During the 1960s, artists from Alan Kaprow and Yoko Ono to Andy Warhol and Richard Serra stopped making "art" as it has been thought of since the Renaissance. They staged performances that mixed everyday life with theater and in yet other, often ironic, ways challenged the system of marketing, display, and aesthetic discourse that ascribes exceptional monetary as well as cultural value to paintings and sculpture. Work Ethic, published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art, brings together a cross section of such radical endeavors and opens a fresh perspective on their genesis and meaning. Most of the avant-garde interventions considered in Work Ethic entailed performances and other procedures generally interpreted as linking a "dematerialization" of the object with the free play of concepts. 
By contrast, Helen Molesworth and her collaborators in Work Ethic set such activities in the context of the workplace and contend that they engage issues of management, production, and skill that accompanied the emergence of the information age. The result is a major breakthrough in understanding the structures and ambitions of a wide range of art-making. Work Ethic reproduces all the diverse material—Bruce Nauman videotapes to Roxy Paine’s painting machine—in the Baltimore exhibition and provides insightful discussion of each piece’s history, structure, and significance. 
Four essays introduce topics, like utopian fantasies of pleasurable work, that are of general relevance to setting the material into a postindustrial context. Throughout this catalogue, there is as well a lively dialogue on the museum’s relationship to art that questions the rules of both the workplace and the art world. The exhibition, "Work Ethic," will be at The Baltimore Museum of Art from October 12, 2003, to January 11, 2004, and at the Des Moines Center for the Arts from May 15 to August 1, 2004.

Work Ethic

Arts & Photography

Molesworth, Helen

History & Criticism

Penn State University Press

Art of the 1980s oscillated between radical and conservative, capricious and political, socially engaged and art historically aware. Published in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, this fascinating book chronicles canonical as well as nearly forgotten works of the 1980s, arguing that what has often been dismissed as cynical or ironic should be viewed as a struggle on the part of artists to articulate their needs and desires in an increasingly commodified world. The major developments of the decade—the rise of the commercial art market, the politicization of the AIDS crisis, the increased visibility of women and gay artists and artists of color, and the ascension of new media—are illuminated in works by Sophie Calle, Nan Goldin, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, and Lorna Simpson, among others. Essays by leading scholars provide unique perspectives on the decade's competing factions and seemingly contradictory elements, from counterculture to the mainstream, radicalism to democracy and historical awareness, conservatism to feminist politics.
Complete with critical texts on each work, This Will Have Been brings into focus the full impact of the art, artists, and political and cultural ruptures of this paradigm-shifting decade. More than 200 full-color reproductions of works in a range of media, including drawing, painting, photography, and sculpture, illustrate this ambitious guide to a period of artistic transformation.

This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s

Yale University Press

A dynamic new look at the legendary college that was a major incubator of the arts in midcentury America In 1933, John Rice founded Black Mountain College in North Carolina as an experiment in making artistic experience central to learning. Though it operated for only 24 years, this pioneering school played a significant role in fostering avant-garde art, music, dance, and poetry, and an astonishing number of important artists taught or studied there. Among the instructors were Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Karen Karnes, M. C. Richards, and Willem de Kooning, and students included Ruth Asawa, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly. Leap Before You Look is a singular exploration of this legendary school and of the work of the artists who spent time there. Scholars from a variety of fields contribute original essays about diverse aspects of the College—spanning everything from its farm program to the influence of Bauhaus principles—and about the people and ideas that gave it such a lasting impact. In addition, catalogue entries highlight selected works, including writings, musical compositions, visual arts, and crafts. The book’s fresh approach and rich illustration program convey the atmosphere of creativity and experimentation that was unique to Black Mountain College, and that served as an inspiration to so many. This timely volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in the College and its enduring legacy.

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957

Precious: The History and Mystery of Gems Across Time

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Ballantine Books

The first monograph on a rising star who is one of contemporary art's most celebrated painters
Los Angeles-based artist Jonas Wood creates vivid images, where space and everyday life are rendered with compressed perspective in bold graphic hues. This monograph - the first on the artist's work - brings together his most significant paintings and drawings. In doing so, it offers a unique insight into the vast array of his sources, which include family photographs, found imagery, baseball cards, and other people's art, including the ceramics of his wife, the artist Shio Kusaka. With contributions by curator and writer Helen Molesworth, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Ian Alteveer, and a conversation between Wood and fellow Los Angeles-based artist Mark Grotjahn.

Jonas Wood (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Alteveer, Ian

Grotjahn, Mark

Phaidon Press

". . . big, visually gripping and psychologically strange [paintings]." -The New York Times Lari Pittman’s meticulously rendered paintings employ a complex mix of symbols and images to create dense and compelling narratives on love, violence, and desire. Drawing upon design, folk art, and decorative traditions, Pittman’s brightly colored paintings incorporate and rework a range of styles and genres—Victorian silhouettes, social realist murals, and Mexican retablos—to conjure a hallucinatory effect unique in contemporary painting. Pittman has earned numerous accolades in the art world and has been included in the Venice Biennale, Documenta X, and four Whitney Biennials. The first monograph on his thirty-year career, this book will be a vital addition to any art enthusiast’s library.

Lari Pittman

Phillips, LIsa

Koestenbaum, Wayne

STORR, Robert

Individual Artists

Skira/Rizzoli

The definitive monograph on contemporary African American painter Kerry James Marshall, accompanying a major traveling retrospective. This long-awaited volume celebrates the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of America’s greatest living painters. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits featuring powerful black figures, Marshall explores narratives of African American history from slave ships to the present and draws upon his deep knowledge of art history from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction, as well as other sources such as the comic book and the muralist tradition. With luscious color and brushstrokes and highly detailed patterning, his direct and intimate scenes of black middle-class life conjure a wide range of emotions, resulting in powerful paintings that confront the position of African Americans throughout American history. Richly illustrated, this monumental book features essays by noted curators as well as the artist, and more than 100 paintings from throughout the artist’s career arranged thematically by subject: history painting; beauty, as expressed through the nude, portraiture, and self-portraiture; landscape; religion; and the politics of black nationalism.

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry

Roelstraete, Dieter

Winograd, Abigail

Precious : The History and Mystery of Gems Across Time /anglais

Penguin Uk

In Kerry James Marshall's Rythm Mastr comic strip, an urban superhero battles the forces of evil using a combination of futuristic and traditional African accoutrements. This graphic narrativization is a stylistic update of Marshall's best-known work, monumental paintings of African-American subjects based on the traditional genre of narrative history painting. In One True Thing, the catalogue accompaniment to Marshall's first solo show in five years, the artist presents a multi-media range of new work that demonstrates the evolution of his ideas and his ongoing commitment to issues of construction and interpretation of meaning. The body of work Marshall is developing for the book and exhibition centers on the idea of ambiguity surrounding the representation of African Americans in our culture. Stemming in part from the Rythm Mastr comic strip project first developed for the 2000 Carnegie International exhibition, the monumental paintings in this new body of work portray figures in the urban landscape of the South Side of Chicago, inspired by the tradition of old-master paintings, especially the townscapes of Canaletto. Marshall is also creating several photographic series depicting urban settings along with a group of figurative works based on African tribal sculptures.

Kerry James Marshall: One True Thing: Meditations On Black Aesthetics

Mills, Charles

Marshall, Kerry James

Fitzpatrick, Robert

Smith, Elizabeth A.T.

Donaldson, Jeff

McLin, Nathaniel

Museum Of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Disturbingly majestic hurricanes, wind-energy fields, tornadoes, landslides, waterspouts, melting glaciers, forest fires and newly mutant species are some of the subjects of Alexis Rockman's deeply hued and intricately crafted works on paper. Surreal and deeply critical of man's destructive relationship to the environment, the primary works collected in this volume, published to accompany Rockman's first major large-scale museum exhibition in the United States, were all made since 2005. With echoes of J.M.W. Turner, Winslow Homer, Charles Burchfield and Rockman's own inimitable realism, the works surge with a power and flow of color that announces a new direction for this remarkable artist, who has been praised as much for his figurative exactitude as for his wildly imaginative take on what is considered the real. Essays are by the Rose Art Museum's Michael Rush and the Harvard University Art Museums' Helen Molesworth; the artist interview is by Brett Littman of The Drawing Center in New York.

Alexis Rockman: The Weight of Air

The Rose Art Museum

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

Books by Molesworth, Helen