Leigh Ledare & Rhea Anastas - Double Bind - A.R.T. Press 2015

In this book Leigh Ledare and Rhea Anastas view the body of work Double Bind to audition ideas about social and aesthetic experience within the unfolding of a dialogue. The prolific imagery of Double Bind—its just under one thousand photographs, and its collection of mass-media ephemera—confronts the viewer in the work’s physical installation in single images and en masse. Double Bind enacts recognizable subjects in this space: the male-female vessel of intimacy that we know as the heterosexual couple. To ask questions about viewing the material and social ensemble of Double Bind is to think within the contradictions of the cultural, psychological, and sexual realms. The texts of this book intervene within and extend the social and aesthetic poiesis of the work. Their conversation also becomes an occasion to attempt concepts that depart from critical practices of recent decades. In this way, the book Double Bind tests a concept of affective criticism by doing, modeling responses created for and within the different scales—both intimate, and public or collective—of artwork and viewership.

257p - EN - 15.2x21.5cm - softcover