The first monograph of Chicago-based Theaster Gates, one of the most exciting and highly regarded contemporary artists at work today.
Theaster Gates has developed an expanded artistic practice that includes space development, object making, performance and critical engagement with many publics. Gates transforms spaces, institutions, traditions, and perceptions.
Gates's training as an urban planner and sculptor, and subsequent time spent studying clay, has given him keen awareness of the poetics of production and systems of organizing. Playing with these poetic and systematic interests, Gates has assembled gospel choirs, formed temporary unions, and used systems of mass production as a way of underscoring the need that industry has for the body.
Gates refers to his working method as 'critique through collaboration' and his projects often stretch the form of what we usually understand visual art to be. His focus is also on the availability of information and the cross-fertilization of ideas. His multi-faceted exhibitions investigate themes of race and history through sculpture, installation, performance and two-dimensional works, furthering the artist's interest in a critique of social practice, shared economies and the question of objects in relation to political and cultural thought.
Gates' recent exhibition and performance venues include the Seattle Art Museum, Art Basel Miami Beach, Milwaukee Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the Whitney Biennial in New York. Gates was a participating artist in Documenta 13 in Kassel (2012) with his total-living installation 12 Ballads for Huguenot House. Other notable solo exhibitions include An Epitaph for Civil Rights at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (2011) and My Labor Is My Protest, at White Cube Bermondsey, London (2012). Parallel to his artist career, Gates is also Director of Arts and Public Life Initiative at the University of Chicago and a board member of the city's South Side Community Center.
Recently commissioned as the 2012 Armory Show Artist and a Loeb Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2011, Gates has received awards and grants from Creative Capital, the Joyce Foundation, Graham Foundation, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art.

Theaster Gates (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Arts & Photography

Borchardt-Hume, Achim

Lee, Lisa

Becker, Carol

History & Criticism

Phaidon Press

The first monograph on the indefatigable explorer of relationships between people, technology, and environmental issues Dutch artist, Daan Roosegaarde, is one of the most innovative artists to emerge in the past decade. His sculptures and installations, made in collaboration with a team of engineers and designers, aim to create better conditions in cities and to make difficult areas habitable again, by rethinking processes and upgrading urban structures. At the core of Roosegaarde's practice is schoonheid, a Dutch word that stands both for 'clean-ness' and 'beauty'. It is this that has informed some of his most popular public projects, including Waterlicht (a virtual flood that shows the force of water); Smog Free Project (a large outdoor air purifier that turns smog into jewelry), and Smart Highway (an interactive road that charges throughout the day and glows at night).

Daan Roosegaarde (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Nanjo, Fumio

Daswani, Nico

Humor & Entertainment

In her newest book, leading social critic Carol Becker offers a timely analysis of the nature of art and its role in politics and society. Completed just before the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center catastrophe, Surpassing the Spectacle is now especially relevant in its analysis of the spectacle society that was omnipresent before that fatal day. This book is remarkably prescient of the new concerns that have now become foremost in our thoughts since the attack. This collection of essays explores such topics as public memorials, America's attempt to hold onto a sense of security while faced with the reality of international terrorists living within our own cities, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, restorative justice, and issues of freedom of expression as they relate to incidents such as New York Mayor Guiliani's quest to ban Chris Ofili's painting of "The Holy Virgin Mary" at the Brooklyn Museum. The essays cohere around Becker's central concerns: the education and role of artists in a post post-modern climate, controversies over public space, iconography, memorializing, and the myth of the global citizen. Throughout, Becker works to reconstruct a vision of humanity that incorporates, and hopefully moves us beyond, a dystopian moment when we no longer were able to use words such as humane, accountable, or the public good without seeming nostalgic and romantic. Becker raises the question of the place of art and the function of public intellectuals in a society desperately in need of creativity and leadership. The book is written in clear and accessible prose, which nonetheless looks at the issues philosophically and does not sacrifice any of the subtleties of thought necessary to contextualize and surpass the spectacle of contemporary U.S. society.

Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art (Culture and Politics Series)

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

In her newest book, leading social critic Carol Becker offers a timely analysis of the nature of art and its role in politics and society. Completed just before the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center catastrophe, Surpassing the Spectacle is now especially relevant in its analysis of the spectacle society that was omnipresent before that fatal day. This book is remarkably prescient of the new concerns that have now become foremost in our thoughts since the attack. This collection of essays explores such topics as public memorials, America's attempt to hold onto a sense of security while faced with the reality of international terrorists living within our own cities, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, restorative justice, and issues of freedom of expression as they relate to incidents such as New York Mayor Guiliani's quest to ban Chris Ofili's painting of 'The Holy Virgin Mary' at the Brooklyn Museum. The essays cohere around Becker's central concerns: the education and role of artists in a post post-modern climate, controversies over public space, iconography, memorializing, and the myth of the global citizen. Throughout, Becker works to reconstruct a vision of humanity that incorporates, and hopefully moves us beyond, a dystopian moment when we no longer were able to use words such as humane, accountable, or the public good without seeming nostalgic and romantic. Becker raises the question of the place of art and the function of public intellectuals in a society desperately in need of creativity and leadership. The book is written in clear and accessible prose, which nonetheless looks at the issues philosophically and does not sacrifice any of the subtleties of thought necessary to contextualize and surpass the spectacle of contemporary U.S. society.

Addresses the questions: What might be the role of the artist in the 21st century? How essential is art to the psychic and political well-being of American society? This collection of essays by cultural critic Carol Becker plumbs particular areas of controversy to understand what information these "zones of contention" might yield about the multifarious culture wars taking place within American society today. In the process she addresses the place of art and artists in society, the difficulties facing women in the workplace, why male bonding exists, why women experience anxiety in relationship to creative endeavors, and why artists are misunderstood within American society. She positions art and artists, as well as institutional dynamics within a philosophical framework.

Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety (SUNY SERIES, INTERRUPTIONS -- BORDER TESTIMONY(IES) AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE/S)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

State Univ of New York Pr

Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety (Suny Series, Interruptions: Border Testimony and Critical Discourses)

State University of New York Press

If there is no eighth day in the biblical account of things, perhaps it's time to add another, now that we have the means. The transgenic art of Eduardo Kac does just that, raising often unanswerable questions about ethics, evolution, biogenetics, and animals' rights, to name but a few of the areas from which his work has raised controversy. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Kac shocked the world, first with a groundbreaking net installation entitled Genesis, and then with Alba, his fluorescent, genetically enginered rabbit. From his first experiments online in the mid-1980s to his current convergence of the digital and the biological, in the Eighth Day installation Kac has always investigated the philosophical and political dimensions of communication processes. Equally concerned with the aesthetic and the social aspects of verbal and nonverbal interaction, Kac has examined linguistic systems, dialogic exchanges and interspecies communication, combining robotics and networking to explore the fluidity of subject positions in the postdigital world.

The Eighth Day: The Transgenic Art Of Eduardo Kac

Baker, Steve

Hayles, N. Katherine

Rawls, William

Machado, Arlindo

Nadarajan, Gunalan

Rawls, Alan

Wilson-Rawls, Jeanne

The Institute for Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University

Disputes over free expression in the arts have always loomed as struggles between creativity and repression, transgression and outrage, candor and hypocrisy. But while high-profile shootouts at art museums and less visible skirmishes at schools, libraries, and theaters persist, overt censorship is no longer the only, or the most dire, threat to free expression. On the one hand, society has become more accepting of provocative imagery, with media conglomerates often leading the way in the depreciation of taboos. On the other hand, artists, while enjoying some unprecedented liberties, are hemmed in by new constraints that often fall beyond the range of First Amendment protection. The current terrain bears little resemblance to the culture wars of a decade ago, much less to what the First Amendment's Framers could have imagined. And since Sept. 11, 2001, the frontlines of the free-expression debate have been shifting once again. Based on a Columbia University conference organized by the National Arts Journalism Program, The New Gatekeepers explores the reconfigured ranks of those who decide what the public gets to see, hear and read, from struggles over intellectual property and copyright, to continuing debates about acceptable and offensive content in the cultural marketplace, to the less visible biases of the arts funding system. This heavily illustrated book also includes a historical overview of censorship and contributions by 40 scholars, artists, experts and journalists from around the United States. Discussed and participating artists include Edouard Manet, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Serra, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Andres Serrano, Carolee Schneemann, Dread Scott, Gran Fury, Joel-Peter Witkin, Kara Walker, Jock Sturges, Chris Ofili, and Tom Sachs.

The New Gatekeepers: Emerging Challenges to Free Expression in the Arts

Menand, Louis

Manet, Édouard

Walker, Kara

Schneemann, Carolee

Mann, Charles

HIRST, Damien

Newman, Roger

SERRA, Richard

Chapman, Jake

Brenson, Michael

Koons, Jeff

Sunstein, Cass

Ofili, Chris

RODIN, Auguste

Sachs, Tom

Adler, Amy

Cahill, Timothy

Gurstein, Rochelle

Tepper, Steven

Godfrey, Marian

Chapman, Dinos

Ferguson, Laura

Scott, Dread

Serrano, Andres

National Arts Journalism Program

This book documents a series of community-based projects by Marina Abramovi? Janine Antoni, Cai Guo-Qiang, Ann Hamilton, Dinh Q. L', Shirin Neshat, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Allan Sekula, Shahzia Sikander and Rirkrit Tiravanija among others, realized in Luang Prabang, Laos, from 2004 to 2008.

The Quiet in the Land: Luang Prabang, Laos

Farmer, John Alan

Mixay, Somsanouk

Morin, France

Engelmann, Francis

Choron-Baix, Catherine

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

The Quiet in the Land, Inc.

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Subversive Imagination: The Artist, Society and Social Responsiblity

Routledge

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Becker, Carol. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Becker, Carol