Art
What is Contemporary Art?
This book began as a two-part issue of e-flux journal devoted to the question: What is contemporary art? First, and most obviously: why is this question not asked? That is to say, why do we simply leave it to hover in the shadow of attempts at critical summation in the grand tradition of twentieth-century artistic movements? A single hegemonic “ism” has replaced clearly distinguishable movements and grand narratives. But what exactly does it mean to be working under the auspices of this singular ism?
Widespread usage of the term “contemporary” seems so self-evident that to further demand a definition of “contemporary ...
Morality in Fragments
Morality is an invitation to reflect and debate situations in contemporary life that refuse clear distinctions between right and wrong, what is and what ought to be. As a whole, this project has been defined by a desire – inherent to contemporary art – to open spaces for active, engaged forms of spectatorship that are not predetermined by either moral or ideological imperatives. Morality is a provocative theme, especially in a world that is now determined by the experiences of war, displacement, political and economic crises, the rise of religious stereotypes, and the radicalization of seemingly old doctrines and ideologies. ...
The Future of Memory
The exhibition The Future of Memory is accompanied by an e-book, available as a free download here. The publication introduces essays by Clint Burnham, Michael Connor, and Nicolaus Schafhausen, alongside a detailed presentation of the works exhibited in the show, written by co-authors Marie Egger, Emilie Lauriola and Vanessa Joan Müller.
Digital communication and virtual interlacing shape our world today and influence our collective memory. Remembering the past, experiencing the present and imagining the future all meld to become part of a seemingly equivalent imagery in digital space. The Future of Memory critically challenges constructions of reality and investigates the conditions ...
Series
Wilfried Lentz
As an accompaniment to some of the shows we put forth a publication with content related to the work of the artists. Due to the research-based practice of most of the artists, there is a lot of interesting material that can not be read directly in the work itself but is worth publishing. The articles are written by writers and scholars who are specialists in the artists' fields of research. The design is by Lesley Moore.
# 1 Tia Ciata's Open House (as an accompaniment with Wendelien van Oldenborgh's show Après la Reprise La Prise, September 2009)
# 2 On the Art of Making Without Hands (with the show Not Created by a Human Hand, December 2009)
# 3 Zakłady na Życie (Plant-Life) (with James Beckett's soloshow with the same title, April 2010)
# 4 Science of the Strange (along with Ulrik Heltoft's show, September 2010)
# 5 Scolpire il Tempo (as an accompaniment to the solo show of Giorgio Andreotta Calò, November 2010)
# 6 On Discipline (with Josef Dabernig's show, April 2011)
# 7 The Prison of Santo Stefano (along with Rossella Biscotti's solo presentation at Frieze Art Fair 2011)
# 8 Trillochromes (with Michael Portnoy's show, November 2013)
# 9 The Revenants (with Moyra Davey's show, April 2015)
Series
15 Invitations
A special programme series featuring exhibitions, projects, written works, performances, and set of e-dossiers marking Asia Art Archive's 15-year anniversary. The participants documented their process and each project has culminated in a set of print and download-on-demand e-dossiers.
60 wrd/min art critic
The following was announced on the windows of a small blue house at dOCUMENTA (13):
The 60 wrd/min art critic is available. Reviews are free of charge, and are written here on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays between the hours of 1 and 6 p.m. Lori Waxman will spend 25 minutes looking at submitted work and writing a 200-word review. Thoughtful responses are guaranteed. Completed reviews will be published in the Hessische/NiedersächsischeAllgemeine (HNA) weekly, and will remain on view here throughout dOCUMENTA (13).
This book collects together all 241 reviews written during the d13 performance, with an afterword by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.
LIST OF ARTIST ...
A Children's Book of Farming in Le Cateau-Cambrésis
A children’s book on agriculture in Le Cateau brings together drawings by students from three classes at three different schools in the region to partner with Musée Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis, located in rural northern France.
At the invitation of Carrie Pilto, director of the museum, artist Harrell Fletcher joined by Nolan Calisch and Molly Sherman proposed instructions for children to illustrate a text on the agricultural history of the region. This book traces the first meeting between these artists and the inhabitants of Le Cateau and its environs, beginning a series of participatory projects initiated by Musée Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis.
Made on ...
A Disagreeable Object
A Disagreeable Object brings together 20 artists who employ and borrow from the methods and artistic practices that the Surrealists developed in the first half of the century. This is not an exhaustive survey, nor an attempt to re-consider our understanding of Surrealism as an historical movement. Rather, the exhibition offers a view of contemporary sculpture identifying influences and attitudes that have filtered through decades of cultural production. The works in A Disagreeable Object respond to a decidedly contemporary context…
A Simulated Future Amid Collapse
As the physical world degrades and so corrodes the credibility of institutions that enable consumption, the status quo in the global north goes virtual. Within a short time, we’ve witnessed a rapidly increasing capacity to design, simulate and conjure a virtual perception of reality with exactitude and definition. Our ability to simulate reality has come to match our ability to record it. We’re able to simulate and produce a photographic image of an object without any need for the object itself. The same goes for retouched images and the act of retouching. As a result, images no longer need to ...
A Taste for Work
Fokus Grupa is an artist collective based in Rijeka, Croatia, founded by Iva Kovač and Elvis Krstulović in 2009. Borrowing their name from a contested research method, used equally for independent research as for PR purposes, they point to the social, economical and political frames of the art field. Their practice is collaborative and interdisciplinary, and it includes art, design and curating. Artistic strategies they use take political shape, without becoming a representational form of ‘political art’. Fokus Grupa concentrates on the relations between art and its public manifestations, in terms of working culture, aesthetics, and social and economic exchange values. Their work investigates ...
A: Art
Invited to Stockholm in spring of 2015 to work with the graduating MA and BA students of the Royal Institute of Art on “making a publication,” the two foreign editors of A:Art (Stuart Bailey and Angie Keefer) instead found themselves swept into the death throes of a decades-old struggle between rival institutions over the current identity and possible future of a national art scene. The book is a chronological account of events that unfolded among the Academy, the art school, its students, assorted government ministries, and the Swedish press, with accompaniment from various outside texts, including Raymond Williams’ Keywords, an ...
After Brad Troemel
“After Brad Troemel” (ABT) is an artist book conceived for the JstChillin exhibition “Read/Write” at 319 Scholes in Brooklyn in 2011. The book—originally published in a limited edition of 20—took as its conceptual core the characterization of artist Brad Troemel as a genius and a mastermind analyzed through the lens of conspiracy theory and amateur internet sleuthing. According to artist and writer Artie Vierkant, who wrote the introduction to this edition, ABT is not “about Brad Troemel, nor any of the myriad names or identities that are mentioned in its pages. ABT is about the construction of identity in a mediated ...
Against Biography
Two figures go out into this world and traverse it: the explorer and the imposter. The explorer stands on terra firma, surveying the horizon that magnetically pulls him. Sometimes Fernweh (in German, “yearning for the faraway”) produces an explorer who never returns, but his traveling is still made possible by the knowledge that he could return at any time. e image of the explorer appends a few basic corollaries to the nature of the Western image and the way it renders history. is Western image is weightless, infinitely thin, hovering above everything, including history. It is reproducible on all channels, ...
Against Comming App
fifty five cent twix
they asked in a chorus at the lights.
how do we creepshow whe re in the money? new daddies abound. some kind of tif trick. -999999996666666
i know it’s time to true turn out around. it must be time for some kind. of refill. my period is here agin. ugh.
I’m finally running low
On marzipan Three fifty Ritter
Web based mobile app.
AGNES
What is AGNES?
AGNES is a digital commission by Cécile B. Evans, the first in a series of digital commissions that coincided with the launch of the new Serpentine website and the opening of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. AGNES introduces herself in stages: like a person, she cannot be experienced in totality through a single encounter.
Who is AGNES?
AGNES lives on the website. She wants to share things with you and learn about your thoughts and feelings. The more you give back, the further AGNES will accompany you on your digital encounter with the Serpentine Galleries. She will introduce you to the ...
Alif
This sixteen page book is titled ‘Alif, after the first letter and numeral of the Arabic language, which are both written with a single stroke. The book contains a series of love poems possibly written by the seventh century arab poet Abu Nuwas, to his contemporary, the alchemist Jabir Ibn Hayyan. The poems are said to be carried out by the poet according to rigorous parameters set by the alchemist.
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