|
Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > From 1900 > Art styles, 1960 - > Electronic & video art
The first extended study of the renowned artists' collective
Fluxus, Corporate Imaginations examines the group's emergence on
three continents from 1962 to 1978, and its complexities,
contradictions, and historical specificity. Its founder, George
Maciunas, organized Fluxus like a multinational corporation,
simulating corporate organization and commodity flows, a reflection
of how he imagined critical art practice at that time. Despite the
collective's critical stance toward the corporation, Fluxus 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 in bold relief. A
study of six central figures in the group-George Brecht, Alison
Knowles, 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 by employing an aesthetics of
organization, communication, events, branding, routine, and global
mapping. Invoking "corporate imaginations," Fluxus artists proposed
"strategies for living" as conscious creative subjects within a
totalizing and increasingly global system, and demonstrated how
these strategies must be repeated in an ongoing negotiation of new
relations of power and control between subject and system.
In her authoritative new book, Maite Conde introduces readers to
the crucial early years of Brazilian cinema. Focusing on silent
films released during the First Republic (1889-1930), Foundational
Films explores how the medium became implicated in a larger project
to transform Brazil into a modern nation. Analyzing an array of
cinematic forms, from depictions of contemporary life and fan
magazines, to experimental avant-garde productions, Conde
demonstrates the distinct ways in which Brazil's early film culture
helped to project a new image of the country.
|
|