Art at the Armory: Occupied Territory

Arts & Photography

Bruegmann, Robert

Wright, Beryl J.

Rorimer, Anne

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Museum Of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Over the past 50 years, East European artists have seen the virtual breakdown of their societies and their cultures. Instead of seeking to replace their devalued ideologies with new belief systems, many have profoundly challenged the very concept of belief systems. In this provocative exhibition catalogue, artists and essayists from Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgari and Slovakia confront Eastern Europe's cultural watershed head on. In addition to the excellent illustrations, the book includes a foldout timeline of noteworthy events since 1945, plus regional maps and a statistical profile of each country.

Beyond Belief: East Central European Contemporary Art

Marcoci, Roxana

History & Criticism

Conceived as a series of journeys akin to those of saints or shamans, Negotiating Rapture brings together the work of Francis Bacon, Joseph Beuys, James Lee Byars, Lucio Fontana, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anselm Kiefer, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and Bill Viola. These artists are exhibited together in order to reveal their diverse expressions of a shared longing: the basic and enduring human urge to transcend the ordinary and experience the sublime.Juxtaposed with a range of works by Old Masters and examples from architecture, literature, and anthropology, the works in Negotiating Rapture show how artists, as creators, move beyond common experience to a state approaching religious ecstasy and how we, as viewers, can in turn discover a deeper involvement in our own humanity. Major essays by Homi K. Bhabha, Georges Didi-Huberman, David Morgan, and Lee Siegel, as well as a series of focused contributions by Yve-Alain Bois, Wendy Doniger, Kenneth Frampton, Martin E. Marty, John Hallmark Neff, Annemarie Schimmel, and Helen Tworkov, consider how rapture resonates both in a cultural context and within the experience of a single human being. A "Travel Guide to Negotiating Rapture," written by curators Richard Francis and Sophia Shaw, explores how each artist in the exhibition has sought to define rapture and, by guiding the viewer/reader, initiates scrutiny of transformative experiences.

Negotiating Rapture

It is said that art reveals the heart of humankind, architecture the soul of civilization. This summer, heart and soul will merge in the new building for Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. Designed by famous Berlin architect Josef Paul Kleihues (his first U.S. commission), the new MCA stands beside both celebrated Michigan Avenue and the city's stunning lake shore. This book examines the entire process of starting and then dramatically expanding a contemporary art museum, from the tumultuous sixties to the cusp of a new century. The MCA's achievements, such as Christo's first wrapping of a public building (1969), Frida Kahlo's first U.S. exhibition (1978), and Jeff Koons's first full-scale museum exhibition (1988) are discussed, accompanied by historic photographs. In his essay "Josef Paul Kleihues: Chicago and Berlin," art and architecture critic Franz Schulze considers the conceptual framework of Kleihues's design for the MCA, as well as the architect's adaptive reuse of the Hamburger Bahnhof train station to house Berlin's Museum of Contemporary Art. Finally, color reproductions of 40 works from the vast MCA permanent collection are juxtaposed with informative text on more than 30 featured artists, including Francis Bacon, Leon Golub, Jasper Johns, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Cindy Sherman, and Andy Warhol. The sum of these parts is a fascinating volume that thoroughly examines the very idea of an art museum according to its corresponding ideal: presenting, interpreting, and collecting the art of our time for a diverse audience.

Collective Vision: Creating a Contemporary Art Museum

Performance Anxiety

Nickas, Bob

Consey, Kevin

A photographic innovator and conceptual artist, Robert Heinecken played an important role in the development of contemporary art practice. That role is critically assessed in this exhibition catalog, which accompanies a major traveling retrospective organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. This volume, the first comprehensive book on Heinecken since 1980, illustrates all the major work in his thirty-year career, and features essays by leading photography critic and historian A.D. Coleman and exhibition curator Lynne Warren.

Robert Heinecken: Photographist- A Thirty-Five Year Retrospective

David Pagel

Irene Borger

Susie Cohen

A.D. Coleman

Lynne Warren

Individual Artists

Sharon Lockhart's photographs and films frame the quiet moments and details of everyday life, exploring the subtle relationships between photography and cinema. Much of her photographic work over the past six years has relied on the staging of scenes characteristic of filmmaking; her work has also treated issues of time, sequence and narrative in a style reminiscent of Conceptual art. Lockhart's films emphasize the photographic basis of the moving image, often using a fixed perspective to capture unexpected movements and human reactions in a given situation. This catalogue documents the largest and most significant solo exhibition of Lockhart's work in an American museum to date, and focuses on Lockhart's photographic and cinematic work since 1994, including her major film projects Goshogaoka (1997) and Teatro Amazonas (1999). Also featured are essays by curator Dominic Molon and art historian Norman Bryson, focusing on Lockhart's rereading of conceptual photography, and her complex approach to narrative and the gaze.

Sharon Lockhart

Molon, Dominic

Negative Thoughts is AA Bronson's first major project outside of the context of General Idea, the artist collective which he co-founded with Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz. From 1986 until the deaths of Zontal and Partz in 1994, General Idea focused on addressing the AIDS crisis. The group became known for their temporary public artworks, which used existing forms of communication and distribution, such as billboards, magazines, subway posters, television, and the Internet. The exhibition documented here combines three works by General Idea along with new works of Bronson's as a meditation on the themes of life and death in the age of AIDS. This accompanying catalogue, designed both to stand on its own and to extend the exhibition to a wider audience, combines an extended memoir with approximately 50 photographs of the artist and his friends to form an autobiographical reflection on Bronson's relation to death, AIDS, and life beyond AIDS.

Aa Bronson: Negative Thoughts

Bronson, AA

Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick--who is also a character actor, former boxer and radio disc jockey--creates colorful and intriguing works that layer imagery from his Chicago childhood, advertising, comic books, and science and nature texts. This spring, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, is mounting a national tour of Max and Gaby's Alphabet, the public premiere of a suite of Fitzpatrick's four-color etchings. Max and Gaby's Alphabet spells out the letters of the alphabet in delightful characters and wondrous objects suggested by the artist's two young children. Conceived by the artist as a means to inspire school-age children, Max and Gaby's Alphabet is intended to interest an adult audience as well as young readers. This fully illustrated color catalogue reproduces the finely detailed etchings at their actual size and features an essay by film director Jonathan Demme, in whose films Fitzpatrick has appeared.

Tony Fitzpatrick: Max And Gaby's Alphabet

Mickey Cartin

Jonathan Demme

Tony Fitzpatrick

H.C. Westermann

"This volume, published on the occasion of a major exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, is the first comprehensive study of Westermann's sculptures, which are examined closely in original and lively texts and more than two hundred illustrations. Encompassing the vast range of the artist's work, from his early constructions of the mid-1850s to his final sculptures of the early 1980s, this catalogue places Westermann's art in the context of his wartime service, his personal experiences, and the politics of his time. The resulting portrait reveals as never before the ideas behind Westermann's unique assemblages."

H. C. Westermann, Robert Storr, Lynne Warren, Dennis Adrian

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Books by Museum Of Contemporary Art, Chicago