The monochrome - a single colour of paint applied over the entirety of a canvas - remains one of the more contentious modernist artistic inventions. But whilst the manufacture of these 'pictures of nothing' was ostensibly straightforward, their subsequent theorisation has been anything but. More than a history, Monochrome: Darkness and Light in Contemporary Art is the first account of the monochrome's lively role in contemporary art. Liberated from the burden of representation, the monochrome first stood for emancipation: an ideological and artistic impulse that characterised the avant-garde of the early twentieth century. Historically, the monochrome embodied the most extreme form of abstraction and pure materiality. Yet more recently, adaptations of the art form have focused on a broader range of cultural and interpretive contexts. Provocative, innovative and timely, this book argues that the latest artistic strategies go beyond stylistic concerns and instead seek to re-engage with ideas around authorship, process and the conditions of the visible as they are given and understood through both light and darkness. Discussing works by artists such as Katie Paterson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tom Friedman, Bruno Jakob, Sherrie Levine and Ceal Floyer, the book shows that the debates around an artwork's form and its possibility for meaning that the monochrome first engendered remain very much alive in contemporary visual culture.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Audience participation has polarized the critical debate surrounding contemporary art's social, moral and aesthetic potential. This incisive collection of essays sheds new light on the political, ethical and artistic capacity of participatory works and tests the most recent theoretical approaches to the subject. Internationally renowned art historians, curators and artists analyse the impact of collaborative aesthetics on personal and social identity, concepts of the artist, the ontology of art and the role of museums in contemporary society. Essays tease apart notions of 'interactivity', 'collaboration', 'performance', 'relational aesthetics' and 'social art' for the purpose of clarifying a range of conflicting approaches to the making and reception of art and promoting a dialogue between art historians, curators, and artists. They ask: what are the ways in which audiences experience contemporary art? Do participatory art forms generate a new type of aesthetic education that is capable of shaping social and political behaviour? What degree of co-operation is required for such artworks to be successful? What approaches do curators take to such works when organizing exhibitions? Through close analysis of interactive artworks in a range of media, Interactive Contemporary Art examines current critical debates in this field and proposes new ways of conceptualizing participatory practices.

A survey of modern art from the Impressionists to the present, with a new chapter on the art of the seventies and eighties, and corrections and revisions in the text.

In this in-depth analysis, Peter Muir argues that Gordon Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect (1975) is emblematic of Henri Lefebvre's understanding of art's function in relation to urban space. By engaging with Lefebvre's theory in conjunction with the perspectives of other writers, such as Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, and George Bataille, the book elicits a story that presents the artwork's significance, origins and legacies. Conical Intersect is a multi-media artwork, which involves the intersections of architecture, sculpture, film, and photography, as well as being a three-dimensional model that reflects aspects of urban, art, and architectural theory, along with a number of cultural and historiographic discourses which are still present and active. This book navigates these many complex narratives by using the central 'hole' of Conical Intersect as its focal point: this apparently vacuous circle around which the events, documents, and other historical or theoretical references surrounding Matta-Clark's project, are perpetually in circulation. Thus, Conical Intersect is imagined as an insatiable absence around which discourses continually form, dissipate and resolve. Muir argues that Conical Intersect is much more than an 'artistic hole.' Due to its location at Plateau Beaubourg in Paris, it is simultaneously an object of art and an instrument of social critique.

This book tells, for the first time, the story of the Situationist International's influence and afterlives in Britain, where its radical ideas have been rapturously welcomed and fiercely resisted. The Situationist International presented itself as the culmination of the twentieth century avant-garde tradition - as the true successor of Dada and Surrealism. Its grand ambition was not unfounded. Though it dissolved in 1972, generations of artists and writers, theorists and provocateurs, punks and psychogeographers have continued its effort to confront and contest the 'society of the spectacle.' This book constructs a long cultural history, beginning in the interwar period with the arrival of Surrealism to Britain, moving through the countercultures of the 1950s and 1960s, and finally surveying the directions in which Situationist theory and practice are being taken today. It combines agile historicism with close readings of a vast range of archival and newly excavated materials, including newspaper reports, underground pamphlets, Psychogeographical films, and experimental novels. It brings to light an overlooked but ferociously productive period of British avant-garde practice, and demonstrates how this subterranean activity helps us to understand postwar culture, late modernism, and the complex internationalization of the avant-garde. As popular and academic interest in the Situationists grows, this book offers an important contribution to the international history of the avant-garde and Surrealism. It will prove a valuable resource for researchers and students of English and Comparative Literature, Modernism and the Avant-Gardes, Twentieth Century and Contemporary History, Cultural Studies, Art History, and Political Aesthetics.

A fascinating look at Keith Haring's New York City subway artwork from the 1980s Celebrated artist Keith Haring (1958-1990) has been embraced by popular culture for his signature bold graphic line drawings of figures and forms. Like other graffiti artists in the 1980s, Haring found an empty canvas in the advertising panels scattered throughout New York City's subway system, where he communicated his socially conscious, often humorous messages on platforms and train cars. Over a five-year period, in an epic conquest of civic space, Haring produced a massive body of subway artwork that remains daunting in its scale and its impact on the public consciousness. Dedicated to the individuals who might encounter them and to the moments of their creation, Haring's drawings now exist solely in the form of documentary photographs and legend. Because they were not meant to be permanent-only briefly inhabiting blacked-out advertising boards before being covered up by ads or torn down by authorities or admirers-what little remains of this project is uniquely fugitive. Keith Haring: 31 Subway Drawings reproduces archival materials relating to this magnificent project alongside essays by leading Haring experts. Distributed for No More Rulers

British painter William Tillyer (born 1938) is regarded as one of the most accomplished and consistently inventive artists working in watercolor. His work luxuriates in translucent color and sensuous brushwork. Some of his pieces, in their untrammeled expressive zeal and readily apparent love of color as a pure quality call to mind the canvases of Morris Louis; in other paintings, flamboyantly voluptuous shapes confront geometric abstractions and Minimalist blocks of color. With 224 full-color images, "William Tillyer: Watercolours" provides a comprehensive look at the titular aspect of Tillyer's oeuvre, looking back over nearly 40 years of work. It includes three texts by the American poet and art historian John Yau, an essay describing the development of Tillyer's watercolors and linking his work to the tradition of the English watercolor, an essay on the latest body of work and an interview with the artist.

The first major exhibition and catalog dedicated to the work of groundbreaking painter and filmmaker Mike Henderson. Mike Henderson (b. 1944) is a painter, filmmaker, and professor emeritus at University of California, Davis. Published to accompany his first museum retrospective, this catalog surveys Henderson's paintings and films from 1965 to 1985, which are rooted as much in Francisco Goya's horror of humanity as in Sun Ra's hope for a new Black future. In the work of that time, Henderson depicted scenes of racial violence, heteromasculinity, and abject social conditions with force and unflinching directness. In 1985, a studio fire damaged much of Henderson's output from the previous two decades, obscuring vital ideas about a time of tumult and change, often referred to as a world on fire. Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965-1985 addresses Henderson's multifaceted art of that period, which examined and offered new ideas about Black life in the visual languages of protest, Afrofuturism, and surrealism. Published in association with the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis Exhibition dates: Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art January 29-June 25, 2023

What does an assemblage made out of crumpled newspaper have in common with an empty room in which the lights go on and off every five seconds? This book argues that they are both examples of a 'precarious' art that flourished from the late 1950s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, in light of a growing awareness of the individual's fragile existence in capitalist society. Focusing on comparative case studies drawn from European, North and South American practices, this study maps out a network of similar concerns and practices, while outlining its evolution from the 1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. This book will provide students and amateurs of contemporary art and culture with new insights into contemporary art practices and the critical issues that they raise concerning the material status of the art object, the role of the artist in society, and the relation between art and everyday life. -- .

In his theory of the 'mirror stage', the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan argued that the female body is defined by its lack of male attributes. Within this framework, he described female sexuality primarily as an absence, and assumed female subordination to the male gaze. However, what happens if one follows Jean Baudrillard's advice to 'swallow the mirror' and go through the 'looking-glass' to explore the reflections and realities that we encounter in the cultural mirror, which reflects the culture in question: its norms, ideals and values? What if the beautiful is inverted and becomes ugly; and the ugly is considered beautiful or shape-shifts into something conventionally thought of as beautiful? These are the fundamental questions that Basia Sliwinska poses in this important new enquiry into gender identity and the politics of vision in contemporary women's art.Through an innovative discussion of the mirror as a metaphor, Sliwinska reveals how the post-1989 practices of woman artists from both sides of the former Iron Curtain - such as Joanna Rajkowska, Marina Abramovic, Boryana Rossa, Natalia LL and Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova - go beyond gender binaries and instead embrace otherness and difference by playing with visual tropes of femininity. Their provocative works offer alternative representations of the female body to those seen in the cultural mirror. Their art challenges and deconstructs patriarchal representations of the social and cultural 'other', associated with visual tropes of femininity such as Alice in Wonderland, Venus and Medusa. The Female Body in the Looking-Glass makes a refreshing, radical intervention into art theory and cultural studies by offering new theoretical concepts such as 'the mirror' and 'genderland' (inspired by Alice's adventures in Wonderland) as critical tools with which we can analyse and explain recent developments in women's art.

Covering the 1960s and 1970s, this volume explores new ways of investigating, comparing and interpreting the different domains of design culture across the Nordic countries. Challenging the traditional narrative, this volume argues that the roots of the most prominent features of Nordic design's contemporary significance are not to be found amongst the objects for the home collectively branded as 'Scandinavian Design' to great acclaim in the 1950s, but in the discourses, institutions and practices formed in the aftermath of that oft-told success story, during the turbulent period between 1960 and 1980. This is achieved by employing multidisciplinary approaches to connect the domains of industrial production, marketing, consumption, public institutions, design educations, trade journals as well as public debates and civic initiatives forming a design culture. This book makes a significant contribution to current, international agendas of historiographical critique focusing on transnational relations and the deconstruction of national design histories. This book will be of interest to scholars in design, design history and Scandinavian studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The only complete career retrospective of this visionary painter, including all her most iconic works, which are prized for their exquisite visual poetry, together with personal letters and facsimiles, reprinted in Martin's own hand, adding intimacy to this classic book Agnes Martin's career spanned over seven decades, with a profile that has skyrocketed since the 2015-17 major exhibition at Tate Modern, London that travelled globally to great acclaim. Though a major influence on Minimalist painters, Martin saw her own work more closely related to Abstract Expressionism, her paintings being 'meditations on innocence, beauty, happiness and love.' This much-anticipated reissue of Martin's exhibition manager and close friend Arne Glimcher's highly-acclaimed book presents 130 of her paintings and drawings alongside her previously unpublished writings and lecture notes. Glimcher's illuminating introduction, his personal memories of visits to Martin at her studio, and their correspondence throughout her career, reveal many insights into the artist's life and work.

Part of the acclaimed 'Documents of Contemporary Art' series of anthologies . Intrinsically collaborative, the magazine is an inherently `open' form, generating constantly evolving relationships. This anthology contextualizes the artist's magazine, surveying the art worlds it has by turns created and superseded; the commercial media forms it has critically appropriated, intervened in or subverted; the alternative, DIY cultures it has brought into being; and the expanded fields of cultural production, exchange and distribution it continues to engender. Surveying case studies of transformational magazines from the early 1960s onwards, this book also includes a wide-ranging archive of key editorial statements, from eighteenth-century Weimar to twenty-first century Bangkok, Cape Town and Delhi. Artists surveyed include: Can Altay, Ei Arakawa, Julieta Aranda, Tania Bruguera, Maurizio Cattelan, Eduardo Costa, Dexter Sinister, Rimma Gerlovina, Valeriy Gerlovin, Robert Heinecken, John Holmstrom, John Knight, Silvia Kolbowski, Lee Lozano, Josephine Meckseper, Clemente Padin, Raymond Pettibon, Adrian Piper, Seth Price, Raqs Media Collective, Riot Grrrl, Martha Rosler, Sanaa Seif, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Scott Treleaven, Triple Canopy and Anton Vidokle. Writers include: Saul Anton, Stuart Brand, Jack Burnham, Johanna Burton, Thomas Crow, Edit DeAk, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jurgen Habermas, Martina Koeppel-Yang, Antje Krause-Wahl, Lucy Lippard, Caolan Madden, Valentina Parisi, Howardena Pindell, Georg Schoellhammer, Nancy Spector, Sally Stein, Reiko Tomii, Jud Yalkut and Vivian Ziherl.

This book explores how feminist artists continued to engage with kitchen culture and food practices in their work as women's art moved from the margins to the mainstream. In particular, this book examines the use of food in the art practices of six women artists and collectives working in Southern California-a hotbed of feminist art in the 1970s-in conjunction with the Women's Art Movement and broader feminist groups during the era of the Second Wave. Focused around particular articulations of food in culture, this book considers how feminist artists engage with issues of gender, labor, class, consumption, (re)production, domesticity, and sexuality in order to advocate for equality and social change. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, food studies, and gender and women's studies.

This book analyses the intermeshing of state power and art history in Europe since 1945 and up to the present from a critical, de-centered perspective. Devoting special attention to European peripheries and to under-researched transnational cultural political initiatives related to the arts implemented after the end of the Second World War, the contributors explore the ways in which this relationship crystallised in specific moments, places, discourses and practices. They make the historic hegemonic centres of the discipline converse with Europe's Southern and Eastern peripheries, from Portugal to Estonia to Greece. By stressing the margins' point of view this volume rethinks the ideological grounds on which art history and the European Union have been constructed as well as the role played by art and culture in the very concept of 'Europe.'

In the minds of many Americans, Islam is synonymous with the Middle East, Muslim men with violence, and Muslim women with oppression. A clash of civilizations appears to be increasingly manifest and the war on terror seems a struggle against Islam. These are all symptoms of Islamophobia. Meanwhile, the current surge in nativist bias reveals the racism of anti-Muslim sentiment. This book explores these anxieties through political cartoons and film--media with immediate and important impact. After providing a background on Islamic traditions and their history with America, it graphically shows how political cartoons and films reveal Americans' casual demeaning and demonizing of Muslims and Islam--a phenomenon common among both liberals and conservatives. Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Sentiment offers both fascinating insights into our culture's ways of "picturing the enemy" as Muslim, and ways of moving beyond antagonism.

As a response to the ubiquity of drawing in contemporary consciousness and a corresponding dearth of critical engagement with the medium, these collected essays provide original interpretations of artists' drawing today. Questions of process, politics, scale, and community raised in the work of the diverse group of artists are situated within the historic discourse on drawing and demonstrate the extent to which contemporary practice challenges previous definitions of the medium. From the room-encompassing drawings of Monika Grzymala and Barbara Bernstein or Sophie Calle's expansive exploration of the Jerusalem eruv to Andrea Bowers's graphite renditions of protest to Ellsworth Kelly's proposal for a memorial to September 11, the essays explore the implications of drawings' departure from the confines of a sheet of paper. Essential reading for both the academic and general audience, this book provides in-depth discussions of artists and projects that have never been treated in a sustained, analytical way; each essay will interest the wider contemporary art audience, as well as students of drawing. Taken as a whole, the volume represents a pertinent and stimulating engagement with issues of paramount importance to our understanding of contemporary art and its place in museums, galleries, and the public sphere.

This book is about the digital interface and its use in interactive new media art installations. It examines the aesthetic aspects of the interface through a theoretical exploration of new media artists, who create, and tactically deploy, digital interfaces in their work in order to question the socio-cultural stakes of a technology that shapes and reshapes relationships between humans and non-humans. In this way, it shows how use of the digital interface provides us with a critical framework for understanding our relationship with technology.

Working in 1970s Italy, a group of artists-namely Ugo La Pietra, Maurizio Nannucci, Francesco Somaini, Mauro Staccioli, Franco Summa, and Franco Vaccari-sought new spaces to create and exhibit art. Looking beyond the gallery, they generated sculptural, conceptual, and participatory interventions, called Arte Ambientale (Environmental Art), situated in the city streets. Their experiments emerged at a time of cultural crisis, when fierce domestic terrorism aggravated an already fragile political situation. To confront the malaise, these artists embraced a position of artistic autonomy and social critique, democratically connecting the city's inhabitants through direct art practices.

From Victorian breakthroughs in synthesising pigments to the BBC’s conversion to chromatic broadcasting, the story of colour’s technological development is inseparable from wider processes of modernisation that transformed Britain. This revolutionary history brings to light how new colour technologies informed ideas about national identity during a period of profound social change, when the challenges of industrialisation, decolonisation of the Empire and evolving attitudes to race and gender reshaped the nation. Offering a compelling new account of modern British visual culture that reveals colour to be central to its aesthetic trajectories and political formations, this chromatic lens deepens our understanding of how British art is made and what it means, offering a new way to assess the visual landscape of the period and interpret its colourful objects.   Across a kaleidoscopic array of materials, from radiant paintings by major Victorian artists, vivid print advertisements and vibrant interwar fashion photographs, to glorious Technicolor films and the prismatic programmes of the BBC’s early years of colour television, The Rainbow’s Gravity reveals how Britain modernised colour and how colour, in turn, modernised Britain. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art