"Urban parkland, invention and repetition are the key motifs of Rodney Graham’s Phonokinetoscope (2001). Drawing together Graham’s early commitment to photography and subsequent investigations into film, music and installation, the work consists of a turntable driving a projector, a vinyl LP with psychedelic rock song written and performed by the artist, and a 16mm film loop featuring Graham riding a bicycle around Berlin’s Tiergarten, while tripping on acid. In this book, Shepherd Steiner discusses Phonokinetoscope as a pivotal work in the context of the artist’s early explorations of proto-cinema and later preoccupations with the ‘temporal object’. He uncovers a practice indebted to deconstruction and a picture of an artist engaged in the most pressing issues confronting contemporary art and theory: reference, mimesis, performance, the legacy of minimalism, topology, irony and memory."--Publisher's description.

This volume covers a variety of authors and topics related to the New Criticism school of the 1920s–1950s in America. Contributors trace the history of the New Criticism as a movement, consider theoretical and practical aspects of various proponents, and assess the record of subsequent engagement with its tenets. The volume will prove valuable for its renewed concentration not only on the New Critics themselves, but also on the way they and their work have been contextualized, criticized, and valorized by theorists and educators during and after their period of greatest influence, both in the United States and abroad.

Borrowing its title from Roman philosopher Lucretius in his epic poem dedicated to Epicurean philosophy, this exhibition catalogue assumes a multi-linear and non-directional curatorial approach to individual artistic practices. While the artists surveyed share an interest in strikingly Modernist forms and structures, they employ surrealist wit to repurpose clichéd forms from our everyday urban environment and popular culture into extra-ordinary aesthetic tropes that challenge a stable understanding of both art and our modernity.

Rodney Graham's "Phonokinetoscope" (2001) is a five-minute 16mm film loop in which the artist is seen riding his Fischer Original bicycle through Berlin's Tiergarten while taking LSD, to the soundtrack of a fifteen-minute song (written and performed by Graham) recorded on a vinyl LP. The turntable drives the projection of the film; the film starts when the needle is placed on the record and stops when the needle is taken off. Graham's ride evokes the Swiss scientist Albert Hoffman's famous 1943 bicycle ride home after an experimental dose of LSD as well as Paul Newman's backward-facing ride in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"; the accompanying music presents a thicket of riffs and borrowings. As the images and visual details repeat in the film's endless loop, the artist's "Phonokinetoscope" refers to a surprising number of works of art and literature, displaying a world rich with subtle meaning. In this illustrated study of "Phonokinetoscope," Shep Steiner describes the work as marking Graham's transition into a new medium. Steiner positions Graham's practice in relation to postminimalist practice and that of other artists including Dan Graham, but especially, Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall; considers Graham's rhetoric of playfulness; and finally, beyond the web of references, argues for a notion of allegory and memory theater keyed to the durational work yet satisfying the aesthetic standards of static art. "Phonokinetoscope," Steiner argues, looks back to Graham's earlier works focusing on the notion of protocinema and forward to his later musical preoccupations.