Böcker av Michael Paraskos

In 2008 four artists and an art critic gathered together in the northern English seaside town of Scarborough to stage an exhibition that would challenge the dominant mainstream British art world. Entitled 'scarborough realists now' (note the lower case) the exhibition was a deliberate attack on the mainstream metropolitan art world, dominated at the time by neo-conceptual artists and critics who were actively hostile to painting. Against this they succeeded in staging a seminal exhibition of radical contemporary realist painting. As the critic Michael Paraskos argues in a new essay, written to accompany this reissue of the original catalogue, the Scarborough exhibition was intended to celebrate realist painting: but the artists were also looking beyond the realist agenda, foreseeing a time when realist painting itself, and particularly Photorealist painting, would also seem dull, mainstream and in need of revitalisation. Drawing on anarchist art theory, Paraskos explains that whilst each of the artists was producing realist art at the time of the show as a necessary act of resistance against conceptualism, realism and Photorealism were never seen as the ultimate goal. Already these artists were developing individual agendas for their work that would take them beyond realism.

The Aphorisms of Irsee is a collection of definitive statements on the nature of art by the artist Clive Head and the writer Michael Paraskos. The aphorisms were formulated whilst Head and Paraskos were teaching at a summer art camp in Irsee, southern Germany. Sometimes controversial, often funny, the aphorisms are designed to challenge our understanding of art by defining its essential characteristics. Head and Paraskos do this not only in terms of the question "what is art?" but the equally important question, "what are the conditions in which art can appear?" With a new introduction for the third edition by Michael Paraskos, the Aphorisms of Irsee are radical, challenging and thought provoking, and a joy to read. They set out a new agenda for art in the twenty-first century.

Clive Head is the leading figurative painter of his generation working in Britain today. In this introduction to his recent work Michael Paraskos discusses the various influences on Head as a painter, ranging from Titian to Matisse. He argues that Head's ambition to create paintings that exist as an alternative reality to our own plunges the viewer into a parallel universe every bit as strange and exciting as that dreamed up by Lewis Carroll. In doing so, Paraskos suggests, Head has enabled painting to follow the other arts in finally grasping the full implications of the concept of mise en abyme, theorised by the influential French critic Roland Barthes, while still producing images that are deeply compelling.

The relationship between art and anarchism has a long but often hidden history. Artists as diverse as Courbet, Pissarro, Signac, van Gogh, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Gris, and many others, have been positively identified as being anarchist, or having sympathies with anarchist ideas. But, as Michael Paraskos suggests in the course of these essays, there is an argument to be made that anarchist ideas are at the heart of all acts of artistic creation.From this Paraskos argues that we need to reconsider what it means to educate artists. He questions the usefulness of putting art students through an inherently uncreative university art education system and advocates instead an organic and open-ended network of ''table-top art schools''. Each of theses, he suggests, would be centred on small groups of practising artists and have its own identity and interests. After considering the often controversial work of the Savoy Press, Paraskos ends with a discussion on a small group of collaborative artists in Cyprus, which included his father, Stass Paraskos, who decided to re-conceptualise their painted canvases as shared anarchist communes. The result was a radical new form collaborative painting.Although dealing with the serious matters of art and political anarchism in the cultural sphere, Paraskos''s light touch and generous writing style is filled with humour and personal anecdote, and is a pleasure to read.

Herbert Read was one of the most influential art and literary theorists of modernism active in the first half of the twentieth century. He is frequently credited with bringing modern art and modernism to a wide public and was dubbed by friends and foes alike as the 'Pope of Modern Art.' As a broadcaster on the BBC and a prolific writer Read was a well known public figure, but his understanding of art, literature and society was built on sometimes recondite forms of Continental Philosophy, particularly idealist philosophy. That he was able to turn these into a theory of culture admired not only by artists, writers and political activists but the wider public is a measure of his skill as a thinker and writer. In this highly readable text Dr Michael Paraskos explains how Read understood idealist theories and how he hybridised them with his anarchist political beliefs to create a uniquely Readian form of anarchist cultural theory.

Michael Paraskos is one of the new generation of art critics who are redefining the way we make and see art in the twenty-first century. He is a leading figure in the New Aesthetics movement, an informal grouping of artists and writers who emphasise the physical and material nature of art above its conceptual meaning. In Regeneration Paraskos puts forward an argument for an aesthetic framework for art which does not look back to the academic aesthetics of previous centuries, but is rooted in the physical and material nature of how artists actually make art. By doing this, he suggests, an art theory based on essential nature of art can come into existence, rather than a repetition of futile attempts to discuss art as if it is music, or poetry, or linguistics, or visual politics. Art is art, he suggests, and it does not need to borrow theories from other human activities to justify its existence. But Regeneration is not simply a discussion of art theory. It is a record of a highly personal, and sometimes painful, journey into discovering the true nature of art. Originally intended for private distribution only to trusted friends in the art world, Regeneration offers a rare glimpse into the experiences that lead art theorists and critics to think, say and do the things they do.