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"An international movement that developed along separate but parallel lines in Europe and America during the 1970s, Conceptual Art grew out of the legacy of Marcel Duchamp. Aiming to completely redefine the relationships between the production, definition and ownership of artworks and their various audiences, Conceptual artists rejected traditional formats, media and definitions. Instead they chose to address some of the key issues underlying modern life and art. Thse included the gulf between initial idea and finished work, the value assigned works of art in modern economies, the role of women and of feminine creativity in general, the politics of exhibition organization - in short, the ways art and the art world have been defined for centuries. Among the notable figures whose work is discussed in essays ranging from the evaluative to the theoretical are Judy Chicago, Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, Marcel Broodthaers and Mary Kelly. The influence of Conceptual Art continues to be felt today in the work of such controversial young artists as Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst." - back cover.
In this first critical account of Matta-Clark's work, Pamela M. Lee considers it in the context of the art of the 1970s—particularly site-specific, conceptual, and minimalist practices—and its confrontation with issues of community, property, the alienation of urban space, the "right to the city," and the ideologies of progress that have defined modern building programs. Although highly regarded during his short life—and honored by artists and architects today—the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78) has been largely ignored within the history of art. Matta-Clark is best remembered for site-specific projects known as "building cuts." Sculptural transformations of architecture...
From Ferdinand Chevel's Palais Ideal (1879-1905) and Simon Rodia's Watts Towers (1921-1954) to Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch (1974) and Richard Serra's Tilted Arc (1981), installation art has continually crossed boundaries, encompassing sculpture, architecture, performance, and visual art. Although unique in its power to transform both the site in which a work is constructed and the viewer's experience of being in a place, installation art has not received the critical attention accorded other art forms. In Space, Site, Intervention, some of today's most prominent art critics, curators, and artists view installation art as a diverse, multifaceted, and international art form that challenges insti...
Offers a formal account and theory of endurance as a practice in performance art and protest. Discusses influential performances by Marina Abramović, Chris Burden, Tehching Hsieh, Yoko Ono, and others, as well as 1960s lunch counter sit-ins and twenty-first-century protest camps. Essential reading in performance theory, art history, and political activism.
Written with beautiful clarity, Art in Consumer Culture: Mis-Design asks the contemporary art world to be honest about the pervasive effects of commodification and the difficulty of staging critique. The book examines the collusion of 'art' and 'design' in contemporary artistic practices in order to find avenues of critique in a commercially driven cultural landscape. Grace McQuilten focuses on the work of Takashi Murakami, Andrea Zittel, Adam Kalkin and Vito Acconci, four contemporary artists who claim to be working in the field of design rather than the traditional art world. McQuilten argues that Zittel, Acconci and Kalkin engage with 'design' only to reactivate the critical practice of art in a more direct engagement with capital - and conceives of and affirms a future for art, outside of the art world, as a parasite in the complex beast of late capitalism. This book is an important and timely provocation to a cynical and apathetic consumer culture, and a call to arms for creative freedom and critical thought.
Empathy: A History tells the fascinating and largely unknown story of the first appearance of empathy in 1908 and tracks its shifting meanings over the following century. Despite the word's ubiquity today, few realize that it began as a translation of Einfühlung ("in-feeling"), a term in German psychological aesthetics that described how spectators projected their own feelings and movements into objects of art and nature. Remarkably, this early conception of empathy transformed into its opposite over the ensuing decades. Social scientists and clinical psychologists refashioned empathy to require the deliberate putting aside of one's feelings to more accurately understand another's. By the end of World War II, interpersonal empathy entered the mainstream, appearing in advice columns, popular radio and TV, and later in public forums on civil rights. Even as neuroscientists continue to map the brain correlates of empathy, its many dimensions still elude strict scientific description. This meticulously researched book uncovers empathy's historical layers, offering a rich portrait of the tension between the reach of one's own imagination and the realities of others' experiences.
In this fiercely ambitious study, Meredith Anne Hoy seeks to reestablish the very definitions of digital art and aesthetics in art history. She begins by problematizing the notion of digital aesthetics, tracing the nineteenth- and twentieth-century movements that sought to break art down into its constituent elements, which in many ways predicted and paved the way for our acceptance of digital art. Through a series of case studies, Hoy questions the separation between analog and digital art and finds that while there may be sensual and experiential differences, they fall within the same technological categories. She also discusses computational art, in which the sole act of creation is the building of a self-generating algorithm. The medium isn't the message - what really matters is the degree to which the viewer can sense a creative hand in the art.
"Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s is the largest and most ambitious contemporary art exhibition ever to be mounted by the Montclair Art Museum. The exhibition and book spotlight a pivotal moment in the recent history of art. Chronicling the "long" 1990s between 1989 and 2001-from the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11-"Come As You Are" examines how the art of this period both reflected and helped shape the dramatic societal events of the era, when the combined forces of new technologies and globalization gave rise to the accelerated international art world that we know today"--
Most people agree that witnessing a live performance is not the same as seeing it on screen; however, most of the performances we experience are in recorded forms. Some aver that the recorded form of a performance necessarily distorts it or betrays it, focusing on the relationship between the original event and its recorded versions. By contrast, Reactivations focuses on how the audience experiences the performance, as opposed to its documentation. How does a spectator access and experience a performance from its documentation? What is the value of performance documentation? The book treats performance documentation as a specific discursive use of media that arose in the middle of the 20th century alongside such forms of performance as the Happening and that is different, both discursively and as a practice, from traditional theater and dance photography. Philip Auslander explores the phenomenal relationship between the spectator who experiences the performance from the document and the document itself. The document is not merely a secondary iteration of the original event but a vehicle that gives us meaningful access to the performance itself as an artistic work.
Arranged in alphabetical order, these 5 volumes encompass the history of the cultural development of America with over 2300 entries.