Sonsbeek Ninety-three
Author: Valerie Smith
Publisher:
Published: 1993
Total Pages: 328
ISBN-13:
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Public Knowledge
Author: Michael Asher
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2019-10-15
Total Pages: 261
ISBN-13: 0262354039
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWritings 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.
Artificial Hells
Author: Claire Bishop
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-07-24
Total Pages: 401
ISBN-13: 1844677966
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis searing critique of participatory art—from its development to its political ambitions—is “an essential title for contemporary art history scholars and students as well as anyone who has . . . thought, ‘Now that’s art!’ or ‘That’s art?’” (Library Journal) Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as “social practice.” Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawel Althamer and Paul Chan. Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to challenge the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art. In Artificial Hells, she not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims made for these projects, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling, and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.
Foul Perfection
Author: Mike Kelley
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2003-06-20
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 9780262611787
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCritical writings and commentary by the Los Angeles based artist Mike Kelley. The work of artist Mike Kelley (b. 1954) embraces performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, and sculpture. Drawing distinctively on high art and vernacular traditions, including historical research, popular culture, and psychology, Kelley came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of craft materials. His recent work offers dialogues with architecture and with repressed memory syndrome, and a sustained inquiry into his own aesthetic and social history. The subjects on which Kelley has written are as varied as his artistic media. They include the work of fellow artists, sound, caricature, the uncanny, UFOlogy, and gender-bending. This book offers a diverse collection of Kelley's writings from the last twenty-five years. It contains major critical texts on art, film, and the wider culture, including his piece on the aesthetic he calls "urban Gothic." It also contains essays, mostly commissioned for exhibition catalogs and journals, on the artists and groups David Askevold, Öyvind Fahlström, Douglas Huebler, John Miller, Survival Research Laboratories, and Paul Thek, among others. Kelley's voices are passionate, analytic, and ironic, and his critical intelligence is leavened with touches of whimsy.
The Analysis of Performance Art
Author: Anthony Howell
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-05
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 1134427301
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis finely illustrated book offers a simple yet comprehensive 'grammar' of a new discipline. Performance Art first became popular in the fifties when artists began creating 'happenings'. Since then the artist as a performer has challenged many of the accepted rules of the theatre and radically altered our notion of what constitutes visual art. This is the first publication to outline the essential characteristics of the field and to put forward a method for teaching the subject as a discipline distinct from dance, drama, painting or sculpture. Taking the theory of primary and secondary colours as his model, Anthony Howell posits three primaries of action and shows how these may be mixed to obtain a secondary range of actions. Based on a taught course, the system is designed for practical use in the studio and is also entertaining to explore. Examples are cited from leading performance groups and practitioners such as Bobbie Baker, Orlan, Stelarc, Annie Sprinkle, Robert Wilson, Goat Island, and Station House Opera. This volume, however, is not just an illustrated grammar of action - it also shows how the syntax of that grammar has psychoanalytic repercussions. This enables the performer to relate the system to lived experience, ensuring a realisation that meaning is being dealt with through these actions and that the stystem set forth is more than a dry structuring of the characteristics of movement. Freud's notion of 'transference' and Lacan's understanding of 'repetition' are compared to a performer's usage of the same terms. Thus the book provides a psychoanalytic critique of performance at the same time as it outlines an efficient method for creating live work on both fine art and theatre courses.
Ann Hamilton
Author: Joan Simon
Publisher: Gregory R. Miller & Co.
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 324
ISBN-13: 9780974364858
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAnn Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects ISBN 0-9743648-5-1 / 978-0-9743648-5-8 Hardcover, 7 x 10.5 in. / 264 pgs / 150 color and 80 b&w. / U.S. $60.00 CDN $72.00 November / Art
Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972
Author: Elena Filipovic
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 218
ISBN-13: 0870708244
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"A sculptor who began working during the postwar period in a classical figurative style, Alina Szapocznikow radically reconceptualized sculpture as an imprint not only of memory but also of her own body. Though her career effectively spanned less than two decades (cut short by the artist's premature death in 1973 at age 47), Szapocznikow left behind a legacy of provocative objects that evoke Surrealism, Nouveau Râealisme, and Pop art. Her tinted polyester casts of body parts, often transformed into everyday objects like lamps or ashtrays; her poured polyurethane forms; and her elaborately constructed sculptures, which at times incorporated photographs, clothing, or car parts, all remain as wonderfully idiosyncratic and culturally resonant today as when they were first made. Well known in Poland, where her work has been highly influential since early in her career, Szapocznikow's compelling book of work is ripe for art historical reexamination. Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972 offers a comprehensive overview of this important artist's work at a moment when international interest is blossoming. Spanning one of the most rich and complex periods of the 20th century, Szapocznikow's oeuvre responds to many of the ideological and artistic developments of her time through artwork that is at once fragmented and transformative, sensual and reflective, playfully realized and politically charged. Featuring over 100 works, including sculpture, drawings, and photography, the exhibition draws on loans from private and public collections, including major institutions in Poland. It is accompanied by a major publication, co published by The Museum of Modern Art and Mercatorfonds, that reflects new scholarship on Szapocznikow, contextualizing this little known artist's work for a wider audience."--Publisher's website.
Thinking Print
Author: Deborah Wye
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 168
ISBN-13: 9780870701245
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEssay by Deborah Wye. Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry.
Sculpture Projects Muenster 07
Author: Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Münster
Publisher: Walther Konig Verlag
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 564
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBeen 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.
