Abstract
<jats:p>Working Title is about all the supposedly mundane things involved in creative work that you’re not supposed to talk about: the prerequisites, formalities, long waits, copyright battles, packaging dilemmas, and project pitches (like the one you’re reading now). This book delves into European and transatlantic audiovisual media from the 1960s and 1970s, including performances, visual art, installations, and films, which might seem well known to us as avant-garde artworks from “the past”—but in this book, they don’t remain there. Exploring the less visible media among these works—from video games, photography, television, and YouTube videos to legal texts, containers, rubbish, and paperwork— Kalani Michell unsettles the familiar motivating mythologies of art of this era and makes space for the heavy lifting these media do, carving out what and how they mean for us today and revisiting their forgotten futures. “Taking us into galleries and performance spaces in New York City, Mainz, Brussels, and elsewhere, Kalani Michell aims principally to undo knots of meaning, asking us to attend to the tying as much as the finished bow. A finely wrought, wonderfully readable, and utterly unique book.” — Johannes von Moltke, author of The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America “Putting pressure on categories like ‘text’ and ‘author’ to reveal a messier and less familiar landscape of media processes, Michell shows with great originality and rigor that the center is always shaped by what surrounds it.” — Erika Balsom, author of Ten Skies “Offering a rich understanding of the hidden histories of labor, amateur practices, and promiscuities of influence that inform the complex afterlives of artworks, this deeply smart work makes an essential contribution.” — Rebecca Schneider, author of Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment Kalani Michell is Assistant Professor of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.</jats:p>