Offering new insights into the role of museums, Wouter Davidts (author of The Fall of the Studio) investigates the connection between architecture, the museum as an institution, the museum program and art. A museum’s architecture may be deployed in a variety of ways: as an autonomous icon, as a flexible space, as a PR instrument, as a memory machine, as a stimulus to urban renewal, as a landscape theme, as a political trump card, as a storage depot for artifacts, and so on. Davidts explores these perspectives through several case studies--the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern and US institutions such as The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA Los Angeles and MoMA P.S.1 in New York.

Triple Bond: Essays on Art, Architecture and the Museum (Vis-a-Vis)

Politics & Social Sciences

Davidts, Wouter

Social Sciences

Valiz/Antennae Series

Italian philosopher Antonio Negri has declared that “Every kind of change belongs to a form of community art,” inverting the convention that community art can be an integral component of social change and extending the rubric of art to propose a commons of all those striving to effect change in social, economic, technological and ecological arenas. So how do these endeavors influence and act upon one another? In Community Art, artists and theorists Tilde Björfors, Bertus Borgers, Paul De Bruyne, Changchengh, Luigi Coppola, An De bisschop, Miguel Escobar Varela, Jan Fabre, Alison M. Friedman, Pascal Gielen, Sonja Lavaert, Carol Martin, Antonio Negri, Alida Neslo, Tessa Overbeek, Lionel Popkin, Richard Schechner, Hein Schoer, Ricky Seabra, Jonas Staal, Klaas Tindemans, Luk van den Dries, Quirijn Lennert van den Hoogen, Hans van Maanen, Bart Van Nuffelen and Karel Vanhaesebrouck explore the practices of artistic and social movements in western and non-western societies.

Community Art: The Politics of Trespassing

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Locating the Producers investigates how and why more long-term and/or accumulative public art projects have began to emerge in response to single locations, and provides in-depth examination of sustained public art projects, including: The Blue House, IJburg (NL), Trekroner Art Plan, Roskilde (DK), Grizdale Arts, Cumbria (UK), and Edgware Road, London.

Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art

Moving Together examines contemporary dance from both a theoretical and a practical perspective, with interactions between the two. The author analyses three important tendencies in contemporary dance: "pure" dance, dance theatre, and (self-) reflexive dance. He proposes a theoretical, conceptual framework, and through extensive dialogues with choreographers he investigates how artistic cooperation results in dance. "Clearly written, meticulously researched and theoretically enriching, Rudi Laermans' first-hand accounts of key performances by some of the most influential names that have defined contemporary choreography since the mid-1980s make us see how crucial the Flemish dance scene has been for the development of contemporary experimental dance-and therefore, how it has also been a strong influence in those discourses that inform the reception and perception of international dance today. Absolutely essential." --André Lepecki, Associate Professor in Performance Studies, New York University. Rudi Laermans is Professor of Social Theory at the University of Leuven (Belgium) and a regular guest teacher at P.A.R.T.S., the Brussels-based international school for contemporary dance headed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. As an academic, he has published widely in both national and international journals and books within the areas of social theory, cultural sociology and the sociology of the arts. Also active as a critic and essayist, he published numerous articles on contemporary dance and is one of the leading voices on, and partly also within, the Flemish dance field.

Moving Together: Making and Theorizing Contemporary Dance

Performing Arts

More often than not, a work of art is produced through a dialectic of action and reflection--a zooming into and out of the material at hand (be it physical or conceptual) that eventually arrives at a synthesis of the two drives. See It Again, Say It Again explores this process of reflection and research within the making of an art work. Does it lead to better art? What do artists actually do when they engage in research? The book includes essays by artists and theorists Janneke Wesseling, Jeroen Boomgaard, Jeremiah Day, Stephan Dillemuth, Irene Fortuyn, Gijs Frieling, Henri Jacobs, W.J.M. Kok, Aglaia Konrad, Frank Mandersloot, Aernout Mik, Ruchama Noorda, Vanessa Ohlraun, Graeme Sullivan, Moniek Toebosch, Lonnie van Brummelen &amp; Siebren de Haan, Hilde Van Gelder, Philippe Van Snick, Barbara Visser, Kitty Zijlmans and Italo Zuffi.

See It Again, Say It Again: The Artist as Researcher

Throughout the world, the educational field is being transformed into a marketplace in which institutions must compete for students, and are called on to assess their cultural contributions in terms of finance and management. Is there any room left for art in such a system? Teaching Art in the Neoliberal Realm investigates the wide-scale reorganization of art education in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, Latin America, Russia and The Netherlands, and seeks to determine both the current impact and future ramifications of market education on the arts and the artist. Most importantly, it provides prescriptions for a positive direction forward, steering between the cynical big business of the art market and the threatened idealism of classic art education. The thematic chapters, interviews and essays adopt both practical and theoretical approaches, and include such contributors as Richard Sennett, Marco Scotini and Dieter Lesage.

Teaching Art in the Neoliberal Realm: Realism versus Cynicism

Hertmans, Stefan

Boomgaard, Jeroen

Overbeek, Tessa

Today’s networked society offers us many possibilities for transmitting information, for interactive communication, mobility and flexibility. It also has a latent side effect: it renders the world ‘flat.’ Time-honored hierarchies, traditions, elites and canons are subject to the challenge of eroding movements. In such a flattened, horizontal world, art institutions are finding it hard to survive. After all, institutions traditionally represent verticality: historic profundity, tradition, dignity and certainty. In Institutional Attitudes, Kenny Cupers, Bart De Baere, Ann Demeester, Jimmie Durham, Alex Farquharson, Mark Fisher, Pascal Gielen, Marc Jacobs, Sonja Lavaert, Thijs Lijster, Isabell Lorey, Markus Miessen, Chantal Mouffe, Gerald Raunig, Patricia Reed, Nicolaus Schafhausen and Blake Stimson explore the future identity of art institutions. Will they be able to reinvent historical profundity? Is this desirable? And if so, what would these new vertical institutions look like?

Institutional Attitudes: Instituting Art in a Flat World (Antennae)

Reference

Is art criticism losing ground to the Internet and its rapidly proliferating art blogs? Do people still consider the art critics employed by newspapers and magazines the most important arbitrators of what is worth seeing and reading? Much recent discussion about the changing landscape of art writing, often framed as a crisis in criticism, has revolved around the question, "what is art criticism?" Spaces for Criticism, edited by Pascal Gielen, asks instead, "where is art criticism?" The contributors to this volume explore new ways and new spaces where art critics might interact with works of art, artists, scholars and a varied, increasingly informed public. The authors argue that criticism has shifted to different places and different stages, experiencing both a displacement onto new media and into new geographic regions and new institutional structures.

Spaces for Criticism: Shifts in Contemporary Art Discourses (Antennae)

Equated with notions of public interaction, the term "participation" is often used very loosely, especially within the contexts of new media and innovation research. Among a recent generation of artists and designers working in new media, there is an increasing need to work across disciplines and domains in ways that enable end users to contribute content, form and structure. These artists are currently developing new parameters in creative collaboration and participation in order to meet the specific working methods and processes required by new media. Participation Is Risky illustrates how interesting participative practices and results are typically characterized by the "risky" confrontation between the differences of disciplines and perspectives. While their work will have no fixed form, Participation Is Risky proposes that artists who engage in participative practices must take the risk of abandoning their traditional roles and evolve through participatory collaboration.

Participation Is Risky: Approaches to Joint Creative Processes

Dread: The Dizziness of Freedom reflects on possible re-articulations of the concept of dread in our times. Associated with the "dizziness of freedom" by Søren Kierkegaard, and with "the ecstasy of nihilism" by China Miéville, the experience of dread is a defining characteristic of the contemporary human condition, and--according to the contributors to this volume--an essential and potentially productive emotion. However dark and fatalistic its connotations, through its dialectical coupling of caution and transgression, of paralysis and overdrive, dread allows us to imagine the world differently. Through conversations with and essays by some of today’s foremost cultural commentators, this book explores the creative agency of dread--an agency that is created by the very forces wishing to suppress or even destroy it--as well as its politics and related conceptions of fear and anxiety.

Dread: The Dizziness of Freedom (Antennae)

Simon Critchley

China Miéville

Ben Hammersley

Thomas Hirschhorn

Johan Grimonprez

James Bridle

Timo Arnall

Kevin Slavin

Superflux

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