Criticism, theory & documents
Fundamental writings, anthologies / essays, texts and interviews.
Series:
2025
English edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Documents
forthcoming
A much-needed mapping of the Indian art scene.
2025
English edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Documents
forthcoming
Renewing our understanding of Ruscha's art.
2025
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – L'écart absolu (Absolute Gap) – Paperback
forthcoming
A philosopher's journey into the heart of New York artistic life.
2025
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Medias/Theories
forthcoming
2025
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – esthétique:critique
forthcoming
Refusing the digital world of late capitalism.
2025
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – esthétique:critique
forthcoming
A new field of counter-investigation across journalism, human rights, art and law.
2024
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Documents
forthcoming
A reflection on our present, through a series of portraits of contemporary artists.
2024
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – ArTeC
An epistemological reflection on sensitive forms of research writing at the crossroads of art, design, anthropology and ergonomics, based on singular inquiry-creation projects.
2024
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Œuvres en sociétés
A history of stupidity (deliberate and sometimes even claimed), regression and superficiality in the arts.
2024
English edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Documents
A critical introduction to the life and work of Yugoslav modernist and conceptual art's foremost exponent Ješa Denegri.
2024
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Misceallenous
A collective exploration of the relationship between contemporary art and archeology.
2024
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Misceallenous
An "ABC of the arts in transition" examining the ecological turn of the arts, the outcome of long-term collective research into the fundamental elements running through the art world and, more generally, the aesthetic and social universe in the current ecological crisis.
2024
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – ArTeC
The first scientific work to trace the history of female comic strip creators, for the (re)valorization of women's heritage.
2024
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Fama
This monographic essay explores Iris Clert, an unclassifiable and emblematic figure of the 1960s artistic avant-garde.
2024
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Misceallenous
A collective reflection on the question of objects in artistic situations, at the crossroads of art history and theory, social sciences and artistic practices.
2024
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Misceallenous
An overview of the use of textile in contemporary visual arts around the world.
2024
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – ArTeC
How do we perceive and think about the infrastructures that condition the ways in which we perceive, think and experience our world? Four essays by Jamie Allen, whose experiments as artist and researcher cross media, disciplines and borders, that invite us to make visible the backstage work of the digitized world, and to think (post)critically about the very notion of critique.
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Perceptions
The challenges of the library and the photographic collection founded by Aby Warburg in the 1920s, as a "laboratory" for collective research on the forms of transmission of images since Antiquity, and an intermedial device of knowledge. An exceptional case study, driven by the question: what was the impact of photography in Warburg's turning point in the history of art and culture?
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Misceallenous
This book retraces Thierry Prat's career as a player and witness to the history of contemporary art in France for over forty years, through a series of interviews that highlight the main issues at stake.
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – ArTeC
Some insights into the imaginaries that inhabit techno-scientific realities, transforming our relationship with the world, closing or opening up the future.
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Al Dante
A trans-theoretical essay: Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux explores the arcana of artists' cult status through a kaleidoscopic series of portraits of "banished" visual artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians and architects, from William S. Burroughs to Jean-Luc Godard via John Cage.
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Misceallenous
A parallel dive into the images of filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and photographer Sophie Ristelhueber.
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Perceptions
The challenges of the library and the photographic collection founded by Aby Warburg in the 1920s, as a "laboratory" for collective research on the forms of transmission of images since Antiquity, and an intermedial device of knowledge. An exceptional case study, driven by the question: what was the impact of photography in Warburg's turning point in the history of art and culture?
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – esthétique:critique
Attempting to bridge the gap between specialised scholarship in the humanistic disciplines and an interdisciplinary project of cultural analysis, Mieke Bal has written an intellectual travel guide that charts the course "beyond" cultural studies.
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – esthétique:critique
Suspected of having been completely assimilated by the commercial industries, it is not so much against these that art must be defended as against a simplistic narrative imposed by a certain sociology of art. When one is finally interested in the artistic practices themselves, it becomes obvious that the art continues to resist: by its politics of the forms.
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – esthétique:critique
On the border between arts and surveillance studies, this book analyzes the technopolitical role of new "machines vision" and considers sousveillance as a democratic counter-power.
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Misceallenous
The protocol and the action of the New Patrons: the radical transformation of the conditions of emergence and appropriation of the art as political act.
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Œuvres en sociétés
An experience of introspection, an epistemological reflection and an act of resistance in the face of depersonalization, around the question of the name.
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – ArTeC
New media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun exposes her original conception of programming and code, alerts us to the racialization bias, homophily and eugenic tendencies that govern our interactions on platforms, and analyzes the need to call upon the humanities and social sciences in the development of algorithmic models for predicting the evolutions and impacts of climate change.
2023
English edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Misceallenous
An intimate portrait of Joan Mitchell, one of the greatest American painters of the 20th century, through a collection of previously unpublished conversations with the artists, art historians and personalities closest to her, from Paul Auster to Zuka.
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Perceptions
The temporal dimension of the image.
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – ArTeC
The great Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa (1900-1981)'s farewell to art criticism, written to his countrymen in the manner of Montesquieu's Persian Letters.
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Misceallenous
A study of the Pictures Generation that considers the feelings provoked by sensational images manipulated by these artists.
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Figures
The very first book devoted to the creations of artificial intelligences in literature and art, and the problems they raise.
2023
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – ArTeC
Blind spots of the ubiquitous digital—a critical and loving glossary: 138 entries to explore the unspoken aspects of new technologies, artificial intelligence and other aspects of digital.
2022
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Misceallenous
A new and expanded edition of the reference flora, the result of 20 years of studies and floristic surveys on a multitude of urban wastelands, allowing, through 600 photographs and 800 original drawings, to recognize and name some 300 silent plants that we come across every day: a methodical herbarium of the wastelands which constitutes a true guide to biodiversity, beautiful and playful, accessible and rigorous..
2022
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – ArTeC
How the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing.
2022
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Misceallenous
(last copies available!)
The first publication on the archive created by the Swiss writer, painter, activist and prostitute Grisélidis Réal (1929-2005) since the 1970s, containing more than 10,000 documents that trace the international mobilizations for the rights of sex workers and their struggles against exclusion and stigmatization.
2022
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Misceallenous
An intimate portrait of Joan Mitchell, one of the greatest American painters of the 20th century, through a collection of previously unpublished conversations with the artists, art historians and personalities closest to her, from Paul Auster to Zuka.
2022
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – ArTeC
A reflection on the domination of the software industry on our use of computers, which calls for a stimulating reinterpretation of materialism.
2022
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Documents
A collection of texts about time and artists working with it.
2022
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Documents
A collection of texts about space and artists working with it.
2022
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Documents
The fascinating story of Jack Goldstein, the beginnings of CalArts, and some of the illustrious fellows who, in the 1970s and 1980s, led the transition from conceptual art to the Pictures Generation, paints an uncompromising picture of the art world then and now.
2022
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Misceallenous
The first study devoted to the American ecological art movement.
2022
French edition
Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents – Perceptions
A comprehensive survey of visual studies and visual culture, from its origins in art history to the current perspectives opened by new technologies, virtual reality and artificial intelligence.