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How the approaches and methods of think tanks—including systems theory, operational research, and cybernetics—paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism. In Think Tank Aesthetics, Pamela Lee traces the complex encounters between Cold War think tanks and the art of that era. Lee shows how the approaches and methods of think tanks—including systems theory, operations research, and cybernetics—paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism and set the terms for contemporary neoliberalism. Lee casts these shadowy institutions as sites of radical creativity and interdisciplinary practice in the service of defense strategy. Describing the distinctive aesthetics ...
Arguing for the necessity of taking art's contribution to contemporary realism seriously, this edited collection intervenes on contemporary debates about realism by demonstrating that the arts do not simply illustrate philosophical theories. The significance of art's realism in times characterised by the normalisation of fake, manipulated and distorted representations of reality can only be fully understood by attending to the ways that the arts mediate, visualise and even shape reality. Each chapter features a different approach to realism and its aesthetic dimensions not only in the visual arts, but also in sound art, film, scientific imaging and literature.
Criticism of contemporary art is split by an opposition between activism and the critical function of form. Yet the deeper, more subterranean terms of art-judgment are largely neglected on both sides. These essays combine a re-examination of the terms of judgement of contemporary art with critical interpretations of individual works and exhibitions by Luis Camnitzer, Marcel Duchamp, Matias Faldbakken, Anne Imhof and Cady Noland. The book moves from philosophical issues, via the lingering shadows of medium-specificity (in photography and art music), and the changing states of museums, to analyses of the peculiar ways that works of art relate to time.To give artistic form to crisis, it is suggested, one needs to understand contemporary art's own constitutive crisis of form.
One of the first book-length publications on contemporary artist Cheyney Thompson, whose work is known for its radically forward-looking intellectualism and formal rigor. Cheyney Thompson’s (b. 1975) work responds to a long history of debates about how art depicts the world, and about how we come to know the world visually. In these meditations on the artist’s work, Christian Schaernack shows that for Thompson, reality is something that we can know only in terms of probabilities, not absolutes. Thompson often produces work that explores contingency at the formal level, sometimes in his artistic process itself (as Jackson Pollock once did), and sometimes through the use of external constr...
The “biennale culture” now determines much of the art world. Literature on the worldwide dissemination of art assumes nationalism and ethnic identity, but rarely analyzes it. At the same time there is extensive theorizing about globalization in political theory, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, political economy, sociology, and anthropology. Art and Globalization brings political and cultural theorists together with writers and historians concerned specifically with the visual arts in order to test the limits of the conceptualization of the global in art. Among the major writers on contemporary international art represented in this book are Rasheed Araeen, Joaquín Barriendos, Susa...
A bold new spatial perspective on modern sculpture, with 800 color images of work by artists including Henry Moore, Lygia Clark, Anish Kapoor, and Ana Mendieta. This monumental, richly illustrated volume from ZKM | Karlsruhe approaches modern sculpture from a spatial perspective, interpreting it though contour, emptiness, and levitation rather than the conventional categories of unbroken volume, mass, and gravity. It examines works by dozens of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists, including Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Lygia Clark, Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, Ana Mendieta, Fujiko Nakaya, Tomás Saraceno, and Alicja Kwade. The large-scale book contains o...
The work of art's mattering and materialization in a globalized world, with close readings of works by Takahashi Murakami, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Hirschhorn, and others. It may be time to forget the art world—or at least to recognize that a certain historical notion of the art world is in eclipse. Today, the art world spins on its axis so quickly that its maps can no longer be read; its borders blur. In Forgetting the Art World, Pamela Lee connects the current state of this world to globalization and its attendant controversies. Contemporary art has responded to globalization with images of movement and migration, borders and multitudes, but Lee looks beyond iconography to view globalizati...
Presentness and Trace -- An Artist Turned Inside Out -- Radical Reciprocity: Passive Sculptor/Active Material -- Tempus Arborus (Tree Time).
Celebrating Suprematism throws vital new light on Kazimir Malevich’s abstract style and the philosophical, scientific, aesthetic, and ideological context within which it emerged and developed. The essays in the collection, which have been produced by established specialists as well as new scholars in the field, tackle a wide range of issues and establish a profound and nuanced appreciation of Suprematism’s place in twentieth-century visual and intellectual culture. Complementing detailed analyses of The Black Square (1915), Malevich’s theories and statements, various developments at Unovis, Suprematism’s relationship to ether physics, and the impact that Malevich’s style had on the design of textiles, porcelain and architecture, there are also discussions of Suprematism’s relationship to Russian Constructivism and avant-garde groups in Poland and Hungary.
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