Zola's activism during the 1871 Paris Commune (which established the modern-day French republic), and ends with an examination of anarchist art during the fall of the Soviet empire. Other subjects include the Neo-Impressionists and their depictions of the homeless in the 1890s; the Dada movement in New York City during World War I; the decline of the Russian Avant-Garde during the 1920s and 30s; the West Coast Beats of the 1940s and 50s; the Modernists of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s; and anarchistic responses to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by visual artists.
Exploring art's potential as a vehicle for meaningful social change from an anarchist perspective, Allan Antliff throws new light on what it means to be radical.
Customer Reviews:
Anarchy and Art is not a politically neutral examination.......2007-08-06
Activist and art critic Allan Antliff presents Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, a thoughtful philosophical discussion of art's potential as a conduit to carry messages of revolution and meaningful social change. Focusing on critical moments since the nineteenth century when artists, poets, philosophers, and critics have dared to speak their voice concerning pivotal events, Anarchy and Art complements its text with a number of black-and-white illustrations and a few color plates of provocative works. Anarchy and Art is not a politically neutral examination, reflecting the author's leftist tendencies and commitment to activism, yet its core message about the role of art as a media that can sway hearts and minds resounds fervently in the mind of the reader.
Book Description
Marcel Duchamp once asked whether it is possible to make something that is not a work of art. This question returns over and over in modernist culture, where there are no longer any authoritative criteria for what can be identified (or excluded) as a work of art.
At this point, art turns into philosophy, all art is now conceptual art, and the manifesto becomes the distinctive genre of modernism. This book takes seriously this transformation of art into philosophy, focusing upon the systematic interest that so many European philosophers take in modernism. Among the philosophers Gerald Bruns discusses are Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas.
In this provocative study, Bruns answers that the culture of modernism is a kind of anarchist community, where the work of art is apt to be as much an event or experience—or, indeed, an alternative form of life—as a formal object. In modern writing, philosophy and poetry fold into one another. In this book, Bruns helps us to see how.
Book Description
England’s Dreaming is the ultimate book on punk, its progenitors, the Sex Pistols, and the moment they defined for music fans in England and the United States Savage brings to life the sensational story of the meteoric rise and rapid implosion of the Pistols through layers of rich detail, exclusive interviews, and rare photographs. This fully revised and updated edition of the book covers the legacy of punk twenty-five years later and provides an account of the Pistols' 1996 reunion as well as a freshly updated discography and a completely new introduction.
Customer Reviews:
England's Dreaming.......2007-07-05
I sought out this book because past reviews I'd read had said it accurately captured the feel of England in the late 1970s. This it does as well as provide an entertaining read, no mean feat for a 600-plus page tome on the birth of the English punk rock movement.
Irony abounds. The Sex Pistols, a ragtag group of petty criminals and anarchist wannabes, pressed just one album and five singles in their brief history yet gave rise to the punk movement and became national icons. The group was the spin-off of a clothing store and thus, a group nominally devoted to anarchy was in fact, a marketing ploy.
All the rest are here as well. Siouxsie and the Banshees. The Clash. Recommended. Holds your interest despite a length absurd for the subject at hand.
A MUST READ.......2007-03-08
The definitive book on Punk history, placing it in an historical context, very informative and well-written - inspiring to read.
Best Thing Since '77.......2006-06-29
Nothing like opening a review by stealing a quote from Gene October of Chelsea (at least, as quoted by Henry Rollins).
Without a doubt a large part of this book is focused on the history of the Sex Pistols from formation to implosion. The other figures of punk are there, though overshadowed and in the background. The Clash, the Buzzcocks, the Ramones..... all treated as walk-on extras in this history of Malcolm McLaren and his ego, and John Lydon and his evil twin Johnny Rotten. To some degree I have to agree with Lydon in the death throes of that final concert in America, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"
It is an intriguing story, thoroughly researched and well written. The listing of bands and tracks at the end of the book are a wonderful chance for those of us too young to remember the true first wave of punk to educate ourselves on the sound. All the same, the narrative itself gives a stilted view of the scene and the importance of one band. The rise and rapid fall of the Sex Pistols is an image of punk itself, and they were at the center of the maelstrom, but there were bands that outlived the summer of '78. The focus stays largely on England, with only passing nods to New York, Cleveland and LA. Out of LA, Salt Lake and DC would rise the second wave from the ashes, their fires stoked by the pioneers. And out of punk would splinter New Wave and Goth in the early eighties.
Despite the stilted view of the Pistols, the book is still an amazing piece of work. Trying to take a fairer view of the clash between Lydon and McLaren, and at last giving a fair nod to the talent of Paul Cook and Steve Jones, it seeks more to report that facts instead of the myths. It also goes a bit beyond that final concert and into the farce of Biggs and Tudor the half-price Rotten clone.
Give it a chance. At the same time, might I suggest some additional reading to flesh out its minor weak points. "Please Kill Me" by Legs McNeil fills in a few of the American gaps. For a bit more biased, but nonetheless entertaining, peek at the Pistols give a nod to Lydon's "Rotten : No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs".
A Masterpiece.......2005-02-08
I started this book thinking I would learn a thing or two about the Sex Pistols, but ended up -- about 700 pages later -- an armchair expert on the cultural history of the 1970s. In other words, Jon Savage is one hell of a writer.
Erik is So Right!.......2004-04-10
Oh Erik Selvia - you are so right! The focus of this book is so narrow and exclusionary that one never gets the full picture of the so-called "punk movement". What movement? Please! The 60's music scene represented a social movement, but this punk thing pales in comparision. Savage tries to elevate it to the same level of significance (as far as social change is concerned). Real changes occurred in the 60's - the late 70s and 80s punk music scenes merely voiced a rude and crude complaint. Don't get me wrong - a lot of great music was generated out of the complaint, but its level of historical significance, outside of contributing to the development of new musical styles and presentation, is minimal to be sure.
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Books Index
Books Home
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Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge--And Why We Must
The Design of Dissent: Socially and Politically Driven Graphics
Graphic Agitation
Graphic Agitation 2: Social and Political Graphics in the Digital Age
Citizen Designer: Perspectives on Design Responsibility
