Dominic Rahtz

In Metaphorical Materialism: Art in New York in the Late 1960s, Dominic Rahtz returns to a period when the materiality of art was thematized and theorized according to varying conceptions of matter and form, and consciously related to materialisms held as wider philosophical and political positions and attitudes. The book consists of a volume of essays on the relationships between materiality and materialism, informed by definitions of labour, process, corporeality, and language, in the work of Carl Andre, Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse and Lawrence Weiner.

Spanning 60 years, this publication surveys the art, editing and curating activities of London-based, Pakistani-born artist Rasheed Araeen (born 1935) for the first time, presenting an expansive artistic practice that has had a profound influence on generations of artists, writers and thinkers. Whether as a pioneer of Minimalist sculpture, a publisher of magazines at the forefront of postcolonial thinking like Third Text (founded 1987) or as an abstract painter drawing inspiration from the art of the Abbasid period, Araeen has consistently sought to realign the understanding of Modernism imposed by the hegemonic discourses of the West. Bringing together newly commissioned essays by leading art critics and historians, documentation from the artist's archive as well as an extensive survey of Araeen's work, this publication offers the opportunity--long overdue--to assess Araeen's impact as an artist and thinker.