An art-handler friend in New York has some stories about installing in buyers’ ritzy apartments: a doorman’s insistence that he ride the service elevator up; having a maid point out where the de Kooning’s supposed to go.

One doesn’t really ‘flip’ through eBooks so much as enter their hybrid worlds, which can mix print conventions with the scattered way of reading we’ve picked up from the web. iBooks’ goofy page-turn effect works well with Rachel Harrison’s The Help, A Companion Guide, a hilarious and off-kilter edition released for iPad and iPhone by Badlands Unlimited, Paul Chan’s art book publishing outfit. The book was inspired by Harrison’s show, The Help (2012), at Greene Naftali in New York, but there are no finished gallery shots, nor any standard catalogue text. Instead we’re bombarded with snippets of Harrison’s reference materials and numerous shots from the installation of her exhibition.

The theme, of course, is the “help”: the research sources and people that surround the polished final exhibition: the denim-clad art-handlers wrapping up Harrison’s speckled foam sculptures beside buckets of cleaning fluid and stray packing tape. There, photos of colored-pencil drawings depicting Amy Winehouse singing to caricatures inspired by early Picasso paintings; Google image searches; newspaper clippings (from Malaysia, I think) about basketball teams and 90s rappers; scans of ceramics from old art catalogs. You’re offered a taste of the artist’s colorfully neurotic research process, sensing the stench of cigarette smoke in a Chelsea alleyway during an overworked gallery registrar’s lunch break. (Pablo Larios)

What occurs when the institutions governing the production of knowledge and power suddenly disappear? Published as part of Witte de With’s series of online publications, punk theorist Avital Ronell extends her continued analysis of culture’s seductions, from hallucinations to modes of communication and consumption. Powering Down on Authority speculates on the very authorising claims of the political. How does authority authorise itself? Beginning with reading Freud and Kojève’s foundational narratives of psychoanalysis’ birth of patriarchy, Ronell moves to Nancy’s analysis of the merging of capital and democracy productive of a culture submitted to measure, evaluation and distributable shares. In light of the recent so-called Arab Spring and resistance to neo-liberal policies towards austerity and market logic, revolution—including those of reform, rebellion, mutiny, insurgency, etc.—require an opposition to authority. If democracy requires reinvigoration, the political must be supplemented by philosophical thinking towards the illogical and incalculable. Her swift reference at the end of the text to Victor Frankenstein, dispossessed of both wife and progeny, may indicate a romantic gesture towards the enabling violation of castration. Yet an embrace of ethical forms of spectacle and violence is exactly what Ronell advocates—or to put it another way, politics plus fantasy. (Stephan Tanbin Sastrawidjaja)

Mix-tapes are heterogeneous by nature, crossing genres and styles to create a one-hour experience that is greater than the sum of its individual parts. Animal Shelter, the occasional intellectual journal edited by Hedi El Kholti and published by Semiotext(e), is like a mix-tape, writes Alex Gartenfeld in Interview. The second issue of the journal features fiction, art work, poetry, conversations and essays that navigate from politics to sexuality, from fiction to non-fiction in a completely non-hierarchical way. What seems to hold this diversity of material together is “loss.” Both in an emotional sense - longing, sadness, the sense of an ending - and in a geographical sense - dispersion, displacement, “unbelonging.” “The 21st century is disoriented,” states Virilio; Kholti writes about the “beauty of exile”; Dodie Bellamy confides that whenever she enters heterosexuality, “it’s been like visiting a foreign country”. Almost every contribution is acutely personal, feeling raw and, in a good way, sometimes even a little unedited. This might very well be the success of a good mix-tape, that it speaks from one heart to another without betraying the effort that went into making it. (Maaike Lauwaert)

In an obituary for Steve Jobs, a long-time Apple supporter, writer and actor Stephen Fry wrote that it would be naive to maintain the distinction between style and substance. Today style determines usability no less than substances does. Current debates in the art world would be incomplete without considering the role graphic design plays in shaping the identities of art institutions and practices. The increasingly interchangeable roles of artists and designers, along with the numerous collaborative initiatives between the two creative fields, open up the development of a more critical understanding of design’s potentiality in facing contemporary capitalist systems. Among the key figures exploring the critical potential of contemporary graphic design is Zak Kyes, who stands behind the production of numerous art publications and designs for art institutions—the work that earned him the INFORM Award in 2010. As a recipient of this annual accolade, Kyes was presented an opportunity to exhibit his works at the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig. Accompanying the exhibition is a Sternberg Press publication, Working With…, in which a multitude of contributors, from Andrew Blauvelt to Marcus Miessen, examine the designer’s critical engagement in shaping the dialogue between art and design. Locating this relationship under the umbrella of economics and politics, the book contributes to the current discourse regarding the questions of authorship, identity and collaboration. (Aliina Astrova)