Norman Klein‘s new collection of essays, Tales of the Floating Class, reveals shared ironies in the arts and urban culture over the past fifty years. It studies the amnesiac effects of globalization upon the narrative structure of television, video, animation, photography and installation art, as well as the shapeshifting that has overwhelmed cities and entertainment spaces. Using Los Angeles and the West as one focal point, various case studies trace the growth of the Floating Class, an expression from the late nineteenth century referring to the outliers who would mill around city parks, crowding the rallies, while listening to rabble-rousing public speakers. These sites were also known as “bughouse squares,” because they sponsored extreme haranguing of all sorts. In earlier centuries, many had been fairgrounds for vendors selling artisanal goods. After 1850, they became a sounding board for the new city, even for avant-garde movements across the arts. Today, the Floating Class exists more internally, for example, in vigilante social networks. Its precarious numbers have grown a hundred-fold. They suffer the mad indignities of a gig economy, and neo-feudal indenture. They try not to feel caught like wild salmon in Trump’s hair. Klein writes in comic flourishes that layer fact and fiction. That is because the line between the real and the imaginary has radically blurred, inside the comic picaresque that defines our history today. Featured are twenty-two essays and fictions that have been reedited from their original published version.

During visits to Los Angeles, Sandra Peters became preoccupied with the work of architect R.M. Schindler: from installations that resemble portraits of some individual Schindler houses to a cube structure (Interface No. 1) responding to the bilateral-diagonal roof configuration of the How House (1925), Schindler’s work became the point of departure for the artist’s multifaceted confrontation with the form of the cube that is documented within this publication.

Routine Pleasures was an exhibition at the Schindler House this past summer that brought together artists working in a variety of media to explore “the termite tendency,” a concept introduced by artist and film critic Manny Farber (1917–2008) in his 1962 essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.” Whereas the original essay applied these labels to the work of filmmakers, exhibition organizer Michael Ned Holte found manifold parallels in contemporary art.

Steve Roden, Lucky Dragons, and Simon Leung presented new performances as part of the exhibition Routine Pleasures, organized by Michael Ned Holte. Each performance was a response to the site and the context of the exhibition but also a continuation of each artist’s ongoing work. Steve Roden began with a sound performance utilizing a grouping of modular synthesizers from his collection. Lucky Dragons continued their exploration of plural delectation, presenting poems in two voices. Concluding the program, Simon Leung returned to the theme of the train (in a nod to Jean-Pierre Gorin’s film which gave the exhibition its title) with a live/video work that mirrors his ongoing dialogue with Warren Niesłuchowski, the subject of his feature video War After War (2011).

Routine Pleasures brought together artists working in a variety of media to explore “the termite tendency,” a concept introduced by artist and film critic Manny Farber (1917-2008) in his 1962 essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.” Whereas the original essay applied these labels to the work of filmmakers, exhibition organizer Michael Ned Holte found manifold parallels in contemporary art.