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The book "Rethinking Postwar Europe" offers an in-depth insight into the largely unexplored topic of artistic practices in the 1940s and 1950s in Europe which until recently had been obscured by ideologies of the Cold War. Thanks to the authors' diverse methodological backgrounds, the volume presents – for the first time – a comprehensive multilayered narrative, focusing on the complexities and entanglements in the artistic field. Instead of assessing the postwar period in the traditional way as divided by the Iron Curtain, the contributions investigate processes of contact, interaction, dissemination, overlapping, and networking. Consequently, the analysis of a diversified European modernism in both its aesthetic and its socio-political dimension resonates with all the different case studies. In particular, the volume looks at how artists developed, designed and (re)negotiated identities and discourses, and sheds new light on the power of art – and creative powers in general – in a postwar setting of mutilations, losses, and devastations.
Conceptualism and Materiality. Matters of Art and Politics underscores the significance of materials and materiality within Conceptual art and conceptualism more broadly. It challenges the notion of conceptualism as an idea-centered, anti-materialist enterprise, and highlights the political implications thereof. The essays focus on the importance of material considerations for artists working during the 1960s and 1970s in different parts of the world. In reconsidering conceptualism’s neglected material aspects, the authors reveal the rich range of artistic inquiries into theoretical and political notions of matter and material. Their studies revise and diversify the account of this important chapter in the history of twentieth-century art - a reassessment that carries wider implications for the study of art and materiality in general .
This volume, edited by Éva Forgács, with contributions from art historians from across Europe and the Americas, analyzes the artistic initiatives of the short time span between the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. In this moment, a new internationalism was anticipated by retrieving pre-war modernism, as well as creating the new era's new artistic lingua franca. The chapters include in-depth case studies that analyze the complex, often interconnected, projects throughout the world—South America and Eastern and Western Europe—that were soon ended by the Cold War.
This book analyses the intermeshing of state power and art history in Europe since 1945 and up to the present from a critical, de-centered perspective. Devoting special attention to European peripheries and to under-researched transnational cultural political initiatives related to the arts implemented after the end of the Second World War, the contributors explore the ways in which this relationship crystallised in specific moments, places, discourses and practices. They make the historic hegemonic centres of the discipline converse with Europe’s Southern and Eastern peripheries, from Portugal to Estonia to Greece. By stressing the margins’ point of view this volume rethinks the ideological grounds on which art history and the European Union have been constructed as well as the role played by art and culture in the very concept of ‘Europe.’
Taking on the myth of France's creative exhaustion following World War II, this collection of essays brings together an international team of scholars, whose research offers English readers a rich and complex overview of the place of France and French artists in the visual arts since 1945. Addressing a wide range of artistic practices, spanning over seven decades, and using different methodologies, their contributions cover ground charted and unknown. They introduce greater depth and specificity to familiar artists and movements, such as Lettrism, Situationist International or Nouveau Réalisme, while bringing to the fore lesser known artists and groups, including GRAPUS, the Sociological Ar...
Camps as a global and ubiquitous mass phenomenon of the present and a flexible isolation tool for/against specific socially, politically, or ethnically defined groups are at the centre of current policies and societal debates. In the present volume, the authors explore camps as (cultural) spaces in a broad sense and deal with their complex dimensions as sites of the Modern. They examine camp spaces and their social configurations, physical/architectural qualities, symbolic functions as well as cultural representations in an intent to define the inscribed ambivalences, inconsistencies and paradoxes of the phenomenon. Positioned within different disciplinary contexts (Contemporary History, Vis...
Following an international conference organized at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in 2013, Oskar Hansen—Opening Modernism analyzes diverse aspects of the architectural, theoretical, and didactical oeuvre of Oskar Hansen, who was the Polish member of Team 10, a group of architects that challenged standard views of urbanism more than fifty years ago. In chronicling the impact of Hansen’s theory of “Open Form” on architecture, urban planning, experimental film, and visual arts in postwar Poland, this volume traces the flow of architectural ideas in a Europe divided by the Cold War. Through discussions of the ideas of openness and participation in state-socialist economies, Oskar Hansen—Opening Modernism offers new insights into exhibition design and the interrelations of architecture, visual arts, and the state.
In a supportive article covering the 4th Berlin Biennial, critic Steven Henry Madoff took a moment to question what many have termed "Biennial Fever," writing, "Are [biennials] here to capture trends or to advance artists' voices in a larger social dialogue? Do they promote international understanding or local interests? Are they bully pulpits for curators turned ideologues, or are they simply there to tap the art market's stopwatch till the next survey of hot new things draws the attention of an ever expanding universe of collectors?" For the 2008 edition of this always-provocative international fair, Curators Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic brought together primarily newly commissioned work by 50 emerging and established international artists for a round-the-clock exhibition that included 63 nightly events. This expansive volume documents it all, and contains contributions by writers, critics and artists including Beatriz Colomina, Bettina Viesmann, Cameron Jamie, Gabriel Kuri, Babette Mangolte, Ahmet Ögüt and Katerina Seda.
Stereotypes often cast communism as a defunct, bankrupt ideology and a relic of the distant past. However, recent political movements like Europe's anti-austerity protests, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street suggest that communism is still very much relevant and may even hold the key to a new, idealized future. In The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, contributors trace the legacies of communist ideology in visual culture, from buildings and monuments, murals and sculpture, to recycling campaigns and wall newspapers, all of which work to make communism's ideas and values material. Contributors work to resist the widespread demonization of communism, demystifying its ideals a...