NICOLAS BOURRIAUD — Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 2002

Softcover. 11 × 17 cm. 96 pages. First edition. Translated by Jeanine Herman. Designed by Surface. Published by Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 2002. ISBN 0-9711193-0-9.

First published in 2002, Postproduction became one of the defining theoretical texts for understanding art made through existing images, objects, recordings and cultural products. Nicolas Bourriaud describes a generation of artists working less as isolated producers than as users, editors, programmers and DJs: selecting material already in circulation and assigning it another sequence, context or function.

Moving between the readymade, appropriation, sampling, exhibition-making and consumer culture, the book considers artists including Marcel Duchamp, Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley, Pierre Huyghe, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno. Its central proposition is that cultural production no longer begins with a blank surface. The available world becomes material.

The book followed Bourriaud’s influential writing on relational aesthetics but shifted the emphasis from participation towards use. Production and consumption begin to overlap. A record is sampled, an artwork is re-exhibited, a commercial object is redirected, and a historical form becomes available for another programme.

For The New Rare, the text provides a useful vocabulary for understanding the continued life of printed matter. Catalogues, invitations, reproductions and discarded publications do not remain fixed within their original purpose. They can be selected, retained, resold, displayed and placed into new relations. Circulation becomes part of the object’s meaning.

The compact format and restrained Surface design reinforce this position. Pale horizontal lines and partially obscured text appear across the white wrappers, as though information has already passed through several stages of reproduction. This copy carries further evidence of that passage through reading, storage and handling.

Condition: good used condition. General toning, rubbing and handling marks to the pale wrappers, with scattered spotting and light surface staining. Minor wear to the edges and corners. Occasional marks internally, including a small stain to one illustrated spread. Binding remains intact.