During the mid-twentieth century, Latin American artists working in several different cities radically altered the nature of modern art. Reimagining the relationship of art to its public, these artists granted the spectator an unprecedented role in the realization of the artwork. The first book to explore this phenomenon on an international scale, Abstraction in Reverse traces the movement as it evolved across South America and parts of Europe. Alexander Alberro demonstrates that artists such as Tomás Maldonado, Jesús Soto, Julio Le Parc, and Lygia Clark, in breaking with the core tenets of the form of abstract art known as Concrete art, redefined the role of both the artist and the spectator. Instead of manufacturing autonomous art, these artists produced artworks that required the presence of the spectator to be complete. Alberro also shows the various ways these artists strategically demoted regionalism in favor of a new modernist voice that transcended the traditions of the nation-state and contributed to a nascent globalization of the art world.

Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth-Century Latin American Art

Arts & Photography

Alberro, Alexander

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Conceptual Art And The Politics Of Publicity

Conceptual art was one of the most influential art movements of the second half of the twentieth century. In this book Alexander Alberro traces its origins to the mid-1960s, when its principles were first articulated by the artists Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, and others. One of Alberro's central arguments is that the conceptual art movement was founded not just by the artists but also by the dealer Seth Siegelaub. Siegelaub promoted the artists, curated groundbreaking shows, organized symposia and publications, and in many ways set the stage for another kind of entrepreneur: the freelance curator. Alberro examines both Siegelaub's role in launching the careers of artists who were making "something from nothing" and his tactful business practices, particularly in marketing and advertising.
Alberro draws on close readings of artworks produced by key conceptual artists in the mid- to late 1960s. He places the movement in the social context of the rebellion against existing cultural institutions, as well as the increased commercialization and globalization of the art world. The book ends with a discussion of one of Siegelaub's most material and least ephemeral contributions, the Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, which he wrote between 1969 and 1971. Designed to limit the inordinate control of collectors, galleries, and museums by increasing the artist's rights, the Agreement unwittingly codified the overlap between capitalism and the arts.

Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity

Mit Pr

Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (Writing Art)

Andrea Fraser's work, writes Pierre Bourdieu in his foreword to Museum Highlights, is able to "trigger a social mechanism, a sort of machine infernale whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself." It often does this by incorporating and inhabiting the social role it sets out to critique -- as in a performance piece in which she leads a tour as a museum docent and describes the men's room in the same elevated language that she uses to describe seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Influenced by the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism, Fraser's interventionist art draws on four primary artistic and intellectual frameworks -- institutional critique, with its site-specific examination of cultural context; performance; feminism, with its investigation of identity formation; and Bourdieu's reflexive sociology. Fraser's writings form an integral part of her artistic practice, and this collection of texts written between 1985 and 2003 -- including the performance script for the docent's tour that gives the book its title -- both documents and represents her work.The writings in Museum Highlights are arranged to reflect different aspects of Fraser's artistic practice. They include essays that trace the development of critical "artistic practice" as cultural resistance; performance scripts that explore art institutions and the public sphere; and texts that explore the ambivalent relationship of art to the economic and political interests of its time. The final piece, "Isn't This a Wonderful Place? (A Tour of a Tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao)," reflects on the role of museums in an era of globalization. Among the book's 30 illustrations are stills from performance pieces, some never before published.

Museum Highlights: The Writings Of Andrea Fraser

Fraser, Andrea

An examination of the origins and legacy of the conceptual art movement.
Conceptual art was one of the most influential art movements of the second half of the twentieth century. In this book Alexander Alberro traces its origins to the mid-1960s, when its principles were first articulated by the artists Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, and others. One of Alberro's central arguments is that the conceptual art movement was founded not just by the artists but also by the dealer Seth Siegelaub. Siegelaub promoted the artists, curated groundbreaking shows, organized symposia and publications, and in many ways set the stage for another kind of entrepreneur: the freelance curator. Alberro examines both Siegelaub's role in launching the careers of artists who were making "something from nothing" and his tactful business practices, particularly in marketing and advertising.
Alberro draws on close readings of artworks produced by key conceptual artists in the mid- to late 1960s. He places the movement in the social context of the rebellion against existing cultural institutions, as well as the increased commercialization and globalization of the art world. The book ends with a discussion of one of Siegelaub's most material and least ephemeral contributions, the Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, which he wrote between 1969 and 1971. Designed to limit the inordinate control of collectors, galleries, and museums by increasing the artist's rights, the Agreement unwittingly codified the overlap between capitalism and the arts.

Essays charting the diverse works of renowned conceptual artist Dan Graham.
The internationally renowned artist Dan Graham is widely acknowledged as one of the leading members of the 1960s conceptual art movement. However, his subsequent work in photography, performance, film, video, and the fusion of art and architecture, though well known in Europe and Japan, is less well known in English-speaking countries.
In Rock My Religion (MIT Press, 1993), Graham explored mainly the work of other artists. In this collection, he articulates the rationale behind his own art. The broadly accessible essays, which include his most canonical texts, are organized both thematically and chronologically. They chart his career from conceptual art for magazine pages of the 1960s, to work integrating video, television, architecture, film, and performance of the 1970s, to his pavilion sculptures of the 1980s and 1990s. The book also features an essay by Jeff Wall and interviews with Graham that address the art historical references and theoretical principles underlying his work.
Published in association with the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art

Graham, Dan

Marian Goodman Gallery

This volume surveys the work of one of the canonical Conceptual artists of the 1960s, American artist Lawrence Weiner. He pioneered the radical proposition that the work of art could exist as a concept, without the need for physical materials which will decay and which transform art into consumer goods.

Lawrence Weiner (Phaidon Contemporary Artist Series)

Batchelor, David

Phaidon Press

Winner, Canadian Museums Association Outstanding Achievement in Publication and Melva J. Dwyer Award
Iain Baxter legally changed his name to IAIN BAXTER&amp; in 2005. He appended an ampersand to his name to underscore that art is about connectivity — about contingency and collaboration with a viewer. He also effected the name change to perpetuate a strategy of self re-definition that is central to his creative project. BAXTER&amp; began making art in the late-1950s under his birth name but quickly realized that the name itself was creative material, to be deployed, manipulated, and shared. In 1965, he formed a collaborative art-making entity which evolved into N.E. Thing Company, a corporate-styled entity whose co-presidents were BAXTER&amp; and his wife Ingrid. Producing a diverse array of projects that encompassed conceptually based photography, pioneering works of appropriation art, and gallery transforming installations, the N.E. Thing Company offered a new model of art making, allowing the artists to remain anonymous and masquerade in the guise of business people. Following the dissolution of N.E. Thing Company in 1978, BAXTER&amp; produced extensive bodies of work with Polaroid film, created numerous installations that blended painting and sculpture, and made pedagogy a focus of his creative enterprise. Consistent themes permeate his work and vector through his thinking. And by assessing these themes — a relentless emphasis on reaching out to the viewer, a core concern with ecology and the environment, and a belief that art must assume plural means and media — one discerns BAXTER&amp;'s creative credo, understanding that "art is all over." This comprehensive book reviews BAXTER&amp;'s remarkable career across all media. It accompanies a major international touring exhibition, which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in November 2011 and at the Art Gallery of Ontario in April 2012. Featuring more than 160 reproductions of BAXTER&amp;'s work, it also includes essays by the exhibition's curator, David Moos, along with contributions by Michael Darling (James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago), Alex Alberro (Associate Professor, University of Florida), and others. The book will also feature a comprehensive bibliography compiled by Adam Lauder (W.P. Scott Chair for Research in E-Librarianship, York University).

IAIN BAXTER&: Works 1958-2011

Goose Lane Editions

Tracing Cultures: Art History, Criticism, Critical Fiction (ISP Papers, No 5)

Distributed Art Pub Inc

Dan Graham is one of the most influential of the American Conceptual artists who first emerged in the mid 1960s as part of a generation that included the Minimalists Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt, with whom he was closely associated during that period. While their work offered a critique of the gallery's white club and of the value of material, Graham began to question the art system itself and decided to operate outside it. From 1965-69 he produced a series of texts such as "Schema" (1966) which he inserted into mass-market magazines. The periodical nature of magazine production and consumption was clearly related to the experience of time and change - a theme central to Graham's work ever since. In 1966-67 he also made a series of photographs showing details of suburban housing projects, new shopping precincts, truck depots and roadside diners, titled "Homes for America". Alongside the photos Graham's texts "deconstruct" social architectural spaces in ways which were far ahead of their time.  From 1969-78 Graham worked primarily with performance, film and video, focusing, for example, on the synchronization of speech and breathing patterns between the artist and his audience. From 1974, with the installation/performance "Present Continuous Past(s)", Graham began to use two-way mirror walls in relation to real reflections and time-delayed video projections. These works evolved into the socially-based architectural projects such as open air pavilions, for which Graham is most famous internationally. These have included a "Skateboard Pavilion" in Stuttgart in 1989 and in the same year "The Children's Pavilion" (with Jeff Wall) and the "Star of David Pavilion" (Vienna, 1991-96). All of Graham's projects are democratically rooted in everyday urban life and activity, particularly children's play. His work is thus as valuable to architects and town planners as to the art community

Dan Graham - Models to Projects

One of the finest exponents of Latin American Kinetic and Op art, the Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez (born in 1923) is a legend among contemporaries such as Jesus Soto and Alejandro Otero--and across Latin America and Europe--but has been woefully little exhibited in North America. Those who caught the groundbreaking 2007 traveling exhibition The Geometry of Hope will recall Cruz-Diez's standout contributions, which had viewers bumping into one another as they negotiated the color shifts and sensations of motion that his sculptural constructions induced. A pioneer in color theory and color perception, Cruz-Diez solicits physical participation in his audience. In late 2008, the Americas Society, known for its leading role in presenting innovative site installations by artists such as Gego, Lygia Pape and Pedro Reyes, orchestrated Cruz-Diez's first solo exhibition in the United States, for which Carlos Cruz Diez: InFormed by Color is the exhibition catalogue--the first comprehensive publication in English devoted to the artist.

Carlos Cruz-Diez: InFormed by Color (AMERICAS SOCIET)

Brodsky, Estrellita

Banai, Nuit

Villanueva, Isabel

Hernández, Mariela

Americas Society

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