New Titles Tuesday, July 5

Here is a selction of print titles added to the collection in the past week.

 Listening in: a multicultural reading of the Psalms /Stephen Breck Reid. Reid maintains that every reader of the biblical text views it through the lens of other contexts. That is to say, communal narratives, cultural myths and stories, and the reader’s own experiences, influence what we bring to, and take away from, Scripture.

 Memory /edited by Ian Farr. This anthology investigates the turn in art not only towards archives and histories, the relics of modernities past, but toward the phenomena, in themselves, of “haunting” and the activation of memory. It looks at a wide array of artistic relationships to memory association, repetition and reappearance, as well as forms of “active” forgetting. Its discussions encompass artworks from the late 1940s onward. This collection also surveys the diversity of situations and registers in which contemporary artists explore memory.

 Systems /edited by Edward A. Shanken. Systems traces the radical shift in aesthetics from its roots in mid twentieth-century general systems theory, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence to the cutting-edge science of the present. The collected texts examine the connections between advanced technological systems, our bodies and minds; the relation of musical to spatial and architectural structures; and the ways in which systems-based art projects can create self-generating entities and networks, alter our experience of time, change the configurations of social relations, cross cultural borders, and interact with threatened ecosystems.

 The object /edited by Antony Hudek. This title focuses on the object as a key to understanding central aspects of modern and contemporary art. This anthology surveys such reappraisals of what constitutes the “objectness” of production, with art as its focus. The object becomes a prism through which to reread contemporary art and better understand its recent past.

 Time /edited by Amelia Groom. This collection surveys contemporary art and theory that proposes a wealth of alternatives to outdated linear models of time.