An exhaustive monograph on the work of the multi-media, award winning artist Monica Bonvicini.

During the mid-twentieth century, Latin American artists working in several different cities radically altered the nature of modern art. Reimagining the relationship of art to its public, these artists granted the spectator a greater role than ever before in the realization of the artwork. The first book to explore this phenomenon on an international scale, Abstraction in Reverse traces the movement as it evolved across South America and parts of Europe. Alexander Alberro demonstrates that artists such as Tomas Maldonado, Jesus Soto, Julio Le Parc, and Lygia Clark, in breaking with the core tenets of the form of abstract art known as Concrete art, redefined the role of both the artist and the spectator. Instead of manufacturing autonomous artworks prior to the act of viewing, these artists presented a range of projects that required the spectator in order to be complete. Importantly, as Alberro shows, these artists set aside regionalist art in favor of a modernist approach that transcended the traditions of any nation-state. Along the way, the artists fundamentally altered the concept of the subject and of how art should address its audience, a revolutionary development with parallels in the greater art world.

"Reading the interviews gathered by Patricia Norvell more than thirty years ago is like opening one of the time capsules Steven Kaltenbach made at around the same time and discusses here. It makes one feel nostalgic for these uncompromising times-so much has changed, so fast! One should be immensely grateful to Norvell for her undertaking and, paradoxically, for the long delay in the publication of these conversations: nothing could have better highlighted the candor and commitment of the artists who participated in this project than their willingness, long after the fact, to let their youthful voices be heard unedited. This is a precious document that casts a fresh light on the early history of Conceptual art, revealing all the doubts and uncertainties its practitioners had to overcome."--Yve-Alain Bois, Harvard University

"These interviews, full of the rich texture and confusion of an art movement at its inception, began as a "process piece" in mid-1969 when formalism still seemed worth defeating. The artists, tired of talking about turpentine, struggle to extend the rhetoric of form, and as they do so, reveal their roles as theorists and philosophers of a newly cerebral art, Conceptualism. Alberro's helpful introduction frames both Norvell's provocative questions and the surprising responses in a useful book that continues the process of historicizing 20th century art."--Caroline Jones, author of "Machine in the Studio

"The contemporary interviews collected in this volume shift the ground on which conceptualism in the United States should be understood. The middle months of 1969 were a time of artistic and social unease when artists were anxious to test-and occasionally todeclaim, as the interviews demonstrate-ideas in conversation with a sympathetic interlocutor. Patricia Norvell proves to have been an ideal listener. She knew conceptualism well enough to keep the conversations honest, but not so well as to make the artists defensive and wary. The artists had things to say, and were not afraid to put themselves out on a limb."--John O'Brian, Professor of Art History, University of British Columbia

"A key document of the late 1960s avant-garde."--James Meyer, Emory University

"[This book is] a reminder that the project of Conceptual art and its artists' reasons for refusing the object of art were far from monolithic. The differences that emerge in the interviews are spoken in voices that are still fresh and particular, but each voice and position is tied to the moment of the late 1960s, from stoned mysticism to philosophical idealism, from political optimism to materialist critique."--Howard Singerman, author of "Art Subjects"

Texts by Hans Haacke that range from straightforward descriptions of his artworks to wide-ranging reflections on the relationship between art and politics. Hans Haacke's art articulates the interdependence of multiple elements. An artwork is not merely an object but is also its context-the economic, social, and political conditions of the art world and the world at large. Among his best-known works are MoMA-Poll (1970), which polled museumgoers on their opinions about Nelson Rockefeller and the Nixon administration's Indochina policy; Gallery-Goers' Birthplace and Residence Profile (1969), which canvassed visitors to the Howard Wise Gallery in Manhattan; and the famously canceled 1971 solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, which was meant to display, among other things, works on two New York real estate empires. This volume collects writings by Haacke that explain and document his practice. The texts, some of which have never before been published, run from straightforward descriptions to wide-ranging reflections and full-throated polemics. They include correspondence with MoMA and the Guggenheim and a letter refusing to represent the United States at the 1969 Sao Paulo Biennial; the title piece, "Working Conditions," which discusses corporate influence on the art world; Haacke's thinking about "real-time social systems"; and texts written for museum catalogs on various artworks, including GERMANIA, in the German Pavilion of the 1993 Venice Biennial; DER BEVOELKERUNG (To the Population) of 2000 at the Berlin Reichstag; Mixed Messages, an exhibition of objects from the Victoria and Albert Museum (2001); and Gift Horse, unveiled on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2015.

Spanning 1989 to 2009, this anthology collects the influential writings of American artist, musician and critic John Miller (born 1954), which have been lauded by Bruce Hainley in "Artforum" as "a pungent intervention into the ideologies of beauty, representation and looking." Ranging from reviews and cultural essays to theory and artist's statements, Miller's writings distinguish themselves from other styles of art criticism insofar as they relate to his larger artistic concerns with the social context of the art object and its sociopolitical ramifications as a commodity (as the title of this volume implies); they are also deeply informed by Miller's vast knowledge of art history and popular culture. More recently, Miller has entered into close dialogue with Dan Graham, Bob Nickas and Nicolas Guagnini. Many of the essays collected here--such as his contributions to the German magazine "Texte zur Kunst"--appear in English for the first time.