Mimesis, Expression, Construction: Fredric Jameson’s Seminar on Aesthetic Theory (London: Repeater, 2024)
Fredric Jameson is one of the world's most influential cultural theorists. This volume, transcribed from audio recordings and edited by Octavian Esanu, collects Jameson's 2003 Duke University seminars on Theodore Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. Composed in the form of a modernist play, Mimesis, Expression, Construction comprises twenty-one seminar transcripts. It introduces the seminars by using the key aesthetic concepts of mimesis (the drive to mimic reality); expression (the subjective urge to convey internal feelings); and construction (the objective form- giving principle of organizing the raw material in art). The volume also aims to introduce Jameson’s “informal” thought as it manifested spontaneously in the classroom, and to compare his speech to his writing, which won him many accolades as a complex dialectical thinker of Marxist cultural criticism, art, aesthetics, and society.
BOOKS & (academic and/or artist books)
The Postsocialist Contemporary: The Institutionalization of Artistic Practice in Eastern Europe after 1989 (Manchester University Press, 2021)
The postsocialist contemporary takes a historical perspective on Eastern Europe to intervene in a wider conversation about “contemporary art.” It revolves around a concrete case in which a program for contemporary art was assembled on the debris of the Berlin Wall by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. The Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA) was a network of twenty art centers active during the 1990s in Eastern Europe. This program played an important role in the realization of the paradigm of “contemporary art” in the former bloc. The book’s main goal, however, is not to recreate the narrative of the Soros Centers but to use this Soros-funded art infrastructure as a critical point of inquiry for engaging with key moments in the transformation of art during the transition to capitalism.
"Escape the Landscape," Special Issue of ARTMargins 10.1 (February, 2021). Edited by Octavian Esanu
This special issue of ARTMargins addresses itself to the historical, geopolitical and geo-cultural, etymological, and aesthetic tensions that have played out in the discourse of landscape. The writers gathered here conceive of landscape as genre or medium, tracing and questioning the boundaries that separate the two; as class ideology and diagram of power, but also—and most importantly—as index, target, strategy, and site of political engagement in the ongoing conflict between capital and labor. The issue seeks inspiration in existing accounts, but it also aims to both assimilate and transcend the dominant frameworks imposed on the landscape (Western, imperial, nativist, postcolonial, and so on).
Contemporary Art and Capitalist Modernization: A Transregional Perspective (Routledge, 2020)
This book addresses the art historical category of “contemporary art” from a transregional perspective, but unlike other volumes of its kind, it focuses in on non-Western instantiations of “the contemporary.” The book concerns itself with the historical conditions in which a radically new mode of artistic production, distribution, and consumption – called “contemporary art” – emerged in some countries of Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet republics of the USSR, India, Latin America, and the Middle East, following both local and broader sociopolitical processes of modernization and neoliberalization. Part I is methodological and theoretical in scope, while Part II is historical and documentary. For the latter, a number of case studies address the emergence of the category “contemporary art” in the context of Lebanon, Egypt, India, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Armenia, and Moldova.
Art, Awakening, and Modernity in the Middle East: The Arab Nude (Routledge 2018)
This edited scholarly volume offers a perspective on the history of the fine arts genre of the nude in the Middle East and includes contributions written by scholars from several disciplines (art history, history, anthropology). Each chapter provides a dis- tinct perspective on the early days of the nude, as its author studies a particular aspect through analysis of artworks and historical documents from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The volume examines a rich body of reproductions of both primary documents and of works of art made by Lebanese, Egyptian, and Syrian artists or of anonymous book illustrations from nineteenth-century Ottoman erotic literature.
"Art Periodicals Today, Historically Considered," Special issue ARTMargines 5.3 (October 2016). Edited by Octavian Esanu and Angela Harutyunyan
This special issue of ARTMargins print dedicated to art periodicals takes as its point of departure a conference organized in 2014 at the American University of Beirut, with the title Critical Machines: Art Periodicals Today. The organizers of the conference deployed the metaphor of “critical machines” to conceptualize the role played by art periodicals in contemporary art and culture. In the language of modern labor processes and manufacturing equipment a “critical machine” is a piece of equipment that is programmed to monitor and report on other machines in the production chain. Critical machines are deployed as preventive maintenance measures to guard against equipment malfunctioning and the disruption of the flow of production. In other words, a critical machine is a robot overseeing other robots’ manufacturing capabilities. Today, art journals, art magazines, newsletters, websites and blogs are the critical machines that monitor artists and their interactions with the cultural field. These periodicals often serve a gatekeeping function, endorsing and determining what counts as “good” or legitimate art, or criticizing and even excluding “foreign bodies,” or experiences and practices that might disrupt and destabilize the established equilibrium in the contemporary art system.
The Arab Nude: The Artist as Awakener (Beirut: AUB Art Galleries, 2015). Edited by Octavian Esanu and Kirsten Scheid
The Arab Nude: The Artist as Awakener examines the way in which artists and intellectuals of the Mandate era Lebanon engaging in a double struggle against imperialism, Ottoman and European, resorted to an ideal form or pictorial device to concretize their visions of Arab modernity. For them, to be “Arab” was as much a matter of ambiguity and ambition as was the quest to be an artist. In fact, both labels required leaps of imagination over local conditions and imperial plans. What claims for identity, community, and political society were invested in the divesting of Arab bodies of their clothes? This book documents the debates that met the genre of the Nude in exhibition halls and newspapers.
Lebanese Painterly Humanism: Georges D. Corm (1896-1971) (Beirut: AUB Art Galleries, 2013)
A republication of Georges D. Corm’s 1966 Essai sur l’art et la civilisation de ce temps with Arabic and English translations and additional texts, accompanying the exhibition Lebanese Painterly Humanism: Georges D. Corm: [1896-1971] organized by AUB Art Gallery 2013.
The Eastern European transition from socialism to capitalism that began in the early 1990s radically altered the artistic practice of the unofficial artists who had emerged decades earlier in the shadow of state socialism. This volume seeks to understand the nature of these changes by closely following the evolution of Moscow Conceptualism and of the Moscow-based conceptual artist group "Collective Actions" in particular. The book takes the history of this group as a case study to argue for a cultural or more specifically an artistic transition that unfolded in the background of the dominant economic and political one. The book performs a close reading of the Collective Actions group’s ten-volume Journeys Outside the City and Andrei Monastyrsky’s Dictionary of Moscow Conceptualism, revealing new artistic concerns and media as well as new modes of interaction among artists and their public.
A Chronology of Spirit: 10000 BC to 10000 AD (Abridged) (contimporary, 2014) ARTIST BOOK
A Chronology of Spirit: 10000 BC to 10000 AD (Abridged) is a comprehensive, year-by-year timeline compiled of found online book material (mainly from Google Books). Unlike a conventional timeline, however, which orders historical data through the perspective of a grand narrative, this book arranges the found material in accordance with a strict sequence of descending (BC) or ascending (AD) years. The “missing years” (that is, the years on which there is no available information on Google Books) are simply listed in their descending or ascending order.
Download Foreword, Table of Contents and two sample chapters: Chapter 1 "10000BC" and Chapter 20 "10000AD"
Dictionary of Moscow Conceptualism: An Adaptation of Andrei Monastyrsky’s Slovar’ terminov Moskovskoi kontseptual’noi shkoly (contimporary.org, 2010) ARTIST BOOK
This book is an annotated translation of the Dictionary of Moscow Conceptualism, edited by Andrei Monastyrsky – the leader of the “Collective Actions” group. It was first published in Russian in 1999. The original Russian edition of the Dictionary contains no images. Since this English adaptation is both a translation and a critico-historical interpretation of the original publication, I took the liberty of inserting under certain concepts pictures of artworks, maps or graphs made or employed by the conceptualists in order to make these terms more comprehensible and more easily accessible to a reader who may not be familiar with Moscow Conceptualism or with Soviet/Russian art historical and cultural contexts.
Strashilki: Little Horror Stories (Oculus Capri, 2010) ARTIST BOOK
This book was an attempt to introduce to the English reader a genre little known outside the former Soviet region. Tese short poems, unofficial and unsanctioned in their early days, emerged in the Soviet Union during the 1970s, and became known, particularly within defiant youth circles, as strashilki, or sometimes sadistskie strashilki (“sadistic little poems,” or simply “little horror poems”). In its original one-word form strashilki economically expresses the entire essence of this type of folk literature: by adding the diminutive suffix ki to the root word strakh (horror) it presents horror in a humorous and, let’s say, less horrible way. Continue.
What Does Why Mean? 2nd. Ed. (Atlanta: J&L Books, 2005) ARTIST BOOK
The book is a collage of questions about art. The questions, which have been asked by critics, philosophers, artists, art historians, have been selected from different sources. Each question is re-contextualized to form a new narrative and it is footnoted to its original source.
What Does Why Mean? 1st Ed. (Stuttgart: Akademie Schloss Solitude, 2002) ARTIST BOOK (first hand-printed edition)
ART-hoc, Publicație a Centrului Soros pentru Artă Contemporană, Chișinău. Supliment/numar special dedicat fotografiei. Februarie 2002.
ART-hoc, Publication of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art, Chișinău. Special issue dedicated to photography. February 2002.
Unfortunately last Sunday afternoon somebody left the door open... (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2000). Co-edited and produced by Octavian Esanu, Franziska Lesak and Giselle de Oliveira Macedo.
The first part of this two-volume publication entitled Unfortunately last Sunday afternoon somebody left the door open... juxtaposes two art institutions: the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (the Netherlands) and KSA:K Center for Contemporary Art, Chisinau (Moldova). The book looks into the history of the Dutch art academy and Moldovan contemporary art center through a montage of historical material from the archives of these institutions.
And Knut's mountain bike has been stolen. Vol. 2 (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2000) Co-edited and designed by Octavian Esanu, Franziska Lesak and Giselle de Oliveira Macedo.
The second volume engages with the history of the third institution involved in this project: the art and photography museum Het Domein Sittard (the Netherlands)