In America during the 1960s, sculpture as an artistic practice underwent a series of radical transformations. Artists including Lee Bontecou, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, H. C. Westermann, and Bruce Nauman offered alternative ways of imagining the three-dimensional object. The objects they created were variously described as erotic, soft, figurative, aggressive, bodily, or, in the words of the critic Lucy Lippard, "eccentric."Looking beyond the familiar and canonic artworks of the 1960s, the book challenges not only how we think about these artists, but how we learn to look at the more familiar narratives of 1960s sculpture, such as Pop and Minimalism. Ambivalent and disruptive, the work of this decade articulated a radical renegotiation—rejection, even—of contemporary paradigms of sculptural practice. This invigorating study explores that shift and the ways in which the kinds of work made in this period defied established categories and questioned the criteria for thinking about sculpture.

Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America

Arts & Photography

Applin, Jo

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

An illuminating study of an overlooked artist from the 1960s whose work has recently returned to the limelight This is the first in‑depth study of the idiosyncratic ten‑year career of Lee Lozano (1930–1999), assuring this important artist a key place in histories of post‑war art. The book charts the entirety of Lozano’s production in 1960s New York, from her raucous drawings and paintings depicting broken tools, genitalia, and other body parts to the final exhibition of her spectacular series of abstract “Wave Paintings” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970. Highly regarded at the time, Lozano is now perhaps best known for Dropout Piece (1970), a conceptual artwork and dramatic gesture with which she quit the art world. Shortly afterwards she announced she would have no further contact with other women. Her “dropout” and “boycott of women” lasted until her death, by which time she was all but forgotten. This book tackles head‑on the challenges that Lozano poses to art history—and especially to feminist art history—attending to her failures as well as her successes, and arguing that through dead ends and impasses she struggled to forge an alternative mode of living. Lee Lozano: Not Working looks for the means to think about complex figures like Lozano whose radical, politically ambiguous gestures test our assumptions about feminism and the “right way” to live and work.

Lee Lozano: Not Working

Almost a half-century after Yayoi Kusama debuted her landmark installation Infinity Mirror Room--Phalli's Field (1965) in New York, the work remains challenging and unclassifiable. Shifting between the Pop-like and the Surreal, the Minimal and the metaphorical, the figurative and the abstract, the psychotic and the erotic, with references to "free love" and psychedelia, it seemed to embody all that the 1960s was about, while at the same time denying the prevailing aesthetics of its time. The installation itself was a room lined with mirrored panels and carpeted with several hundred brightly polka-dotted soft fabric protrusions into which the visitor was completely absorbed. Kusama simply called it "a sublime, miraculous field of phalluses." A precursor of performance-based feminist art practice, media pranksterism, and "Occupy" movements, Kusama (born in 1929) was once as well known as her admirers--Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, and Joseph Cornell. In this first monograph on an epoch-defining work, Jo Applin looks at the installation in detail and places it in the context of subsequent art practice and theory as well as Kusama's own (as she called it) "obsessional art." Applin also discusses Kusama's relationship to her contemporaries, particularly those working with environments, abstract-erotic sculpture, and mirrors, and those grappling with such issues as abstraction, eroticism, sexuality, and softness. The work of Lee Lozano, Claes Oldenburg, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse is seen anew when considered in relation to Yayoi Kusama's.

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field (One Work)

Afterall Books

A study of Kusama's era-defining work, a “sublime, miraculous field of phalluses,” against the background of abstraction, eroticism, sexuality, and softness.
Almost a half-century after Yayoi Kusama debuted her landmark installation Infinity Mirror Room―Phalli's Field (1965) in New York, the work remains challenging and unclassifiable. Shifting between the Pop-like and the Surreal, the Minimal and the metaphorical, the figurative and the abstract, the psychotic and the erotic, with references to “free love” and psychedelia, it seemed to embody all that the 1960s was about, while at the same time denying the prevailing aesthetics of its time. The installation itself was a room lined with mirrored panels and carpeted with several hundred brightly polka-dotted soft fabric protrusions into which the visitor was completely absorbed. Kusama simply called it “a sublime, miraculous field of phalluses.” A precursor of performance-based feminist art practice, media pranksterism, and “Occupy” movements, Kusama (born in 1929) was once as well known as her admirers―Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, and Joseph Cornell. In this first monograph on an epoch-defining work, Jo Applin looks at the installation in detail and places it in the context of subsequent art practice and theory as well as Kusama's own (as she called it) “obsessional art.”
Applin also discusses Kusama's relationship to her contemporaries, particularly those working with environments, abstract-erotic sculpture, and mirrors, and those grappling with such issues as abstraction, eroticism, sexuality, and softness. The work of Lee Lozano, Claes Oldenburg, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse is seen anew when considered in relation to Yayoi Kusama's.

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room--Phalli's Field (One Work)

Alison Wilding RA is one of Britain's foremost sculptors. Tracing the trajectory of her artistic evolution, this original publication provides the first critical survey of Wilding's rich career. Known for her use of contrasting materials and often pairing forms in precarious balancing acts, Wilding's recent works combine string, steel and hair, mirrored glass, silicone rubber, alabaster, sand, and painted foam. Wilding's sculptural language steps beyond the so-called 'new sculpture,' which emerged within Britain in the 1980s, to embrace the European and American vocabularies for producing large-scale abstract sculpture that appeared from the 1960s onward. Drawing on extensive interviews with the artist, this impeccably researched and beautifully produced publication will situate Wilding's work within its rightful place in the history of modern abstract sculpture.

Alison Wilding

Fer, Briony

Lund Humphries

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) was one of the most influential and provocative American artists of the 20th century. This fully illustrated book accompanies the first exhibition in over three decades of a crucial phase of his work referred to as the Black Pourings. This controversial body of black enamel and oil paintings, which were exceptional in their absolute merging of color and surface, are accompanied here by drawings that are regarded as his most important and productive. A number of virtually unknown and rarely seen sculptures are also included, illuminating Pollock’s experimentations with space, density, and figuration. Accompanying a major exhibition and including insightful essays by a team of scholars, this book reveals a less-known aspect of Pollock’s work.

Blind Spots: Jackson Pollock

Fried, Michael

Delahunty, Gavin

Straine, Stephanie

Tate Publishing

Accompanying the first major American retrospective exhibition of Yayoi Kusama's work, and an exhibition at Tate Modern in London, this volume offers a definitive monograph on Japan's most famous living artist. It features a wealth of works from all periods in Kusama's career, as well as essays by various international curators and critics, discussing Kusama's years in New York, her career after her return to Japan, her installation works and the psychoanalytic import of her art. Kusama's originality, innovation and sheer drive to make art have propelled her through a career that has spanned six decades, encompassing painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, collage, film and video, performance, installation and even product design. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s Kusama lived in New York, and was at the forefront of many artistic innovations in the city, becoming close with artists such as Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg, and influencing many others along the way. It was in these years that Kusama was dubbed "the Polka Dot Princess," for her obsessive use of polka dots in installations and happenings. Returning to Japan in her forties, she rebuilt her career, waiting years for the international recognition that she has recently achieved. Now in her ninth decade, Kusama's imagination remains fertile and productive, as she continues to devise dazzling installations and relentlessly hand-paints her ongoing series of minutely detailed figurative fantasy paintings. Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929. She left Japan for New York at the age of 28, following a correspondence with Georgia O'Keeffe, and was soon participating in the city's 1960s wave of happenings and avant-garde activities. In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan and began writing surrealistic novels and poetry. On November 12, 2008, Christie's New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, a record for a living female artist.

Yayoi Kusama

Yamamura, Midori

Nixon, Mignon

D.A.P./Tate

The career of American artist Lee Lozano (1930-1999) was brief but extraordinarily intense. Throughout the 1960s, during the transition from Pop art to Minimalism and Conceptualism, and up until her self-imposed exile in the 1970s, Lozano created a genuinely radical and frequently obscene body of work that traversed a gamut of idioms. Her early paintings were executed in a messy cartoon style, oozing with violence and sexuality. By 1967, Lozano was responding to Minimalism and Op art with her abstract Wave paintings. It was also around this time that she initiated a series of actions that tested both the limits of art and acceptable conduct in society, such as smoking pot, masturbating and, mostly notoriously of all, boycotting women. This publication accompanies a retrospective of Lozano's works at Moderna Museet in Stockholm--works which after 40 years remain as witty, acerbic and shockingly fresh as ever.

Lee Lozano

Lippard, Lucy

Müller-Westermann, Iris

Reference

Hatje Cantz

A non-Western female artist arriving in the US as Pop art and Minimalism were beginning to take shape, Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) was part of these milieus but also remained somewhat outside of them, developing a highly distinctive artistic universe. Yayoi Kusama: In Infinity offers an extensive overview of the major stages of Kusama’s work: from her abstract, intensively hand-crafted Infinity Net paintings (which made Kusama’s initial reputation in New York) to the soft, eroticized furniture sculptures covered in hundreds of white, penis-like forms, ending with Kusama’s recent works that shape whole spaces as intense environments. This volume also includes new essays discussing Kusama’s artistic and literary work and four of Kusama’s own poems.

Yayoi Kusama: In Infinity

KUSAMA, YAYOI

Laurberg, Marie

Würrer, Stefan

Jacobsen, Signe Marie

Individual Artists

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

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