Paul Wood

Extensive survey of the politically outward-looking Conceptualism emerging from Art & Language in the UK. Especially considering its critique of the norms of Modernist art practices in contemporary art, particularly practices of art education.

Edited, compiled and introduced by Paul Wood, Biting the Hand: Traces of Resistance in the Art & Language diaspora is about a dissident formation of artists active in the UK in the 1970s and 80s.

The book tells the story of artists engaging with a critique of then-contemporary modernist art education, who have embarked on a series of theoretical investigations which became increasingly politicised under the pressures of an evolving social crisis. Increased racism, unemployment and attacks on the organised working class all raised questions about how a critical art might respond.

By the late 1970s, these radical artists, mostly in the orbit of the Art & Language group, were producing posters and leaflets for a wide range of left-wing causes, as well as analyses of the politics of art and design education and the role of cultural ideology in maintaining consensus. In the 1980s, as Thatcherism tightened its grip, those involved went their separate ways into areas as diverse as media work, trade unionism, health and education.

Biting the Hand has three parts: a retrospective introduction setting the formation in its historical context, and two annotated documentary sections presenting examples of the work as both text and image, written and edited by Paul Wood.

It also includes a foreword by Sezgin Boynik, publisher, and an afterword by Ann Stephen, curator and art historian, further expanding on the book's subject.

For many years Paul Wood worked for the Art History Department of the Open University. His publications from that period include Conceptual Art (2000), Western Art and the Wider World (2013), and the four-volume anthology Art in Theory (1990-2020), co-edited with Charles Harrison and others.

Edited, compiled and introduced by Paul Wood.
Foreword by Sezgin Boynik; afterword by Ann Stephen.

The first English translation of Karel Teige's The Marketplace of Art in two volumes includes a critical introduction, inquiries, and extensive commentaries. Originally published in the Czech language in 1936, The Marketplace of Art is the summation of Teige's artistic, political, and theoretical work.

Acclaimed as one of the leading theoreticians of avant-garde art and architecture between the two world wars, Teige's more political writings still remain to be discovered. Written in 1936, in the context of the rising conservative right-wing culture, and during the intense debates between the avant-garde artists and the Communist Party, The Marketplace of Art is a response to the capitulation of contemporary art to fascist and Stalinist currents. Teige discusses this reaction as something deeply inscribed into the culture of the bourgeoisie, which he claims is a culture "not able to create and inspire any other kind of art besides a hollow and pompous academism or sentimental kitsch." Teige's Marxist analysis of the art market shows in which way this culture is tied with capitalist institutions and he offers artistic and political strategies to oppose its absolutism. In today's warmongering culture of authoritarian neoliberalism where the contemporary art market is run by oligarchs, Karel Teige's radical critique of the art market is more relevant than ever. 

Rab-Rab Press presents this long-awaited translation with an accompanying volume of commentaries and interventions. Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Joseph Grim Feinberg, the book is published in collaboration with Contradictions/Kontradikce Journal based in Prague. The commentary volume includes commissioned essays by Zbyněk Baladrán, Dave Beech, Jana Ndiaye Berankova, Michel Chevalier, Esther Leslie, John Roberts, and Paul Wood, as well as an inquiry on The Marketplace of Art with responses from František Dryje, Tomáš Hříbek, Rea Michalová, Šimon Svěrák, and Roman Telerovský.

Czech artist, critic, and art theorist Karel Teige (1900-1951), close to the French Surrealists, founder of the Devětsil group in 1920, and member of Leva Fronta (The Left Front), was one of the most important figures of the Czech avant-garde.