Passages in Modern Sculpture

Passages in Modern Sculpture
Author: Rosalind E. Krauss
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 1981-02-26
Genre: Design
ISBN: 9780262610339

Studies major works by important sculptors since Rodin in the light of different approaches to general sculptural issues to reveal the logical progressions from nineteenth-century figurative works to the conceptual work of the present.

Dissolve into Comprehension

Dissolve into Comprehension
Author: Jack Burnham
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2023-08-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262548801

Influential writings by the legendary art critic and theorist Jack Burnham—a pioneer in new media systems aesthetics and an early advocate of conceptualism. Jack Burnham is one of the few critics and theorists alive today who can claim to have radically altered the way we think about works of art. Burnham's use of the term “system” (borrowed from theoretical biology) in his 1968 essay “System Aesthetics” announced the relational character of conceptual art and newer research-based projects. Trained as an art historian, Burnham was also a sculptor. His first book, Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968), established him as a leading commentator on art and technology. A postformalist pioneer, an influential figure in new media art history, an early champion of conceptual and ecological art, and the curator of the first exhibition of digital art, Burnham is long overdue for reevaluation. This book offers that opportunity by collecting a substantial and varied selection of his hard-to-find texts, some published here for the first time. Although Burnham left the art world abruptly in the 1990s, his visionary theoretical ideas have only become more relevant in recent years. This collection seeks to restore Burnham to his rightful place in art criticism and theory, reestablishing his voice as crucial to critical conversations of the period. It gathers his early writing on sculpture, his essays on systems art and conceptualism, his views of the New York art world, and his later occult work—including an unorthodox interpretation of Marcel Duchamp's work that draws on the Kabbalah.

Modern Sculpture Reader

Modern Sculpture Reader
Author: Jon Wood
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2012-08-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1606061062

In many anthologies of art, sculpture is given short shrift in relation to other media, if it is treated at all. Modern Sculpture Reader aims to rectify this situation by presenting a collection of important texts that have defined sculpture’s radically changing status and role since the end of the nineteenth century, a time marked by a general reappraisal of the forms and functions of art. From the rigorously theoretical to the experimental and poetic, Modern Sculpture Reader offers a lively discourse on the medium by a range of artists, writers, critics, and poets—Marcel Duchamp, Louise Bourgeois, Claes Oldenberg, André Breton, Ezra Pound, and Clement Greenberg—in a variety of genres: poems, lectures, transcribed interviews, newspaper and magazine articles, and artists’ statements. These diverse text selections offer valuable insight into the development of the critical language of sculpture and its connections to other media in an era of increasingly conceptual artistic practice. Many of the essays highlight key ongoing concerns such as sculpture’s physical properties and conditions of display, both of which have important implications for the viewer’s tactile and emotional interaction with sculptural works.

Modern Sculpture

Modern Sculpture
Author: Douglas Dreishpoon
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2022-10-25
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520297490

"Artists of any ilk can be extremely opinionated when it comes to what they do, how they do it, and what it might mean. Sculptors are no exception. Modern Sculpture: Artists in Their Own Words presents a selection of manifestos, documents, statements, articles, and interviews from more than ninety subjects, including an ample selection of contemporary sculptors. With this book, editor Douglas Dreishpoon defers to sculptors, whose varied points of view illuminate the medium's perpetual transformation-from object to action, concept to phenomenon-over the course of two centuries. Each chapter progresses in chronological sequence to highlight the dominant stylistic, philosophical, and thematic threads that unite each kindred group. The result is a distinctive, artist-centric history and survey of sculpture that showcases the expansive dimensions and malleability of the medium"--

Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art

Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art
Author: Joanna Page
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 178735976X

Projects that bring the ‘hard’ sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few focus on regions beyond Europe and the Anglophone world. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists’ kitchens. While they draw on recent scientific research, these art projects also ‘decolonize’ science. If increasing knowledge of the natural world has often gone hand-in-hand with our objectification and exploitation of it, the artists studied here emphasize the subjectivity and intelligence of other species, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human. They design technologies that work with organic processes to promote the health of ecosystems, and seek alternatives to the logics of extractivism and monoculture farming that have caused extensive ecological damage in Latin America. They develop do-it-yourself, open-source, commons-based practices for sharing creative and intellectual property. They establish critical dialogues between Western science and indigenous thought, reconnecting a disembedded, abstracted form of knowledge with the cultural, social, spiritual, and ethical spheres of experience from which it has often been excluded. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art interrogates how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas. At the same time, it explores broader questions in the field of art, including the relationship between knowledge, care, and curation; nonhuman agency; art and utility; and changing approaches to participation. It also highlights important contributions by Latin American thinkers to themes of global significance, including the Anthropocene, climate change and environmental justice.

Domesticating the Invisible

Domesticating the Invisible
Author: Melissa S. Ragain
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520343824

Domesticating the Invisible examines how postwar notions of form developed in response to newly perceived environmental threats, in turn inspiring artists to model plastic composition on natural systems often invisible to the human eye. Melissa S. Ragain focuses on the history of art education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to understand how an environmental approach to form inspired new art programs at Harvard and MIT. As they embraced scientistic theories of composition, these institutions also cultivated young artists as environmental agents who could influence urban design and contribute to an ecologically sensitive public sphere. Ragain combines institutional and intellectual histories to map how the emergency of environmental crisis altered foundational modernist assumptions about form, transforming questions about aesthetic judgment into questions about an ethical relationship to the environment.

The Sculptural in the (Post-)Digital Age

The Sculptural in the (Post-)Digital Age
Author: Mara-Johanna Kölmel
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2023-06-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 311077514X

Digital technologies have profoundly impacted the arts and expanded the field of sculpture since the 1950s. Art history, however, continues to pay little attention to sculptural works that are conceived and ‘materialized’ using digital technologies. How can we rethink the artistic medium in relation to our technological present and its historical precursors? A number of theoretical approaches discuss the implications of the so-called ‘Aesthetics of the Digital’, referring, above all, to screen-based phenomena. For the first time, this publication brings together international and trans-historical research perspectives to explore how digital technologies re-configure the understanding of sculpture and the sculptural leading into the (post-)digital age. Up-to-date research on digital technologies’ expansion of the concept of sculpture Linking historical sculptural debates with discourse on the new media and (post-)digital culture

The Sculptural Imagination

The Sculptural Imagination
Author: Alex Potts
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2000-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780300088014

Potts also offers a detailed view of selected iconic works by sculptors ranging from Antonio Canova and Auguste Rodin to Constantin Brancusi, David Smith, Carl Andre, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois - key players in modern thinking about the sculptural. The impact of minimalism features prominently in this discussion, for it disrupted accepted understanding of how a viewer interacts with a work of art, thereby placing the phenomenology of viewing three-dimensional objects for the first time at the center of debate about modern visual art."--Jacket.