Anthony Elms

Gregg Bordowitz: Drive presents a series of essays and texts surrounding Gregg Bordowitz's films Fast Trip, Long Drop and Habit. Images from Bordowitz's installation Drive, exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago April 6-July 7, 2002, are also featured. Bordowitz made a big splash in 1993 with Fast Trip, Long Drop. It featured a blend of documentary footage and fictional narrative to focus on his HIV positive diagnosis, the diagnosis of a friend's breast cancer, and the recent deaths of his grandparents. Instead of creating a somber ode to mortality, Bordowitz offered a darkly humorous essay on history, illness, AIDS activism, and representational strategies. Habit (2002) is the sequel to Fast Trip, Long Drop. It follows the regimens, routines, and thoughts that result from Bordowitz's decade of life as a person with AIDS. Coupled with this are new interviews with some of the same faces featured in Fast Trip, Long Drop, the introduction of new friends and confidants, and extensive footage of AIDS activists in South Africa fighting and organizing to gain access to the same drugs that are keeping Bordowitz and many of his friends alive. The tone of this film is slower from the earlier one, reflecting a change in the tenor of AIDS activism, the fact that South Africa 2001 is not New York 1992, and the new domesticity and responsibility that governs Bordowitz's life today. For the book, Brodowitz assembled a collection of authors whose views on AIDS and/or aesthetics he greatly respects. Topics range from critical assessments of his films, to the moralizing tenor found in popular images of homosexuality and AIDS, the current state of the aesthetic avant-garde, political activism, race and its complicated relation to sexuality and public policy, living with illness, and a short fiction work on the mental space of illness.

This volume documents seven spraypainted murals by Katharina Grosse (born 1961), collectively titled Psychylustro, which punctuate the path between the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia and Atlantic City in New Jersey, and which can be seen by the 34,000 travelers who travel this route daily.

"Blast Counterblast" is a multifaceted, fascinating examination of the way intellectuals interact - through influence, argumentation, and criticism. Looking at both Wyndham Lewis' modernist publication "Blast" and Marshall McLuhan's 1969 response to it, "Counterblast", the contributors to this volume - a selection of writers, visual artists, performers, and filmmakers - skewer relational aesthetics and identity politics in order to restate what the role of identity formation is today. Taking McLuhan and Lewis as starting points, the essays in this volume develop and push the ideas presented in both "Blast" and "Counterblast". "Blast Counterblast" includes the writings of Maria Fusco, Michael Hoolboom, My Barbarian, Lane Relyea, and Ryan Trecartin.

Sun Ra (1914-93) - self-proclaimed visionary extraterrestrial of the "Angel Race," prophetic jazz band leader and composer, and lyrical proponent of Afro-futurism - was one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century music. Though many of Sun Ra's fans are familiar with the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of his work, most remain blissfully unaware of how artists have continued to explore time and (outer) space through the invention and composition of his legacy. Published to coincide with the exhibition Pathways to Unknown Worlds, the remarkable illustrations and essays of "Traveling the Spaceways" confronts the visual manifestation of Sun Ra's philosophy and demonstrates how graphics and design were essential to his message of self-determination. The influence of Sun Ra's openness to new technologies and experimentation, his sense of personal identity as a construct rather than a given, and his playful attitude toward history and myth-making are all evidenced by the remarkable writers and artists who have contributed to this volume, including Pedro Bell, My Barbarian, Dave Muller, and Charlemagne Palestine. A refreshing reconsideration of the impact of Sun Ra's life on American history and visual culture, "Traveling the Spaceways" is an unforgettable look at the Ra persona in the context of contemporary art.

Philosopher, Afro-futurist, and jazz legend Sun Ra (1914-93) constructed much of his complicated public persona during his sojourn in Chicago in the mid-1950s. Working with a still-shadowy underground fraternal organization, Ra amassed a library of books on the occult, Egyptology, race studies, Theosophy, and religion - all in service of drawing elliptical connections between these disparate bodies of knowledge. This work became the foundation of the personal mythology Ra employed in the 1960s when he began fronting his Myth-Science Arkestra and started drawing attention from more mainstream jazz fans. "Pathways to Unknown Worlds" presents a kaleidoscopic range of materials from those years, including original record cover designs and production materials, paper ephemera, and photographs. These materials - most previously unseen - dramatically flesh out the story of Sun Ra's mystical journey of discovery and his lofty goals for the dissemination of his new knowledge; they are certain to fascinate and delight Ra's legion of fans.

Light and darkness transform city buildings into surreal structures: an ordinary gray concrete building in plain daylight changes at night into a mysterious monolith or, under a blue-tinted lens, into an ethereal edifice. Swedish artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff harnessed these transformative powers of light to create a powerful spectacle that presents Chicago architecture from a wholly original perspective in this collection of striking photographs. "Red Empty (Chicago 2003)" is the latest in a series of urban-centered works spanning from Bangkok to Santa Fe in which von Hausswolff set 1000-watt red spotlights against the architecture of run-down, abandoned buildings to generate spectral real-world monochromes. His images explore intermediate realms through these otherworldly images - worlds traced by psychic residue that re-write the history of particular sites. "Red Empty" is a compelling visual work that transforms Chicago architecture into sculptures of light, shadow, and stone.