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Introduction: Locating global contemporary art in global China

Jenny Lin

in Above Sea: Contemporary art, urban culture, and the fashioning of global Shanghai

The introduction argues that the global turn in contemporary art has been limited by overly generalized cultural categorizations and inadequate coverage of the local social, economic, political, and ... More

The introduction argues that the global turn in contemporary art has been limited by overly generalized cultural categorizations and inadequate coverage of the local social, economic, political, and historical contexts of non-Western artworks. In response, the author posits an urban-focused, historically grounded, and theoretically rigorous model of disciplinary diversification that foregrounds key examples of art and design created in and about Shanghai. The city is described as an exemplary case study with which to localize global contemporary art, accounting for Shanghai’s longstanding “East-meets-West” mythology and genealogy stemming from its early twentieth century semi-colonial past and radical transformation during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). The introduction acknowledges how Republican Shanghai has been recognized by scholars as a modern cultural capital with its own unique Shanghai style, haipai (literally sea style), and proposes that we must also consider the city’s art and design of the 1990s-2000s, the period of Shanghai’s most rapid growth as an international financial and cultural capital.Less

Continuum 1952–1961

in Art and Pluralism: Lawrence Alloway's Cultural Criticism

Lawrence Alloway's scope as an art critic became international in 1950, but his criticism only changed significantly the following year after a review of a Roberto Matta exhibition at the Institute ... More

Lawrence Alloway's scope as an art critic became international in 1950, but his criticism only changed significantly the following year after a review of a Roberto Matta exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). This review marked Alloway's transition from connoisseurship and simple evaluation to a far more dense and demanding art criticism. This section focuses on Alloway's life as an art critic in the period 1952–1961. It provides an overview of ICA in the early 1950s and its Independent Group, Alloway's attitudes toward abstraction and figurative art, his cultural continuum model, his views on graphics and advertising, art autre, Alloway's first trip to the United States, and the emergence of Pop art.Less

Conceptual Art and identity politics: from the 1960s to the 1990s

Nizan Shaked

in The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art

This chapter asks how a precisely articulated set of practices, defined by artists in the 1960s as Conceptual Art, evolve into a broad notion of conceptualism, and how the latter had expanded into ... More

This chapter asks how a precisely articulated set of practices, defined by artists in the 1960s as Conceptual Art, evolve into a broad notion of conceptualism, and how the latter had expanded into its present forms. It shows how, in the United States context, some of the most important strategies of conceptualism developed through the influence of contemporaneous politics, more specifically the transition from Civil Rights into Black Power, the New Left, the anti-war movement, feminism, and gay liberation, as well as what later came to be collectively named “identity politics” in the 1970s. A range of artists who have self-defined as conceptualists synthesised Conceptual analytic approaches with an outlook on identity formation as a means of political agency, and not as a representation of the self, a strategy that significantly expanded in the 1970s. Two major aspects of identity politics have impacted the field. The first, activist and administrative, consisted of protests against existing institutions, the developments of action groups and collectives, and the subsequent formulation of alternative spaces. The second was the bearing that it had on artistic strategy, form, and subject matter. This chapter focuses on practices that took a critical outlook on identity formation.Less

Introduction

Nizan Shaked

in The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art

The introduction addresses two intersecting trajectories in American art between the late 1960s and the early twenty-first-century century. On the one hand, it traces the ways in which disciplinary ... More

The introduction addresses two intersecting trajectories in American art between the late 1960s and the early twenty-first-century century. On the one hand, it traces the ways in which disciplinary Conceptual Art, with a capital “C”, expanded into the diverse set of practices that have been characterised generally as conceptualism. On the other hand, it shows how the expansion of a critical conceptualism has been strongly informed by the turbulent rights-based politics of the 1960s. Initially, first generation Conceptual artists responded to preceding art movements within disciplinary boundaries, examining the definition of art itself and engaging abstract concerns. Artists then applied the basic principles of Conceptual Art to address a range of social and political issues. This development reflects the influence of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student movement, the anti-war movement, second wave feminism, and the gay liberation movement. Central in the American context, the multiple identity-based mobilisations that came to be known as “identity politics” were further articulated in the 1970s. The artists addressed in this book: Adrian Piper, Joseph Kosuth, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke, and Charles Gaines expanded the propositions of Conceptual Art.Less

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

Nizan Shaked

in The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art

This chapter takes a close look at Adrian Piper’s transition from Conceptual Art to conceptualism, in the context of Conceptual Art’s canonical interpretations. I observe that her contribution was ... More

This chapter takes a close look at Adrian Piper’s transition from Conceptual Art to conceptualism, in the context of Conceptual Art’s canonical interpretations. I observe that her contribution was focused specifically on questions of mediation—the mediation of content by materials, forms, and language—later considering the mediating power of race, gender and other forms of apparent difference. From the application of analytic thinking to the work of art, she extended her enquiries to the dynamic relationship between the various elements of the artwork, such as object, author, body, self, circulation, and audience reception. Piper’s use of the autobiographical tone and the body arrived chronologically after an extended period of preoccupation with the context of the art object, its circulation and reception, and general inquiries into the nature of time and space through a focus on media and mediation. In accordance with this sequence of development, I propose to read her later work in the same way, always first as Conceptual, onto which we can then apply the political question. To enter the work through its analytic base is to read it on the terms of its making, not the subject position of its maker.Less

The Video that Knew Too Much: Hitchcock, Contemporary Art and Post-Cinema

Steven Jacobs

in Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts

While all previous chapters discuss art in film, the paragraphs dealing with the ‘cinematic’ in contemporary photography and video art invert this relation by focusing on film in art. This is also ... More

While all previous chapters discuss art in film, the paragraphs dealing with the ‘cinematic’ in contemporary photography and video art invert this relation by focusing on film in art. This is also the scope of the sixth and last chapter, which discusses the omnipresence of the filmic image in contemporary art museums and exhibitions. Not coincidentally, the conquest of the museum by the projected image coincided with the notions of the ‘death of cinema’ and the age of ‘post-cinema.’ Such ideas were particularly expressed by Godard in his Histoire(s) du cinéma, which presented itself not only as a reflection on the relations between film and history but also as an investigation of the relation between cinema and the other arts, especially the pictorial tradition. This chapter shows how modernist cinema found refuge in the museum, where it metamorphosed into new phenomena such as video art or film installations. In particular, this chapter focuses on the ways artists have appropriated the films of Hitchcock.Less

Tom McCarthy

Daniel Lea

in Twenty-First-Century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices

This chapter explores the writing of Tom McCarthy and situates him as one of the exciting experimental voices of contemporary British writing that is seeking to explore the limits and tolerances of ... More

This chapter explores the writing of Tom McCarthy and situates him as one of the exciting experimental voices of contemporary British writing that is seeking to explore the limits and tolerances of the realistic. The chapter situates McCarthy within the notion of the contemporary avant-garde novel and contextualises his fictional writing alongside his non-fiction and his work as a conceptual artist. This is followed by close analysis of his fiction up to Satin Island (2015). McCarthy’s writing absorbs the cultural novelty of digital convergence, channelling the technological sublime of the 21st century back into the shell of the realist novel to examine the extent to which it any longer has representational credibility.Less

Discourse and Displacement: Contemplating Beijing’s Urban Landscape

Xiaoping Lin

in Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-garde Art and Independent Cinema

This chapter reviews “Space and Vision: The Impression of Transmuting Daily Lives in Beijing,” an exhibition of five Chinese avant-garde artists curated by Huang Du, which opened for two days at the ... More

This chapter reviews “Space and Vision: The Impression of Transmuting Daily Lives in Beijing,” an exhibition of five Chinese avant-garde artists curated by Huang Du, which opened for two days at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Beijing in 1998. The photographic and video installations of the artists represent the capital city’s public and private spaces affected by globalization by featuring subject matters that ranged from skyscrapers to McDonald’s hamburgers. Indeed, it is the transformation of Beijing that furnished the theme of “Space and Vision,” a subject that has recently aroused considerable discussion among Chinese and Westerners. The chapter then gives insight into Beijing as an “Olympic city,” where new architecture evokes a strong response in avant-garde artists such as Hong Hao and Wang Guofeng.Less

Rethinking the Museum in Morocco

Katarzyna Pieprzak

in Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco

This concluding chapter focuses on multiple museums in Morocco. It discusses the three contemporary museological models that exist in tension with one another in early twenty-first-century Morocco. ... More

This concluding chapter focuses on multiple museums in Morocco. It discusses the three contemporary museological models that exist in tension with one another in early twenty-first-century Morocco. The first is the construction of the National Contemporary Art Museum. The second is a curatorial practice that conceives of exhibitions as nomadic expeditions. The third is a portable literary museum that emerges from exile. The coexistence of these three models reveals how multiple actors—firmly invested in art museums as vital collective spaces for art, memory, and communal interaction—critically challenge each other, showing the fictions inherent in monolithic discourses on art, modernity, and the nation. It also argues that Moroccan artists, curators, intellectuals, and politicians all believe in museums and their main role in an open and progressive society.Less

The Uninvited Guest (1966–1984)

James King

in Roland Penrose: The Life of a Surrealist

This chapter details events in Roland Penrose's life from 1966 to 1984. By the mid-1960s, Roland used his Sussex home as a refuge from his lecture tours, meetings at the Institute of Contemporary ... More

This chapter details events in Roland Penrose's life from 1966 to 1984. By the mid-1960s, Roland used his Sussex home as a refuge from his lecture tours, meetings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and other London-based activities. As a result, he paid more attention to the garden and filled it with sculptures. Although he kept in touch with the ICA, Roland had lost touch with its day-to-day activities during his Picasso years. He had expected Herbert Read to carry on in his place, but when Read died in 1968 Roland felt duty-bound to rekindle his formerly close relationship with the Institute. Finding new quarters for the ICA — and raising funds to accomplish this — became Roland's preoccupation. In 1973, Picasso died on 8 April, in his ninety-first year. In 1977, when he served on the committee selecting the Picasso works that would constitute the dation en paiement (death duties) payable to the French government, Roland felt he was burgling an old friend's house.Less

: From Medium to Site

Andrew V. Uroskie

in Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art

Since the mid-‘90s, contemporary art practice and criticism has been engaged in a widespread reformulation of the concept of “site-specificity.” At the same time, the vast proliferation of artists’ ... More

Since the mid-‘90s, contemporary art practice and criticism has been engaged in a widespread reformulation of the concept of “site-specificity.” At the same time, the vast proliferation of artists’ film and video installation has given rise to an anxiety over the proper material, institutional, and discursive location of these works as they abjure the traditional conditions of the art gallery’s white cube or the film theatre’s black box. The introduction endeavors to bring these two apparently disparate threads together by recalling their historical conjunction within a theory and practice of 1960s Expanded Cinema.Less

Textual Shift and the Cultural Logic of Punctuation

Jeff Scheible

in Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation

The introduction considers punctuation generally (existing studies, theories, histories of it), examining how punctuation both undergoes and reflects a broader “shift” in textuality corresponding ... More

The introduction considers punctuation generally (existing studies, theories, histories of it), examining how punctuation both undergoes and reflects a broader “shift” in textuality corresponding with the emergence of digital media—text is briefer, spread across media, characters are isolated, more visually ubiquitous, and characters are redefined and recontextualized.Less

Within, Aside, and Too Much: On Parentheticality across Media

Jeff Scheible

in Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation

This chapter takes parentheses as starting points for critical thinking, across three primary sites: Derrida’s writing, criticism of the televisual laugh track, and Miranda July’s Me and You and ... More

This chapter takes parentheses as starting points for critical thinking, across three primary sites: Derrida’s writing, criticism of the televisual laugh track, and Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know. Developing “parentheticality” as a relational concept, the chapter addresses critical theory, comedy, sound, sexuality, and new media aesthetics.Less

Connecting the Dots: Periodizing the Digital

Jeff Scheible

in Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation

This chapter examines the intersection of the period and textual shift related to digital media: how it “periodizes” the digital, from its typographical redefinition as a dot in the 1980s internet ... More

This chapter examines the intersection of the period and textual shift related to digital media: how it “periodizes” the digital, from its typographical redefinition as a dot in the 1980s internet protocol documents to a reading of Adaptation, in the context of dotcom anxieties to contemporary textual habits and visual culture.Less

# Logic

Jeff Scheible

in Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation

Analyzing diverse media forms and objects, this chapter mobilizes the hashmark as a reading lens to delineate digital media’s textual processes, mapping a broader cultural logic and aesthetic of the ... More

Analyzing diverse media forms and objects, this chapter mobilizes the hashmark as a reading lens to delineate digital media’s textual processes, mapping a broader cultural logic and aesthetic of the information age and complicating the mark’s relation to “new media” by looking at other technological histories of the number sign.Less