A richly illustrated survey of Alfredo Jaar's Studies on Happiness (1979-1981) and its deep political stakes in the historical context of Chile's neoliberal transition.
Between 1979 and 1981, a young artist and architecture school dropout named Alfredo Jaar asked Chileans the deceptively simple question: Are you happy? Including private interviews, sidewalk polls, and video-recorded forums, among other interventions, Jaar's two-year and seven-phase project, Studies on Happiness, addressed a country in transition, as a newly adopted constitution remade Chile through privatization and other neoliberal reforms. Jaar's first major artwork has been imprecisely discussed in the monographic literature on the artist and rarely mentioned in studies of Chilean art after 1973.
Edward Vazquez contextualizes Jaar's Studies on Happiness within his early production and places his practice within the Chilean art world, thus reinstating the project's historical embeddedness and the deep political stakes of its sociality. The work's marginality is a strength: its minor status in the period and in Jaar's oeuvre allow it an historical freedom in engaging Chilean culture under Augusto Pinochet and provides a wedge to realign current interpretations of Chilean art and hemispheric conceptualism with the openness central to Jaar's project.
Cet ouvrage se concentre sur une oeuvre de Pierre Huyghe, Untitled (Human Mask), où l'on trouve un singe déguisé en jeune fille portant un masque blanc inspiré du théâtre Nô et redessiné par Pierre Huyghe. Elle s'inspire d'un fait réel largement diffuse sur YouTube montrant l'animal dressé pour servir dans un restaurant au Japon.
An illustrated study of Richard Hamilton's famous Pop art painting of Mick Jagger and art dealer Robert Fraser in handcuffs.
One of the defining paintings of British Pop art, Richard Hamilton's Swingeing London 67 (f) depicts two men--Mick Jagger and Hamilton's art dealer Robert Fraser--handcuffed together in the back of a police van. The image is taken from a newspaper photograph that shows the two being driven from Lewes prison to Chichester Magistrates Court following their June 1967 arrest for possession of drugs. The title is a clever and bitter play on words, conflating the "swinging" of 1960s-era London with the "swingeing" (to swinge is to beat or scourge) punishment meted out to new cultural heroes by the law. Hamilton's painting is far from reportage; it portrays the historical clash of cultures between Pop (and Pop art) and the establishment.
In this illustrated study of Hamilton's celebrated painting, Andrew Wilson views Swingeing London 67 (f) as history painting, to be understood in the context of the struggle against the British state's attempt--aided and abetted by the popular press--to repress any expression of personal liberation. Hamilton's Pop art idiom of figuration and media images was his way of refusing the demands of an old aesthetic order. For him, Pop art was the expression of an open-ended, analytical, critical, and artistic process that reflected his own direct engagement with ethical issues. With Swingeing London 67 (f), Hamilton offers not only a representational image but also a trigger for critical activity--an image of an event and an image of what determines the conditions of that image.
In 1986 the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London showed a new commission by the artist Helen Chadwick (1954-1996). What Chadwick conceived for the ICA exhibition explored her characteristic themes--the female body (her own), the aesthetics of pleasure, the material variety and wonder of phenomena--but took them in a new, flamboyant direction. In this illustrated volume, Marina Warner examines one part of Chadwick's installation, The Oval Court. This work was erotic, playful, and fierce; it showed imaginative ambition on an exceptional scale and a unique, piquant sensibility, both raunchy and delicate.
Despite the work's recognition as a feminist monument of rare intensity, it has rarely been shown or discussed since the author's catalogue essay for the original exhibition. Warner here reconsiders Chadwick's influence as an artist who helped to shift conventional aesthetics and transvalue despised, even abominated forms. Exploring the work's richly layered composition in light of intervening years, Warner shows how Chadwick's imagination has shaped many artists' ideas and ethics, and emboldened their adventures with materials.
An illustrated examination of Donald Rodney's seminal digital media work Autoicon (1997-2000).
Donald Rodney's Autoicon, a work originally produced as both a website and CD-ROM, was conceived by the artist in the mid-1990s but not completed until two years after his death in 1998. Referencing Jeremy Bentham's infamous nineteenth-century Auto-Icon, the work proposes an extension of the personhood and presence of Rodney, while critically challenging dominant conceptions of the self, the body, and historicity. Grounded in a partial collection of medical documents that constitute biomedicine's attempts to comprehensively know and maintain Rodney's body during his lifelong experience of sickle-cell aneamia, Autoicon pursues the artist's address, from the mid-1980s onward, of the British social and institutional body's cellular composition through racialized, biopolitical power.
Autoicon consists of a Java-based AI and neural network that engages the user in text-based chat, and provides responses by drawing from a dense body of data points related to Rodney and his work, including documentation of artworks, medical records, interviews, images, notes, and video. Pulling both from this internal archive and the external archive of the Internet, a montage machine composes constantly mutating images according to a rule-based system established around Rodney's working process.
In this One Work edition, curator Richard Birkett traces the distinct contemporary presence of Autoicon, and the ideas and relations that emerged around its conception before and after Rodney's death, particularly linking the work to the artist's seminal 1997 exhibition 9 Night in Eldorado. Birkett addresses Autoicon as both an index of entangled social and material relations around Rodney--a form of dispersed memory--and a vector of critical creative production that continues to resonate with contemporary artistic practices and radical thought. While attuned to late twentieth century discourse around the body's dissolution into the virtual and the technological potential for extending consciousness, in its content and structure Autoicon locates these discourses of the human and posthuman in relation to the durable productive forces of post-Enlightenment racialization and ableism. The workings of the mind that Autoicon presents are intrinsically tied to Rodney's wider use in his work of bodily matter, and genealogically bound to a Black history of displacement, dispossession, and resistance experienced physiologically, socially, and familially by the artist. Autoicon offers up a counter-manifestation of the subject as formed and multiplied through temporal disjuncture, affectability and acts of preservation, care, and collectivity.
Afterall n° 53 s'intéresse à la question de l'exposition et examine, à travers les notions de médium et de milieu, un ensemble de pratiques et de modes de pensée qui repositionnent l'exposition en termes concrets, spatiaux, architecturaux et expérientiels. En parallèle, les artistes et auteurs réunis dans ce numéro explorent également les risques et le potentiel des métaphores dans la production des expositions.
Au sommaire : Stan Douglas par Shep Steiner et Kim Jihoon ; Cross-Eyed and Painless in Toronto par Luis Jacob ; The Exhibition as Medium par Yuk Hui et Adeena Mey ; Thinking Blackness in Pan-American Artistic Networks: The Case of the Bienal de São Paulo par Bruno Pinheiro ; Anawana Haloba ; Logic of the Written Word and Oral Logic: Conflict at the Heart of the Archive par Mamoussé Diagne ; On Mediterreanism in the Event-Institution par Chiara Cartuccia ; Walid Raad par Elisa Adami ; Becoming Ethnic in China: A 'Good Story' Told in Painting and Dialect par Hera Chan et Alvin Li.
Ce numéro double propose un « dépaysement » en élargissant le regard au-delà de l'occidentalocentrisme, vers un horizon transnational et pluraliste, explorant les nouveaux imaginaires créés par des artistes et des penseurs du « Sud global », du Brésil à la république démocratique du Congo.
Au sommaire : Filipa Ramos et Nav Haq sur Jonathas de Andrade, Elvira Espejo Ayca sur le soutien mutuel aux arts, Lorraine Leu et Jareh Das sur Rosana Paulino, Charles Stankievech sur Clarice Lispector et Lygia Clark, Hyunjin Kim et Chloe Ting sur Lotus L. Kang, Botanical Entanglements, Women's Emancipation and Coloniality par Corina L. Apostol, Felix Kalmenson sur le commerce de la gutta-percha, des portfolios d'artistes de Marwa Arsanios et Sinzo Aanza, Maxa Zoller sur le workshop Habib Gorghi, Melissa Gronlund sur Feryal Matar, Mi You sur Ashkat Akhmedyarov, Baudouin Bikoko sur la photographie congolaise, Célestin Badibanga ne Mwine sur l'émergence de la nouvelle scène artistique congolaise, Lotte Arndt sur la 7e Biennale de Lubumbashi, des idées pour retarder la fin du monde par Ailton Krenak, entretien avec Richard Mosse, Shaping Atmospheres par Ala Roushan et Charles Stankievech, Stephanie Bailey sur Sin Wai Kin.
A strikingly original analysis of Isa Genzken's move towards merging sculptural and architectural morphologies into the critique of commodity culture.
Fuck the Bauhaus, made in the year 2000 out of quotidian objects and cheap materials foraged from New York City by the German artist Isa Genzken, marked a poetic and provocative departure from Genzken's earlier work. Since the 1970s, Genzken's "post-Minimalist" works had been like ruins in reverse, conjuring the haunting specters of recent catastrophe, destruction, and failure in the United States, while also playfully suggesting a degree of freedom and elevation.
Analyzing how this mode gave way to a new penchant for appropriation, collage, and montage, André Rottmann offers a strikingly original analysis of Genzken's move towards merging sculptural and architectural morphologies into the critique of commodity culture. In this new addition to the One Work series, Rottmann draws on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, Bruno Latour, and other contemporaneous theorists of "assemblage" to illuminate Genzken's work as a powerful reimagination of social relations in flux.
A richly illustrated exploration of Sung Hwan Kim's complex record of migrant stories, displacement and belonging, border-crossings and translation.
In A Record of Drifting Across the Sea (2017-), Sung Hwan Kim turns to past histories of migration. The artist parses the traces-archival and bodily-left by undocumented Korean migrants who came to the US by way of Hawai'i at the turn of the last century, and ponders over their impact on other migrant and indigenous communities. As an ongoing film and installation series, comprising two chapters and a third in progress, A Record unsettles the limits of the "one work" with its distributive, open-ended and collaborative nature.
In this speculative inquiry, Janine Armin explores each chapter in Kim's multilayered work as a mycelial network of feelers entangling and extending the wider work in process. Engaging history through the senses, folklore and myth, as much as through archival material, Kim navigates and crosses the boundaries between displacement and belonging. Focusing on the artist's attempt to escape from representation, Armin illuminates and attends to the different stories and non-sovereign ways of being together towards which his work points us.
This title is part of the One Work book series, which focuses on artworks that have significantly changed the way we understand art and its history.
