Category: ICI Press

Searching for Sebald

Although many recent scholarly texts address Sebald’s complex prose, Searching for Sebald is the first to explore Sebald’s fictive world through the idiosyncratic and anti-heroic photographs that propel and interrupt his labyrinthine narratives. Theoretical essays approach Sebald through the multiple filters of art history, film and photographic studies, cultural theory, and psychoanalysis. Contemporary visual art projects offer a more anamorphic reading of this bricoleur. The book also features an English translation of an interview Sebald gave in 1997 in which he talks exclusively about his use of photographs. Searching for Sebald is the 7th in a series of publications by ICI Press that explores the methodologies of culture.

Featuring artwork by:

Shimon Attie, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Andre Breton, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Walther Brüx, Tacita Dean, Marcel Duchamp, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rodney Graham, Vic Muniz, Adam Pendleton, Gerhard Richter

Artist projects:

  • Dorothy Cross
    “Antartica“
  • Christel Dillbohner
    “Wahlverwandschaften und Korrespondenzen”
  • Anne Flannery
    “Sebald’s Invisible Cities”
  • Axel Forrester
    “Max”
  • Suvan Geer
    “Trying to Remember my Mother’s Face”
  • Skuta
    “The Colorful Auras Found in Black & White Glass Plates of One Family”
  • Pablo Helguera
    “How to Understand the Light on a Landscape”
  • Antoinette LaFarge
    “All That is Beyond Hearing”
  • Daniel Lash
    “Translation and Repetition: An Architectural Translation of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn“
  • Matthew Marco
    “The Minimalls of Downey, CA (excerpt)”
  • Jeremy Millar
    “A Firework for W.G. Sebald (2005-6)”
  • Helen Mirra
    “Rings of Saturn Index”
  • Chris Rochelle
    “Birdland”
  • Christian Scholz
    “A Sebald Portfolio”
  • Tris Vonna-Michell
    “Who is Reinhold Hahn”
  • Tim Wright
    “In Search of Oldton”
  • The Institute of Cultural Inquiry Research Team
    “A Truth That Lies Elsewhere”

Essay contributions:

  • Richard Crownshaw (Manchester Metropolitan University)
    “German Suffering or ‘Narrative Fetishism?’: W.G. Sebald’s “Air War and Literature: Zürich Lectures”
  • Adrian Daub (University of Pennsylvania)
    “Donner à voir – The Logics of the Caption in W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn and Alexander Kluge’s The Devil’s Blind Spot“
  • Lisa Diedrich (Stony Brook University)
    “Gathering Evidence of Ghosts: W.G. Sebald’s Practices of Witnessing”
  • Florence Feiereisen and Daniel Pope (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
    “True Fictions and Fictional Truths: The Enigmatic in Sebald’s Use of Images in The Emigrants“
  • Mattias Frey (Harvard)
    “Theorizing Cinema in Sebald and Sebald with Cinema”
  • Christopher C. Gregory-Guider (University of Sussex)
    “Memorial Sights/Sites: Sebald, Photography, and the Art of Autobiogeography in The Emigrants“
  • Avi Kempinski (University of Michigan)
    “Quel roman! Sebald, Barthes, and the Pursuit of the Mother-Image”
  • Christina Kraenzle (York University, Toronto)
    “Picturing Place: Travel, Photography and Imaginative Geography in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn“
  • Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes (University of Ulster)
    “Post-War Germany and ‘Objective Chance’: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys and Tacita Dean”
  • Anneleen Masschelein (K.U. Leuven, Belgium)
    “Negative Indexicality in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and André Breton’s Nadja“
  • Bettina Mosbach (Bonn University)
    “Superimposition as a Narrative Strategy in Austerlitz“
  • Christian Scholz, translated by Markus Zisselsberger
    “But the written word is not a true document,” a conversation with W.G. Sebald (1997)
  • John Sears (Manchester Metropolitan University, Cheshire)
    “Photographs, Images and the Space of Literature in Sebald’s Prose”
  • Carsten Strathausen (University of Missouri)
    “Going Nowhere: Sebald’s Rhizomatic Travels”
  • Markus Zisselsberger (State University of NY, Binghamton)
    “Melancholy Longings: Sebald, Benjamin, and the Image of Kafka”

with an introductory essay by:

  • Lise Patt (Institute of Cultural Inquiry)
    “Searching for Sebald: What I Know for Sure”

For purchasing of Searching for Sebald or SFS special editions, please visit our giftshop.

Monkey Head Complete Catalog

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The Monkey Head Collection will be a limited edition box set in a still yet to be determined form. The edition will include all nine lab books created in conjunction with each researcher during their iteration of the With Everything But the Monkey Head, along with a project catalog produced by the ICI, which will summarize the project ‘findings’ as we work to theorize the untheorizable within visual research (10 books in total)..

These are the initial books that will comprise this unique limited edition set.

MH Iteration 01: Martin Gantman

Part journal, workbook, recipe book, and itinerary, this chronicle will provide a snapshot of Martin Gantman’s exploration into the terms used to set up the project. He asks, what is theory, what is research, or practice, and what is an activity or event that is ‘something-based?’

 

MH Iteration 02: Anna Ayeroff

For Ayeroff,  the photographic operates in relation to rather than in production of the places she visits. In this practice-based research model, the photograph is not used to document research but is active, embodied, and performative within a changing space that is research – research that is capable of rupturing our way of seeing and thinking.’

 

MH Iteration 03: Antoinette LaFarge

The roles of happenstance, coincidence and serendipitous tangents within the research process take center stage as LaFarge engages with the newly realized (yet wholly) unconscious influence of the letter ‘W’ throughout her practice as an artist, writer, and scholar. 

 

MH Iteration 04: Greg Cohen

For Cohen, research stems from investigation of the unknown. He employs modes of self-portraiture to explore the interplay of appropriation and fictive constructions, pondering how such acts of ‘borrowing’ and ‘making’ contribute to a speculative research practice.

 

MH Iteration 05: Christian Smith

Smith explores the roles of materials and technique within the setting of research parameters. Utilizing antiquated wet-plate photography processes in a portable darkroom, Smith aims to capture new environments in old ways as he continues to build his experimental, alternative map of Los Angeles.

 

MH Iteration 06: Christel Dillbohner

Dillbohner examines the roles of coincidence and serendipity, to render the (seemingly) invisible connection between these two phenomena into visibility and generate new possibilities for seeing and being in the world—ones which demand the conscientiousness of open eyes and an emptied mind to observe things “mit dem anderen Blick”.

 

MH Iteration 07: Pam Posey

Posey utilizes field data gathered on multiple trips to Iceland, interludes of analog observational techniques (drawing, printing, tracing), and an interest in hermeneutics to expand and “complicate” the simplifying and reductive tendencies of scientific classification systems.

 

MH Iteration 08: Amy Kaczur

Building off, Stitching Julia: installation for an imagined life and the persistence of inquiry, Kaczur attempts to mine and imagine the life and cultural shaping of Juliska Alt Kaczur through a singular photographic portrait.

 

 

MH Iteration 09: E of the We

The Thin End of the Wedge (the E of the We) embarks on an interpretive field project in Iceland, not in pursuit of a particular end or destination but as a means of sparking unforeseen and unknowable experiences as part two of “An Inconvenient Camera.”

 

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Monkey Head Project Catalog

The catalog for  With Everything But the Monkey Head will be an homage to 19th century salesman ‘dummy books’ which provided snippets and examples of all the best parts of the books in compact portable form, that lends itself to ideas which are still unfolding.

Sample Book Proposal

This sample is the original book proposal that was submitted to our distributor for Searching for Sebald: Photography after W. G. Sebald. It is our hope that our own successful proposal will demonstrate both the breadth and depth expected from outside proposals, and the extent to which publications can (and do) change between the initial proposal process and the final publication date.

*Please note that proposals will not be accepted from those who do not send a formal letter of inquiry prior to their submission. For more information about outside book project proposals or past ICI press publications, please contact us at info@culturalinquiry.org.

GUEST EDITORS SOUGHT FOR ICI PRESS

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CALL FOR GUEST EDITORS/CURATORS

The ICI Press is seeking guest editors and/or curators for two upcoming books in its long-standing ‘eye’ series. These compilations will join Bataille’s Eye (1997) and Benjamin’s Blind Spot (2001) as projects that examine theoretical texts that have remained on university syllabi in a variety of vision-based disciplines even though they are often characterized as problematic and outdated. Why do these works continue to occupy privileged positions? Does our allegiance to their teachings create blind spots in our thinking or do they exist outside of time or pop agendas as unique catalysts to ever-evolving thought ?

ICIP-BTplay_cards-wROLAND BARTHES’ CAMERA LUCIDA

With a mix of scholarly texts and artist projects, the first publication will examine Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes’ book on photography. Our goal is to consider the content of Barthes’ book, characterized as ‘flawed, impossible, infuriating, and moving’ even in its day but also its symmetrical and ‘photographic’ (postive/negative) book design that has been subject to as many ‘translations’ as the text. We imagine some proposals where Barthes is omnipresent while in others he might be nothing but a ghostly presence. Camera Lucida evokes strong emotions in its readers; we hope to create a book of equal passion. We are seeking a guest editor and a guest curator for this project but will also consider candidates that feel they are qualified and able to commit to both positions.

3 liubolin2ROGER CAILLOIS’ “MIMICRY AND LEGENDARY PSYCHASTHENIA”

The second book project will unpack Roger Caillois’ seminal essay “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” Caillois has cycled in and out of contemporary thinking with cultural escorts that were unimaginable when the essay was first published. Written in the height of surrealism, Caillois could not imagine the degree to which his ideas would be tested with the ‘Ghost Army’ of WW II. And recently, Caillois’ theories have come back into play as theorists and practitioners explore challenges to vision brought on by the Internet. Given Caillois’ multi-disciplinary interests, we imagine a project that reaches across disciplines not only in the range of its scholarly texts but also in its visual contributions and in the design of the final book form. We are seeking a guest editor/curator with an adventurous spirit although we will not rule out editor/curator teams or collaborative groups.

A $1000 honorarium is available for each publication (to be split, if there are separate editors/curators) along with multiple copies of the finished book and/or deluxe artist edition planned for each publication. Guest Editor duties are outlined here.

Please send a letter outlining your interest in either project along with a current cv, a writing sample, and examples of, or links to, relevant past work to info@culturalinquiry.org. We will begin the interview process on March 1, 2014 and will continue until we find the right candidate.

 

Guest Curator/Editor Duties – Publications

LP-Museo_book-wFrom time to time, the ICI  works with guest curators/editors to create ‘compilations’ that address issues or concerns of interest to the Institute. These compilations can take many forms: a display, an event, or a printed publication, to name just a few possibilities. Listed here are the duties of curator/editors for printed compilations:

DUTIES:

1.  Work with ICI to create a call for papers. The call may have to be repeated.

2.  Help organize advisory board and work with this board to recommend articles for publication. Many of the articles will come from the open call for papers. In some cases, the guest editor will work with the advisory board to find essays to help round out the publication.

3.  Work with ICI and the Guest Curator to finalize selection of articles for the book.

4.  Work with each of the authors to ensure that deadlines are met, contracts are signed and that copyrights and permissions are granted. The Guest Editor mediates between the authors and the ICI.

5.  Work with line editor if any problems come up with the text

6.   Write an introduction

7.  Work with book designer to prevent any design mishaps (i.e. images reversed, etc.)

8.  Make a one-year commitment to the project.

9.  Work with ICI to title the publication

ICI Press at L.A. Art Book Fair in February 2014

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Join ICI Press at the
2nd Annual LA Art Book Fair
at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

January 30 – February 2, 2014
Friday, 11— pm
Saturday, 12—6 pm
Sunday, 11—6 pm
Preview, Thursday, January 30, 6—9 pm ($10 entrance fee)

Visit us at Booth # F29

This event is free and open to the public.

The LA Art Book Fair is a unique event for artists’ books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals and zines presented by more than 250 presses, artists, and independent publishers from 19 countries.

For more information about our participation in the event contact us at info@culturalinquiry.org. For information abut the fair and tickets to the Thursday night preview, please visit the fair website: www.laartbookfair.net

Searching for Sebald: Reader’s Edition

ICIP-SFSreader_pcv-wSearching for Sebald – Reader’s Edition

The Reader’s Edition includes a softcover trade edition of Searching for Sebald with a free-standing print of Christel Dillbohner’s project for Searching for Sebald. Book and poster are housed  in a silver cardboard sleeve.

 

 

 

Purchase the Reader’s Edition of Searching for Sebald at our gift shop.