Public Knowledge

Public Knowledge

Author: Michael Asher

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-10-15

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0262354039

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Writings by the conceptual artist Michael Asher—including notes, proposals, exhibition statements, and letters to curators and critics—most published here for the first time. The California conceptual artist Michael Asher (1943–2012) was known for rigorous site specificity and pioneering institutional critique. His decades of teaching at CalArts influenced generations of artists. Much of Asher's artistic practice was devoted to creating works that had no lasting material presence and often responded to the material, social, or ideological context of a situation. Because most of Asher's artworks have ceased to exist, his writings about them have special significance. Public Knowledge collects writings by Asher about his work—including preliminary notes and ideas, project proposals, exhibition statements, and letters to curators and critics—most of which have never been previously published. Asher gave few interviews, didn't write art criticism, and rarely published extensive accounts of his own work. Yet writing was central to his artistic practice, serving as a tool for working out ideas, negotiating institutional parameters, and describing thought processes. In these texts, he considers writing and documentation, discusses artistic practice, offers notes for gallery and museum talks, presents artist statements for exhibition-goers, describes individual works and their situational context, and reflects on teaching and art education. Among other things, Asher provides his definition of site specificity, addresses the function of art in public space, and analyzes the intersection of teaching art and institutional models of education. Readers will see an artist at work, formulating ethical and political strategies for making art in a situational world.


Discrete Causal Theory

Discrete Causal Theory

Author: Benjamin F. Dribus

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-04-26

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 331950083X

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This book evaluates and suggests potentially critical improvements to causal set theory, one of the best-motivated approaches to the outstanding problems of fundamental physics. Spacetime structure is of central importance to physics beyond general relativity and the standard model. The causal metric hypothesis treats causal relations as the basis of this structure. The book develops the consequences of this hypothesis under the assumption of a fundamental scale, with smooth spacetime geometry viewed as emergent. This approach resembles causal set theory, but differs in important ways; for example, the relative viewpoint, emphasizing relations between pairs of events, and relationships between pairs of histories, is central. The book culminates in a dynamical law for quantum spacetime, derived via generalized path summation.


Abstract Painting and the Minimalist Critiques

Abstract Painting and the Minimalist Critiques

Author: Matthew L. Levy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-05-07

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0429852975

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This book undertakes a critical reappraisal of Minimalism through an examination of three key painters: Robert Mangold, David Novros, and Jo Baer. By establishing their substantive engagements with Minimalist discourse, as well as their often overlooked artistic exchanges with their sculptor peers, it demonstrates that painting crucially informed the movement’s development, serving not only as an object of critique but also as a crucible for its most central tenets. It also poses broader disciplinary implications as it historicizes and challenges Minimalism’s "death of painting" critiques that have been so influential to theories of modernism and postmodernism in the visual arts.


ModelEd, TestEd, TrustEd

ModelEd, TestEd, TrustEd

Author: Joost-Pieter Katoen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-10-16

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 3319682709

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This Festschrift volume has been published in honor of Ed Brinksma, on the occasion of his 60th birthday. The contributions in this Festschrift are written by a number of Ed's former Ph.D. students and collaborators. The papers are a reflection on his research contributions and interests and all fall into the area of formal methods, or in Ed's terminology applied mathematics in computer science. The papers address modeling languages and semantics, model-based testing, verification and performance analysis, probabilistic computation, system dynamics, and applications of formal methods.


Author:

Publisher: Erasmus Ediciones

Published:

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 8415462107

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It's Not Personal

It's Not Personal

Author: Susan Best

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-06-17

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1350144169

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How does something as potent and evocative as the body become a relatively neutral artistic material? From the 1960s, much body art and performance conformed to the anti-expressive ethos of minimalism and conceptualism, whilst still using the compelling human form. But how is this strange mismatch of vigour and impersonality able to transform the body into an expressive medium for visual art? Focusing on renowned artists such as Lygia Clark, Marina Abramovic and Angelica Mesiti, Susan Best examines how bodies are configured in late modern and contemporary art. She identifies three main ways in which they are used as material and argues that these formulations allow for the exposure of pressing social and psychological issues. In skilfully aligning this new typology for body art and performance with critical theory, she raises questions pertaining to gender, inter-subjectivity, relation and community that continue to dominate both our artistic and cultural conversation.


Art and Design

Art and Design

Author: Peter Stupples

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-01-23

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1527506932

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This book is a selection of essays covering aspects of the history, and contemporary understanding of the fields of art and design and their inter-percolation. Making things has always involved skill and thought. Thought is given to their creation so they are fit for purpose. Where the purpose is aesthetic or intellectual pleasure, the resulting object is often called art. There is, however, often a hierarchy placing “art” somewhere apart from “design.” But isn’t some art designed? These essays investigate aspects of this dichotomy – from both sides of the supposed divide to discuss the ground between.


American Artists Engage the Built Environment, 1960-1979

American Artists Engage the Built Environment, 1960-1979

Author: Susanneh Bieber

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-31

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1000894800

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This volume reframes the development of US-American avant-garde art of the long 1960s—from minimal and pop art to land art, conceptual art, site-specific practices, and feminist art—in the context of contemporary architectural discourses. Susanneh Bieber analyzes the work of seven major artists, Donald Judd, Robert Grosvenor, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Mary Miss, who were closely associated with the formal-aesthetic innovations of the period. While these individual artists came to represent diverse movements, Bieber argues that all of them were attracted to the field of architecture—the work of architects, engineers, preservationists, landscape designers, and urban planners—because they believed these practices more directly shaped the social and material spaces of everyday life. This book’s contribution to the field of art history is thus twofold. First, it shows that the avant-garde of the long 1960s did not simply develop according to an internal logic of art but also as part of broader sociocultural discourses about buildings and cities. Second, it exemplifies a methodological synthesis between social art history and poststructural formalism that is foundational to understanding the role of art in the construction of a more just and egalitarian society. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, architecture, urbanism, and environmental humanism.


Soft Is Fast

Soft Is Fast

Author: Meredith Morse

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2016-02-19

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0262334674

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An innovative analysis of Simone Forti's interdisciplinary art, viewing her influential 1960s “dance constructions” as negotiating the aesthetic strategies of John Cage and Anna Halprin. Simone Forti's art developed within the overlapping circles of New York City's advanced visual art, dance, and music of the early 1960s. Her “dance constructions” and related works of the 1960s were important for both visual art and dance of the era. Artists Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer have both acknowledged her influence. Forti seems to have kept one foot inside visual art's frames of meaning and the other outside them. In Soft Is Fast, Meredith Morse adopts a new way to understand Forti's work, based in art historical analysis but drawing upon dance history and cultural studies and the history of American social thought. Morse argues that Forti introduced a form of direct encounter that departed radically from the spectatorship proposed by Minimalism, and prefigured the participatory art of recent decades. Morse shows that Forti's work negotiated John Cage's ideas of sound, score, and theater through the unique approach to movement, essentially improvisational and grounded in anatomical exploration, that she learned from performer and teacher Ann (later Anna) Halprin. Attentive to Robert Whitman's and La Monte Young's responses to Cage, Forti reshaped Cage's concepts into models that could accommodate Halprin's charged spaces and imagined, interpenetrative understanding of other bodies. Morse considers Forti's use of sound and her affective use of materials as central to her work; examines Forti's text pieces, little discussed in art historical literature; analyzes Huddle, considered one of Forti's signature works; and explicates Forti's later improvisational practice. Forti has been relatively overlooked by art historians, perhaps because of her work's central concern with modes of feeling and embodiment, unlike other art of the 1960s, which was characterized by strategies of depersonalization and affectlessness. Soft Is Fast corrects this critical oversight.