Contemporary Art

Ce livre apporte des éléments de compréhension de l’art contemporain à partir d’une réflexion sur le land art américain, qui a bouleversé le rapport du spectateur aux œuvres d’art en l’invitant au voyage.

Le land art est aujourd’hui très étudié parce qu’il détermine un point à partir duquel on peut comprendre comment les paramètres de l’art ont changé. Or, l’articulation entre la démarche des artistes et l’environnement critique qui accompagne leur création forme des paysages théoriques, c’est-à-dire des moyens de percer les mécanismes sémiotiques et conceptuels qui ont contribué à la reconnaissance de cette mouvance. Parcourir ces paysages théoriques du land art nécessite donc de circuler dans les types de discours produits par ses principaux acteurs, qu’il s’agisse de celui de l’esthéticien ou du spectateur face aux œuvres, ou alors du critique d’art, ou encore de l’artiste.

Ou Ning, "Bishan Project: Efforts to Build a Utopian Community under Authoritarian Rule", Janet Marstine and Svetlana Mintcheva ed., Curating Under Pressure: International Perspectives on Negotiating Conflict and Upholding Integrity (London and New York: Routledge, 2020). https://www.routledge.com/Curating-Under-Pressure-International-Perspectives-on-Negotiating-Conflict/Marstine-Mintcheva/p/book/9780815396192

This paper looks at the interactivity of Carsten Höller’s Test Site 2006, using Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency (1998) and Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (1998). In the first part Gell is used to examine the interactive relationships between artist and participants mediated by the slides, the aesthetic quality and political significance of which are then revealed in the second part with reference to Bourriaud.

This book condenses and evaluates hundreds of current journal articles in psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science and makes their principles and results available to art historians, cultural theorists and philsophers in ways that are important for the humanities, and in ways that challenge the sciences to do better when they study art. While recent studies in neuroscience and psychology have shed light on our sensory and perceptual responses to art, they have yet to explain our responses to contemporary art which downplays perceptual responses and instead encourages conceptual thought. The Psychology of Contemporary Art brings together the most important developments in recent scientific research on visual perception and cognition and applies the results of empirical experiments to analyses of contemporary artworks not normally addressed by psychological studies. The author explains, in simple terms, how neuroaesthetics, embodiment, metaphor, conceptual blending, situated cognition and extended mind offer fresh perspectives on specific contemporary artworks - including those of Marina Abramović, Francis Alÿs, Tracey Emin, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Marcus Harvey, Mona Hatoum, Thomas Hirschhorn, Gabriel Orozco, Marc Quinn and Cindy Sherman. This book will appeal to psychologists, cognitive scientists, artists and art historians, as well as those interested in a deeper understanding of contemporary art

This article draws on the “transactional view” developed by John Dewey and Arthur Bentley in order to help us understand the images that circulate within our electronic networks beyond the representational figure appearing on the surface of our screens. To grasp their dynamics, one needs to take into account the multiple layers they are made of, from the materiality of electronic flows, through the strata of machine languages, the transfer protocols and the design of their interface. The image we identify and isolate in its representational features is a lure that obfuscates the multiple implications of the transactions that generate it. Taking stock of these transactions is a precondition to debunk some of the illusions carried by the images.

The presence of arts and cultural institutions and networks is vital to the health of any global city, old, and new. But it is less apparent how we measure their contributions to quality of life issues in the rapidly changing mega cities of the global north or south.

How do we develop quantitative and qualitative measurements to assess the impact of arts and culture on the quality of life in cities? How do we balance issues of social justice and creativity in cities where the super-rich and the ultra-poor of the world reside and often collide? What is the role of public and private sectors in creating a healthy cultural ecology in a global city? How do we measure value beyond the economic impact of the arts—numbers of tickets sold, number of tourists visiting the city, the gentrification of a neighborhood? What are the key ingredients for a healthy cultural ecology of the city, taking into account artists, large established institutions as well as smaller arts organizations?  What are the barriers to the successful implementation of cultural policy in global cities?


Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought, in partnership with Ford Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), organized a one-day
program to bring together scholars, policy makers, private sector and non-profit leaders, and practitioners—artists, architects, planners, community activists—to discuss some of these urgent issues around developing a better understanding of the role arts and culture can play in the social health of global cities.

A dialog between Tristan Garcia and Flora Katz on the work of the artist Jessica Warboys.

Written in the context of a residency at Parc Saint Leger with Martha Salimbeni, Hélène Bertin, Mathieu Arbez Hermoso and Christèle Selliez-Vandernotte.

Tristan Garcia and Flora Katz « Ciné-Vitrail et Escalier de Penrose, Les objets passagers de Jessica Warboys » in "La Gamme de Shepard", ed. Parc Saint Léger, 2014  (Fr)

In recent years, there has been increasing scholarly interest in the history of museums, academies and major exhibitions. There has been, however, little to no sustained interest in the histories of alternative exhibitions (single artwork, solo artist, artist-mounted, entrepreneurial, privately funded, ephemeral, etc.) with the notable exception of those publications that deal with situations involving major artists or those who would become so—for example J.L. David's exhibition of Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) and The First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874—despite the fact that these sorts of exhibitions and critical scholarship about them have become commonplace (and no less important) in the contemporary art world. The present volume uses and contextualizes eleven case studies to advance some overarching themes and commonalities among alternative exhibitions in the long modern period from the late-eighteenth to the late-twentieth centuries and beyond. These include the issue of control in the interrelation and elision of the roles of artist and curator, and the relationship of such alternative exhibitions to the dominant modes, structures of display and cultural ideology.

Edited by Rimgaila Salys

The early years of the twenty-first century have been an exciting transitional period in Russian cinema, as the industry recovered from the crises of the late 1990s and again stepped onto the global stage. During these years four generations, from the late Soviet directors through post-Soviet and New Russian filmmakers to the Russian millennials, have worked in varying visual styles and with diverse narrative strategies, while searching for a new cinematic language. Financing and distribution models have evolved, along with conservative politics driving Ministry of Culture regulation. This reader is intended both for contemporary Russian cinema courses and for modern Russian culture courses that emphasize film. It does not attempt to establish a canon for the period but seeks to provide undergraduate students with an introduction to significant Russian films released between 2005 and 2016 that are also available with English subtitles. The twenty-one essays on individual films provide background information on directors’ careers, detailed analyses of selected films, along with suggested further readings both in English and Russian.

Learn more & purchase: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/filmandmediastudies/the-contemporary-russian-cinema-reader

Sound and picture as basic fields that allow an individual to perceive the world do not carry the same intensity of meaning in the contemporary world. Images and scripts fight each other for dominance; the sound, be it voice, sound, or tune, with an agreed meaning or without, remains left behind. The rule of the image and script and the insignificance of fleeting, uncatchable sound extend far in the past and are certainly connected with the possibility of preserving one or the other. Man was able to preserve images as early as 40,000 b.c.; the first scripts were presumably invented in Sumer, but sound in its expression remained uncatchable until the emergence of the first audio technologies. Sound inhabits its time and disperses itself in a moment. Its life is too fleeting to attract a lot of attention or let alone allow the time needed to apply research methods. The image was easier to catch and therefore it overpowered sound and prevailed as a more faithful assistant to the exegetical mind. Of course note scripts existed, with which one could interpret sound, while at the same time neither paintings nor photography could ever offer a total record of reality. Still the registering of sound was not possible until 1877, when Thomas Edison recorded the human voice-a children's song, Mary Had a Little Lamb to be exact-on a tinfoil cylindrical phonograph on December 6 th (he had perhaps recorded the word halloo on an early paper model of a phonograph in July of the same year). The existence of technologies that make sounds accessible at all times gave hearing a new status and sound recordings entered archives, libraries, laboratories, art, and philosophies. Sound could now travel far away from its creator and seperate itself from the body, which lost control over it exactly

This practice-based doctoral research explores the nature of the feral, as manifested in an object-based installation practice of contemporary art that scavenges - physically, socially and metaphorically - in the gap between defined spaces. My conception of the feral draws out the political promise of this indeterminacy: the state of being partly wild and partly civilised. The page is also constructed materially, as a space where
heterogeneous elements meet: different voices expressed through the writing and images of my practice.

In claiming the feral as a critical concept, I reject its more common, derogatory, usage. In particular, during the 2011 London riots, the former British Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clarke labelled the rioters a “feral
underclass”, seeking to fix them in this uncivilised, abject position. I unfix this separation, through a feral interpretation of my objects, as they interpenetrate domestic, institutional, and civilised public spheres.
Mother’s milk solidifies as plaster-filled condom bombs, at once phallic and breast-like, poised to ignite a pyre of social theory texts in a gallery project space, a former factory; haphazard conglomerations of plant matter and urban debris are strung together in bunting on an inner-city community hall.

The feral becomes here a rival concept to Julia Kristeva’s formulation of abjection, as the seeping bodily organs evoked by my objects are not defined in terms of the individual, but reflected on through the formless
mass of the social body, the displaced undercommons of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, the wild of Jack Halberstam, the rioters of Joshua Clover.
The feral has an antagonistic quality, but it cannot fit the relational models of art put forward by Chantal Mouffe and Claire Bishop that seek to civilise this antagonism. Neither can the positivity of Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman new materialism extract the hybridity of materials I use from the precariousness of the social conditions from which they are drawn. My practice, like the feral, resists these separations.

L’arte, nelle sue diverse declinazioni temporali ed espressive, ha offerto innumerevoli interpretazioni dello spazio agricolo. L’artista ha costruito visioni, memorie, strutture percettive, il tutto estrapolando dallo spazio fenomenologico frammenti emozionali, selezionando precise inquadrature, attraverso un’azione volontaria che scarta, sposta, riconfigura, ricompone, modifica, racconta. Il suo lavoro è quello di svelare anticipatamente un paesaggio e di presentarlo alla collettività.
Con l’opera “Le spigolatrici” (Parigi, Louvre) del 1848 di Jean-François Millet, comincia un nuovo modo di guardare la campagna. Idealizzata dalla pittura romantica e resa emozionale dai paesaggisti, questa propone, dal realismo francese in poi, una dimensione nuova che contempla gli aspetti economico, sociale e urbano. Da allora la campagna, non è più percepita come natura ideale, luogo degli avvenimenti mitologici, ma spazio della produzione agricola connessa alla città.
Gli artisti si concentrano su nuovi temi iconografici: il lavoro dei campi vi è incluso. Si costruisce un nuovo linguaggio, temi diversi per un nuovo importante committente, la borghesia. La perdita del carattere “mitologico” e “ludico” dello spazio agricolo, presente nelle pitture di Giorgione e Goya, rappresenta un evento culturale. La campagna, da spazio allegorico, luogo di ninfe, di dei, di battaglie, di rivelazioni sacre, diventa fisica, rappresenta e accoglie i riti del proletariato.
Nella “casa all’Estaque” (Berna, Kunstmuseum) del 1908 di Georges Braque si percepisce, attraverso il linguaggio cubista, la de-costruzione del paesaggio urbano/agricolo e la sua ricomposizione originale. Significativi sono i contributi di Herich Hecker con “primavera in Fiandre” del 1916 riconducibile all’esperienza del Brücke; i lavori di Paul Cézanne riferiti a “la Montagne Sainte-Victoire” ed in particolare la tela di Filadelfia del 1904; il “Paesaggio raggista” del 1912 (San Pietroburgo, Museo Russo) di Michail Larinov e le sperimentazioni di Kazimir Malevic, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee e Giorgio De Chirico.
Attraverso i secoli, dalle decorazioni della sala di villa Livia del I secolo d.C. (Giardino della villa di Livia, Roma, Museo Nazionale Romano) è un susseguirsi di visioni dello spazio agricolo fino alle opere pittoriche di d’Inessa (artista siciliano) che propongono un paesaggio denso di memorie, di pregnanze, di ridondanze. Acquarelli che ricompongono le esperienze di Cézanne, di Turner, di Picasso in chiave contemporanea per descrivere un paesaggio malinconico e fiabesco.
Negli anni ’60 e ’70 gli artisti della Land Art, Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Richard Serra e altri, contribuiscono a connotare l’ambiente con un oggetto-scultura effimero e minimalista che costruisce l’identità dei luoghi. “Con la Land Art è direttamente l’ambiente, su cui interviene l’artista a divenire esso stesso una forma estetica fruibile come opera d’arte.” Il lavoro segue procedure che appartengono al fare dell’architettura: scavare, aggiungere, unire, piantare, bucare, ecc . Questa forma d’arte costituisce un contributo significativo nella lettura, percezione e costruzione del paesaggio. I nuovi materiali dell’arte sono il suolo, lo spazio, la luce, lo sguardo, la memoria: tutti elementi utili per riconfigurare lo spazio agricolo o per meglio comprenderlo.

Da una visione contemplativa e visionaria all’esercizio del progetto.
L’arte, anche quella letteraria, ha costruito paesaggi, determinando la configurazione dei luoghi. Pensiamo alla letteratura bucolica di Virgilio, di Petrarca. Nel XVI secolo in Spagna Garcilaso de la Vega (Toledo 1503 - Nizza 1536), poeta e guerriero, costituisce un caso emblematico. Pluma y espada riassumono la sua natura, il suo destino. Garcilaso, attraverso i suoi scritti, contribuisce a configurare il paesaggio di limite di Toledo. Suggerisce una precisa modalità insediativa relativamente all’espansione della città verso la “Fabbrica delle armi”. Tra la città storica e la nuova espansione uno spazio agricolo, reso sistemico dalle mura arabe. Le permanenze archeologiche e agricole costituiscono l’armatura organizzativa di questo spazio che mantiene per secoli la sua configurazione fino alla presa d’atto da parte della comunità di Toledo: mantenere due coni ottici privilegiati per godere della magnifica veduta del “casco historico”.
“Le città invisibili” di Italo Calvino rappresentano un documento utile per comprendere il rapporto tra forma, simbolo e funzione. Le campagne urbane descritte nel capitolo “le città continue 4” permettono di ricostruire un processo di trasformazione usuale. La cancellazione della memoria, dello spazio agricolo che diventa scarto, residuo. Italo Calvino permette di cogliere l’essenza della trasformazione urbana, dello spazio limite non solo sul piano fisico ma su quello della percezione emozionale.

Ce livre aborde le mythe de Narcisse à partir de ses sources antiques et propose d’étudier ses répercussions dans l’art du XXe siècle.
Ce mythe constitue un archétype culturel ponctuant la littérature et l’histoire de l’art occidentales et se trouve à l’origine d’une stratégie de représentation confrontant la personne à sa propre image par le biais d’un médium. La présente étude met à jour les situations d’illusion qui structurent ce récit fondateur dans chacune de ses variations et considère leur reformulation en termes visuels : dans l’oeuvre du Caravage et de Poussin notamment, puis à travers différents exemples tirés de l’activité artistique du XXe siècle jusqu’à nos jours.
A ce titre, la métamorphose de Narcisse en une notion – le narcissisme – et surtout sa réélaboration par le biais de l’image – le stade du miroir – sont mises en confrontation avec le mythe. Fort des différentes strates historique, exégétique et visuelle recouvrant l’histoire de Narcisse, ce livre propose une étude de cas choisis dans le travail de trois artistes, Francis Bacon, Bill Viola et Jeff Wall. Les trois corpus d’oeuvres sélectionnés exemplifient chacun l’exploitation d’un médium artistique différent: la peinture, la vidéo et la photographie. Ils proposent un effet de réverbération du mythe et/ou de ses instanciations visuelles, et plus encore interagissent entre eux, communiquant parfois même par la grâce d’une référence explicite d’un artiste à un autre, de telle sorte que cet ouvrage s’érige en un circuit thématique cohérent.

As a participant in the internationally presented eight part series The Scientists - Profiles of Discovery in 1979 by the Science-Unit of Australian National Television my subtitle was Pope the Catalyst. In that year UNESCO appointed me as a Special Science-Art Delegate to the Second Marcel Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity in Honour of Albert Einstein, Trieste, Italy. At the conference I discussed with China’s most highly awarded physicist, Kun Huang, about his paper with the Nobel Laureate in Physics, Max Born, entitled Dynamical Theory of Crystal Lattices containing a criticism of Einstein’s mechanistic worldview. My Science-Art Research Centre of Australia had also criticised Einstein's mechanistic worldview for not being stabilised by Plato’s Science-Art to balance the forces of nature.

A critical, comparative analysis of the exhibition project Utopia Station, mounted by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Molly Nesbit, and Rirkrit Tiravanija at the 2003 Venice Biennale, against Hardt and Negri's 2000 treatise, Empire. This essay was written in 2006 and originally published online in the journal PART (no. 12, 2007), which is now defunct as far as I can tell. I wrote this piece in my first year of grad school, but it has been cited by a number of scholars so I share it here in case it may be of further use to others.

Whether due to his insight or influence, Foucault’s mixture of cynicism, paranoia and obsession with power mirrors our current cultural zeitgeist. His thoughts resonate on both thin edges of the American political thought. On the left, consider feminist law scholar Catharine MacKinnon who stated that men incarcerated for rape thinks it is stupid because “They were put into jail for something very little different from what most men do most of the time and they call it sex. The only difference is they got caught. It may also be right.”  On the right, there are those who believe that including homosexuality as a personal choice would lead to an epidemic of sodomy. In speaking of homosexuality, Pat Buchanan sees even mere acceptance as wrong.  While these ideas are clearly on the lip of the American political bell curve, it is an arc plotted on a Foucauldien graph. The X-axis is knowledge and the right axis is power.

Archaic Modernism is the second monographic retrospective dedicated to Christophe Spzajdel. Back in 2018 Szpajdel commissioned Archaeological Records to cure the biography, critic essay and logo selection for his new anthology of logos. Together with the author we decided to narrate his most recent production – the body of work made after the release of the book 'Lord of the Logos' (Gestalten, 2010) – as an evolution of his original Depresiv'Moderne and Winterstijl calligraphic styles in the one named Archaic Modernism. Archaic Modernism is an ideal synthesis of his career as graphic designer.

Book (in French) published in 2003 at the occasion of the first exhibition staging exclusively biomedia art works at the national art center Le Lieu Unique in Nantes/France. Hauser Jens (ed.): L'Art Biotech. Nantes/Trézélan, 2003.

The publication has not been available anymore since 2008; this PDF is made accessible with the agreement and the kind support of the Filigranes publishing house, until an augmented new edition will be be available. Great thanks to Filigranes and Patrick Le Bescont! https://www.filigranes.com

How is home-grown contemporary art viewed within the Middle East? And is it understood differently outside the region? What is liable to be lost when contemporary art from the Middle East is 'transferred' to international contexts - and how can it be reclaimed? This timely book tackles ongoing questions about how 'local' perspectives on contemporary art from the Middle East are defined and how these perspectives intersect with global art discourses. Inside, leading figures from the Middle Eastern art world, western art historians, art theorists and museum curators discuss the historical and cultural circumstances which have shaped contemporary art from the Middle East, reflecting on recent exhibitions and curatorial projects and revealing how artists have struggled with the label of 'Middle Eastern Artist'. Chapters reflect on the fundamental methodologies of art history and cultural studies - considering how relevant they are when studying contemporary art from the Middle East - and investigate the ways in which contemporary, so-called 'global', theories impact on the making of art in the region. Drawing on their unique expertise, the book's contributors offer completely new perspectives on the most recent cultural, intellectual and socio-political developments of contemporary art from the Middle East.

Maps out the practice of fictioning as a new field of study for art and philosophy. Fictioning in art is an open-ended, experimental practice that involves performing, diagramming or assembling to create or anticipate new modes of existence. In this extensively illustrated book containing over 80 diagrams and images of artworks, David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan explore the technics of fictioning through three focal points: mythopoesis, myth-science and mythotechnesis. These relate to three specific modes of fictioning: performance fictioning, science fictioning and machine fictioning. In this way, Burrows and O'Sullivan explore how fictioning can offer us alternatives to the dominant fictions that construct our reality in an age of 'post-truth' and 'perception management'. Through fictioning, they look forward to the new kinds of human, part-human and non-human bodies and societies to come.

'This is a book about loops, the fictional and the real, the virtual and the actual, the past that never was and the people yet to come-and how to occupy them, to live in the in-between, summon demons, talk to cats, compose new temporalities, all in the name of building a future so alien that none of us could even imagine what it might be like.' Laboria Cuboniks