Over the last century, many artists and filmmakers have used silence as subject matter and medium, exploring it as symbol, phenomenon, memorial device, and oppressive force. Silence examines the ways twenty-nine artists invoke silence to shape space and consciousness, most after John Cage's 4'33" (1952). Among this carefully curated selection are Joseph Beuys's The Silence of Marcel Duchamp Is Overrated (1964) and works by several artists who matured in the 1960s and 70s, including Bruce Nauman and Marcel Broodthaers; documentation of Tehching Hsieh's One Year Performance 1978-79, in which the artist spent a year in a cage without speaking, reading, writing, or engaging with any media; and Andy Warhol's Electric Chair paintings. Other artists featured in the publication include Robert Rauschenberg and Ad Reinhardt, represented by white or black paintings; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maya Deren, Jennie C. Jones, Jacob Kirkegaard, Christian Marclay, Doris Salcedo, and Martin Wong; and intermedia artists Steve Roden and Steven Vitiello. Over forty full-color plates complement three thought-provoking essays and artist biographies.

Silence

Arts & Photography

Kamps, Toby

Seid, Steve

History & Criticism

The Menil Collection

Commotion: Martin Kersels : Madison Art Center, Wisconsin, December 7, 1997-February 15, 1998 : Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, June 13-August

Saltz, Jerry

Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens

Wheaton, Mark

Madison Art Center

Kersels, Martin

Contributors include Hugh M. Davies, Toby Kamps, Ralph Rugoff.

Small World: Dioramas in Contemporary Art

Davies, Hugh

Davies, Hugh M.

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego

Lateral Thinking assesses the artistic achievements of the 1990s, concentrating on work by 40 contemporary artists from North, South, and Central America, Cuba, Africa, China and Europe. These include Matthew Barney, Vanessa Beecroft, Roman de Salvo, Zhang Huan, William Kentridge, Byron Kim, Jean Lowe, Vik Muniz and Cindy Sherman. A number of pervasive themes recur throughout: the body, the construction of identity (gender, personal, social, or ethnic), the role of the artist and the "everyday."

Lateral Thinking: Art Of The 1990S

Red Green Blue is almost the title of a 1963 painting by Ellsworth Kelly. Red Blue Green, a monumental rectangular oil work, considered a crucial fulcrum point in the artist's career, represents Kelly's concerns about the tension between the figure and the ground, offering two precisely shaped and balanced red and blue forms set against a strongly contrasting green ground. Working within a strict set of limits, he created a string of similarly grand, powerful works and defined many of the ideas about line, form, and color that still drive his work today. These works, made from the late 50s to the mid-60s, established the artist's singular style and his reputation as one of the most innovative abstract painters of the latter half of the 20th century, one who boldly broke with the strictures of the abstract expressionist movement, which dominated painting in the United States in the 50s. Exploring the complex interplay of invented and real-world inspirations that led to this body of figure/ground paintings, this volume presents a selection of 21 major paintings and 36 related drawings, collages, and photographs from that time period, as well as a new painting from 2002 that reexamines related concerns.

Ellsworth Kelly: Red Green Blue--Paintings and Studies, 1958-1965

Bernstein, Roberta

Rich, Sarah

Individual Artists

John Wood (born 1969) and Paul Harrison (born 1966) fuse their aesthetic research with existential slapstick comedy. Working together since 1993, the British duo use a wide variety of props, including furniture, household utensils and their own bodies, setting up comical interactions with objects that they record in austere video works. Describing themselves as performance artists and sculptors whose audience is the video camera, Wood and Harrison are heirs to silent film comics Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and to uniquely British comedy troupes like Monty Python. Through their efforts, no matter how absurd, Sisyphean or masochistic, Wood and Harrison reveal the potential for inventive play in all scenarios. Grounded in the joys and pratfalls of the everyday, Wood and Harrison's blend of high and low, philosophical and funny, captures both a sense of wonder and the thrill of genuine experimentation.

John Wood & Paul Harrison: Answers to Questions

Photography & Video

Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston

A kind of bemused, moralistic fascination with the absurd and troubling aspects of everyday life informs the hyperrealistic sculptural work of Tony Matelli. Using different combinations of paint, resin, PVC and polyurethane, he strands a lone seeing-eye dog on a city corner, plants weeds and flowers in a gallery floor, poses a sleepwalker in his tighty whities, conjoins a severely emaciated, life-size African couple, and bathes two kissing seals in a pool of oil.

Tony Matelli

Fischman, Lisa

Walther König, Köln

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Books by Kamps, Toby