What we’re reading
Across seven essays, Schneider presents a forensic and unique examination of both contemporary and historical performance, drawing on a variety of elucidating sources including the "America" plays of Linda Mussmann and Suzan-Lori Parks, performances of Marina Abramovic ́ and Allison Smith, and the continued popular appeal of Civil War reenactments. Performing Remains questions the importance of representation throughout history and today, while boldly reassessing the ritual value of failure to recapture the past and recreate the "original."
"The Nature and Art of Workmanship explores the meaning of skill and its relationship to design and manufacture. Cutting through a century of fuzzy thinking, David Pye proposes a new theory of making based on the concepts of 'workmanship of risk' and 'workmanship of certainty'. And he shows how good workmanship imparts all-important diversity to our visual environment."
Rebecca Horn is a multi-talented artist whose kinetic sculptures, films and installations have contributed to her unique international reputation. Her surreal installations and objects work as metaphors; often playfully erotic, they arouse curiousity and childlike amazement, yet also subconsciously evoke fear and uncertainty Glance of Infinity is a comprehensive survey of Rebecca Horn's work from 1970 up to the present day, including her most recently exhibited works at this year's Venice Biennale, for the new building of the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, and in the Munster Skulptur Projekte in Munster 1997. This full scale monograph includes an interview with the artist, and essays by Brace W. Ferguson, Lynne Cooke, Doris von Drahten and Rebecca Horn, as well as a comprehensive index. Beautifully designed and printed, it constitutes an invaluable work of reference and presents a complete visual documentation of the development of one of our most important contemporary artists.
The Invisible Dragon made a lot of noise for a little book When it was originally published in 1993 it was championed by artists for its forceful call for a reconsideration of beauty—and savaged by more theoretically oriented critics who dismissed the very concept of beauty as naive, igniting a debate that has shown no sign of flagging. With this revised and expanded edition, Hickey is back to fan the flames. More manifesto than polite discussion, more call to action than criticism, The Invisible Dragon aims squarely at the hyper-institutionalism that, in Hickey’s view, denies the real pleasures that draw us to art in the first place. Deploying the artworks of Warhol, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Mapplethorpe and the writings of Ruskin, Shakespeare, Deleuze, and Foucault, Hickey takes on museum culture, arid academicism, sclerotic politics, and more—all in the service of making readers rethink the nature of art. A new introduction provides a context for earlier essays—what Hickey calls his "intellectual temper tantrums." A new essay, "American Beauty," concludes the volume with a historical argument that is a rousing paean to the inherently democratic nature of attention to beauty.
The Jewelry of Ideas is published in conjunction with Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s exhibition celebrating gifts from the Susan Grant Lewin Collection of contemporary jewelry. This renowned collection, built by the New York–based Lewin over several decades and recently donated to Cooper Hewitt, captures the diversity and achievements of art, or studio, jewelry with nearly 150 significant works by designers from the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Cathy Caruth juxtaposes the writings of psychoanalysts, literary and political theorists, and literary authors who write in a century faced by a new kind of history, one that is made up of events that seem to undo, rather than produce, their own remembrance. At the heart of each chapter is the enigma of a history that, in its very unfolding, seems to be slipping away before our grasp.
This "jeweler's bible" is the most thorough reference available on traditional and innovative jewelry making techniques. More than 900 photographs illustrate historical and current jewelry-making concepts by more than 300 jewelers. It includes an extensive index, glossaries of jewelry forms and findings and an international supply source list.
Dispensing with clichéd arguments that craft is art, Adamson persuasively makes a case for defining craft in a more nuanced fashion. The interesting thing about craft, he argues, is that it is perceived to be 'inferior' to art. The book consists of an overview of various aspects of this second-class identity - supplementarity, sensuality, skill, the pastoral, and the amateur. It also provides historical case studies analysing craft's role in a variety of disciplines, including architecture, design, contemporary art, and the crafts themselves. Thinking Through Craft will be essential reading for anyone interested in craft or the broader visual arts.
This is a book about the exhilaration and the catastrophe of embodiment. Analyzing different instances of injured bodies, Peggy Phelan considers what sustained attention to the affective force of trauma might yield for critical theory. Advocating what she calls "performative writing", she creates an extraordinary fusion of critical and creative thinking which erodes the distinction between art and theory, fact and fiction. The bodies she examines here include Christ's, as represented in Caravaggio's painting The Incredulity of St Thomas, Anita Hill's and Clarence Thomas's bodies as they were performed during the Senate hearings, the disinterred body of the Rose Theatre, exemplary bodies reconstructed through psychoanalytic talking cures, and the filmic bodies created by Tom Joslin, Mark Massi, and Peter Friedman in Silverlake Life: The View From Here. This new work by the highly-acclaimed author of Unmarked makes a stunning advance in performance theory in dialogue with psychoanalysis, queer theory, and cultural studies.
Between 2010 and 2011, curator Elena Filipovic along with artists Danh Vo, Carol Bove and Tino Sehgal, organized a visionary Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition across three institutions: WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel; and MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. With the profound visual and conceptual potential of Gonzalez-Torres' work in mind, Filipovic devised an exhibition structure that entailed two autonomous-yet-adjacent exhibitions of his work at each of the three venues: one iteration by her, and one by Vo, Bove and Sehgal respectively. This volume follows the show's structure. Each venue has a dedicated section which includes a preface by Filipovic, photographic documentation of each exhibition and a contribution by Vo, Bove and Sehgal reflecting upon their positions as curators of Gonzalez-Torres' work.
As entertaining as it is incisive, Stoned is a raucous journey through the history of human desire for what is rare, and therefore precious. What makes a stone a jewel? What makes a jewel priceless? And why do we covet beautiful things? In this brilliant account of how eight jewels shaped the course of history, jeweler and scientist Aja Raden tells an original and often startling story about our unshakeable addiction to beauty and the darker side of human desire. What moves the world is what moves each of us: desire. Jewelry—which has long served as a stand-in for wealth and power, glamor and success—has birthed cultural movements, launched political dynasties, and started wars. Masterfully weaving together pop science and history, Stoned breaks history into three categories—Want, Take, and Have—and explains what the diamond on your finger has to do with the GI Bill, why green-tinted jewelry has been exalted by so many cultures, why the glass beads that bought Manhattan for the Dutch were initially considered a fair trade, and how the French Revolution started over a coveted necklace.