Bøger udgivet af Cabinet

Derived from the Latin "forensis," the word forensics refers to the "forum" and designates the practice of making an argument by using objects before a professional, political or legal gathering. "Cabinet" issue 43, with a special section on "Forensics" edited by Eyal Weizman, features Weizman on the changing role of forensics following the discovery of the body of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele; Lawrence abu-Hamdan on the use by the British police of minute shifts in electrical signatures to precisely date recorded phone conversations; an interview with legendary forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow; and artist projects by Hito Steyerl and Fareed Armaly. Elsewhere in the issue: Rachel Berwick on "zugunruhe," a term coined in the 1950s to describe the phenomenon of nighttime restlessness of birds about to migrate; D. Graham Burnett and Sal Randolph's guide to identifying paper shredder patterns in order to reassemble destroyed documents; an artist project by Amie Siegel; and much more.

Edited by Sina Najafi. Text by Valerie Smith, Steven Connor, Jeff Dolven, Margaret Wertheim.

Looming large in both geological fact and sociocultural significance, mountains promise grandeur, picturesque natural beauty, good health and the chance to literally rise above the everyday--yet they also menace our imaginations with their harsh conditions, dangerous terrain and deep sense of isolation. These multivalent moods have proved an enticement to sportsmen, scientists, poets and philosophers. Indeed, our modern notion of the "sublime" was born in the Alps--where, as the English critic John Dennis wrote in 1693, nature was revealed as not solely a "delight that is consistent with reason," but also an experience "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair." Cabinet 27 features Brian Dillon on the Cold War fact and Faustian fiction of Germany's Brocken; Allen S. Weiss on Petrarch and the winds of Mount Ventoux; and Jeffrey Kastner on the eighteenth-century Alpine panoramas of Hans Conrad Escher von der Linth. It also features Christopher Turner on the "lunar photographs" of James Nasmyth; Viktoria Tkaczyk on scientist Robert Hooke; biologist J.S.B. Haldane on being the right size; artist projects by Casey Logan and Walead Beshty; and Peter Lamborn Wilson's examination of the alchemical properties of building materials.

Roger Andersson's book "Letters from Mayhem is an artist book made of 26 duotone watercolors, each depicting one letter of the alphabet. Printed on thick board in the format of a children's ABC primer, each letter is embedded in a fairytale setting in which wispy long-haired teenagers lie around stoned, sniffing glue, listening to heavy metal, and so on. This garden of vices overgrown with weeds and entangled vines forms a strange foil for imagery drawn from drug culture, anarchy, heavy metal, and children's cartoons, rendering every scene both innocent and corrupt. Full of messages hidden within plants, ponds, and clouds, Andersson's drawings evoke a soft nostalgia for childhood tempered by images of soft-edged romantic decadence.

Coined by the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet in 1835, the term "average man" evokes both contentment and anxiety. In some sense an inverted history of the genius, the story of the average has had a formative influence on modern aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. For the artist, to be mediocre is a greater fault than to have failed spectacularly. For the politician, the battle for the heart of the average Joe determines both message and mode of address. For the philosopher, the consideration ol everyday life and the ordinary demands a redefinition of philosophy itself. Edited with Paul Fleming (German Department, New York University), this issue features Francis Galton's late 19th-century composite photographs of criminals; a compilation of political paeans to the common man: an interview with German scholar Jurgen Link on the reign of normalcy; the postwar search in the U.S. for the perfect Norm and Norma; actuarial tables, risk management, and the insurance industry; and Frances Richard on Diderot's analysis of hack painting. The issue also includes Matthew Klam on the color purple and art projects by Jason Salavon, Aleksandra Mir, Pedro Reyes and more.

The seventh publication in Cabinet's 24-Hour Book series, in which distinguished authors and artists are incarcerated in the Cabinet gallery space to complete a project from start to finish within 24 hours, The Death of the Artist breaks from prior volumes to stage an experiment involving six different contributors working simultaneously on a single book. Gathered at Cabinet's Berlin event space, the six artists and writers were each asked to consider their own finitude, figurative or literal. The volume includes Sam Durant's meditation on the death of an artwork as a political idea; Tom McCarthy's forensic postulations about death and geometry; Eva Stenram's modified found photographs that suggest violence-to-come; Omer Fast's script in which a woman on an Austrian ski slope becomes the reluctant audience for a retelling of a Yiddish folk tale; Susan Ploetz's outline for a Live Action Role Play (LARP) in which players can learn the art of dying; and Till Gathmann's aleatory game whose outcome can invoke death.

In the spring of 2010, the Brooklyn-based quarterly magazine Cabinet invited poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum to begin writing a regular column. Entitled "Legend," the column had a highly unusual premise. Every three months, the editors of the magazine would ask Koestenbaum to write one or more extended captions for a single photograph with which they had provided him; drawn from obscure vernacular, commercial and scientific sources, all of the images were unfamiliar to the author. After 18 installments, Koestenbaum concluded his column in the winter of 2015. Notes on Glaze, featuring an introductory essay by the author, collects all the "Legend" columns, as well as their accompanying photographs. Refusing the distancing language of critical disinterest, Koestenbaum's columns always locate the author in intimate proximity to the subjects portrayed in the photographs and to the impossibly variegated cast of characters--ranging from Debbie Reynolds to Duccio, the Dalai Lama to Barbra Streisand; from Hegel to Pee-wee Herman, and Emily Dickinson to Cicciolina--that pass through these texts. Wayne Koestenbaum (born 1958), a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, has published 17 books of poetry, criticism and fiction, including My 1980s & Other Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background (Turtle Point Press, 2012) and The Anatomy of Harpo Marx (University of California Press, 2012). His most recent book of poetry, The Pink Trance Notebooks, was published in 2015 by Nightboat Books.