Over the last four decades, Matt Mullican has created a complex body of work concerned with systems of knowledge, meaning, language, and signification. His work takes form as drawing, collage, video, sculpture, performance, and installation, but Mullican is perhaps best known for his performances: these take place under hypnosis, allowing the artist to treat his own psyche as yet another medium. The drawings Mullican makes in this state--as an alter ego he refers to as "that person" --recall Surrealist experiments with automatic writing. In recent years, interest has surged in Mullican's work as younger artists and curators have rediscovered him. This first major monograph on the artist, a group of renowned art world figures considers the expanse of Mullican's art--from the "bulletin boards" that combine notes, sketches, and archival photographs to the graphic language used to illustrate his idiosyncratic cosmology. Curator Lynne Cooke and art historian Hal Foster address various aspects of Mullican's multidisciplinary practice, while a roundtable conversation between Mullican, Conceptual artist John Baldessari, and curator Ulrich Wilmes completes this comprehensive survey. The in-depth discussion investigates Mullican's early days as a student--when Baldessari was his professor--and the development of his signature works.
The first monograph of Chicago-based Theaster Gates, one of the most exciting and highly regarded contemporary artists at work today.
Theaster Gates has developed an expanded artistic practice that includes space development, object making, performance and critical engagement with many publics. Gates transforms spaces, institutions, traditions, and perceptions.
Gates's training as an urban planner and sculptor, and subsequent time spent studying clay, has given him keen awareness of the poetics of production and systems of organizing. Playing with these poetic and systematic interests, Gates has assembled gospel choirs, formed temporary unions, and used systems of mass production as a way of underscoring the need that industry has for the body.
Gates refers to his working method as 'critique through collaboration' and his projects often stretch the form of what we usually understand visual art to be. His focus is also on the availability of information and the cross-fertilization of ideas. His multi-faceted exhibitions investigate themes of race and history through sculpture, installation, performance and two-dimensional works, furthering the artist's interest in a critique of social practice, shared economies and the question of objects in relation to political and cultural thought.
Gates' recent exhibition and performance venues include the Seattle Art Museum, Art Basel Miami Beach, Milwaukee Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the Whitney Biennial in New York. Gates was a participating artist in Documenta 13 in Kassel (2012) with his total-living installation 12 Ballads for Huguenot House. Other notable solo exhibitions include An Epitaph for Civil Rights at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (2011) and My Labor Is My Protest, at White Cube Bermondsey, London (2012). Parallel to his artist career, Gates is also Director of Arts and Public Life Initiative at the University of Chicago and a board member of the city's South Side Community Center.
Recently commissioned as the 2012 Armory Show Artist and a Loeb Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2011, Gates has received awards and grants from Creative Capital, the Joyce Foundation, Graham Foundation, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art.
Set in the years between the meteoric launches of Madonna and Courtney Love, Petal Pusher takes readers on a stirring journey across rock and roll, from the big-haired 1980s to the grunge-filled 1990s, when Laurie Lindeen brought her all-girl band, Zuzu's Petals, to compete in the indie rock arena.
Minneapolis in the eighties was a musical hotbed, the land of 10,000 lakes and 10,000 bands that gave birth to Prince, the Replacements, and Soul Asylum. For Laurie Lindeen it was the perfect place to launch her rock-and-roll dream. She moved to the city with her best friends Phyll ("Annie Oakley meets Patsy Cline") and Coleen ("former cheerleader gone off the arty deep end") to crash in decrepit apartments and coax punk rock from crappy used guitars. But unbeknownst to her friends, Laurie has a secret in her past -- a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis that fuels her passion to make it big on the local, national, and international rock scene. With inspiring determination, Laurie and her Zuzu's Petals survive the many challenges of being underdogs in a man's world. Then Laurie is thrown a curveball when she falls for Paul Westerberg of Replacements fame and reevaluates exactly what it means to "make it big." By turns hilarious and heartrending, Petal Pusher is a brilliant behind-the-scenes look at music on the front lines, and the awe-inspiring tale of one woman's fight against disease and the disillusionment of life in the rock underground.
Viewers of contemporary art are often invited to involve themselves actively in artworks, by entering installations, touching objects, performing instructions or clicking on interactive websites. Why have artists sought to engage spectators in these new forms of participation? In what ways does active participation affect the viewer's experience and the status of the artwork? Spanning a range of practices including kinetic art, happenings, environments, performance, installations, relational and new media art from the 1950s to the present, this critical anthology sheds light on the history and specificity of artworks that only come to life when you - the viewer - are invited to 'do it yourself.' The volume consists of fifteen essays by art historians, critics and curators, which are divided into three sections. Part I addresses the emergence of spectator participation in the 1960s, while Part II brings together in-depth case studies of specific participatory practices in the 1960s, 1970s and 1990s, analysing the issues that they raise in their very modes of operation. The more general critical essays in Part III map out a range of theoretical approaches to the 'do-it-yourself' artwork. Together, the three sections provide invaluable historical perspectives and theoretical tools for scholars, students, artists and readers interested in contemporary art. Rather than a specialist topic in the history of twentieth- and twenty-first century art, the 'do-it-yourself' artwork raises broader issues concerning the role of the viewer in art, the status of the artwork and the socio-political relations between art and its contexts.
You may think of it not as a book, but as a library, an elevator, an amateur performance in a nearby theatre.
Open it to the table of contents.
Turn to the page that sounds the most interesting to you.
Read a sentence or two.
Repeat the process.
Read this book as a creative act, and feel encouraged.'
39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance is a collection of miniature stories, parables, musings and thinkpieces on the nature of reading, writing, art, collaboration, performance, life, death, the universe and everything. It is a unique and moving document for our times, full of curiosity and wonder, thoughtfulness and pain.
Matthew Goulish, founder member of performance group Goat Island, meditates on these and other diverse themes, proving, along the way, that the boundaries between poetry and criticism, and between creativity and theory, are a lot less fixed than they may seem. The book is revelatory, solemn yet at times hilarious, and genuinely written to inspire - or perhaps provoke - creativity and thought.
This comprehensive international bibliography is the first to attempt documentation of this diverse field, covering the history of Artist's Performance. It focuses on its early twentieth-century antecedents in such movements as Futurism, Dada, Russian Constructivism, and the Bauhaus as well as its peak period in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s with such developments as Gutai, Fluxus, Viennese Actionism, Situationism, and Guerrilla Art Action. Major emphasis is also given to sources on 115 individual performance artists and groups. More than 3700 entries document print and media materials dating from 1914 to 1992. Organized for maximum accessibility, the sources are also extensively cross-referenced and are indexed by artist, subject, title, and author. Three appendices identify reference works, libraries, and archives, and addenda material not found in the book text, and two others list artists by country and by group or collective.
This monograph explores the world of German multimedia artist Alexis Dworsky (born 1976). Trained as a landscape architect, Dworsky specializes in performances and sculptures that meld scientific and artistic concepts, touching upon such themes as dinosaurs and space travel.
Russian poet, author, artist and art theorist Andrei Monastyrski (born 1949) is, along with Ilya Kabakov, one of the founders of conceptualism in Russia, and a protagonist of Collective Actions, a group of artists who have organized participatory actions on the outskirts of Moscow since 1976. Though his poetry is less well known, poetry is where he began. After writing in the manner of the Russian modernists (who were newly available to Soviet readers during Khrushchev's thaw), Monastyrski's interest in John Cage and ideas about consciousness from Western and Eastern philosophical traditions led him to conduct experiments with sound, form and the creation of artistic situations involving constructed objects that required viewer engagement to complete. Elementary Poetry collects poems, books and action objects from the '70s and '80s, tracing a genealogy of the art action in poetry.
