MINIMAL ART AND ARTISTS

This book is is a study of Minimal art and artists, particularly painters, sculptors, 3-D, installation and land artists.

All of the key practitioners and theoreticians of the still-influential 1960s Minimal art movement and style are studied here: Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Frank Stella, Robert Ryman, Robert Smithson, Brice Marden, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and many land artists (such as Robert Smithson, Christo, James Turrell and Michael Heizer).

Chapters include: Minimal aesthetics; Minimal painting and painters; Minimal sculptors and sculpture; Minimal art and land artists; and Minimal art today.

Fully illustrated. 232 pages. Large format.

The text has been fully revised for this edition, with new illustrations added. www.crmoon.com.

The Minimal artists did not consider themselves a group; they did not produce manifestos; they did not agree on aesthetics or working practices (though some were friends); they tended not to be directly involved in political art (Minimal art was more conservative than counter-culture); and they disliked the term 'minimalism'.

It tended to be the critics (as usual) who came up with the terms for the new art. Lucy Lippard used the term 'structurist', 'dematerialization' and 'eccentric abstraction'; Michael Fried had 'literalist' and 'objecthood'; Peter Hutchinson used 'Mannerist'; Barbara Rose coined 'ABC Art'; Lawrence Alloway had 'systematic painting'; Robert Morris took up 'unitary forms' and 'anti-form'; and Donald Judd employed 'speci c objects'.

Probably the premier Minimal artist (and philosopher) is Donald Judd; Judd stands at the centre of Minimal art, and no account of Minimalism is complete without placing Judd in the foreground. Robert Smithson, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Morris and Carl Andre have been among the most lucid of theorists among artists.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it seemed as if every artist went through a Minimal period at some time in their career, as well as a painting-as-sculpture period, and a brush with performance art (and perhaps body art). Both a Conceptual art phase and an on-going installation art preoccupation were mandatory for contemporary artists, it seems. All contemporary art can be viewed as basically Conceptual art, and a increasing proportion of it is installation art

In Resonant Matter, Lutz Koepnick considers contemporary sound and installation art as a unique laboratory of hospitality amid inhospitable times. Inspired by Ragnar Kjartansson’s nine-channel video installation The Visitors (2012), the book explores resonance—the ability of objects to be affected by the vibrations of other objects—as a model of art’s fleeting promise to make us coexist with things strange and other. In a series of nuanced readings, Koepnick follows the echoes of distant, unexpected, and unheard sounds in twenty-first century art to reflect on the attachments we pursue to sustain our lives and the walls we need to tear down to secure possible futures. The book’s nine chapters approach The Visitors from ever-different conceptual angles while bringing it into dialogue with the work of other artists and musicians such as Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Guillermo Galindo, Mischa Kuball, Philipp Lachenmann, Alvien Lucier, Teresa Margolles, Carsten Nicolai, Camille Norment, Susan Philipsz, David Rothenberg, Juliana Snapper, and Tanya Tagaq. With this book, Koepnick situates resonance as a vital concept of contemporary art criticism and sound studies. His analysis encourages us not only to expand our understanding of the role of sound in art, of sound art, but to attune our critical encounter with art to art’s own resonant thinking.

Includes 100 blank pages. Hardbound with gray cloth veneer.

Beginning in the late 1970s, a number of visual artists in downtown New York City returned to an exploration of the cinematic across mediums. Vera Dika considers their work within a greater cultural context and probes for a deeper understanding of the practice.

Since Marcel Duchamp created his "readymades" a century ago--most famously christening a urinal as a fountain-- the practice of incorporating commodity objects into art has become ever more pervasive. "Uncommon Goods" traces one particularly important aspect of that progression: the shift in artistic concern toward the hidden ethical dimensions of global commerce. Jaimey Hamilton Faris discusses the work of, among many others, Ai Weiwei, Cory Arcangel, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Santiago Sierra, reading their artistic explorations as overlapping with debates about how common goods hold us and our world in common. The use of readymade now registers concerns about international migrant labor, outsourced manufacturing, access to natural resources, intellectual copyright, and the commoditization of virtual space.

In each chapter, Hamilton Faris introduces artists who exemplify the focus of readymade aesthetics on aspects of global commodity culture, including consumption, marketing, bureaucracy, labor, and community. She explores how materially intensive, "uncommon" aesthetic situations can offer moments to meditate on the kinds of objects, experiences, and values we ostensibly share in the age of globalization. The resulting volume will be an important contribution to scholarship on readymade art as well as to the study of materiality, embodiment, and globalization.

Engendering an avant-garde is the first book to comprehensively examine the origins of Vancouver photo-conceptualism in its regional context between 1968 and 1990. Employing discourse analysis of texts written by and about artists, feminist critique and settler-colonial theory, the book discusses the historical transition from artists' creation of 'defeatured landscapes' between 1968-71 to their cinematographic photographs of the late 1970s and the backlash against such work by other artists in the late 1980s. It is the first study to provide a structural account for why the group remains all-male. It accomplishes this by demonstrating that the importation of a European discourse of avant-garde activity, which assumed masculine social privilege and public activity, effectively excluded women artists from membership. -- .

Combining place and fiction in an imaginative interpretation of ten sites in the city of London, CJ Lim and Ed Liu take well-known institutions, epochs and lifestyles in the British capital and renders them fantastic in a string of architectural short stories. The medium is an intersection of paper assemblages with short stories. The stories have been exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Victoria and Albert Museum but are collected for the first time in a single volume, laid out as they were designed to be seen as one phantasmogoric city vision. Painstakingly constructed, the stories assemble a sequence of improbable marriages between architecture and story, encompassing a retelling of the Three Little Pigs at Smithfield, a dating agency at Battersea, and a ringed transport system manifesting as a celestial river over the great metropolis. Drawing on a wealth of literary symbolism from Carroll's Alice in Wonderland to Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities and imbued with humour and irony, the book builds on London's rich mix of extravagance and fictive tradition. Enthralling, inspirational and entertaining, this cabinet of curiosity and wonder depicts a vision of the city that is immoral, anarchic, and unscientific, and at the same time, glorious, ravishing and a pleasure to behold.