The Object Of Art

Reconsidering the Object of Artexamines a generally underexposed (and therefore often misunderstood) period in contemporary art and highlights artists whose practices have inspired much of the most significant art being produced today. It illustrates and discusses many crucial, ground-breaking works that have not been seen within their proper historical context, if they have been individually seen at all. By 1969 such artists as Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Marcel Broodthaers, Dan Graham, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner and others had begun to create works using a variety of media that sought to reevaluate certain fundamental premises about the formal, material, and contextual definitions of art. This first comprehensive overview of Conceptual art in English documents the work of fifty-five artists, work that marked a significant rupture with traditional forms and concepts of painting, sculpture, photography, and film. Also included are essays that elucidate the significant aesthetic issues that gave rise, in both America and Europe, to the highly individual, but related, modes of Conceptual art. Lucy Lippard (art historian) writes on the broader sociopolitical milieu in which this work was made; Stephen Melville (Professor of Art History, Ohio State University) probes the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of Conceptual art; and Jeff Wall (artist) discusses the relationship between Conceptual art and photography. Anne Rorimer and Ann Goldstein (curators of the exhibition the book accompanies) respectively take up the role of language in this work, and discuss each of the artists. Copublished with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Discussions of the object as a key to understanding central aspects of modern and contemporary art. Artists increasingly refer to "post-object-based" work while theorists engage with material artifacts in culture. A focus on "object-based" learning treats objects as vectors for dialogue across disciplines. Virtual imaging enables the object to be abstracted or circumvented, while immaterial forms of labor challenge materialist theories. This anthology surveys such reappraisals of what constitutes the "objectness" of production, with art as its focus. Among the topics it examines are the relation of the object to subjectivity; distinctions between objects and things; the significance of the object's transition from inert mass to tool or artifact; and the meanings of the everyday in the found object, repetition in the replicated or multiple object, loss in the absent object, and abjection in the formless or degraded object. It also explores artistic positions that are anti-object; theories of the experimental, liminal or mental object; and the role of objects in performance. The object becomes a prism through which to reread contemporary art and better understand its recent past. Artists surveyed include Georges Adéagbo, Art in Ruins, Iain Baxter, Louise Bourgeois, Pavel Büchler, Lygia Clark, Claude Closky, Brian Collier, Jimmie Durham, Fischli & Weiss, Luca Frei, Meschac Gaba, Isa Genzken, Gruppe Geflecht, Eva Hesse, Mike Kelley, John Latham, Antje Majewski, Gustav Metzger, Cady Noland, Gabriel Orozco, Adrian Piper, Falke Pisano, Eva Rothschild, Aura Satz, Kenneth Snelson, Hito Steyerl, Josef Strau, Alina Szapocznikow, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Erwin Wurm Writers include Homi K. Bhabha, Jack Burnham, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Lynne Cooke, Gillo Dorfles, Jean Fisher, Ferreira Gullar, Charles Harrison, Paulo Herkenhoff, Julia Kristeva, Bruno Latour, Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Jean-François Lyotard, Lev Manovich, Ursula Meyer, Bruno Munari, Georges Perec, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Dieter Roelstraete, Howard Singerman, Nancy Spector, Marcus Steinweg, Anne Wagner, Gérard Wajcman, Slavoj Zizek

Meaning in the visual arts centers on how the physical work makes its content or presence visible. The art object is fundamental.

This book draws on the work of anthropologist Alfred Gell to reinstate the importance of the object in art and society. Rather than presenting art as a passive recipient of the artist's intention and the audience's critique, the authors consider it in the social environment of its production and reception. A Return to the Object introduces the historical and theoretical framework out of which an anthropology of art has emerged, and examines the conditions under which it has renewed interest. It also explores what art 'does' as a social and cultural phenomenon, and how it can impact alternative ways of organising and managing knowledge. Making use of ethnography, museological practice, the intellectual history of the arts and sciences, material culture studies and intangible heritage, the authors present a case for the re-orientation of current conversations surrounding the anthropology of art and social theory. This text will be of key interest to students and scholars in the social and historical sciences, arts and humanities, and cognitive sciences.

Book art object is a record of the first biennial Codex Book Fair and Symposium: The Fate of the Art,Berkeley, California, 2007. The event showcased contemporary artist books and fine press and fine art editions produced by some of the worlds most esteemed printers, designers, book artists, and artisans.The book includes transcripts of the following lectures: Sarah Bodman, Research Fellow, Centre for Fine Print Research, UWE, Bristol: The hybrid lexicon: an overview of contemporary artists publishing in the UK; Robert Bringhurst, poet, translator, and typographer: Spiritual geometry: the book as a work of art; and Felipe Ehrenberg, artist, Mexican diplomat, former publisher of the Beau Geste Press, London: Cutting and pasting: metaphor of life. The volume is superbly illustrated in full color throughout.

Lacey Yeager is young, captivating, and ambitious enough to take the NYC art world by storm. Groomed at Sotheby's and hungry to keep climbing the social and career ladders put before her, Lacey charms men and women, old and young, rich and even richer with her magnetic charisma and liveliness. Her ascension to the highest tiers of the city parallel the soaring heights--and, at times, the dark lows--of the art world and the country from the late 1990s through today.

By Francois Dagognet.

An exploration of transformations in the nature of the art object and artistic authorship in the last four decades. In this book, Martha Buskirk addresses the interesting fact that since the early 1960s, almost anything can and has been called art. Among other practices, contemporary artists have employed mass-produced elements, impermanent materials, and appropriated imagery, have incorporated performance and video, and have created works through instructions carried out by others. Furthermore, works of art that lack traditional signs of authenticity or permanence have been embraced by institutions long devoted to the original and the permanent. Buskirk begins with questions of authorship raised by minimalists' use of industrial materials and methods, including competing claims of ownership and artistic authorship evident in conflicts over the right to fabricate artists' works. Examining recent examples of appropriation, she finds precedents in pop art and the early twentieth-century readymade and explores the intersection of contemporary artistic copying and the system of copyrights, trademarks, and brand names characteristic of other forms of commodity production. She also investigates the ways that connections between work and context have transformed art and institutional conventions, the impact of new materials on definitions of medium, the role of the document as both primary and secondary object, and the significance of conceptually oriented performance work for the intersection of photography and the human body in contemporary art. Buskirk explores how artists active in the 1980s and 1990s have recombined strategies of the art of the 1960s and 1970s. She also shows how the mechanisms through which art is presented shape not only readings of the work but the work itself. She uses her discussion of the readymade and conceptual art to explore broader issues of authorship, reproduction, context, and temporality.