Sven Spieker (ed.), Destruction. Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge: MIT Press/Whitechapel, 2017).
Prefaced by a detailed introduction, this book collects writings by artists, writers, philosophers, and critics from all over the world who assess the effects and meanings of destruction in 20th-century art.
The Big Archive. Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge/Mass.: MIT Press, 2008)
“The typewriter, the card index, and the filing cabinet: these are technologies and modalities of the archive. To the bureaucrat, archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive’s content stands as a quasi-objective correlative of the “living” past. Twentieth-century art made use of the archive in a variety of ways—from what Spieker calls Marcel Duchamp’s “anemic archive” of readymades and El Lissitzky’s Demonstration Rooms to the compilations of photographs made by such postwar artists as Susan Hiller and Gerhard Richter. In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker investigates the archive—as both bureaucratic institution and index of evolving attitudes toward contingent time in science and art—and finds it to be a crucible of twentieth-century modernism.” (Press release)
(Korean Translation)
Sven Spieker/Mark Lipovetsky (eds.), The Imprints of Terror. The Rhetoric of Violence and the Violence of Rhetoric in Modern Russian Culture. Anna Brodsky/Mark Lipovetsky/Sven Spieker [eds.], Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach. Sonderband 64, 2006.
This edited volume, dedicated to the memory of Marina Kanevskaya, investigates the importance of violence and its philosophical and ideological underpinnings in contemporary Russian literature, art, film, and philosophy. Participants include Sven Spieker, Mark Lipovetsky, A. Banerjee, E. Dobrenko, D. Brandenberger, A. Prochorov, A. Brodsky, M. Epstein, M. Lipovetsky, G. Shapiro, A. Efimova, D. Kujundžic, I. Sandomirskaja, A. Genis, M. Kanevskaya, and D. Possamai.
Sven Spieker (ed.), Bürokratische Leidenschaften. Kultur- und Mediengeschichte im Archiv (Berlin: Kadmos, 2004), 386pp.
This volume brings together essays by philosophers, historians of science, literary theorists, and art historians. Located at the intersection of art, science, media studies, and art, the book investigates the relationship between cultural production and bureaucratic administration. One key concept at the center of Bürokratische Leidenschaften is the archive whose reach and influence is traced from Hollywood film to library organization. Contributors include Stefan Rieger, Boris Groys, Wolf Kittler, Bernhard Siegert, and Sven Spieker.
Sven Spieker (ed.), Gøgøl: Exploring Absence (Bloomington: Slavica, 2000)
This edited volume, with an introduction by its editor, explores the theme of absence in Gøgøl’s works. Its working premise is that in Gøgøl’s writing the unsayable and the sayable cannot be viewed in isolation from each other; in order to understand either, we have to examine the other. Includes essays by Boris Groys, Renate Lachmann, Mikhail Epstein, Michael Holquist, Mikhail Yampolsky, Sven Spieker, and others. The book includes the last published article by the late Soviet semiotician and scholar of culture Yurii Lotman, commissioned and written specifically for this volume.
Figures of Memory and Forgetting in Andrej Bitov’s Prose. Postmodernism and the Quest for History. (= Slawische Literaturen) Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995, ISBN:978-3-631-46940-8.
Focused on one of Russia’a most celebrated contemporary writers, Andrei Bitov (1937-2018), this monograph focuses on the problem of postmodernism in Soviet literature during the 1970s-’90s, with special emphasis on the psychological, aesthetic, and epistemological implications of Bitov’s postmodern treatment of memory. The book contains an extensive bibliography on the author.