The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art

The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art

Author: Martha Buskirk

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2005-02-18

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780262524421

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An exploration of transformations in the nature of the art object and artistic authorship in the last four decades. In this book, Martha Buskirk addresses the interesting fact that since the early 1960s, almost anything can and has been called art. Among other practices, contemporary artists have employed mass-produced elements, impermanent materials, and appropriated imagery, have incorporated performance and video, and have created works through instructions carried out by others. Furthermore, works of art that lack traditional signs of authenticity or permanence have been embraced by institutions long devoted to the original and the permanent. Buskirk begins with questions of authorship raised by minimalists' use of industrial materials and methods, including competing claims of ownership and artistic authorship evident in conflicts over the right to fabricate artists' works. Examining recent examples of appropriation, she finds precedents in pop art and the early twentieth-century readymade and explores the intersection of contemporary artistic copying and the system of copyrights, trademarks, and brand names characteristic of other forms of commodity production. She also investigates the ways that connections between work and context have transformed art and institutional conventions, the impact of new materials on definitions of medium, the role of the document as both primary and secondary object, and the significance of conceptually oriented performance work for the intersection of photography and the human body in contemporary art. Buskirk explores how artists active in the 1980s and 1990s have recombined strategies of the art of the 1960s and 1970s. She also shows how the mechanisms through which art is presented shape not only readings of the work but the work itself. She uses her discussion of the readymade and conceptual art to explore broader issues of authorship, reproduction, context, and temporality.


Precarious Visualities

Precarious Visualities

Author: Olivier Asselin

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2008-07-21

Total Pages: 699

ISBN-13: 0773578110

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Through the study of exemplary media works and practices - photography, film, video, performance, installations, web cams - scholars from various disciplines call attention to the unsettling of identification and the disablement of vision in contemporary aesthetics. To look at an image that prevents the stabilization of identification, identity and place; to perceive a representation that oscillates between visibility and invisibility; to relate to an image which entails a rebalancing of sight through the valorization of other senses; to be exposed, through surveillance devices, to the gaze of new figures of authority - the aesthetic experiences examined here concern a spectator whose perception lacks in certainty, identification, and opticality what it gains in fallibility, complexity, and interrelatedness. Precarious Visualities provides a new understanding of spectatorship as a relation that is at once corporeal and imaginary, and persistently prolific in its cultural, social, and political effects. Contributors include Raymond Bellour (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Monika Kin Gagnon (Concordia University), Beate Ochsner (University of Mannheim -Universität Mannheim), Claudette Lauzon (McGill University), David Tomas (Université du Québec à Montréal), Slavoj Zizek (Ljubljiana University and University of London), Marie Fraser (Université du Québec à Montréal), Alice Ming Wai Jim (Concordia University), Julie Lavigne (Université du Québec à Montréal), Amelia Jones (University of Manchester), Eric Michaud (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Hélène Samson (McCord Museum), and Thierry Bardini (Université de Montréal)."


Public Art (Now)

Public Art (Now)

Author: Claire Doherty

Publisher: Art / Books

Published: 2015-03-09

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1908970170

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Public Art (Now): Out of Time, Out of Place is the first survey of progressive public art from around the world. It presents some of the most significant artworks in the public realm from the last decade, challenging preconceptions about where, when and how public art takes place. The face of public art is changing. For decades, art in the public realm has been characterized by the landmark sculpture or spectacular outdoor event that helps to define or brand a place. But in recent years, a new wave of international artists and producers has rejected the monumental scale and mass appeal of such artworks. Instead, these individuals and groups favour unconventional forms that unsettle rather than authenticate a place's identity; disrupt rather than embellish a particular location; and contest rather than validate the design and function of public space. Performed interactions, collaborative social movements and small-scale subversive acts are just some of the unorthodox approaches taken by these artists. Their works challenge preconceived ideas about the role of art in place-making as they seek to remake places through radical forms and practices. Public Art (Now): Out of Time, Out of Place presents the artists who have been redefining the practice of public art over the past decade. They directly address the most pressing issues of our time, including the encroachment of corporate concerns on public space, the implications of global migration and the isolation of the individual, and the potential of collective action to share the future of our towns and cities. Some forty key works from around the world are organized into five sections – 'Displacement', 'Intervention', 'Disorientation', 'Occupation' and 'Perpetuation' – with detailed descriptions and dozens of installation and process shots. Interviews and quotes from practitioners, commissioners and commentators reveal the impetus and context for the projects, while the editor's introduction sets out the conceptual, practical and ethical issues raised by the works. Bringing together the most significant artworks in the public realm of the last ten years – from ephemeral interventions to long-term ongoing projects – this dynamic survey is an essential reference for anyone interested in the ideas, issues and impulses behind progressive public art, and an accessible introduction to one of the most vibrant areas of contemporary art.


Modern Sculpture Reader

Modern Sculpture Reader

Author: Jon Wood

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2012-08-21

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 1606061062

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In many anthologies of art, sculpture is given short shrift in relation to other media, if it is treated at all. Modern Sculpture Reader aims to rectify this situation by presenting a collection of important texts that have defined sculpture’s radically changing status and role since the end of the nineteenth century, a time marked by a general reappraisal of the forms and functions of art. From the rigorously theoretical to the experimental and poetic, Modern Sculpture Reader offers a lively discourse on the medium by a range of artists, writers, critics, and poets—Marcel Duchamp, Louise Bourgeois, Claes Oldenberg, André Breton, Ezra Pound, and Clement Greenberg—in a variety of genres: poems, lectures, transcribed interviews, newspaper and magazine articles, and artists’ statements. These diverse text selections offer valuable insight into the development of the critical language of sculpture and its connections to other media in an era of increasingly conceptual artistic practice. Many of the essays highlight key ongoing concerns such as sculpture’s physical properties and conditions of display, both of which have important implications for the viewer’s tactile and emotional interaction with sculptural works.


Sculpture Projects Muenster 07

Sculpture Projects Muenster 07

Author: Brigitte Franzen

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 556

ISBN-13: 9783865603005

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"Been to enough biennials? Skulptur Projekte Münster only happens every 10 years. This, its fourth iteration (following 1977, 1987 and 1997), invites artists from all over the world--many of whom are returning to the city and the event--to create new site-specific works. Thus Michael Asher brings back his trailer and parks in sites he first sussed out in 1977, continuing to explore the conflicts between rigid form and mobile space, and to document the dramatic transformation of the urban environment over four decades. Guy Ben-Ner equips bicycles with screens and places them around the city; by pedaling, participants control the speed and direction of a film of the artist doing the same. Guillaume Bijl mocks up an archaeological site 25 feet square and 18 feet deep, whose steep walls imitate layers of soil. Visitors climb a grassy hill to peer into the pit from a balustrade; in the pit, a 14-foot, shingle-roofed spire topped by a weathercock preens. This extensive book inspired by and documenting the festival opens on 35 sections between 4 and 16 pages long, each designed by the artist and illuminating his or her work in text and images. Its second half comes in the form of a glossary of more than 100 key concepts linked to the subject of art in public spaces; artists, art historians, philosophers, urbanists, architects, sociologists and other writers weighing in with definitions from their respective disciplinary perspectives. Participants include Francis Alÿs, Isa Genzken, Mike Kelley, Rosemarie Trockel, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler and Pae White."--amazon.com


Sculpsit

Sculpsit

Author: Kerstin Mey

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 9780719061660

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Cornelia Parker ; Michael Sandle ; Mark Wallinger ; Georg Baselitz ; Tracey Emin ; Kiki Smith ; Ping Qiu ; Azade Koker ; Kuc Wolff ; Stelarc.


Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe

Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe

Author: Nicolas Whybrow

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-09-17

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1350166987

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Through its examination of five quite different art events in cities across Europe, Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe offers a compelling exploration of how public art takes place in the modern city. Roughly tracing a central horizontal trajectory from the western to the eastern edges of the continent, Nicolas Whybrow considers the Folkestone Triennial in the UK, Sculpture Projects Münster in Germany, the Venice Biennale in Italy, Belgrade's Mikser Festival in Serbia and the Istanbul Biennial in Turkey. Writing within the context of a thirty-year international 'biennial boom', Whybrow interrogates the extent to which biennial events and their artworks seek to engage with the socio-cultural and political complexity of cities, in particular the work that is involved in this relationship. With its focus on Europe, he also tells a composite story of continental difference at a moment of high tension, centering on issues of migration, political populism and uncertainty around the future form of the European Union.


Mark Dion

Mark Dion

Author: Ruth Erickson

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2017-01-01

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0300224079

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A comprehensive survey of American artist Mark Dion, examining three decades of his critically engaged practice interrogating our relationship with nature The first book in two decades to consider the entire oeuvre of Mark Dion (b. 1961), this volume examines thirty years of the American artist's pioneering inquiries into how we collect, interpret, and display nature. Part of a generation of artists expanding institutional critique in the 1990s, Dion adopted the methods of the archaeologist or the natural history museum, juxtaposing natural objects, taxidermy, books, and more to reorganize the natural and the manmade in poetic, witty ways. These sculptures, installations, and interventions offer novel approaches to questioning institutional power, which he sees as connected to the control and representation of nature. Generously illustrated, this publication introduces new insights and features more than seventy-five artworks. Essays address topics ranging from Dion's ecological activism to his loving critique of museums. A diverse group of contributors explores his work as a teacher, his public artworks such as Neukom Vivarium in Seattle, and his intricate curiosity cabinets installed throughout the world. They reveal how Dion's practice and formal investigations--which are rooted in history--connect to contemporary questions of disciplinary boundaries and the acquisition of knowledge in the age of the Anthropocene.