How global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present, combating modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism.
If European modernism was premised on the new―on surpassing the past, often by assigning it to the “traditional” societies of the Global South―global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present. In this account of what globalization means for contemporary art, David Joselit argues that the creative use of tradition by artists from around the world serves as a means of combatting modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism. Modernism claimed to live in the future and relegated the rest of the world to the past. Global contemporary art shatters this myth by reactivating various forms of heritage―from literati ink painting in China to Aboriginal painting in Australia―in order to propose new and different futures. Joselit analyzes not only how heritage becomes contemporary through the practice of individual artists but also how a cultural infrastructure of museums, biennials, and art fairs worldwide has emerged as a means of generating economic value, attracting capital and tourist dollars.
Joselit traces three distinct forms of modernism that developed outside the West, in opposition to Euro-American modernism: postcolonial, socialist realism, and the underground. He argues that these modern genealogies are synchronized with one another and with Western modernism to produce global contemporary art. Joselit discusses curation and what he terms “the curatorial episteme,” which, through its acts of framing or curating, can become a means of recalibrating hierarchies of knowledge―and can contribute to the dual projects of decolonization and deimperialization.

Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (October Books)

Joselit, David

Reference

The MIT Press

There is not one Marcel Duchamp, but several. Within his oeuvre Duchamp practiced a variety of modernist idioms and invented an array of contradictory personas: artist and art dealer, conceptualist and craftsman, chess champion and dreamer, dandy and recluse. In Infinite Regress, David Joselit considers the plurality of identities and practices within Duchamp's life and art between 1910 and 1941, conducting a synthetic reading of his early and middle career. Taking into account underacknowledged works and focusing on the conjunction of the machine and the commodity in Duchamp's art, Joselit notes a consistent opposition between the material world and various forms of measurement, inscription, and quantification. Challenging conventional accounts, he describes the readymade strategy not merely as a rejection of painting, but as a means of producing new models of the modern self.

Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (October Books)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Mit Pr

In a world where politics is conducted through images, the tools of art history can be used to challenge the privatized antidemocratic sphere of American television.
American television embodies a paradox: it is a privately owned and operated public communications network that most citizens are unable to participate in except as passive specators. Television creates an image of community while preventing the formation of actual social ties because behind its simulated exchange of opinions lies a highly centralized corporate structure that is profoundly antidemocratic. In Feedback, David Joselit describes the privatized public sphere of television and recounts the tactics developed by artists and media activists in the 1960s and 1970s to break open its closed circuit.
The figures whose work Joselit examines―among them Nam June Paik, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas, Abbie Hoffman, Andy Warhol, and Melvin Van Peebles―staged political interventions within television's closed circuit. Joselit identifies three kinds of image-events: feedback, which can be both disabling noise and rational response―as when Abbie Hoffman hijacked television time for the Yippies with flamboyant stunts directed to the media; the image-virus, which proliferates parasitically, invading, transforming, and even blocking systems―as in Nam June Paik's synthesized videotapes and installations; and the avatar, a quasi-fictional form of identity available to anyone, which can function as a political actor―as in Melvin Van Peebles's invention of Sweet Sweetback, an African-American hero who appealed to a broad audience and influenced styles of Black Power activism. These strategies, writes Joselit, remain valuable today in a world where the overlapping information circuits of television and the Internet offer different opportunities for democratic participation.
In Feedback, Joselit analyzes such midcentury image-events using the procedures and categories of art history. The trope of figure/ground reversal, for instance, is used to assess acts of representation in a variety of media―including the medium of politics. In a televisual world, Joselit argues, where democracy is conducted through images, art history has the capacity to become a political science.

Feedback: Television against Democracy

Feedback: Television against Democracy (Mit Press)

Humor & Entertainment

Preface by David A. Ross Endgame provides the first comprehensive discussion of two interrelated groups of artists who have recently emerged amidst brisk critical debate and who all, in various ways, represent a critique of the commodity, or the commodification of art objects. These are the painters Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley, Sherrie Levine, and Philip Taaffe, who have ironically adopted the visual strategies of earlier modern artists, and the sculptors General Idea, Jon Kessler, Jeff Koons, Joel Otterson, and Haim Steinbach, who use consumer objects and their modes of presentation as raw material in their sculpture. Both sets of artists draw upon the formal lessons of Pop Art, Minimalism, and the more recent work of "appropriation" artists, as well as upon current theories of the political economy of the image. The book includes substantial essays by some of today's most noted art historians and critics: Yve-Alain Bois (Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University) charts the history of the belief in "the end of painting" which he sees as central within 20th-century art, and he compares the diverse strategies that Mondrian, Rodchenko, Duchamp, and more recently Robert Ryman have employed to work out an "end of painting," with the qualitatively different apocalyptic tone of Halley, Levine, Bleckner, and Taaffe. Hal Foster (Senior Editor of Art in America) examines the critical position of the sculpture of Steinbach, Koons, Kessler, and General Idea in relation to the history of the opposition between commodity and art object within modern art as first dramatized by Duchamp's readymades. Thomas Crow (Associate Professor of Art History, University of Michigan) charts the recent history of image appropriation as an antimodern or postmodern gesture of art's apparent loss of originality and cultural or social powerlessness in the face of the paradoxically thriving art market. The iconography of the sculptures included in Endgame is the focus of David Joselit's essay Modern Leisure, which notes in particular the frequency with which objects associated with sports and housecleaning are incorporated in their works. Elisabeth Sussman charts the transition between widespread appropriation of imagery drawn from mass media sources in the late 1970s and early 1980s to the use of fine art referents (like Op Art) in recent abstract painting. Bob Riley describes media performances by Richard Baim, Gretchen Bendes and Perry Hoberman which accompany Endgame. David Joselit, Bob Riley, and Elisabeth Sussman are curators at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Distributed by The MIT Press.

Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture

Foster, Hal

Bois, Yve-Alain

Sussman, Elisabeth

Crow, Thomas

Riley, Bob

Travel

In Infinite Regress, David Joselit considers the plurality of identities and practices within Duchamp's life and art between 1910 and 1941, conducting a synthetic reading of his early and middle career.

“The work of the sculptor Rachel Harrison is both the zeitgeist and the least digestible in contemporary art. It may also be the most important, owing to an originality that breaks a prevalent spell in an art world of recycled genres, styles, and ideas.”—Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker In her sculptures, room-sized installations, drawings, photographs, and artist’s books, Rachel Harrison (b. 1966) delves into themes of celebrity culture, pop psychology, history, and politics. This publication, created in close collaboration with the artist, explores twenty-five years of her practice and is the first comprehensive monograph on Harrison in nearly a decade. Its centerpiece is an in-depth plate section, which doubles as a chronology of Harrison’s major works, series, and exhibitions. Objects are illustrated with multiple views and details, and accompanied by short texts. This thorough approach elucidates Harrison’s complicated, eclectic oeuvre—in which she integrates found materials with handmade sculptural elements, upends traditions of museum display, and injects quotidian objects with a sense of strangeness. Six accompanying essays cover Harrison’s earliest works to her most recent output. The book also includes a handful of photo-collages that the artist created specifically for this project. Published here for the first time, these pieces superimpose found images with reproductions of Harrison’s own past work.

Rachel Harrison Life Hack

Whitney Museum of American Art

No other introductory book presents the diversity and complexity of postwar American art from Abstract Expressionism to the present as clearly and succinctly as this groundbreaking survey. David Joselit traces and analyzes the contradictory formal, ideological, and political conditions during this period that made American art predominant throughout the world. Social and cultural transformations rooted in mass media technologies―photography, television, video, and the Internet―elevated consumer commodities to the status of legitimate art subjects, as in pop and installation art, and also brought about a mechanization of the creative act. Canonical movements and figures are discussed at length―Pollock, Rothko, Krasner, Oldenburg, Johns, Warhol, Paik, Ruscha, Sherman, Schnabel, Koons, Barney, and others―in juxtaposition with lesser known contemporary artists and practices. 183 illustrations, 80 in color

American Art Since 1945 (World of Art)

Thames&Hudson

Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism

A landmark study in the history of modern art€”revised, updated, and expanded.Conceived by four of the most influential art historians of our time, this groundbreaking book has now been updated and expanded to include the most recent developments in contemporary art. The original authors have been joined by David Joselit to provide the most comprehensive history of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries ever published.More than 120 articles are presented in a year-by-year structure, with each focusing on a crucial event€”from the creation of a seminal work to the opening of a major exhibition€”to tell the myriad stories of art from 1900 to the present. Key turning points and breakthroughs in modernism are explored, as are the antimodernist reactions that proposed alternative visions of art and the world. The book€™s flexible structure and extensive cross-referencing allow readers to follow the many developments in the art world

KRAUSS, ROSALIND

Buchloh, Benjamin H.D.

Five of the most influential and provocative art historians of our time have come together to provide a comprehensive history of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries―the most important chronicle of modern art for a generation. The authors of Art Since 1900 adopt a unique, year-by-year structure in which they present more than one hundred and twenty short essays, each focusing on crucial events and the creation of a seminal work, the publication of an artistic manifesto, or the opening of a major exhibition that tell the story of the dazzling diversity of practice and interpretation that characterizes art of this period. Each turning point and breakthrough of modernism and postmodernism is explored in depth, as are the frequent anti-modernist reactions that proposed alternative visions of art and the world. Art Since 1900 introduces students to the key theoretical approaches to modern and contemporary art in a way that enables them to comprehend the many “voices” of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 544 full-color and 246 black-and-white illustrations

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

Books by Joselit, David

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

Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (October Books)

Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (October Books)

Feedback: Television against Democracy

Feedback: Television against Democracy (Mit Press)

Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture

Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (October Books)

Rachel Harrison Life Hack

American Art Since 1945 (World of Art)

Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism

Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism