Art for the Already Dead

The Infinite Xerox

AFTAD Library

Library

cataloging status: pleasantly disordered

reading room open late

Reading Room — On the table

freshly shelved
Cover: Les Fleurs du mal

Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil)

Charles Baudelaire · 1857

Modernity’s perfume. Spleen, city light, and the shock of beauty.

Read AFTAD Canon
Cover: Les Chants de Maldoror

Les Chants de Maldoror (FR)

Comte de Lautréamont · 1869

A glorious affront. Surrealist ancestor, corrosive and sublime.

Read Beautiful Corpse

Core Collection

backbones of the canon
Visions of Excess

Visions of Excess

Georges Bataille · 1927–1939 (sel. writings)

Sacred/profane switchboard, still crackling. Essays that misbehave when unattended.

Read Core Collection
Voices of Silence

Voices of Silence

André Malraux · 1951

The museum without walls—also without exit signs. Grand, disorienting, necessary.

Read Core Collection
Principles of Art History

Principles of Art History

Heinrich Wölfflin · 1915

Binary lenses for when your eyes refuse to agree: linear/painterly, closed/open, tectonic/atectonic.

Read Core Collection

Painter’s Painters

craft sharpened into devotion
Art in its Own Terms

Art in its Own Terms

Fairfield Porter · 1979

Domestic metaphysics. Essays from a painter who thought with his brush.

Read Painter’s Painters
In Relation to the Whole

In Relation to the Whole

Rackstraw Downes · 2005

Three decades of essays from the painter’s vantage. Slow, meticulous, expansive.

Read Painter’s Painters

Occult Mechanics

grimoires-as-theory
Three Books of Occult Philosophy

Three Books of Occult Philosophy

Henry Cornelius Agrippa · 1531 (Tyson ed.)

The Renaissance master system: celestial correspondences, talismans, and the cosmos as mechanism.

Read Occult Mechanics
Illuminations

Illuminations

Arthur Rimbaud · 1886

Visionary circuitry disguised as prose poems; symbols wired to shock the nervous system.

Read Occult Mechanics
A Throw of Dice Will Never Abolish Chance

A Throw of Dice Will Never Abolish Chance

Stéphane Mallarmé · 1897

A typographic grimoire: words constellate like gears; the page behaves like a machine.

Read Occult Mechanics

Workshop & Eye

seeing & technique
The Elements of Drawing

The Elements of Drawing

John Ruskin · 1857

Instructional, moral, and obsessive; seeing as ethical practice.

Read Workshop & Eye
Journal (Eugène Delacroix)

Journal

Eugène Delacroix · 1822–1863

Studio notes on color, form, and restlessness — the painter thinking aloud.

Read Workshop & Eye
Codex Madrid

Codex Madrid

Leonardo da Vinci · 15th c.

Massive facsimile of notebooks — mechanics, sketches, and visions. Worth the wait to load.

Read PDF Open in Reader Workshop & Eye

Rag-Picker Shelf

pamphlets & quick hits
What I Believe

What I Believe

Emma Goldman · 1908

A short anarchist manifesto, sharp enough to hand out on a street corner.

Read Rag-Picker Shelf
Some IWW Cartoons

Some IWW Cartoons

Industrial Workers of the World · 1970s

Radical union politics as pamphlet art.

Read Rag-Picker Shelf

Night School

shorter classics for students & insomniacs
Ways of Seeing

Ways of Seeing

John Berger · 1972

How images train attention. Watch/read, then go look again.

Read Night School
Against Interpretation

Against Interpretation

Susan Sontag · 1964

Feel first, parse later: Sontag’s case for an erotics of art.

Read Night School