Matthew Rampley’s The Vienna School of Art History is the first book in over seventy-five years to study in depth and in context the practices of art history from 1847, the year the first teaching ...position in the discipline was created, to 1918, the collapse of Austria-Hungary. It traces the emergence of art history as a discipline, the establishment of norms of scholarly enquiry, and the involvement of art historians in wider debates about the cultural and political identity of the monarchy. While Rampley also examines the formation of art history elsewhere in Austria-Hungary, the so-called Vienna School plays the central role in the study. Located in the Habsburg imperial capital, Vienna art historians frequently became entangled in debates that were of importance to art historians elsewhere in the Empire, and the book pays particular attention to these areas of overlapping interest. The Vienna School was well known for its methodological innovations and this book analyzes its contributions in this area. Rampley focuses most fully, however, on the larger political and ideological context of the practice of art history, in particular the way in which art historical debates served as proxies for wider arguments over the political, social, and cultural life of the Habsburg Empire.
This book traces the influence of the changing political environment on Czech art, criticism, history, and theory between 1895 and 1939, looking beyond the avant-garde to the peripheries of modern ...art. The period is marked by radical political changes, the formation of national and regional identities, and the rise of modernism in Central Europe – specifically, the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the creation of the new democratic state of Czechoslovakia. Marta Filipová studies the way in which narratives of modern art were formed in a constant negotiation and dialogue between an effort to be international and a desire to remain authentically local.
How do dealers price contemporary art in a world where objective criteria seem absent?Talking Pricesis the first book to examine this question from a sociological perspective. On the basis of a wide ...range of qualitative and quantitative data, including interviews with art dealers in New York and Amsterdam, Olav Velthuis shows how contemporary art galleries juggle the contradictory logics of art and economics. In doing so, they rely on a highly ritualized business repertoire. For instance, a sharp distinction between a gallery's museumlike front space and its businesslike back space safeguards the separation of art from commerce.
Velthuis shows that prices, far from being abstract numbers, convey rich meanings to trading partners that extend well beyond the works of art. A high price may indicate not only the quality of a work but also the identity of collectors who bought it before the artist's reputation was established. Such meanings are far from unequivocal. For some, a high price may be a symbol of status; for others, it is a symbol of fraud.
Whereas sociological thought has long viewed prices as reducing qualities to quantities, this pathbreaking and engagingly written book reveals the rich world behind these numerical values. Art dealers distinguish different types of prices and attach moral significance to them. Thus the price mechanism constitutes a symbolic system akin to language.
Social works Jackson, Shannon
2011., 2011, 20110228, 2011-02-28
eBook
‘a game-changer, a must-read for scholars, students and artists alike’ – Tom Finkelpearl
At a time when art world critics and curators heavily debate the social, and when community organizers and ...civic activists are reconsidering the role of aesthetics in social reform, this book makes explicit some of the contradictions and competing stakes of contemporary experimental art-making.
Social Works is an interdisciplinary approach to the forms, goals and histories of innovative social practice in both contemporary performance and visual art. Shannon Jackson uses a range of case studies and contemporary methodologies to mediate between the fields of visual and performance studies. The result is a brilliant analysis that not only incorporates current political and aesthetic discourses but also provides a practical understanding of social practice.
1. Performance, Aesthetics, and Support 2. Quality Time: Social Practice Debates in Contemporary Art 3. High Maintenance: The Sanitation Aesthetics of Mierle Laderman Ukeles 4. Staged Management: Theatricality and Institutional Critique 5. Tech Support: Labor in the Global Theatres of The Builders Association and Rimini Protokoll 6. Welfare Melancholia: The Public Works of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset 7. Unfederated Theatre: Paul Chan Waiting in New Orleans
'Social Works takes an interdisciplinary look at the forms, goals, and histories of innovative social practice in contemporary performance and visual art. Shannon Jackson presents a range of case studies and contemporary methodologies to examine the fields for performative and visual art studies.' – Public Art Review, 2011, Issue 45
‘Shannon Jackson offers vivid close readings of art and performance … and she considers social issues relating to welfare, sanitation, urban planning, and globalisation, and how they coincide with class, gender, race, and – especially – labour…This will be a useful, enriching, and stimulating book for artists, students, and academics across art, performance, and social theory.’ – Jen Harvie, Contemporary Theatre Review
'Throughout the various studies that comprise Social Works , Jackson demonstrates the critical mobility across psychoanalysis, feminist, queer, and critical race theory needed to produce interpretations that trouble the very grounds of what constitutes art, life, and the public.' – Jennifer Cayer, e-misférica
'Jackson presents an informed and critical exploration of the 'social turn' in contemporary art, and overall, what is offered here is a thorough re-visioning of how the social phenomena of theatre and performance might be thought about and understood...This brilliant book asks us to think about art and performance as forms of human welfare, performatively creating and sustaining systems of social support, and working in ways that secure the maintenance of life.' – Jenny Hughes, New Theatre Quarterly
'Shannon Jackson's superb new book is, in a very challenging way, about vocabulary. Bypassing–even eschewing–language sometime dissed as "jargon," Jackson forces readers to think and think again about basic terms such as "performance," "social practice," "art," "politics," and "public"...Jackson's book is an invitation to consume art promiscuously but to choose words as if the future of the world depended upon them." – Dorothy Chansky, TDR: The Drama Review
'This is a subtle, nuanced and socially committed book that should be widely read.' – Stephen Bottoms, Theatre Research International
'Amidst the upheaval of the 'social turn', Social Works is a pivotal landmark. As we attempt to conceive of 'the aesthetic' and 'the social' together in performance and across the arts, Jackson's articulation of what she calls the "support" of a performance, that is, the real social, economic, and even logistical conditions that allow it to come to be, is a great contribution to the debate. In her distinctive voice, Jackson offers pertinent and noteworthy examples to unfold a sophisticated framework for understanding the political, ethical, and aesthetic implications of the social turn. She 'explores the social aspirations of socially engaged projects less as the extra-aesthetic milieu that legitimates or compromises the aesthetic act and more as the unraveling of the frame that would cast "the social" as "extra"' (16). This stance subtly rewrites the grounding of performance studies, and Jackson's far-reaching book is thus a vital reference at this moment of transition.' – James Andrew Wilson, PhD Candidate, University of Warwick
'Jackson's phenomenal book shifts the discussion from taste to ethnography in her critical examination of the intersection of social art, performance and theater. Not only a must read for those interested in the intersections of art and social change, but perhaps more importantly, for those searching for a calibrated compass in the age of vast interdisciplinary art production.' Nato Thompson, Chief Curator, Creative Time
' Social Works is a thrilling encounter: a politically important and intellectually innovative book. Shannon Jackson's exploration of the social work that underpins and enables the making of art is wonderfully judged. She draws out the ways in which art, politics and the public realm are intimately interwoven. The book is itself a vital and generous piece of social work.' John Clarke, Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University
' Social Works is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present and future of art at the intersection of performance and social practice. Shannon Jackson combines impeccable research and rigorous critical thinking with a lucid, approachable writing style. I have found this book invaluable in my work as both a curator and a critic.' Andy Horowitz, Founder, Culturebot.org
Shannon Jackson is the director of the Arts Research Center at University of California at Berkeley where she is also Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Her award-winning previous publications include Professing Performance (2004) and Lines of Activity (2000).
The green bloc Fowkes, Maja
2015, 20150630, 2015-04-10
eBook
This book examines the approaches of renowned Central European artists to the natural environment, uncovering an up till now largely unrecognized aspect of their work, which has regularly been ...analyzed through socio-political contexts, but rarely in terms of ecology. It focuses on the period after 1968, which not only brought changes to the political landscape of Eastern Europe, but shifted artistic practice towards conceptualism and was instrumental in spreading environmental consciousness. It comparatively investigates artists and artist groups from Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia and Czech Republic, at the moment when art exited the gallery and entered the natural environment, while socialist governments attempted to keep control over information about the real state of environmental pollution and block globally emerging ecological discourse. Apart from embedding artistic production in social, political and environmental histories of the region, this book also addresses the problem of art history as a discipline under socialism, presents a more complete picture of its neo-avant-garde art and constitutes an unprecedented application of the ecological paradigm to art history. It demonstrates the creativity, inventiveness and astuteness of Central European artists whose vision could not be controlled by any imposed borders at the dawn of global awareness of ecological crisis.
In this groundbreaking book, David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually ...understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé.
The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left-right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the antimodern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism.
In a major departure from the existing literature David Roberts argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.
After World War II, the concept of borders became unsettled, especially after the rise of subaltern and multicultural studies in the 1980s. Art at the U.S.-Mexico border came to a turning point at ...the beginning of that decade with the election of U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Beginning with a political history of the border, with an emphasis on the Chicano movement and its art production, Ila Sheren explores the forces behind the shift in thinking about the border in the late twentieth century. Particularly in the world of visual art, borders have come to represent a space of performance rather than a geographical boundary, a cultural terrain meant to be negotiated rather than a physical line. From 1980 forward, Sheren argues, the border became portable through performance and conceptual work. This dematerialization of the physical border after the 1980s worked in two opposite directions—the movement of border thinking to the rest of the world, as well as the importation of ideas to the border itself. Beginning with site-specific conceptual artwork of the 1980s, particularly the performances of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, Sheren shows how these works reconfigured the border as an active site. Sheren moves on to examine artists such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Coco Fusco, and Marcos Ramirez "ERRE." Although Sheren places emphasis on the Chicano movement and its art production, this groundbreaking book suggests possibilities for the expansion of the concept of portability to contemporary art projects beyond the region.
REMEX presents the first comprehensive examination of artistic responses and contributions to an era defined by the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994–2008). Marshaling over a decade’s worth ...of archival research, interviews, and participant observation in Mexico City and the Mexico–US borderlands, Amy Sara Carroll considers individual and collective art practices, recasting NAFTA as the most fantastical inter-American allegory of the turn of the millennium. Carroll organizes her interpretations of performance, installation, documentary film, built environment, and body, conceptual, and Internet art around three key coordinates—City, Woman, and Border. She links the rise of 1990s Mexico City art in the global market to the period’s consolidation of Mexico–US border art as a genre. She then interrupts this transnational art history with a sustained analysis of chilanga and Chicana artists’ remapping of the figure of Mexico as Woman. A tour de force that depicts a feedback loop of art and public policy—what Carroll terms the “allegorical performative"—REMEX adds context to the long-term effects of the post-1968 intersection of D.F. performance and conceptualism, centralizes women artists’ embodied critiques of national and global master narratives, and tracks post-1984 border art’s “undocumentation" of racialized and sexualized reconfigurations of North American labor pools. The book’s featured artwork becomes the lens through which Carroll rereads a range of events and phenomenon from California’s Proposition 187 to Zapatismo, US immigration policy, 9/11 (1973/2001), femicide in Ciudad Juárez, and Mexico’s war on drugs.
In the decades following World War II, France experienced both a period of affluence and a wave of political, artistic, and philosophical discontent that culminated in the countrywide protests of ...1968. In Disordering the Establishment Lily Woodruff examines the development of artistic strategies of political resistance in France in this era. Drawing on interviews with artists, curators, and cultural figures of the time, Woodruff analyzes the formal and rhetorical methods that artists used to counter establishment ideology, appeal to direct political engagement, and grapple with French intellectuals' modeling of society. Artists and collectives such as Daniel Buren, André Cadere, the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, and the Collectif d’Art Sociologique shared an opposition to institutional hegemony by adapting their works to unconventional spaces and audiences, asserting artistic autonomy from art institutions, and embracing interdisciplinarity. In showing how these artists used art to question what art should be and where it should be seen, Woodruff demonstrates how artists challenged and redefined the art establishment and their historical moment.
