Bøger i Writing Art serien

Writings by the conceptual artist Michael Asher—including notes, proposals, exhibition statements, and letters to curators and critics—most published here for the first time.The California conceptual artist Michael Asher (1943-2012) was known for rigorous site specificity and pioneering institutional critique. His decades of teaching at CalArts influenced generations of artists. Much of Asher's artistic practice was devoted to creating works that had no lasting material presence and often responded to the material, social, or ideological context of a situation. Because most of Asher's artworks have ceased to exist, his writings about them have special significance. Public Knowledge collects writings by Asher about his work—including preliminary notes and ideas, project proposals, exhibition statements, and letters to curators and critics—most of which have never been previously published. Asher gave few interviews, didn't write art criticism, and rarely published extensive accounts of his own work. Yet writing was central to his artistic practice, serving as a tool for working out ideas, negotiating institutional parameters, and describing thought processes. In these texts, he considers writing and documentation, discusses artistic practice, offers notes for gallery and museum talks, presents artist statements for exhibition-goers, describes individual works and their situational context, and reflects on teaching and art education. Among other things, Asher provides his definition of site specificity, addresses the function of art in public space, and analyzes the intersection of teaching art and institutional models of education. Readers will see an artist at work, formulating ethical and political strategies for making art in a situational world.

The most comprehensive collection to date of the artist Bruce Nauman's writings plus all of his major interviews from 1965 to 2001.

Chosen to represent the United States at the 46th Venice Biennale, Bill Viola, a New York artist living on the West Coast, is recognized internationally for his work in video and sound installations. This book brings together a selection of essays, notebook entries, drawings, and descriptions of projects that map Viola's personal course through the readings, observations, experiments, and associations that form the groundwork for his art. Each work illustrated is accompanied by a description by the artist, as well as comments on the work's origins from the artist's notebooks.For the last 25 years, Viola has used innovative multimedia technologies to explore the phenomena of sense perception as a language of the body and avenue to self-knowledge, integrating many disciplines and philosophies to reveal contemporary art's relevance to the modern world. His views have deep roots in mysticism, poetry, philosophy, Eastern art, shamanism, Chinese Taoism, Sufism, and Zen Buddhism. Viola's chief concerns today are to draw attention to the upset ecological balance of nature by focusing on the connection between our inner and outer lives, on the conception of the self as part of the whole.Published in association with the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London.

Essays, criticism, and performance scripts written between 1985 and 2003 by an artist whose artistic practice investigates and reveals the social structures of art and its institutions.

In 2006, even though he could barely type, China¿s most famous artist started blogging. For more than three years, Ai Weiwei turned out a steady stream of scathing social commentary, criticism of government policy, thoughts on art and architecture, and autobiographical writings. He wrote about the Sichuan earthquake (and posted a list of the schoolchildren who died because of the government¿s ¿tofu-dregs engineering¿), reminisced about Andy Warhol and the East Village art scene, described the irony of being investigated for ¿fraud¿ by the Ministry of Public Security, made a modest proposal for tax collection. Then, on June 1, 2009, Chinese authorities shut down the blog. This book offers a collection of Ai¿s notorious online writings translated into English--the most complete, public documentation of the original Chinese blog available in any language. The New York Times called Ai ¿a figure of Warholian celebrity.¿ He is a leading figure on the international art scene, a regular in museums and biennials, but in China he is a manifold and controversial presence: artist, architect, curator, social critic, justice-seeker. He was a consultant on the design of the famous ¿Bird¿s Nest¿ stadium but called for an Olympic boycott; he received a Chinese Contemporary Art ¿lifetime achievement award¿ in 2008 but was beaten by the police in connection with his ¿citizen investigation¿ of earthquake casualties in 2009. Ai Weiwei's Blog documents Ai¿s passion, his genius, his hubris, his righteous anger, and his vision for China

The first collection of writings by a noted artist and activist whose work has focused on the AIDS epidemic.

Departing from conventional genres of architectural writing, Roger Connah presents an original and wry reflection on the fickle but exciting role that language, semantics, and philosophy have played this century in relation to architecture. Welcome to The Hotel Architecture is a five-part "anti-epic" poem on the culture of architecture - its tribes and inventions, the spectacular and vernacular, and the processes through which names and movements are secured, erased, forgotten, and manipulated.

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 São 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 BEVÖLKERUNG (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.

Essays, project plans, and correspondence from across Nam Jun Paik's career, much of it previously out of print or unpublished.Nam June Paik (1932-2006) is a pivotal figure in the history of modern art. Arguably the most important video artist of all time, and certainly among the most influential and prolific, Paik was a legendary innovator who transformed the electronic moving image into an artist's medium. He wrote incessantly—corresponding with friends, composing performance scores, making production notes for television projects, drafting plans for video installations, writing essays and articles. Celebrated for his visionary development of new artistic tools and for his pioneering work in video and television, Paik often wrote to sharpen his thinking and hone his ideas. He used the typewriter to fashion sentences that broke apart and reassembled themselves as he wrote, producing both poetic texts and aesthetic objects on the page. This first extensive collection of Paik's writings includes many previously unpublished and out-of-print texts. Drawing on materials from the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Nam June Paik Archive and from a range of international publications, We Are in Open Circuits offers important but long-unavailable essays, including "Global Groove and Video Common Market”; unpublished writings on such topics as his creative partnership with the cellist Charlotte Moorman and the role of public television; a substantial part of his compilation "Scrutable Chinese”; and detailed plans for some of his groundbreaking broadcast works, including the trio Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), Bye Bye Kipling (1986), and Wrap Around the World (1988). It also includes nearly 150 pages that reproduce Paik's original typed and handwritten pages, letting readers see his writing in various stages of inspiration and execution.