Her examination of Earthworks relationship to the ecology movement perceptively corrects a popular misconception about the artists goals while acknowledging the social and cultural complexities of the period."
The Colors covers the past three decades of the American art scene, a period during which the prevailing artistic fashion has shifted as often as the focus of the Whitney Biennial, when art and money, talent and celebrity have often been confused. During this period, figures such as Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, and Keith Haring have crossed over from the rarefied world of high art into popular culture, and art dealers, like Hollywood power agents, have often claimed as much attention as those they represented. Anthony Haden-Guest has moved within this world, known the players, and delivers here an authoritative and deliciously inside account.Focusing on the lives and personalities of the art world's main players, and with a sure critical component, Haden-Guest gives us vivid portraits of the period's key artists as they strive to fulfill their ambitions. He does justice as well to the machinations of those who have come to control the larger drama -- the dealers, collectors, and museum curators. Filled with incredible anecdotes, dramatically told stories, and subtle critical assessments, True Colors tells the story of the art world that we have never heard before.
How leading American artists reflected on the fate of humanity in the nuclear era through monumental sculpture In the wake of the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945, artists in the United States began to question what it meant to create a work of art in a world where humanity could be rendered extinct by its own hand. The New Monuments and the End of Man examines how some of the most important artists of postwar America revived the neglected tradition of the sculptural monument as a way to grapple with the cultural and existential anxieties surrounding the threat of nuclear annihilation. Robert Slifkin looks at such iconic works as the industrially evocative welded steel sculptures of David Smith, the austere structures of Donald Judd, and the desolate yet picturesque earthworks of Robert Smithson. Transforming how we understand this crucial moment in American art, he traces the intersections of postwar sculptural practice with cybernetic theory, science-fiction cinema and literature, and the political debates surrounding nuclear warfare. Slifkin identifies previously unrecognized affinities of the sculpture of the 1940s and 1950s with the minimalism and land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and acknowledges the important contributions of postwar artists who have been marginalized until now, such as Raoul Hague, Peter Grippe, and Robert Mallary. Strikingly illustrated throughout, The New Monuments and the End of Man spans the decades from Hiroshima to the Fall of Saigon, when the atomic bomb cast its shadow over American art.
On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century explores the radical transformation of drawing that began during the last century as numerous artists critically re-examined the traditional concepts of the medium. In a revolutionary departure from the institutional definition of drawing and from reliance on paper as the fundamental support material, artists instead pushed the line into real space, expanding the medium's relationship to gesture and form and connecting it with painting, sculpture, photography, film and dance. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, On Line presents a discursive history of mark-making through nearly 250 works by 100 artists, including Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alexander Calder, Karel Malich, Eva Hesse, Anna Maria Maiolino, Richard Tuttle, Mona Hatoum and Monika Grzymala, among many others. Essays by the curators illuminate individual practices and examine broader themes, such as the exploration of the line by the avant-garde and the relationship between drawing and dance.
Lines are omnipresent in our everyday experience and language. They reflect and influence the spatial and temporal structures of our world view. Taking Tim Ingold’s cultural history of the line as a starting-point, this book understands lines as expressions that allow insights into cultural theoretical phenomena and thus go beyond their mere form. The essays will investigate this premise from various disciplines (architecture, art, cartography, film, literature and philosophy).
New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.
"Finding silence amidst restlessness is what makes creative life possible-and death comprehensible. But how do we find-more importantly, how do we "understand"-silence while immersed in the chattering of the digital age? Have we forgotten how to listen? Are we less prepared than ever for the ultimate silence that awaits us all? Mark C. Taylor's new book is a philosophy of silence for our nervous, buzzing present, a timely work for a world where noise is a means of distraction, domination, and control. Here Taylor asks the reader to pause long enough to hear what is not said, and to attend to what remains unsayable. But in his account, our way to "hearing" silence is to "see" it: Taylor explores variations of silence by considering the work of leading modem and postmodern visual artists, from Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt to James Turrell and Anish Kapoor. Drawing also on the insights of philosophers, theologians, writers, and composers, he weaves a rich narrative modeled on the Stations of the Cross. "We come from and return to silence; in between, silence is the gap, hesitation, interval that allows thoughts to form and words to emerge," he writes. His chapter titles suggest our positions toward silence--or rather, our pre-positions: Without. Before. From. Beyond. Against. Within. Around. Between. Toward. With. In. Recasting Hegel's phenomenology of spirit and Kierkegaard's stages on life's way, Taylor translates the traditional "Via Dolorosa" into a Nietzschean "Via Jubilosa" that affirms silence in the midst of noise, light in the midst of darkness"--
