A show challenging conventional understandings of public art, Culture in Action in Chicago had a new social agenda, and rethought what an exhibition of contemporary art might be. Through eight projects by artists initiated in the early 1990s and developed in collaboration with local people, the intention was to engage diverse groups over time, in addition to the visiting public in 1993. In the fifth book in Afterall's Exhibition Histories series, the course of these projects is documented, with critical reappraisal of this important exhibition in newly commissioned essays and interviews, together with reviews from the time.

Exhibition as Social Intervention: 'Culture in Action' 1993 Exhibition Histories, Volume 5

Arts & Photography

Draxler, Helmut

Decter, Joshua

History & Criticism

Afterall Books

In his recent exhibition at Vienna’s Museum of Modern Art, Harun Farocki showed two split-screen video installations: “Comparison via a Third” looks at international methods of brick-making and “Eye/Machine” takes on contemporary surveillance technology. Farocki’s work was also recently seen at Documenta XII, 2007.

Harun Farocki: Nebeneinander

Michalka, Matthias

Farocki, Harun

Büttner, Elisabeth

Individual Artists

Walther König, Köln

If Goya had collaborated with Lichtenstein, it may have resulted in something like the dark Pop visions of Andreas Hofer. He draws on film, comics, fairy tales, myths and religion for his monstrous figures in nightmarish settings. Dripping with paint, the Justice League series places superheroes in a peril their powers seem unable to overcome: Batman and Wonder Woman in Dying Stars morph into trees, their arms sprouting branches and their legs roots, while a shadowy pterodactyl hovers in the background. In other works, Hofer shows he's not without black humor in appropriating iconic material, as when he has Malevich's “Black Square” sprout vampire teeth.

Andreas Hofer

Are Michael Krebber's most recent pieces, made from wooden stretchers and industrially produced colored fabrics, paintings? Perhaps in the sense that, as Helmut Draxler's essay observes, Krebber's work deals with the relationships between signs: "how figure and ground, form and format, surface and space, color and object, frame and wall, object and installation, light and place, material and reference, title and context, original and found material can be related to one another."

Michael Krebber: Secession (English and German Edition)

Herrmann, Matthias

Coercing Constellations: Space, Reference and Representation with Fareed Armaly (Polypen)

Reference

Bbooks Verlag

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

Books by Draxler, Helmut