Mark von Schlegell
Ickles, Etc.
Critical Spatial Practice 5
Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen
Featuring artwork by Louise Lawler
Wednesday, September 24, 2014, 7pm
MAK Center for Art and Architecture
Schindler House
835 North Kings Road
West Hollywood, CA 90069
Friday, September 26, 2014, 3pm
The Classroom at the New York Art Book Fair
MoMA PS1
22–25 Jackson Ave.
Long Island City, NY 11101
Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 8:30pm
Pro qm
Almstadtstraße 48–50
10119 Berlin
Sternberg Press is pleased to announce the publication of Ickles, Etc. by Mark von Schlegell, the fifth book in the Critical Spatial Practice series edited by Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen.
It’s the late 21st century. Technological, environmental, and social catastrophes have changed the meanings of culture, nature, and landscape forever. But in what remains of the international urban scene, architecture still refuses to admit it hasn’t been modern since the early 20th century. Enter Ickles, Etc.
Helming Los Angeles’s most misunderstood info-architecture practice is Henries Ickles, “the man without self-concept.” Time and again Ickles offers practical solutions to the most impenetrable theoretical entanglements of art, architecture, and science in the 2090s.
In the fifth book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, Mark von Schlegell’s fusion of theory and fiction puts the SF back in notions of “speculative aesthetics.” A collection of interconnected comical sci-fi stories written for various exhibitions, Ickles, Etc. explores the future of architectural practice in light of developments in climatology, quasicrystalography, hyper-contemporary art, time travel, and the EGONET. Occupying New Los Angeles, visiting the Danish Expansion, Nieuw Nieuw Amsterdam, and 1970s St. Louis, the practice finds selves embroiled in very spicy mustards indeed, redefining info-architecture and jettisoning the burdensome “self-concept” of the Western tradition in the process. Just don’t expect a visit to the ruins of Disney Hall!
Mark von Schlegell is the author of the novels Venusia, Mercury Station, and the forthcoming Sundogz from Semiotext(e), as well as of two books of literary theory, Realometer and Dreaming the Mainstream, from Merve Verlag, Berlin. Schlegell has directed the Pure Fiction seminar at Städelschule in Frankfurt since 2012, which has published three experimental fiction compendia.
Mark von Schlegell
Ickles, Etc.
Critical Spatial Practice 5
Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen
Featuring artwork by Louise Lawler
Design by Zak Group
September 2014
10.5 x 15 cm, 172 pages, 9 color ill., softcover with dust jacket
ISBN 978-3-95679-073-7
Previous books in the series include:
Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen, eds., What Is Critical Spatial Practice? (artwork by Armin Linke)
Markus Miessen in Conversation with Chantal Mouffe, The Space of Agonism (artwork by Rabih Mroué)
Beatriz Colomina, Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (artwork by Dan Graham)
Keller Easterling, Subtraction (artwork by Metahaven)
Forthcoming books in the series:
Robert Jan van Pelt, The Architecture of the Returned Gaze (artwork by Trevor Paglen)
Eyal Weizman, The Roundabout Revolutions
For orders, please contact order [at] sternberg-press.com.
For press inquiries and all other concerns, please contact mail [at] sternberg-press.com.
Sternberg Press
Caroline Schneider
Karl-Marx-Allee 78
D-10243 Berlin
