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Collecting the Now offers a new, in-depth look at the economic forces and institutional actors that have shaped the outlines of postwar art history, with a particular focus on American art, 1960–1990. Working through four case studies, Michael Maizels illuminates how a set of dealers and patrons conditioned the iconic developments of this period: the profusions of pop art, the quixotic impossibility of land art, the dissemination of new media, and the speculation-fueled neo-expressionist painting of the 1980s. This book addresses a question of pivotal importance to a swath of art history that has already received substantial scholarly investigation. We now have a clear, nuanced understandi...
An examination of the origins and legacy of the conceptual art movement.
How the queer correspondence art of Ray Johnson disrupted art world conventions and anticipated today’s highly networked culture Once regarded as “New York’s most famous unknown artist,” Ray Johnson was a highly visible outlier in the art world, his mail art practice reflecting the changing social relations and politics of queer communities in the 1960s. A vital contribution to the growing scholarship on this enigmatic artist, Queer Networks analyzes how Johnson’s practice sought to undermine the dominant mechanisms of the art market and gallery system in favor of unconventional social connections. Utilizing the postal service as his primary means of producing and circulating art, ...
This is a collection of writings by and about the work of the 1960s minimalists, illustrated with photographs of paintings, sculptures and performance.
In many anthologies of art, sculpture is given short shrift in relation to other media, if it is treated at all. Modern Sculpture Reader aims to rectify this situation by presenting a collection of important texts that have defined sculpture’s radically changing status and role since the end of the nineteenth century, a time marked by a general reappraisal of the forms and functions of art. From the rigorously theoretical to the experimental and poetic, Modern Sculpture Reader offers a lively discourse on the medium by a range of artists, writers, critics, and poets—Marcel Duchamp, Louise Bourgeois, Claes Oldenberg, André Breton, Ezra Pound, and Clement Greenberg—in a variety of genre...
Exploring the epistemological potential of meta- and inter-images Since the 1990s, when the question of the visual became central in various arts and humanities disciplines, images that refer to themselves as such or to other images have enjoyed an increasing interest. Meta- and Inter-Images in Contemporary Visual Art and Culture partakes in, enriches and updates these debates. It investigates what meta- and inter-images can make known about the visual, in its own terms, by its own means. Written by scholars in aesthetics, art history, and cultural, film, literary, media, and visual studies, the essays gathered here tackle meta- and inter-images in an array of creative artefacts, practices, ...
Conceptual Performance explores how the radical visual art that challenged material aesthetics in the 1960s and 1970s tested and extended the limits, character and concept of performance. Conceptual Performance sets out the history, theoretical basis, and character of this genre of work through a wide range of case studies. The volume considers how and why principal modes and agendas in Conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s necessitated new engagements with performance, as well as expanded notions of theatricality. In doing so, this book reviews and challenges prevailing histories of Conceptual art through critical frameworks of performativity and performance. It also considers how Conceptua...
In four decades of abstract art practice, Lynda Benglis has not merely challenged the status quo. She has tied it in knots, melted it down and poured it across the floor, cast it in glass, clay and bronze. Daring and sometimes outrageous, her intense and provocative practice has produced some of the most iconic pieces of art from the late twentieth century. Richmond gives serious critical attention to work often dismissed as trivial and rootless, recovering the themes that link the different phases of the artist's quest to capture the 'frozen gesture'. Whether challenging popular tastes and definitions of art with her 1970s abstract knotwork or mocking puritanical aesthetics of gender with h...
Irrational Judgments examines the close friendship and significant exchange of ideas between Eva Hesse (1936–1970) and Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) in New York City during the 1960s. Taking its title from LeWitt’s statement “Irrational judgments lead to new experience,” this book examines the breakthroughs of the artists’ intertwined careers, offering a new understanding of minimal, post-minimal, and conceptual art amid the era’s political and social upheavals. Kirsten Swenson offers the first in-depth discussion of the early critical developments of each artist: LeWitt’s turn from commercial design to fine art, and Hesse’s move from expressionist painting to reliefs and sculpture. Bringing together a wealth of documents, interviews, and images—many published here for the first time—this handsome publication presents an insightful account of the artists’ influence on and support for each other’s pursuit of an experimental practice. Swenson’s analysis expands our understanding of the artists’ ideas, the importance of their work, and, more broadly, the relationship of the 1960s New York art world to gender politics, the Vietnam War, and the city itself.