Download or read book Words to Be Looked At written by Liz Kotz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-02-26 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical study of the use of language and the proliferation of text in 1960s art and experimental music, with close examinations of works by Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, John Cage, Douglas Huebler, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner, La Monte Young, and others. Language has been a primary element in visual art since the 1960s—in the form of printed texts, painted signs, words on the wall, recorded speech, and more. In Words to Be Looked At, Liz Kotz traces this practice to its beginnings, examining works of visual art, poetry, and experimental music created in and around New York City from 1958 to 1968. In many of these works, language has been reduced to an object nearly emptied of meaning. Robert Smithson described a 1967 exhibition at the Dwan Gallery as consisting of “Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read.” Kotz considers the paradox of artists living in a time of social upheaval who use words but chose not to make statements with them. Kotz traces the proliferation of text in 1960s art to the use of words in musical notation and short performance scores. She makes two works the “bookends” of her study: the “text score” for John Cage's legendary 1952 work 4'33”—written instructions directing a performer to remain silent during three arbitrarily determined time brackets—and Andy Warhol's notorious a: a novel—twenty-four hours of endless talk, taped and transcribed—published by Grove Press in 1968. Examining works by artists and poets including Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, George Brecht, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Jackson Mac Low, and Lawrence Weiner, Kotz argues that the turn to language in 1960s art was a reaction to the development of new recording and transmission media: words took on a new materiality and urgency in the face of magnetic sound, videotape, and other emerging electronic technologies. Words to Be Looked At is generously illustrated, with images of many important and influential but little-known works.
Download or read book Work Ethic written by Helen Anne Molesworth and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the proliferation of new ways of making "art" in the 1960s by focusing on the changed organization of work in society at the time. Co-published with The Baltimore Museum of Art in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name.
Download or read book Conversazione con George Brecht written by George Brecht and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Off Limits written by Simon Anderson and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By constantly challenging one another to take art "Off Limits," George Brecht, Geoffrey Hendricks, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, Robert Watts, and Robert Whitman defied the art world, bringing Abstract Expressionism to a screeching halt and setting the stage for the art of the rest of the century. Off Limits accompanies a major exhibition of the same title at The Newark Museum, February 18 - May 16, 1999.
Download or read book Action Art written by John Gray and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1993-05-30 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive international bibliography is the first to attempt documentation of this diverse field, covering the history of Artist's Performance. It focuses on its early twentieth-century antecedents in such movements as Futurism, Dada, Russian Constructivism, and the Bauhaus as well as its peak period in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s with such developments as Gutai, Fluxus, Viennese Actionism, Situationism, and Guerrilla Art Action. Major emphasis is also given to sources on 115 individual performance artists and groups. More than 3700 entries document print and media materials dating from 1914 to 1992. Organized for maximum accessibility, the sources are also extensively cross-referenced and are indexed by artist, subject, title, and author. Three appendices identify reference works, libraries, and archives, and addenda material not found in the book text, and two others list artists by country and by group or collective.
Download or read book Fluxus Forms written by Natilee Harren and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-03-20 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art. . . . Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples,” writes artist George Maciunas in his Fluxus manifesto of 1963. Reacting against an elitist art world enthralled by modernist aesthetics, Fluxus encouraged playfulness, chance, irreverence, and viewer participation. The diverse collective—including George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, and Robert Watts—embraced humble objects and everyday gestures as critical means of finding freedom and excitement beyond traditional forms of art-making. While today the Fluxus collective is recognized for its radical neo-avant-garde works of performance, publishing, and relational art and its experimental, interdisciplinary approach, it was not taken seriously in its own time. With Fluxus Forms, Natilee Harren captures the magnetic energy of Fluxus activities and collaborations that emerged at the intersections of art, music, performance, and literature. The book offers insight into the nature of art in the 1960s as it traces the international development of the collective’s unique intermedia works—including event scores and Fluxbox multiples—that irreversibly expanded the boundaries of contemporary art.
Download or read book Corporate Imaginations written by Mari Dumett and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first extended study of the renowned artists’ collective Fluxus, Corporate Imaginations examines the group as it emerged on three continents from 1962 to 1978 in its complexities, contradictions, and historical specificity. The collective’s founder, George Maciunas, organized Fluxus like a multinational corporation, simulating corporate organization and commodity flows, yet it is equally significant that he imagined critical art practice in this way at that time. For all its avant-garde criticality, Fluxus also ambivalently shared aspects of the rising corporate culture of the day. In this book, Mari Dumett addresses the “business” of Fluxus and explores the larger discursive issues of organization, mediatization, routinization, automation, commoditization, and systematization that Fluxus artists both manipulated and exposed. A study of six central figures in the group—George Brecht, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Mieko Shiomi, and Robert Watts—reveals how they developed historically specific strategies of mimicking the capitalist system. These artists appropriated tools, occupied spaces, revealed operations, and, ultimately, “performed the system” itself via aesthetics of organization, communication, events, branding, routine, and global mapping. Through “corporate imaginations,” Fluxus artists proposed “strategies for living” as conscious creative subjects within a totalizing and increasingly global system, demonstrating how these strategies must be repeated in an ongoing negotiation of new relations of power and control between subject and system.
Download or read book George Brecht written by Thomas Kellein and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fluxus written by Natasha Lushetich and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the most definition-resistant art movement in history and departing from its two chief characteristics: intermediality and interactivity, this book develops an original theory of practice, the experiential philosophy of non-duality, which is the philosophy of dynamic co-constitutivity. This is done by tracing the performativity of intermedial works – works that fall conceptually between the art and the life media, such as Bengt af Klintbergs’s event score: “Eat an orange as if it were an apple” – in five key areas of human experience: language, temporality, the sensorium, social rites and rituals, and systems of economic exchange. The main argument, woven with the aid of the Derridian blind tactics, the Gramscian production of social life and the Zen-derived interexpression of Kitaro Nishida, is that the practical philosophy of co-constitutivity arises from the logic of the intermedium. In pursuing this argument, the book does three things: (1) it theorises an oeuvre that has remained under-theorised due to its fundamentally non-discursive nature and in doing so reinstates Fluxus as an influential cultural, rather than a “merely” artistic paradigm; (2) it serves as a companion to thinking by doing since most Fluxus intermedia are ready-mades, and, as such, readily available in the everyday environment; and (3) it establishes the counter-hegemonic logic of fluxing while tracing its legacy in contemporary practices as diverse as the culture-jamming activism of The Yes Men, the paradoxical performance work of Song Dong and the pervasive game worlds of Blast Theory. Natasha Lushetich is an artist, researcher and Lecturer in Performance at the University of Exeter, UK. Her specialist areas include intermedia, live art, performance and philosophy, and questions of identity and ideology. Her recent writings have appeared in Babilonia, Performance Research, TDR, Theatre Journal, Total Art Journal as well as in a number of edited collections.
Download or read book Material Imagination written by Natalie Adamson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-07-24 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Material Imagination examines the interrelated concepts of matter, materialism, and materiality in postwar European art, from 1946-1972. Provides a unique perspective on European art by prioritizing material dimensions over concept or context, while also paying attention to theoretical and historical concerns Explores artists’ methods and materials in order to better understand the social and cultural environments in which their works of art were made Demonstrates how materials can be harnessed to affect the critical interpretation of artwork Brings together exceptional illustrations and new research in eight essays by art historians and scholars
Download or read book John Cage written by Julia Robinson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-08-12 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extended trajectory of Cage literature, from early critical reaction to writing by contemporaries to current scholarship. John Cage (1912–1992) defined a radical practice of composition that changed the course of modern music and shaped a new conceptual horizon for postwar art. Famous for his use of chance and “silence” in musical works, a pioneer in electronic music and the nonstandard use of instruments, Cage was one of the most influential composers of the last century. This volume traces a trajectory of writings on the artist, from the earliest critical reactions to the scholarship of today. If the first writing on Cage in the American context, often written by close associates with Cage's involvement, seemed lacking in critical distance, younger scholars—a generation removed—have recently begun to approach the legacy from a new perspective, with more developed theoretical frameworks and greater skepticism. This book captures that evolution. The texts include discussions of Cage's work in the context of the New Music scene in Germany in the 1950s; Yvonne Rainer's essay looking back on Cage and New York experimentalism of the 1960s; a complex and original mapping of Cage's place in a wider avant-garde genealogy that includes Le Corbusier and Moholy-Nagy; a musicologist's account of Cage's process of defining and formalizing his concept of indeterminacy; and an analysis of Cage's project that considers his strategies of self-representation as key to his unique impact on modern and postmodern art.
Download or read book Res written by Francesco Pellizzi and published by Peabody Museum Press. This book was released on 2005-12-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contents of this issue are: “Between Creation and Destruction,” by Finbarr Barry Flood and Zoë Sara Strother; “People Have Three Eyes: Ephemeral Art and the Archive in Southeastern Nigeria,” by Sarah Adams; “Beyond Monument Lies Empire: Mapping Songhay Space in Tenth- to Sixteenth-Century West Africa,” by Kristina Van Dyke; “Censorship and Iconoclasm—Unsettling Monuments,” by John Peffer; “Recycling Icons and Bodies in Chinese Anti-Buddhist Persecutions,” by Eric Reinders; “Modifications of Ancient Maya Sculpture,” by Bryan R. Just; “Roman Oscilla: An Assessment,” by Rabun Taylor; “Turning Tale into Vision: Time and Image in the Divina Commedia,” by Gervase Rosser; “Building outside Time in Alberti’s De re aedificatoria,” by Marvin Trachtenberg; and “Restoration as Re-creation at the Sainte-Chapelle,” by Meredith Cohen; and the documents and discussions “The Constitution of Pleasure: François-Joseph Belanger and the Chateau de Bagatelle,” by Taha Al-Douri; “Composing Vinteuil: Proust’s Unheard Music,” by Mauro Carbone; “Diskotel 1967: Israel and the Western Wall in the Aftermath of the Six Day War,” by Daniel Bertrand Monk; “The ‘Kulturbolschewiken’ I: Fluxus, the Abolition of Art, the Soviet Union, and ‘Pure Amusement,’” by Cuauhtémoc Medina; and “Aby Warburg in America Again: With an Edition of His Unpublished Correspondence with Edwin R. A. Seligman (1927–1928),” by Davide Stimilli.
Download or read book Conversations with Beethoven written by Sanford Friedman and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the famous composer’s notebooks, this biographical novel offers “a perfect portrait of an irascible genius” and “revelatory fossils of the last year of Beethoven’s anguished life” (Edmund White) Deaf as he was, Beethoven had to be addressed in writing, and he was always accompanied by a notebook in which people could scribble questions and comments. In a tour de force fiction invention, Conversations with Beethoven tells the story of the last year of Beethoven’s life almost entirely through such notebook entries. Friends, family, students, doctors, and others attend to the volatile Maestro, whose sometimes unpredictable and often very loud replies we infer. A fully fleshed and often very funny portrait of Beethoven emerges. He struggles with his music and with his health; he argues with and insults just about everyone. Most of all, he worries about his wayward—and beloved—nephew Karl. A large cast of Dickensian characters surrounds the great composer at the center of this wonderfully engaging novel, which deepens in the end to make a memorable music of its own.
Download or read book Fluxus Administration written by Colby Chamberlain and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "George Maciunas is typically associated with the famous art collective Fluxus, of which he is often thought to have been the leader. In this book, critic and art historian Colby Chamberlain wants us to question two things: first, the idea that Fluxus was a "group" in any conventional sense, and second, that Maciunas was its "leader." Instead, Chamberlain shows us how Maciunas used the paper materials of bureaucracy in his art-cards, certificates, charts, files, and plans, among others-to subvert his own status as a "figurehead" of this collective and even as a biographical entity. Each of the book's chapters situates Maciunas's artistic practice in relation to a different domain: education, communication, production, housing, and health. We learn about his use of the postal service to make Fluxus into an international network; his manipulation of US copyright law to pursue a "Soviet" ideal of collective authorship; his intervention in Manhattan's zoning restrictions as founder and manager of the "Fluxhouse" artists' lofts in SoHo; and his performances protesting against normative ideals of health and family, focusing on his own, ultimately failed medical self-management. Fluxus Administration is not a biography, but it does delve more deeply than any other book into Maciunas's life and work, showing the lengths to which the artist himself went to disrupt any easy account of himself"--
Download or read book The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision written by T. Brown and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the explosion of interest in the "global 1968," the arts in this period - both popular and avant-garde forms - have too often been neglected. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars in history, cultural studies, musicology and other areas to explore the symbiosis of the sonic and the visual in the counterculture of the 1960s.
Download or read book Escape to Life written by Eckart Goebel and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2012-05-29 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After 1933, New York City gave shelter to many leading German and German-Jewish intellectuals. Stripped of their German citizenship by the Nazi-regime, these public figures either stayed in the New York area or moved on to California and other places. This compendium, adopting the title of a famous volume published by Klaus and Erika Mann in 1939, explores the impact the US, and NYC in particular, had on these authors as well as the influence they in turn exerted on US intellectual life. Moreover, it addresses the transformations that took place in the exiled intellectuals’ thinking when it was translated into another language and addressed to an American audience. Among the individuals presented in this volume, are such prominent names as T.W. Adorno, H. Arendt, W. Benjamin, E. Bloch, B. Brecht, S. Kracauer, the Mann family, S. Morgenstern, and E. Panofsky. The authors of the essays in this compendium were free to choose the angle (biography, theory, politics) or aspect (a single work, a personal constellation) deemed best to illuminate the given intellectual’s work. Acclaimed NYC photographer Fred Stein, a German-Jewish refugee from Dresden, produced numerous portraits of exiled intellectuals and artists. A selection of these compelling portraits is reproduced in this book for the first time.
Download or read book Michael Nyman Collected Writings written by Pwyll ap Siôn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over three decades Michael Nyman's music has succeeded in reaching beyond the small community of contemporary music aficionados to a much wider range of listeners. An important element in unlocking the key to Nyman's success lies in his writings about music, which preoccupied him for over a decade from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. During this time Nyman produced over 100 articles, covering almost every conceivable musical style and genre - from the Early Music revival and the West's interest in 'world' music, or from John Cage and minimalism to rock and pop. Nyman initiated a number of landmark moments in the course of late twentieth-century music along the way: he was one of the first to critique the distinction between the European avant-garde and the American experimental movement; he was the first to coin the term 'minimalism' in relation to the music of (then largely unknown) Steve Reich and Terry Riley, and later Philip Glass; the first to seriously engage with the music of the English experimental tradition and the importance of Cornelius Cardew, and to identify the importance of Art Colleges in nurturing and developing a radical alternative to modernism; and one of the first writers to grasp the significance of post-minimalists such as Brian Eno and Harold Budd, and to realize how these elements could be brought together into a new aesthetic vision for his own creative endeavours, which was formulated during the late 1970s and early 80s. Much of what transformed and defined Nyman's musical character may be found within the pages of this volume of his writings, comprehensively edited and annotated for the first time, and including previously unpublished material from Nyman's second interview with Steve Reich in 1976. There is also much here to engage the minds of those who are interested in pre-twentieth century music, from Early and Baroque music (Handel and Purcell in particular) to innovative features in Haydn, spatial elements in Berlioz, or Bruckner and Mahler's symphonic works.
