Working Title

“A finely wrought, wonderfully readable, and utterly unique book. Taking us into galleries and performance spaces in New York City, Mainz, Brussels, and elsewhere, Kalani Michell insists that processes initiated in the avant-garde works studied are not somehow ‘over,’ but ongoing, as layers of meaning and mediation continue to accrete. Scouring photographic archives, museum galleries, video games and YouTube uploads, and the very materiality of media, Michell aims principally to undo knots of meaning, asking us to attend to the tying as much as the finished bow. This is fascinating reading for media theorists and art historians alike.”—Johannes von Moltke, author of The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America

"Challenging conceptions of work and artist as bounded and discreet entities, Working Title—through a series of interwoven, deeply convincing close analyses—makes legible the artistic practices, communication traces, and intervening decisions that constitute the process of art that is occluded by an exclusive focus on product. An original and substantive contribution to our understanding of the avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, this highly original work not only opens up new views onto its primary objects of analysis but also moves us to understand the theories and critical approaches it mobilizes in a new way."—Sara Hall, Associate Professor of Germanic Studies, University of Illinois Chicago

“Michell shows that unboxing is more than just a YouTube genre: it is a critical method for understanding media. By attending to the ‘wrapping’ that surrounds films, performances, and artworks but too often gets overlooked, this book puts pressure on categories like ‘text’ and ‘author’ to reveal a messier and less familiar landscape of media processes. With great originality and rigor, Michell shows that the center is always shaped by what surrounds it.”—Erika Balsom, author of Ten Skies

“An excellent study of the energetic intra-activity of media ‘among themselves’ (borrowing a phrase from Luce Irigaray). The book offers a rich understanding of the hidden histories of labor, amateur practices, and promiscuities of influence that inform the complex afterlives of artworks as they are boxed, unboxed, exhibited, decommissioned, institutionalized, canonized, repackaged, or forgotten. Deeply smart, this work asks how 1960s and 1970s ‘alternative’ media, from performance art to experimental film, magazine to documentary, have been and still are put to work, often crossing media in the process. Thinking about the gestural migrations of seemingly discrete objects in and beyond their emergence, Michell helps us consider ever further the profound complexities of remediation as fundamental to the late modern mediatic condition. Well written, excellently researched, and an enjoyable read, Working Title makes an essential contribution to media studies, performance studies, visual studies, and overlapping intra-active fields of inquiry.”—Rebecca Schneider, author of Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment