"Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, the first comprehensive survey of performance art by black visual artists. While black performance has been largely contextualized as an extension of theater, visual artists have integrated performance into their work for over five decades, generating a repository of performance work that has gone largely unrecognized until now. Radical Presence provides a critical framework to discuss the history of black performance traditions within the visual arts beginning with the "happenings" of the early 1960s, throughout the 1980s, and into the present practices of contemporary artists."--Publisher's website
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, Pawe? 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.
Double Agent is a group exhibition featuring artists who use other people as a medium. The show contains works in a variety of media, including video and live performance - works which are often slippery in meaning or disquieting in effect.
This catalogue was produced on the occasion of Kori Newkirk: 1997-2007, an exhibition presenting work created after Kori Newkirk received his MFA from the University of California at Irvine through today. Newkirk is a celebrated multimedia artist whose practice is based on transforming everyday materials into loaded signifiers making viewers think not only about concepts of African-American culture and beauty, but also of new and ever-changing ways of making art. This 128 page full-color soft-cover catalogue with sixty illustrations illuminates how the varied but interrelated strands of Newkirk¿s practice have converged and developed over time. It is the first major publication devoted to Newkirk¿s work. It includes a detailed biography and exhibition history. It features essays by Huey Copeland, Dominic Molon and Deborah Willis, and a Q+A with Newkirk and Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem. Newkirk, who was born in the Bronx, raised in Cortland, New York, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, creates work informed by his whole life and experience.
An exploration of the history and significance of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Poland. The Palace of Culture and Science is a massive Stalinist skyscraper that was “gifted” to Warsaw by the Soviet Union in 1955. Framing the Palace’s visual, symbolic, and functional prominence in the everyday life of the Polish capital as a sort of obsession, locals joke that their city suffers from a “Palace of Culture complex.” Despite attempts to privatize it, the Palace remains municipally owned, and continues to play host to a variety of public institutions and services. The Parade Square, which surrounds the building, has resisted attempts to convert it into a money-making commercial center. Author Michal Murawski traces the skyscraper’s powerful impact on twenty-first century Warsaw; on its architectural and urban landscape; on its political, ideological, and cultural lives; and on the bodies and minds of its inhabitants. The Palace Complex explores the many factors that allow Warsaw’s Palace to endure as a still-socialist building in a post-socialist city. “The most brilliant book on a building in many years, making a case for Warsaw’s once-loathed Palace of Culture and Science as the most enduring and successful legacy of Polish state socialism.” —Owen Hatherley, The New Statesman’s“Books of the Year” list (UK) “An ambitious anthropological biography of Poland’s tallest and most infamous building, the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. . . . It is a truly fascinating story that challenges a tenacious stereotype, and Murawski tells it brilliantly, judiciously layering literatures from multiple disciplines, his own ethnographic work, and personal anecdotes.” —Patryk Babiracki, H-Net History
A reader on issues of race, class, and gender in post-Socialist states from an artworld perspective. Come Closer: The Biennale Reader, published on the occasion of the inaugural Prague biennale, considers the present via counter-hegemonic readings of the past. The book explores various perspectives of class, race, and gender differences in post-socialist states, past and present. In societies today that can seem fragmented, alienated, and sealed-off, a feeling of "us" and "them" can potentially emerge. The reliance on a common language to bring people closer often does the opposite, leading to feelings of contempt, anxiety, and fear. By drawing attention to themes of intimacy, care, and empathy, the contributions in this book search for new types of communication that can bring people together. Like language, art can be used to mediate these differences, and to examine issues relating to how people coexist in society. Come Closer comprises republished texts as well as newly commissioned contributions from both emerging and established artists, social and political scientists, and art historians from Eastern Europe, Asia, and the United States. Contributors Jérôme Bazin, Heather Berg, Pavel Berky, Anna Daučíková, Patrick D. Flores, Isabela Grosseová, Vít Havránek, Marie Iljašenko, Rado Ištok, Barbora Kleinhamplová, Eva Koťátková, Kateřina Lišková, Ewa Majewska, Tuan Mami, Alice Nikitinová, Alma Lily Rayner, Sarah Sharma, Jirka Skála, Adéla Souralová, Edita Stejskalová, Tereza Stejskalová, Matěj Spurný, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, Simone Wille
Clifford Owens (born 1971) has long been aware that the history of African-American performance art remains largely unwritten. Rather than rectifying the oversight in scholarly terms, Owens has created an unprecedented artistic project, a compendium of African-American performance art that is both highly personal and thoroughly historical. This volume, Owens' first publication, includes written performance scores that Owens solicited from fellow African-American artists, which he then enacted in various locations at MoMA PS1. Clifford Owens: Anthology brings together the final artworks that resulted from the performances, and features essays by art historians Huey Copeland and John Bowles, as well as MoMA PS1 assistant curator Christopher Y. Lew. It also includes interviews with individuals who attended the live performances and a round-table discussion with selected Anthology artists moderated by art historian Kellie Jones.
Sixteen artists from 9 countries created works of art inspired by ecology and the environment that were specifically developed for the exhibition, in dialogue with the MAMBO curatorial team. Most of the artistic projects were specially commissioned for the 32nd São Paulo Biennial. "Incerteza viva is a collective process that began in early 2015 and brings together teachers, students, artists, activists, educators, scientists and thinkers in Brazil, Colombia and other places." --Page [1].
