Publications

• The Use of Style by A. Kennedy

  

  

  KADMON, 107 pp, £7.00, 2015, paperback,
  132 mm X 197 mm, ISBN 978-0-9567780-5-5 KADMON is an imprint of DAAT PRESS.
  
  

  Biographical information and book details:

  The Use of Style links the subject’s style of thought and style of being to the perceived or made style of the object. This is neither a royal road into the object’s totalized meaning or into the core of the unitary subject — both are produced in certain socio-historical, contingent relations. Ethical consequences and possibilities emerge where the style of the subject and object overlap in our assessments. As aesthetic judgments this interaction demonstrates our aesthetic education — our ability to evaluate systems of thought that are not immediately our own or familiar to us; the self-naturalised and reified relation between the subject and object is temporarily halted in thought. In the moment of contemplation the relationship between subject and object becomes our ‘stylistics of existence’ and in the activity of judging there is potential for freedom.

• How Glasgow Stole the Idea of Contemporary Art by A. Kennedy

  

  

  KADMON, 234 pp, £15.00, 2014, paperback, 132 mm X 197 mm, ISBN 978-0-9567780-2-4. KADMON is an imprint of DAAT PRESS.
  
  

  Biographical information and book details:

  This collection of reviews, articles, essays and lectures was published or presented between 2004 and 2014, a period in which Glasgow’s art scene received enormous international attention. During this time Kennedy taught at the University of Glasgow and Edinburgh College of Art, and was an occasional guest lecturer at Glasgow School of Art and Inverleith House at Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens. He also worked as the art editor of The List and was the associate editor of MAP magazine. He now runs Daat Press, a Glasgow-based publishing house, and works as a freelance art historian and critic.
  
  How Glasgow Stole the Idea of Contemporary Art collects most of his relevant work published during this time, and should be of vital interest to those looking for an overview of the Glasgow art scene from a first-hand critical perspective. Some of the texts are short, and cover an artist’s exhibition in three or five hundred words for a magazine column, others are longer essays and verbatim lecture notes, placing an artist’s work beside his or her contemporaries in Glasgow, or in a wider international art historical context.
  
  The title refers to Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, a book that examines the socio-political factors that led to New York becoming the centre of the art world during the Cold War. But rather than doing the same for Glasgow during the ‘Glasgow Miracle’, Kennedy presents the aesthetic evidence, embodied within the art objects, of how this new ‘theft’ took place.

• How Many Cats by Arron Sands

  

  

  DAAT PRESS, 70 pp, £7.00, 2012, paperback, 197 mm X 127 mm, 90 gsm bookwove paper.
  
  How Many Cats is the first collection of poems by Glasgow-based poet Arron Sands. Sands is a fine art graduate from Glasgow School of Art, an institution with a formidable reputation, and which has a large tradition of artists moving into literature and poetry. His work draws on various styles of poetry from over the last century, deconstructing and reconstructing a modern imagist approach.

• The Kabbalistic Mirror of Genesis: Commentary on Genesis 1 - 3 by David Chaim Smith www.davidchaimsmith.com

  

  

  DAAT PRESS, 176 pp, 21 b/w figures and plates, £13.99, 2011, paperback, 210 mm X 148 mm (A5).
  
  The Kabbalistic Mirror of Genesis is the first book of its kind. It rigorously re-examines the first three chapters of the book of Genesis from a radical non-theistic position, completely removing the concept of a creator God. Despite this ‘heretical’ position, the book utilizes a traditionally precise kabbalistic vocabulary and structure. Previous works that have attempted to unpack the text invariably rely on theistic dogma and mythology. Smith’s book is absolutely devoid of conventional religious ‘truth’, and probes the ultimate mysteries using epistemological and ontological questioning from a base of gnostic realization. The Kabbalistic Mirror of Genesis was previously only available to a small group of Smith’s students and close colleagues, but it is now apparent that this work is enormously important and had to be made available to a wider audience.

  ‘A gifted artist who has a deep contemporary understanding of Jewish mystical wisdom, David Chaim Smith takes us into the domain where zero is one, where the all is nothing, and where the creative moment is constantly renewing itself. The Kabbalistic Mirror of Genesis is not a book simply to read, but to contemplate and live with.’
  
  - Rodger Kamenetz, author of Burnt Books and The Jew in the Lotus

  ‘An amazing book – boy does it have chutzpah!’
  
  - Hymenaeus Beta, Frater Superior, O.T.O.

  Author Biography

  David Chaim Smith was born in 1964 in New York City. His education and early career was as a visual artist throughout the 1980s. In 1990 he began an immersion into the Hermetic Qabbalah, which included ritual work with several occult orders. In 1997 he abandoned visual art for dedication to mystical practice, from which came a unique blend of Chassidic mysticism and traditional Kabbalah with Hermeticism. This coalesced through working with the 13th century text Fountain of Wisdom, which he mapped out diagrammatically. The resulting symbol system served as the basis for his 2007 return to visual art. He currently lives in New York City with his wife Rachel.