Download or read book Art and Subjecthood The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism written by Graw and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many contemporary artworks evoke the human figure: consider the omnipresence of the mannequin in current installations of artists like John Miller, Thomas Hirschhorn, Heimo Zobernig, or David Lieske. Or consider the revival of a minimalist vocabulary, which embraces anthropomorphism as in the works of Isa Genzken and Rachel Harrison. This book brings together contributions from the eponymous conference, all of which seek to speculate on the reasons as to why, since the turn of the millennium, we have encountered so many artworks that tend to reconcile Minimalism with suggestions of the human figure. It proposes that this new artistic convention becomes rather questionable when discussed in the light of Franco Berardi's theory of semiocapitalism-a power technology that aims squarely at our human resources. The participants of this conference were asked to offer possible explanations for this wide acceptance of anthropomorphism could it be that this is a manifestation ofthe increasingly desperate desire for art to have agency?
Download or read book Art and Subjecthood written by Isabelle Graw and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is based on the conference 'Art and subjecthood: the return of the human figure in semiocapitalism' ... organized by the Institut f'ur Kunstkritik on July 1, 2011, at the Staatliche Hochschule f'ur Bildende K'unste/St'adelschule in Frankfurt am Main"--P. 6.
Download or read book I m Isa Genzken the Only Female Fool written by Nicolaus Schafhausen and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: X93;The Only Female Fool” is how Isa Genzken describes herself in the self-chosen title of her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wien. This statement is typical of the fluid boundaries between deep seriousness and the exuberant, eccentric spirit that pervades her work. Genzken’s artistic practice is characterized by a wide spectrum of media and forms, although her roots in sculpture always remain visible. The exhibition and catalogue focus on specific aspects of her oeuvre, including the mirror motif, the examination of architecture, and space as a social sphere; where early works are juxtaposed with series from later creative periods. Genzken’s collaboration with other artists and her admiration for certain artistic positions is also brought into focus, and selected works by Dan Graham, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Lawrence Weiner are presented in dialogue with Genzken’s multilayered work. 00Exhibition: Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (28.05-07.09.2014).
Download or read book Beckett s Breath written by Goudouna Sozita Goudouna and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-15 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the intersection of Samuel Beckett's thirty-second playlet Breath with the visual artsSamuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions. Breath (1969) is the focus and the only theatrical text examined in this study, which demonstrates how the piece became emblematic of the interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett's later writings, and of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts. The book attends to fifty breath-related artworks (including sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, performance art) and contextualises Beckett's Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism. Key FeaturesExamines Beckett's ultimate venture to define the borders between a theatrical performance and purely visual representationJuxtaposes Beckett's Breath with breath-related artworks by prominent visual artists who investigate the far-reaching potential of the representation of respiration by challenging modernist essentialismThe focus on this primary human physiological function and its relation to arts and culture is highly pertinent to studies of human performance, the nature of embodiment and its relation to cultural expressionFacilitates new intermedial discourses around the nature and aesthetic possibilities of breath, the minimum condition of existence, at the interface between the visual arts and performance practices and their relation to questions of spectacle, objecthood and materiality
Download or read book Against Value in the Arts and Education written by Sam Ladkin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-05-18 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against Value in the Arts and Education proposes that it is often the staunchest defenders of art who do it the most harm, by suppressing or mollifying its dissenting voice, by neutralizing its painful truths, and by instrumentalizing its ambivalence. The result is that rather than expanding the autonomy of thought and feeling of the artist and the audience, art’s defenders make art self-satisfied, or otherwise an echo-chamber for the limited and limiting self-description of people’s lives lived in an “audit culture”, a culture pervaded by the direct and indirect excrescence of practices of accountability. This book diagnoses the counter-intuitive effects of the rhetoric of value. It posits that the auditing of values pervades the fabric of people’s work-lives, their education, and increasingly their everyday experience. The book uncovers figures of resentment, disenchantment and alienation fostered by the dogma of value. It argues instead that value judgments can behave insidiously, and incorporate aesthetic, ethical or ideological values fundamentally opposed to the “value” they purportedly name and describe. The collection contains contributions from leading scholars in the UK and US with contributions from anthropology, the history of art, literature, education, musicology, political science, and philosophy.
Download or read book Dolls Photography and the Late Lacan written by Rosalinda Quintieri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating new book, Rosalinda Quintieri addresses some of the key questions of visual theory concerning our unending fascination with simulacra by evaluating the recent return of the life-size doll in European and American visual culture. Through a focus on the contemporary photographic and cinematic forms of this figure and a critical mobilisation of its anthropological complexity, this book offers a new critical understanding of this classical aesthetic motif as a way to explore the relevance that doubling, fantasy and simulation hold in our contemporary culture. Quintieri explores the figure of the inanimate human double as an "inhuman partner", reflecting on contemporary visuality as the field of a hypermodern, post-Oedipal aesthetic. Through a series of case studies that blur traditional boundaries between practices (photography, performance, sculpture, painting, documentary) and between genres (comedy, drama, fairy tale), Quintieri puts in contrast the new function of the double and its plays of simulations on the background of the capitalist injunction to enjoy. Engaging with new theories on post-Oedipal forms of subjectivity developed within the Lacanian orientation of psychoanalysis, Quintieri offers exciting analyses of still and moving photographic work, giving body to an original aesthetic model that promises to revitalise our understanding of contemporary photography and visual culture. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and researchers from Lacanian psychoanalysis, visual studies and cultural theory, as well as readers with an academic interest in the cultural history of dolls and the theory of the uncanny.
Download or read book Mean Boys written by Geoffrey Mak and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of Monsters and Gay Bar, a ferocious inquiry into art and desire, style and politics, madness and salvation, and coming of age in our volatile, image-obsessed present. You know them when you see them: mean boys take up space, wielding cruelty to claim their place in the pecking order. Some mean boys make art or music or fashion; others make memes. Mean boys stomp the runways in Milan and Paris; mean boys marched at Charlottesville. And in the eyes of critic and style expert Geoffrey Mak, mean boys are the emblem of our society: an era ravenous for novelty, always thirsting for the next edgy thing, even at our peril. In this pyrotechnic memoir-in-essays, Mak ranges widely over our landscape of paranoia, crisis, and frenetic, clickable consumption. He grants readers an inside pass to the spaces where culture was made and unmade over the past decade, from the antiseptic glare of white-walled galleries to the darkest corners of Berlin techno clubs. As the gay son of an evangelical minister, Mak fled to those spaces, hoping to join a global, influential elite. But when calamity struck, it forced Mak to confront the costs of mistaking status for belonging. Fusing personal essay and cultural critique, Mean Boys investigates exile and return, transgression and forgiveness, and the value of faith, empathy, and friendship in a world designed to make us want what is bad for us.
Download or read book Skizo mails written by Franco Berardi and published by Doormats. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Electronic diary entries from around the world dating from 2009 to 2012 of an Italian cultural theorist & political activist.
Download or read book Contemporary Sculpture and the Critique of Display Cultures written by Dan Adler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Dan Adler addresses recent tendencies in contemporary art toward assemblage sculpture and how these works incorporate tainted materials – often things left on the side of the road, according to the logic and progress of the capitalist machine – and combine them in ways that allow each element to retain a degree of empirical specificity. Adler develops a range of aesthetic models through which these practices can be understood to function critically. Each chapter focuses on a single exhibition: Isa Genzken’s "OIL" (German Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2007), Geoffrey Farmer’s midcareer survey (Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal, 2008), Rachel Harrison’s "Consider the Lobster" (CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, 2009), and Liz Magor’s "The Mouth and Other Storage Facilities" (Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, 2008).
Download or read book Culture Catastrophe and Rhetoric written by Robert Hariman and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores political culture, especially the catastrophic elements of the global social order emerging in the twenty-first century. By emphasizing the texture of political action, the book theorizes how social context becomes evident on the surface of events and analyzes the performative dimensions of political experience. The attention to catastrophe allows for an understanding of how ordinary people contend with normal system operation once it is indistinguishable from system breakdown. Through an array of case studies, the book provides an account of change as it is experienced, negotiated, and resisted in specific settings that define a society’s capacity for political action.
Download or read book Bad New Days written by Hal Foster and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the world’s leading art theorists dissects a quarter century of artistic practice Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror. Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it. Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms “abject,” “archival,” “mimetic,” and “precarious.”
Download or read book Rich Texts written by John Kelsey and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiled for the first time here, the critic, artist, gallerist, dealer, translator John Kelsey's selected essays gamesomely convey some of the most poignant challenges in the art world and in the many social roles it creates. “When the critic chooses to become a smuggler, a hack, a cook, or an artist,” Kelsey said at a 2007 conference at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, “it's maybe because criticism as such remains tied to an outmoded social relation.” It is precisely this relation that Kelsey intends to not only critique but also to surpass. In this way, Kelsey's “Rich Texts” play the double role of explaining the art world and actively participating in it; they close the distance between the work of art and how we talk about it. Originally published in Artforum—where Kelsey is a contributing editor—Texte zur Kunst, Parkett, and various artists' catalogues, the essays compiled in Rich Texts have all been written over the last decade, and therefore embody a timeliness that strikes at the core of the contemporary art world and the crises that have come to define it. Institut für Kunstkritik Series
Download or read book Like Life written by Luke Syson and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2018-03-19 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since before the myth of Pygmalion bringing a statue to life through desire, artists have used sculpture to explore the physical materiality of the body. This groundbreaking volume examines key sculptural works from thirteenth-century Europe to the global present, revealing new insights into the strategies artists deploy to blur the distinction between art and life. Three-dimensional renderings of the human figure are presented here in numerous manifestations, created by artists ranging from Donatello and Edgar Degas to Kiki Smith and Jeff Koons. Featuring works created in media both traditional and unexpected—such as glass, leather, and blood—Like Life presents sculpture by turns conventional and shocking, including effigies, dolls, mannequins, automata, waxworks, and anatomical models. Texts by curators and cultural historians as well as contemporary artists complete this provocative exploration of realistic representations of the human body. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}
Download or read book Thinking Through Painting written by Isabelle Graw and published by Sternberg Press. This book was released on 2012-09-07 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction : remarks on contemporary painting's perseverance André Rottmann -- Painting and atrocity : the Tuymans strategy Peter Geimer -- Questions for Peter Geimer Isabelle Graw -- Response to Isabelle Graw Peter Geimer -- The value of painting : notes on unspecificity, indexicality, and highly valuable quasi-persons Isabelle Graw -- Questions for Isabelle Graw Peter Gaimer -- Response to Peter Gaimer Isabelle Graw.
Download or read book The Wretched of the Screen written by Hito Steyerl and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2013-04-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Hito Steyerl's writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerl's landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image. Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings. e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
Download or read book The Brancusi Effect written by Paola Mola and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents archival documents of Brancusi's second solo exhibition at Brummer Gallery, New York, which opened on November 17, 1933.
Download or read book Jutta Koether written by Jutta Koether and published by Dumont. This book was released on 2006 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jutta Koether's translucent color fields, expressive brushstrokes and female subjects--as well as her use of poetry, art history and Mylar--can make her seem like a feminist answer to the Cologne art scene, a counterpart to artists like Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke and Albert Oehlen. In fact, she is a central contemporary painter in her own right, as well as a performance artist, a musician and a critic. She collaborates musically with Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Television's Tom Verlaine, contributes regularly to Artforum and the respected German culture magazine Spex, and teaches in Bard College's MFA program--and has recently shown her work at Reema Spaulings Fine Art and Thomas Erben Gallery in New York. Koether's work, which the New York Times has called "vibrant" and "intriguing," was a standout in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. This look back documents the artist's oeuvre from the mid-80s forward, with an extensive selection of images.
