#documentsofcontemporaryart

[worldfoodbooks]

OPEN TODAY 12-7 PM. NEW IN THE BOOKSHOP: "WORK" EDITED BY FRIEDERIKE SIGLER (2017) Warhol’s Factory of the 1960s, Minimalism’s assembly-line aesthetics, conceptual and feminist concern with workers’ conditions in the 1970s—these are among the antecedents of a renewed focus on the work of art: labor as artistic activity, as artistic method and as object of artistic engagement. In 2002, the “Work Ethic” exhibition curated by Helen Molesworth at the Baltimore Museum of Art took its cue from recent art to spotlight this earlier era of artistic practice in which activity became as valid as, and often dispensed with, object-production. Revealed through this prism was “dematerialized” art’s close and critical relation to the emergent information age’s criteria of management, production and skill. By 2015, the Venice Biennale reflected artists’ wider concern with global economic and social crises, centered on exploitative and precarious worlds of employment. Yet while art increasingly engages with human travail, work’s significance in itself is seldom addressed by critics. This anthology explicitly investigates work in relation to contemporary art, surveying artistic strategies that grapple with the complexities of being an art worker in the new economy, a postproducer, a collaborator, a fabricator, a striker, an ethical campaigner, or would-be transformer of labor from oppression to liberation. Artists surveyed include Pawel Althamer, Francis Alÿs, Marwa Arsanios, Chto Delat, Alice Creischer, Ana de la Cueva, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jeremy Deller, Maria Eichhorn, Harun Farocki, Claire Fontaine, Andrea Fraser, Liam Gillick, Melanie Gilligan, Gulf Labour Coalition, Tehching Hsieh, Lamia Joreige, Lee Lozano, Goshka Macuga, Teresa Margolles, Adrian Melis, Annette Messager, Gustav Metzger, Jean-Luc Moulène, Ahmet Ögüt, Philip Rizk, Martha Rosler, Tino Sehgal, Santiago Sierra, Tamas St. Auby, Mladen Stilinovic, W.A.G.E., Artur Zmijewski Available in the bookshop today and via our new website. #worldfoodbooks #work #whitechapel #documentsofcontemporaryart #mitpress (at WORLD FOOD BOOKS)

[doragarciathebook]

AWESOME congratulations @barbararmunoz Posted @withregram • @barbararmunoz Thrilled to be Guest Editor of 😷HEALTH 🌱#documentsofcontemporaryart published by @whitechapelgallery @mitpress - while contemplating how this book will land in September amidst this extreme health & political crisis. HEALTH maps contemporary practices confronting and reshaping wellness ideologies, critically tackling illness and impairment in their practice while changing ableist institutional dynamics. With @bighedva @filipaaaaaaaaaaa @portiamalatjie @dora_garcia_lopez @arriolaaimar @patrick.staff @miguelopez1 @oreetashery @patridominguez @tedkerr @catalinalozanom #tabitarezaire @margaridamendesm @wearecanaries @simoneyvetteleigh @pedronevesmarques and many others 💙 So grateful to @the_chus_martinez #tjdemos @helmut_recko for their generous endorsement 🙌🏽 Link in bio ⬆️ https://www.instagram.com/p/CAxHEDAKrrE/?igshid=1t744ifgn3h7z

[amcint23]

I was captivated by several of the writings in the "Gazes" section of ANIMALS this morning and couldn't stop reading!

[worldfoodbooks]

OPEN TODAY 12-7 PM. NEW IN THE BOOKSHOP: "WORK" EDITED BY FRIEDERIKE SIGLER (2017) Warhol’s Factory of the 1960s, Minimalism’s assembly-line aesthetics, conceptual and feminist concern with workers’ conditions in the 1970s—these are among the antecedents of a renewed focus on the work of art: labor as artistic activity, as artistic method and as object of artistic engagement. In 2002, the “Work Ethic” exhibition curated by Helen Molesworth at the Baltimore Museum of Art took its cue from recent art to spotlight this earlier era of artistic practice in which activity became as valid as, and often dispensed with, object-production. Revealed through this prism was “dematerialized” art’s close and critical relation to the emergent information age’s criteria of management, production and skill. By 2015, the Venice Biennale reflected artists’ wider concern with global economic and social crises, centered on exploitative and precarious worlds of employment. Yet while art increasingly engages with human travail, work’s significance in itself is seldom addressed by critics. This anthology explicitly investigates work in relation to contemporary art, surveying artistic strategies that grapple with the complexities of being an art worker in the new economy, a postproducer, a collaborator, a fabricator, a striker, an ethical campaigner, or would-be transformer of labor from oppression to liberation. Artists surveyed include Pawel Althamer, Francis Alÿs, Marwa Arsanios, Chto Delat, Alice Creischer, Ana de la Cueva, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jeremy Deller, Maria Eichhorn, Harun Farocki, Claire Fontaine, Andrea Fraser, Liam Gillick, Melanie Gilligan, Gulf Labour Coalition, Tehching Hsieh, Lamia Joreige, Lee Lozano, Goshka Macuga, Teresa Margolles, Adrian Melis, Annette Messager, Gustav Metzger, Jean-Luc Moulène, Ahmet Ögüt, Philip Rizk, Martha Rosler, Tino Sehgal, Santiago Sierra, Tamas St. Auby, Mladen Stilinovic, W.A.G.E., Artur Zmijewski Available in the bookshop today and via our new website. #worldfoodbooks #work #whitechapel #documentsofcontemporaryart #mitpress (at WORLD FOOD BOOKS)

[worldfoodbooks]

BACK IN THE BOOKSHOP: "DESTRUCTION" edited by SVEN SPIEKER (2017) The effects and meanings of destruction are central to the work of many of our most influential artists. Since the early 1960s, artists have employed destruction to creative ends. Here destruction changes from a negative state or passive condition to a highly productive category. The destructive subversion of media imagery aims to release us from its controlling effects. The self-destructing artwork extinguishes art’s fixity as arrested form and ushers in the ephemeral and contingent "open work." This anthology explores artworks that convey the threat of destruction an how they have disrupted the perceived integrity of built structures and institutions. Artistic acts of iconoclasm or risk to the self have raised consciousness of authoritarian oppression. More understated works explore the theme of destruction in armed conflict, media violence, and threats to the environment. These text make up the first collection to be focused systematically on destruction in modern and contemporary art. Artists surveyed include Ai Weiwei, John Baldessari, Monica Bonvicini, Alexander Brener, Stuart Brisley, Douglas Gordon, Huang Yong Ping, Enrique Jezik, Milan Knizak, Paul McCarthy, Piero Manzoni, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gustav Metzger, Otto Mühl, Yoko Ono, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Petr Pavlensky, William Pope.L, Walid Raad, Arnulf Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, Song Dong, Jean Tinguely, Wolf Vostell Writers include Alain Badiou, Walter Benjamin, Horst Bredekamp, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Medina Cuauthémoc, Dario Gamboni, Richard Galpin, Caleb Kelly, Bruno Latour, Sven Lütticken, Antonio Negri, Sophie O’Brien, Kristine Stiles, Jennifer Walden Available today in the bookshop and via our new website. #worldfoodbooks #destruction #whitechapel #documentsofcontemporaryart #mitpress (at WORLD FOOD BOOKS)

[worldfoodbooks]

OPEN TODAY 12-7 PM. NEW IN THE BOOKSHOP: "DESTRUCTION" edited by SVEN SPIEKER (2017) The effects and meanings of destruction are central to the work of many of our most influential artists. Since the early 1960s, artists have employed destruction to creative ends. Here destruction changes from a negative state or passive condition to a highly productive category. The destructive subversion of media imagery aims to release us from its controlling effects. The self-destructing artwork extinguishes art’s fixity as arrested form and ushers in the ephemeral and contingent "open work." This anthology explores artworks that convey the threat of destruction an how they have disrupted the perceived integrity of built structures and institutions. Artistic acts of iconoclasm or risk to the self have raised consciousness of authoritarian oppression. More understated works explore the theme of destruction in armed conflict, media violence, and threats to the environment. These text make up the first collection to be focused systematically on destruction in modern and contemporary art. Artists surveyed include Ai Weiwei, John Baldessari, Monica Bonvicini, Alexander Brener, Stuart Brisley, Douglas Gordon, Huang Yong Ping, Enrique Jezik, Milan Knizak, Paul McCarthy, Piero Manzoni, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gustav Metzger, Otto Mühl, Yoko Ono, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Petr Pavlensky, William Pope.L, Walid Raad, Arnulf Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, Song Dong, Jean Tinguely, Wolf Vostell Writers include Alain Badiou, Walter Benjamin, Horst Bredekamp, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Medina Cuauthémoc, Dario Gamboni, Richard Galpin, Caleb Kelly, Bruno Latour, Sven Lütticken, Antonio Negri, Sophie O’Brien, Kristine Stiles, Jennifer Walden Available today in the bookshop and via our new website. #worldfoodbooks #destruction #whitechapel #documentsofcontemporaryart #mitpress (at WORLD FOOD BOOKS)

[kenyaworkspace]

#research for my six-week course: #PrivilegeAsPlasticMaterial (Spring 2017) #DocumentsOfContemporaryArt #PetraLangeBerndt

[disorderlydessert]

Mark Cousins “The Ugly”//1994

(Concepts and Contexts) pg145-151

Cousins’ opening paragraph in the extract puts ugliness into a category which negotiates the truth/beauty of something, in regards to beauty “possessing a privileged” (145) while the ugly comes from a place of error “Ugliness is condemned to a the role of the mistake, to the role of the object that has gone wrong…” (145) just as media, advertising and society’s ideals of beauty, portray the idea that if you’re ugly, you are missing something/missing out on something.  “Ugliness will be thought of from the point of view of beauty” (145). This ‘philosophical drama’ is subject to contingency and individuality. Cousins is then wanting to argue that the ugly and the beautiful are two very separate things. Referencing Aristotle, beauty has been regarded through objectification of the “totality” (145) “the perfect object is, rather, one which is finished, completed.”(145) With thoughts attached to fragmented narratives and photography’s stillness, it can be said that what is presented in an image, as a final product, something of totality, is something that cannot undergo any change, because then it’s perfection will be redundant. Therefore, what exists in that frame is the only representation of that moment. It is not present in real time.  In comparison, the ugly demonstrates an individuality with is not in continuity with the ideal. What Cousins then pushes is that beauty is “triumphant for having overcome the resistance of itself in its moments of ugliness” (146) which only heightens this ideas that beauty is merely a snapshot of the tip of an ice berg, but does not show the hideous nature below.   This state of zenith awakens the fear of an unreachable location. Much like the fictitious nature of a film set, so remarkable and desirable, but not real. But, there is some safety in the barrier between our reality and these fake worlds we want to be in…

Cousin’s wishes to address the concept of beauty and ugliness in regards to it being a relationship between subject and object, opposed to a definitive thing, because it is all a personal experience, it cannot be defined. Stating that these concepts cannot be “reduced to a set of attributes” (147) but that “It exists, decisively and fundamentally, within the relation. But what is this relation?”(147). Cousins then proposes a hypothesis  “The ugly object is an object which is experienced both as being there and as something that should not be there” (147) re-referencing it as an error. Again, this is not a definitive theory where there should be a ‘right’ place for the ugly, but more its presence in relation to the subject. He forms some connections by questioning what makes dirt, dirty. And why must we believe a stain must be cleansed? “Is this because the stain is ugly?” (148) It’s not an issue of its aesthetics, but that it is in the wrong place and should be removed. This idea can be played up physically and metaphorically. To enter a place where one should not be, it does have to cross some boundary. A place of prohibition. But what constitutes this space of the ugly? There is the outside representation of the object and the inside existence of the object. But it’s inside is larger than its outside.