Books published by Ediciones Poligrafa

A key tool for analysing the concept of authorship in the internet age.

Cubism and War explores the work of artists who attempted to keep the Parisian Cubist movement of 1911-1914 alive during the First World War. This little community of artists had been moved by the expanded possibilities that had opened up in painting and sculpture at the beginning of the twentieth century, and they refused to accept that recording the war or producing propaganda was their duty. By refusing to forget the excitement of 1911-14, they kept faith in their independence as individuals as this war of machines threatened to rob every front-line soldier of his humanity, drawing even foreigners in France towards a state of ''total war''.The vast majority of fit young Frenchmen were mobilised, so the artists left behind in Paris were either foreign or too old or unfit for combat. Pablo Picasso, then called the inventor of Cubism, remained a leading figure, alongside his fellow Spaniards Juan Gris and María Blanchard, the Mexican Diego Rivera, the Italian Gino Severini, and the Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz.One feature of this book is the diversity of the work produced by these artists, each working as individuals. Another, however, especially from 1917, is the move made by most of them towards a more structured, architectural Cubism, which could be taken as reparative against the destructive forces that seemed to have taken over the whole world.

Since his reception of the Independent Film Award (1968) from the journal Film Culture, Michael Snow''s work has placed in the ranks of such major figures of avant-garde cinema as Stan Brakhage and Gregory Markopoulos, as well as in the company of two other artists-turned-filmmakers: the photographer Robert Frank and the painter Andy Warhol.The image of Michael Snow that emerges from this complete monograph is that of a contemporary Renaissance man. The artist himself captured this diversity in a profile written in the late 1960s: "I am not a professional. My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor - sometimes they all work together."Mixing reflexive humour with a nuanced grasp of the many faces of contemporary art, Snow''s text acknowledges the difficulties an artist faces in approaching different disciplines when there is a tendency towards purity in all these media as separate endeavours. Within a structure of seventeen chapters, Michael Snow makes a complete overview on his own work, writing the texts and laying out each sequence - an editorial task he knows very well, as is evidenced by this beautiful artist''s book. Certainly, this is an unsurpassed book about one of our most outstanding artists.

One of Brazil''s leading contemporary artists, Caio Reisewitz (Sao Paulo, 1967) has produced a remarkable body of work over the past 15 years, concentrating almost exclusively on Brazilian topics. His large-scale colour photographs explore the changing relationship between the city and the countryside in a period of feverish economic development.Many of his photographs testify to his fascination with the architectural heritage of Brazil''s colonial period, as well as its innovative 20th-century modernist architecture. Other imposing works portray the pristine landscapes and dense forests around his hometown of São Paulo: areas that are now threatened by urban sprawl. Also, Caio Reisewitz''s work sets out to establish connections between the construction of what is real and the recording of what is artificial through photography. In his photomontages (in which the curator Fernando Cocchiarale detects traces of the Dadaist legacy of Hannah Höch and Joaquim Reis) human beings can be present, but they appear in transfigured form.Text in English and French.

A guide to Barcelona, one of the most visited cities in the world

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78) died at only 35 of pancreatic cancer and has since become a cult figure of late 20th-century art. Trained in architecture at Cornell, he went on to question the field's conventions in vivid projects--performance and recycling pieces, space and texture works and word games--some of which excised holes into existing buildings or assembled deeds to New York City alleys and curbs. The artist used a variety of media to document his work, including film, video and photography. His work and words, while sophisticated enough to make him an "artist's artist," and colossal and outgoing enough to draw public attention and affection, were always also grounded in social or political convictions. In the early 1970s, Matta-Clark developed the idea of "anarchitecture," which encompassed his interest in voids, gaps and left-over spaces. Gordon Matta-Clark: Experience Becomes the Object collects five essays and ten individual interviews with various friends and family members of Matta-Clark's. Together, they outline a biographical profile and offer an analysis of the historical period in which the artist developed his short but successful career. New, never-before-published material and photographs as well as an exclusive link to the documentary Crosswords: Matta-Clark's Friends by Matias Cardone are also included.

Juan Uslé (Santander) has been living in New York since the early ''90s, and is one of the most prominent figures of contemporary painting. The hypersensitivity described by Uslé in his work is a sort of memorable visionary state because it is painful. When we see certain paintings by Uslé, always in intense, bright and burning colours, we should be reminded of encounters with one of those states that take us out of our everyday way of perceiving, Each one of these events teaches us that everything we perceive can be captured in an entirely different way, given that even a small modification of the perceptual apparatus can cause it to vary.Some of Uslé''s paintings, the most complex, bring to mind looking through a kaleidoscope. It is useful to recall that these types of experiences, to which we are unaccustomed, are neither easy nor comfortable, and yet remain a crucial step away from being painful. In their excess they put pressure on our aesthetic expectations. This work would be the pictorial equivalent of Rimbaud''s famous quote: "dérèglement de tous les sens".

Held at a single venue over a 12-month period (Jan-Dec 2010), Domino Canibal project in Spain allowed successive artists to create original works by reinterpreting, demolishing, appropriating, and canibalising the work of preceding artists. This title offers an overview of the project.