Fifty years of media critique from the leading exponent of feminist video art Throughout her five-decade career, New York-based artist Dara Birnbaum (born 1946) has relentlessly dissected the process of watching and has argued against the passive absorption of mass media, information and ideology, through various techniques--many of which can be described as subversive reactions or reversals. As media itself has evolved over the years, from the monolithic nature of TV broadcast networks to the Internet's decentralization of information, Birnbaum's work has remained consistently prescient and vital, incorporating new technologies and providing a touchstone for generations of younger artists. Including original scholarship by leading critics and curators of moving image and media art, this book examines Birnbaum's key works and concepts to illustrate how much her practice has to teach in a technology and media laden culture that demands constant participation and response.
Leading international artists and art educators consider the challenges of art education in today's dramatically changed art world. The last explosive change in art education came nearly a century ago, when the German Bauhaus was formed. Today, dramatic changes in the art world—its increasing professionalization, the pervasive power of the art market, and fundamental shifts in art-making itself in our post-Duchampian era—combined with a revolution in information technology, raise fundamental questions about the education of today's artists. Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) brings together more than thirty leading international artists and art educators to reconsider the practices of art education in academic, practical, ethical, and philosophical terms. The essays in the book range over continents, histories, traditions, experiments, and fantasies of education. Accompanying the essays are conversations with such prominent artist/educators as John Baldessari, Michael Craig-Martin, Hans Haacke, and Marina Abramovic, as well as questionnaire responses from a dozen important artists—among them Mike Kelley, Ann Hamilton, Guillermo Kuitca, and Shirin Neshat—about their own experiences as students. A fascinating analysis of the architecture of major historical art schools throughout the world looks at the relationship of the principles of their designs to the principles of the pedagogy practiced within their halls. And throughout the volume, attention is paid to new initiatives and proposals about what an art school can and should be in the twenty-first century—and what it shouldn't be. No other book on the subject covers more of the questions concerning art education today or offers more insight into the pressures, challenges, risks, and opportunities for artists and art educators in the years ahead. Contributors Marina Abramovic, Dennis Adams, John Baldessari, Ute Meta Bauer, Daniel Birnbaum, Saskia Bos, Tania Bruguera, Luis Camnitzer, Michael Craig-Martin, Thierry de Duve, Clémentine Deliss, Charles Esche, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Hans Haacke, Ann Lauterbach, Ken Lum, Steven Henry Madoff, Brendan D. Moran, Ernesto Pujol, Raqs Media Collective, Charles Renfro, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Michael Shanks, Robert Storr, Anton Vidokle
A personal and expert account of the artists and events that defined the medium's first 50 years - now in paperback Since the introduction of portable consumer electronics nearly a half century ago, artists throughout the world have adapted their latest technologies to art-making. In this new paperback edition of her acclaimed book, curator Barbara London traces the history of video art as it transformed into the broader field of media art - from analog to digital, small TV monitors to wall-scale projections, and clunky hardware to user-friendly software. In doing so, she reveals how video evolved from fringe status to be seen as one of the foremost art forms of today.
An examination of Lee Lozano's greatest experiment in art and endurance—a major work of art that might not exist at all. The artist Lee Lozano (1930–1999) began her career as a painter; her work rapidly evolved from figuration to abstraction. In the late 1960s, she created a major series of eleven monochromatic Wave paintings, her last in the medium. Despite her achievements as a painter, Lozano is best known for two acts of refusal, both of which she undertook as artworks: Untitled (General Strike Piece), begun in 1969, in which she cut herself off from the commercial art world for a time; and the so-called Boycott Piece, which began in 1971 as a month-long experiment intended to improve communication but became a permanent hiatus from speaking to or directly interacting with women. In this book, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer examines Lozano's Dropout Piece, the culmination of her practice, her greatest experiment in art and endurance, encompassing all her withdrawals, and ending only with her burial in an unmarked grave. And yet, although Dropout Piece is among Lozano's most important works, it might not exist at all. There is no conventional artwork to be exhibited, no performance event to be documented. Lehrer-Graiwer views Dropout Piece as leveraging the artist's entire practice and embodying her creative intelligence, her radicality, and her intensity. Combining art history, analytical inquiry, and journalistic investigation, Lehrer-Graiwer examines not only Lozano's act of dropping out but also the evolution over time of Dropout Piece in the context of the artist's practice in New York and her subsequent life in Dallas.
Can postwar art be understood as an exercise in calculated insanity? Taking this provocative question as its basis, this book explores the art and history of delirium from 1950 to 1980, an era shaped by the brutality of World War II and the rapid expansion of industrial capitalism. Skepticism of science and technology—along with fear of its capability to promote mass destruction—developed into a distrust of rationalism, which profoundly influenced the art of the times. Delirious features work by more than sixty artists from Europe, Latin America, and the United States, including Dara Birnbaum, León Ferrari, Gego, Bruce Nauman, Howardena Pindell, Peter Saul, and Nancy Spero. Experimenting with irrational subject matter and techniques, these artists forged new strategies that directly responded to such unbalanced times. Disturbing and challenging, the works in this book—in multiple media and often, counterintuitively, incorporating highly ordered and systematic structures—upend traditional notions of aesthetic harmony. Three wide-ranging essays and a richly illustrated plates section investigate the degree to which delirious times demand delirious art, inviting readers to “think crazy." p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}
This work combines images of Dara Birnbaum's landmark pieces, among other works - with fascinating dialogues between Birnbaum and the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist as well as numerous insightful essays.
Sections include: experiments and generalised causal inference; statistical conclusion validity and internal validity; construct validity and external validity; quasi-experimental designs that either lack a control group or lack pretest observations on the outcome; quasi-experimental designs that use both control groups and pretests; quasi-experiments: interrupted time-series designs; regresssion discontinuity designs; randomised experiments: rationale, designs, and conditions conducive to doing them; practical problems 1: ethics, participation recruitment and random assignment; practical problems 2: treatment implementation and attrition; generalised causal inference: a grounded theory; generalised causal inference: methods for single studies; generalised causal inference: methods for multiple studies; a critical assessment of our assumptions.
Cultural Writing. Essays. Literary Criticism. Dziga Vertov's 'Man With a Movie Camera' is widely regarded as the definitive modernist statement in film. What fate awaits it--and you, devoted reader--in the current era of political disarray and highspeed wireless traffic? This collection--over four years in the making--devoted to just a single frame of film may reveal the answer. This is the Special Jubilee Edition of VERTOV FROM Z TO A in honor of the 90th Anniversary of the October Revolution. Contributors include Abu Ali, Bruce Andrews, Yann Beauvais, Ericka Beckman, Walter Benjamin, Diane Bertolo, Francois Bucher, Edwin Carels, Abigal Child, Ludovic Cortade, Brian Frye, Joy Garnett, Marina Grzinic, Michelle Handelman, Peter Hitchcock, Robert Kelly, Marina de Bellagente LaPalma, David Larcher, Barbara Lattanzi, Les LeVeque, David Levi Strauss, Jeanne Liotta, Laura U. Marks, Julie Murray, Kristin Prevallet, Cathy Nan Quinlan, Melissa Ragona, John David Rhodes, Jason Simon, John Smith, Michael Smith, Allan Sondheim, Caspar Stracke, Beatrijs van Agt, Mercedes Vincente, William C. Wees, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Ghen Zando-Dennis and Thomas Zummer.
