When the current cycle of the Maya Long Count calendar concludes on 21 December 2012, the world will end. And so Cabinet offers doomed readers a guide to the brief time that remains. This oversized, beautifully produced wall calendar, featuring artworks by Swedish artists Bigert & Bergstr m illustrating 12 methods of divination, ignores the familiar holidays in favor of more than 60 significant dates in the history of apocalyptic prophecy. Starring comets, aliens, floods, returning messiahs and more, The Last Calendar will be with you for all the days of the coming year, and ends--as will you--on 21 December 2012.

The Last Calendar: Your Companion for the 356 Days of 2012: A Project by Bigert & Bergström for Cabinet Books

Arts & Photography

Bigert & Bergström

Individual Artists

Cabinet Books

Since its launch in late 2000, Cabinet magazine has become a touchstone for a certain approach to understanding culture, one that shuns orthodox distinctions--high/low, serious/humorous, professional/amateur--in favor of a commitment to the idea that all objects, practices and discourses can, if read against the grain, teach us something important about the world. Its hybrid sensibility merges the visually engaging style of an arts periodical, the exuberance of a fanzine and the in-depth exploration of a scholarly journal to create a sourcebook of ideas for an international audience of readers, from artists and designers to scientists, philosophers and historians. Using essays, interviews and artist projects to present a variety of topics in language accessible to the non-specialist, Cabinet has aimed to encourage a new culture of curiosity. This anthology brings together some of the most interesting successes, and a few instructive failures, published in the first 40 issues of Cabinet, virtually all of which are sold out, along with essays specially commissioned for the volume. It includes contributions by more than a hundred writers and artists, including Jonathan Ames, Alain Badiou, Daniel Birnbaum, Matthew Buckingham, D. Graham Burnett, Paul Collins, Simon Critchley, Lorraine Daston, Mark Dery, Brian Dillon, Jeff Dolven, Spencer Finch, Joshua Foer, Leon Golub, Douglas Gordon, Anthony Grafton, Joseph Grigely, Shelley Jackson, Denis Johnson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Jonathan Lethem, Josiah McElheny, Helen Mirra, Albert Mobilio, Alexander Nagel, Francine Prose, Matthew Ritchie, Daniel Rosenberg, Luc Sante, Christopher Turner, Tom Vanderbilt, Marina Warner, Slavoj Zizek and many others.

Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine

History & Criticism

In the spring of 2010, the Brooklyn-based quarterly magazine Cabinet invited poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum to begin writing a regular column. Entitled "Legend," the column had a highly unusual premise. Every three months, the editors of the magazine would ask Koestenbaum to write one or more extended captions for a single photograph with which they had provided him; drawn from obscure vernacular, commercial and scientific sources, all of the images were unfamiliar to the author. After 18 installments, Koestenbaum concluded his column in the winter of 2015. Notes on Glaze, featuring an introductory essay by the author, collects all the "Legend" columns, as well as their accompanying photographs. Refusing the distancing language of critical disinterest, Koestenbaum’s columns always locate the author in intimate proximity to the subjects portrayed in the photographs and to the impossibly variegated cast of characters―ranging from Debbie Reynolds to Duccio, the Dalai Lama to Barbra Streisand; from Hegel to Pee-wee Herman, and Emily Dickinson to Cicciolina―that pass through these texts. Wayne Koestenbaum (born 1958), a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, has published 17 books of poetry, criticism and fiction, including My 1980s &amp; Other Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background (Turtle Point Press, 2012) and The Anatomy of Harpo Marx (University of California Press, 2012). His most recent book of poetry, The Pink Trance Notebooks, was published in 2015 by Nightboat Books.

Notes on Glaze: 18 Photographic Investigations By Wayne Koestenbaum

Kostenbaum, Wayne

The fifth volume in Cabinet’s 24-Hour Book series, critic and poet Jeff Dolven’s Take Care is a meditation on care and caring in the form of a response to a found document: the 1986 catalog for Braintree Scientific, an American company that manufactures lab products used in experiments on rats and mice.

Take Care (Twenty Four Hour Book, 5)

Literature & Fiction

Dolven, Jeff

Essays & Correspondence

Sally O'Reilly's The Ambivalents--like its companion volume, Jeff Dolven's Take Care--is a response to a 1986 catalog for Braintree Scientific, an American company that manufactures lab products used in experiments on rats and mice. O'Reilly's book comprises letters to the company in the guise of various characters, including an artist, a literary critic, a dissatisfied customer and schoolchildren.

The Ambivalents (Twentyfour Hour Book Series, 6)

The fourth volume in Cabinet's 24-Hour Book series, novelist Fabian Kastner's Archive of the Average Swede considers a project initiated by Sweden's National Archive in the early 1980s designed to fully record the life of a typical citizen. The selected citizen, however, turned out to be a very different figure than what the archive had hoped for.

Archive of the Average Swede (Twentyfour Hour Book Series, 4)

Literary

The Mollino Set

Lytle Shaw

The seventh publication in Cabinet's 24-Hour Book series, in which distinguished authors and artists are incarcerated in the Cabinet gallery space to complete a project from start to finish within 24 hours, The Death of the Artist breaks from prior volumes to stage an experiment involving six different contributors working simultaneously on a single book. Gathered at Cabinet's Berlin event space, the six artists and writers were each asked to consider their own finitude, figurative or literal. The volume includes Sam Durant's meditation on the death of an artwork as a political idea; Tom McCarthy's forensic postulations about death and geometry; Eva Stenram's modified found photographs that suggest violence-to-come; Omer Fast's script in which a woman on an Austrian ski slope becomes the reluctant audience for a retelling of a Yiddish folk tale; Susan Ploetz's outline for a Live Action Role Play (LARP) in which players can learn the art of dying; and Till Gathmann's aleatory game whose outcome can invoke death.

The Death of the Artist: A 24-Hour Book (A Twenty-four-hour Book)

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Books by Cabinet Books