Joan Jonas I Want to Live in the Country (and Other Romances)


Book Description

An illustrated study of performance and video artist Joan Jonas's 1976 video, an elliptical narrative that moves between the countryside of Nova Scotia and a television studio in New York City.




Joan Jonas


Book Description

"'Joan Jonas: They Come to Us without a Word' documents Jonas's project for the United States Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, an expansive installation that incrporates multiple components, included projected videos, drawings, and objects. Each section of the pavilion represents a particular creature (bees, fish), object (mirror), force (wind), or place (homeroom). Recited fragments of ghost stories sourced from the oral tradition of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, form a continuous narrative linking one room to the next. As Jonas says, 'We are haunted, the rooms are haunted.' Designed with Jonas's close collaboration, this fully illustrated book features an extensive collection of images selected by the artist, including stills, drawings, and photographs, that not only document this ambitious and important new work but form an integral part of the presentation and experience of 'They Come to Us without a Word'. Also included are Jonas's poetic notes on her process and major new texts from ann Reynolds and Marina Warner as well as an interview with the artist by Ingrid Schaffner." -- Publisher.




Joan Jonas


Book Description

Joan Jonas emerged in a rich and experimental 1960s New York art scene that included such luminaries as Richard Serra, Gordon Matta-Clark, John Cage, Philip Glass, and Merce Cunningham. Since that time Jonas has gained a peerless status as a pioneer of performance and video. Jonas's work typically encompasses video, performance, installation, sound, text, and drawing. Defying easy categorization, it engages with complex ideas of ritual, myth, and storytelling. In recent years Jonas has also become increasingly engaged with environmental issues, focusing on the animal world and the vulnerability of our planet. This new publication includes an introduction to Jonas's practice and brings together selected conversations from the last fourteen years, in which the artist talks about her interdisciplinary approach as well as the influences and impulses she has absorbed from literature, music, traditional Japanese Noh theater, and the rituals of foreign cultures.




Becoming Audible


Book Description

Becoming Audible explores the phenomenon of human and animal acoustic entanglements in art and performance practices. Focusing on the work of artists who get into the spaces between species, Austin McQuinn discovers that sounding animality secures a vital connection to the creatural. To frame his analysis, McQuinn employs Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, Donna Haraway’s definitions of multispecies becoming-with, and Mladen Dolar’s ideas of voice-as-object. McQuinn considers birdsong in the work of Beatrice Harrison, Olivier Messiaen, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Daniela Cattivelli, and Marcus Coates; the voice of the canine as a sacrificial lab animal in the operatic work of Alexander Raskatov; hierarchies of vocalization in human-simian cultural coevolution in theatrical adaptations of Franz Kafka and Eugene O’Neill; and the acoustic exchanges among hybrid human-animal creations in Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Minotaur. Inspired by the operatic voice and drawing from work in art and performance studies, animal studies, zooarchaeology, social and cultural anthropology, and philosophy, McQuinn demonstrates that sounding animality in performance resonates “through the labyrinths of the cultural and the creatural,” not only across species but also beyond the limits of the human. Timely and provocative, this volume outlines new methods of unsettling human exceptionalism during a period of urgent reevaluation of interspecies relations. Students and scholars of human-animal studies, performance studies, and art historians working at the nexus of human and animal will find McQuinn’s book enlightening and edifying.




The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art


Book Description

Arranged in alphabetical order, these 5 volumes encompass the history of the cultural development of America with over 2300 entries.




Martha Rosler


Book Description

The first sustained critical examination of a work by Martha Rosler that bridged the concerns of conceptual art with those of political documentary. In The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1974–1975) Martha Rosler bridged the concerns of conceptual art with those of political documentary. The work, a series of twenty-one black-and-white photographs, twenty-four text panels and three blank panels, embraces the codes of the photo-text experiments of the late 1960s and applies them to the social reality of New York's Lower East Side. The prevailing critical view of The Bowery focuses on its implicit rejection, or critique, of established modes of documentary. In this illustrated, extended essay on the work by Rosler, Steve Edwards argues that although the critical attitude towards documentary is an important dimension of the piece, it does not exhaust the meaning of the project. Edwards situates the work in relation to debates and practices of the period, especially conceptual art and the emergence of the photo-text paradigm exemplified by the work of Robert Smithson, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Hans Haacke, Victor Burgin, and the Women and Work group. In particular, he contextualizes Rosler's work of this period within the politicized San Diego group (which included, in addition to Rosler, Allan Sekula, Fred Lonidier, and Philip Steinmetz). Comparing The Bowery to Rosler's later video vital statistics of a citizen, simply obtained (1977) and the films of the Dziga-Vertov Group (formed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin), Edwards shows how the work engages with conceptual art and the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s.




Yayoi Kusama


Book Description

Almost a half-century after Yayoi Kusama debuted her landmark installation 'Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field' (1965) in New York, the work remains challenging and unclassifiable. Jo Applin looks at the installation in detail and places it in the context of subsequent art practice and theory as well as Kusama's own (as she called it) 'obsessional art'.




Ilya Kabakov


Book Description

An illustrated study of one of Ilya Kabakov's most fantastic installations. The fictitious hero of this 1984 installation is a lonely dreamer who develops an impossible project: to fly alone in cosmic space. But this dream is also an individual appropriation of a collective Soviet project and the official Soviet propaganda connected to it. Having built a makeshift slingshot, the hero apparently flies through the ceiling of his shabby room and vanishes into space. The miserable room and the primitive slingshot suggest the reality behind the Soviet utopia, in which where cosmic vision and the political project of the Communist revolution are seen as indissoluble. The Man who Flew into Space from His Apartment also raises questions of authorship in modernity. All of Kabakov's work is made in the name of other, fictitious artists. This reveals a hidden rule of the modern art system: only an artist who doesn't want to be an artist or who doesn't even know that he is an artist is a real artist—just as only an artwork that does not look like an artwork is a real artwork. The installation is a narrative, the documentation of a fictitious event. Afterall Books are distributed by The MIT Press.




Lee Friedlander


Book Description

Lee Friedlander's 'The Little Screens' first appeared as a 1963 photo-essay in Harper's Bazaar, with commentary by Walker Evans. Six untitled photographs show television screens broadcasting eerily glowing images of faces and figures into unoccupied rooms in homes and motels across America. As distinctive a portrait of an era as Robert Frank's 'The Americans', 'The Little Screens' grew in number and was not brought together in its entirety until a 2001 exhibition at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Friedlander (b. 1934) is known for his use of surfaces and reflections--from storefront windows to landscapes viewed through car windshields -- to present a pointed view of American life. The photographs that make up The Little Screens represent an early example of this photographic strategy, offering the narrative of a peripatetic photographer moving through the landscape of 1960s America that was in thrall to a new medium. In this astute study, Saul Anton argues that The Little Screens marked the historical intersection of modern art and photography at the moment when television came into its own as the dominant medium of mass culture.




David Hammons


Book Description

Drawing on unpublished documents and oral histories, an illustrated examination of an iconic artwork of an artist who has made a lifework of tactical evasion. One wintry day in 1983, alongside other street sellers in the East Village, David Hammons peddled snowballs of various sizes. He had neatly laid them out in graduated rows and spent the day acting as obliging salesman. He called the evanescent and unannounced street action Bliz-aard Ball Sale, thus inscribing it into a body of work that, from the late 1960s to the present, has used a lexicon of ephemeral actions and self-consciously “black" materials to comment on the nature of the artwork, the art world, and race in America. And although Bliz-aard Ball Sale has been frequently cited and is increasingly influential, it has long been known only through a mix of eyewitness rumors and a handful of photographs. Its details were as elusive as the artist himself; even its exact date was unrecorded. Like so much of the artist's work, it was conceived, it seems, to slip between our fingers—to trouble the grasp of the market, as much as of history and knowability. In this engaging study, Elena Filipovic collects a vast oral history of the ephemeral action, uncovering rare images and documents, and giving us singular insight into an artist who made an art of making himself difficult to find. And through it, she reveals Bliz-aard Ball Sale to be the backbone of a radical artistic oeuvre that transforms such notions as “art,” “commodity,” “performance,” and even “race” into categories that shift and dissolve, much like slowly melting snowballs.