During the 1990s a number of artists claimed the exhibition as their medium. Working independently or in various collaborative constellations, they eschewed the individual object in favor of the exhibition environment as a dynamic arena, ever expanding its physical and temporal parameters. For these artists an exhibition can comprise a film, a novel, a shared meal, a social space, a performance or a journey. Their work engages directly with the vicissitudes of everyday life, offering subtle moments of transformation. This catalogue, which accompanies a major exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, is the first in the U.S. to examine the dynamic interchange among a core group of these artists--Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija--a many-sided conversation that helped shape the cultural landscape of the 1990s and beyond.

Theanyspacewhatever

Arts & Photography

FOSTER, HAL

Blom, Ina

Von Hantelmann, Dorothea

BOURRIAUD, NICOLAS

Bonami, Francesco

King, Emily

Gioni, Massimiliano

Hoffmann, Jens

Iles, Chrissie

Birnbaum, Daniel

Govan, Michael

Avgikos, Jan

Joseph, Branden

Boeri, Stefano

Falguières, Patricia

Douroux, Xavier

Föll, Heike

Lange, Christy

Archer, Michael

History & Criticism

Guggenheim Museum Publications

Artists have always used their imaginations to see beyond visible matter--to posit other physics, other energies, new ways of conceiving the visible and new models for art--but the past century has seen an explosion of such investigations. In the fashion of a Wunderkammer, The Quick and the Dead takes stock of the 1960s and 70s legacy of experimental, or "research" art by pioneers like George Brecht, who posited objects as motionless events and asked us to consider "an art verging on the non-existent, dissolving into other dimensions," and Lygia Clark, whose foldable sculptures sought to dissolve the boundary between inside and outside, each "a static moment within the cosmological dynamics from which we came and to which we are going." In a series of encounters with art made strange by its expansions, contractions, inversions and implosions in time and space, The Quick and the Dead surveys more than 80 works by a global, multigenerational group of 50 artists, scientists and musicians--among them James Lee Byars, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Harold Edgerton, Ceal Floyer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierre Huyghe, The Institute for Figuring, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Stephen Kaltenbach, On Kawara, Christine Kozlov, David Lamelas, Louise Lawler, Paul Etienne Lincoln, Mark Manders, Kris Martin, Steve McQueen, Helen Mirra, Catherine Murphy, Bruce Nauman, Rivane Neuenschwander, Claes Oldenburg, Roman Ondák, Adrian Piper, Roman Signer and Shomei Tomatsu, among many others. Includes reprints of texts by diverse luminaries such as John McPhee, Jalal Toufic, Oliver Sacks, Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson.

The Quick and the Dead

Osborne, Peter

Eleey, Peter

Blanke, Olaf

Wertheim, Margaret and Christine

Walker Art Center

This book takes its cue from a simple observation. During the last 30 years or so, the term style has all but disappeared from art critical or art historical terminology. For new art history it was an increasingly problematic term, associated with the taxonomist and historicist concerns of “old” art history, not to speak of its fixation on the figure of the great artist. For contemporary art criticism the term seemed simply irrelevant: Faced with artistic activities that challenged traditional ideas of the work of art and its relation to aesthetics itself, new critical paradigms had to be invented. As interventions in social reality, an art of actions and events, replaced preoccupations with visual style and shape, the politics of social sites replaced the language of forms.But while style has all but disappeared from art historical and art critical discourse, artistic practice since the 1960's onwards has seemed increasingly focused on the stylistics of the life-environment, the way in which everyday life itself is formed, designed or stylized. This development calls for a new reading of the relationship between art and the question of style, one that approaches the question of style itself not just as an art historical “tool” or method of explanation but as a social site in which relations between appearance, recognition and social identity is negotiated. The question or crisis of the contemporary style site is related to the significance of stylistic issues in contemporary politics and economics that capitalizes on life itself and that is perhaps best understood through its particular production of subjectivity. The works discussed in this book treat style as precisely such a site, and should therefore be discussed in extension of what is generally known as “site specific practices” in art. However, the style site works radically change the notion of the politics of this type of art, and may in the end also contribute to open the question of the life-art practices of the avant-garde to new interpretations. Ina Blom is an Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo. She has written extensively on modern and contemporary art and is also active as an art critic.

On the Style Site: Art, Sociality, and Media Culture (Sternberg Press)

Sternberg Press

Leon Battista Alberti’s 1435 treatise De pictura influenced generations of painters by suggesting that a painting should be approached as an open window. By the twentieth century, the window had transformed into a motif that would test the limits of painting. With his 1920 “Fresh Widow”--a replica of a French window with panes covered in black leather--Marcel Duchamp postulated a farewell to illusionist painting. This publication presents the development of window painting by artists such as Robert Delaunay, Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Ellsworth Kelly, Eva Hesse, Gerhard Richter and many others.

Fresh Widow: The Window in Art since Matisse and Duchamp

YAU, John

FRANZ, Erich

Gronert, Stefan

Bippus, Elke

Reference

Hatje Cantz

In this innovative take on early video art, Ina Blom considers the widespread notion that analog video was endowed with lifelike memory and agency. Reversing standard accounts of artistic uses of video, she follows the reflexive unfolding of a technology that seemed to deploy artists and artistic frameworks in the creation of new technical and social realities. She documents, among other things, video's emergence through the framework of painting, its identification with biological life, its exploration of the outer limits of technical and mental time control, and its construction of new realms of labor and collaboration. Enlisting a distinctly media-archaeological approach, Blom's new book―her second from Sternberg Press―is a brilliant look at the relationship between video memory and social ontology.

The Autobiography of Video: The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (Sternberg Press)

Humor & Entertainment

Art critical essays focusing on artworks that, in various ways, convey a sense of unheroic "trouble." Stories of the undead of contemporary painting, the mediation of pain, photography courting stupidity, sculpture and architecture courting animism, populism in avant-garde art, fear of avant-garde territorialism, ambivalent networking, displaced abstractions and misplaced weather systems. The essays assembled in this volume were all written over the past twenty years-a period in which Ina Blom pursued art critical writing alongside more academic work and when the boundaries between the two genres grew at times deliberately blurred. Dispersed as they were across a variety of publications with limited accessibility-out-of-print anthologies and artist's books, hard-to-find art catalogues, journals, and magazines protected by paywalls-Houses To Die In and Other Essays on Art at last brings them together, and not just for practical reasons. If the texts collected here have one thing in common, it is in a certain pull they display toward artistic projects that are not redemptive or exemplary, but which instead convey a sense of trouble- trouble actively sought by the artists or keenly felt by Blom. A distinctly unheroic trouble.

Houses To Die In and Other Essays on Art

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