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In this first full-length study of a largely forgotten optical device from the eighteenth century, Arnaud Maillet reconfigures our historical understanding of visual experience and meaning in relation to notions of opacity, transparency, and imagination. Many are familiar with the Claude glass as a small black convex mirror used by artists and spectators of landscape to(...)
The Claude glass: use and meaning of the black mirror in western art
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In this first full-length study of a largely forgotten optical device from the eighteenth century, Arnaud Maillet reconfigures our historical understanding of visual experience and meaning in relation to notions of opacity, transparency, and imagination. Many are familiar with the Claude glass as a small black convex mirror used by artists and spectators of landscape to reflect a view and make tonal values and areas of light and shade visible. In a groundbreaking account, Maillet goes well beyond this particular function of the glass and situates it within a richer archaeology of Western thought, exploring the uncertainties and anxieties about mirrors, reflections, and their potential distortions. He takes us from the magical and occult background of the 'black mirror', through a full evaluation of its importance in the age of the picturesque, to its persistence in a range of technological and representational practices, including photography, film, and contemporary art. "The Claude Glass" is a lasting contribution to the history of Western visual culture.
Art Theory
Andy Warhol: blow job
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In Andy Warhol's silent black-and-white movie, Blow Job (1964), a youth is filmed as he is apparently being given the sex act named in the title. The 35-minute film is accentuated by the paucity of expression on the actor's face: we see only his head and shoulders, rigidly framed so that all offscreen space has to be imagined, or avoided. In this extended examination of(...)
Andy Warhol: blow job
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In Andy Warhol's silent black-and-white movie, Blow Job (1964), a youth is filmed as he is apparently being given the sex act named in the title. The 35-minute film is accentuated by the paucity of expression on the actor's face: we see only his head and shoulders, rigidly framed so that all offscreen space has to be imagined, or avoided. In this extended examination of Blow Job, Peter Gidal deciphers the structures, abstract and concrete, of Warhol's crucial film. Warhol's techniques—the use of the close-up, the general use of camera movement, and the complete theatrical mise en scène—(especially when compared to the Godardian cinéma vérité of the time) make the materiality of the film process, its making and viewing, ineluctably present. An important experimental filmmaker, Gidal has had retrospectives at the London Film-Maker's Co-op; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the National Film Theatre, London, as well as in Japan and San Francisco. He taught advanced film theory at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1971-1983.
Art Theory
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In 1968, toward the end of a decade that witnessed civil rights protests, the escalation of the war in Vietnam, and an expanded notion of artistic practice (epitomized by "Happenings"), Yvonne Rainer presented her evening-length work, The Mind is a Muscle. A choreographed, multipart performance for seven dancers, interspersed with film and text, this major work was built(...)
Yvonne Rainer: the mind is a muscle
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In 1968, toward the end of a decade that witnessed civil rights protests, the escalation of the war in Vietnam, and an expanded notion of artistic practice (epitomized by "Happenings"), Yvonne Rainer presented her evening-length work, The Mind is a Muscle. A choreographed, multipart performance for seven dancers, interspersed with film and text, this major work was built upon a backbone of variations on Rainer's dance solo, Trio A. In this extended illustrated essay exploring The Mind is a Muscle, Catherine Wood examines the political and media context in which Rainer chose to use the dance-theatre situation as her medium and analyzes Rainer's radical approach to image-making in live form. Catherine Wood is Curator of contemporary art/performance at Tate Modern.
Art Theory
Alighiero e Boetti: mappa
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In 1971 Alighiero e Boetti commissioned Afghan embroiderers to create a map of the world, with each country bearing the colours and pattern of its flag. The commission grew into a beautifully crafted, large-scale series of maps produced over a period of twenty years in Kabul, Afghanistan and Peshawar, Pakistan. Each map tracked geopolitical changes throughout the world:(...)
Alighiero e Boetti: mappa
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In 1971 Alighiero e Boetti commissioned Afghan embroiderers to create a map of the world, with each country bearing the colours and pattern of its flag. The commission grew into a beautifully crafted, large-scale series of maps produced over a period of twenty years in Kabul, Afghanistan and Peshawar, Pakistan. Each map tracked geopolitical changes throughout the world: the break-up of the Soviet Union, the unification of Germany, disputes over territories in the Middle East and regime changes in the Eurasian peninsula. In this new study, Italian curator Luca Cerizza looks at Boetti's Mappa in relation to world events and the history of map-making, as well as to the contemporary art movements of Minimalism, Conceptualism and Arte Povera. Luca Cerizza is an art historian and curator based in Berlin.
Art Theory
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In discussing what makes The Way Things Go utterly compelling to its viewers—whether they have seen it one time or many times—Jeremy Millar leaves no doubt as to why this film was chosen for the One Work series. As everyday objects crash, scrape, slide, or fly into one another with devastating, impossible, and persuasive effect, viewers find themselves witnessing a(...)
Fischli and Weiss: the way things go
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In discussing what makes The Way Things Go utterly compelling to its viewers—whether they have seen it one time or many times—Jeremy Millar leaves no doubt as to why this film was chosen for the One Work series. As everyday objects crash, scrape, slide, or fly into one another with devastating, impossible, and persuasive effect, viewers find themselves witnessing a spectacle that seems at once prehistoric and postapocalyptic. Millar tells us why this extraordinary film speaks to us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. If history is "just one thing after another," then The Way Things Go is truly a historic work.
Art Theory
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Marc Camille Chaimowicz was one of the first artists to merge the realms of performance and installation art.His important 1972 installation Celebration? Realife featured masks, mirrors, various small objects, including masks and a mirror ball, music by the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, and others-and the artist, serving tea and engaging visitors in conversation in an(...)
Marc Camille Chaimowicz: celebration? realife
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Marc Camille Chaimowicz was one of the first artists to merge the realms of performance and installation art.His important 1972 installation Celebration? Realife featured masks, mirrors, various small objects, including masks and a mirror ball, music by the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, and others-and the artist, serving tea and engaging visitors in conversation in an adjacent room. It raised questions about public/private dichotomies, art/design boundaries, and identifications based on gender, and recast the artist as a kind of art director and stage designer. This work's recent reinstallation (as Celebration? Realife Revisited 1972/2000) and the critical acclaim it inspired confirms Chaimowicz's importance and points to his relationships with artists as different and as difficult as Cerith Wyn Evans, Jutta Koether, Kai Althoff, and others. This richly illustrated study of Celebration? Realife, with many color images, uses Chaimowicz's installation to reconstruct that cultural moment in the 1970s when the role of the artist and the relationships of art, design, popular culture, and performance changed. Tom Holert is an art historian, independent scholar, and critic who has published widely in magazines including Artforum and Bookforum.
Art Theory
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Mary Heilmann is one of the most important abstract painters of her generation. Her distinctively fluid, humorous, and bright canvases combine the modes of Abstract Expressionism with a vibrant Pop sensibility. Heilmannn's 1979 painting in hot pink and black, evocatively titled Save the Last Dance for Me, marked a shift in the artist's perspective. Heilmann describes it:(...)
Mary Heilmann: save the last dance for me
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Mary Heilmann is one of the most important abstract painters of her generation. Her distinctively fluid, humorous, and bright canvases combine the modes of Abstract Expressionism with a vibrant Pop sensibility. Heilmannn's 1979 painting in hot pink and black, evocatively titled Save the Last Dance for Me, marked a shift in the artist's perspective. Heilmann describes it: "Now the work came from a different place. Instead of working out of modernist non-image formalism, I began to see that the choices in the work depended more on content for their meaning." This beautifully illustrated study of Save the Last Dance for Me explores the development of Heilmann's work, and the way it continues to engage us—psychologically, sensually, and socially. Terry R. Myers is a lecturer, critic, and independent curator based in Los Angeles, Visiting Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Adjunct Associate Professor at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
Art Theory
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Joan Jonas approaches video as a drawing tool, a mirror, and a framing device. Since 1968, she has used video and performance to explore ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the archetypal authority of objects and gestures. With her influential 1976 work, I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances) Jonas nimbly structures an elliptical narrative that(...)
Joan Jonas: I want to live in the country (and other romances)
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Joan Jonas approaches video as a drawing tool, a mirror, and a framing device. Since 1968, she has used video and performance to explore ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the archetypal authority of objects and gestures. With her influential 1976 work, I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances) Jonas nimbly structures an elliptical narrative that unmistakably establishes her voice and visual lexicon. I Want to Live in the Country features two locations—the untamed landscape of Nova Scotia and a television studio in New York City—as it examines themes of loss, displacement, time, and memory through still life compositions and Super-8 footage. Jonas creates a meditation of frames within frames, monitors within monitors, overlaid with poetic musings—a murmured story of the unconscious. Joan Jonas, Professor of Visual Arts at MIT, is known for her pioneering video and performance art.
Art Theory
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In Richard Prince's 1977 work Untitled (couple), difference mixes uncannily with sameness. We can't quite tell whether the shiny couple we see is human or android; their clothing seems curiously out of date. Why do they fascinate us? What is it about their typicality that produces an impression of strangeness? Michael Newman explores Prince's work and his revival of the(...)
Richard Prince: untitled (couple)
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In Richard Prince's 1977 work Untitled (couple), difference mixes uncannily with sameness. We can't quite tell whether the shiny couple we see is human or android; their clothing seems curiously out of date. Why do they fascinate us? What is it about their typicality that produces an impression of strangeness? Michael Newman explores Prince's work and his revival of the image through photography—rephotographed reproduced photographs—after the impasses of conceptualism. Newman examines the relation of Prince's work to images appearing in illustrated magazines, advertising, and television during the artist's formative years and argues that the vintage TV series The Twilight Zone is crucial to understanding Prince's use of images in his work. Michael Newman is Associate Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has published in ArtForum, Art in America, Parachute, and other journals and is coeditor of the book Rewriting Conceptual Art.
Art Theory
Hollis Frampton (nostalgia)
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Frampton's (nostalgia) is a formal masterpiece, long overlooked and understudied. It emerges from a body of film work that is rarely screened, the prints damaged and difficult to locate. Frampton's work is valued in artist filmmaking and film theory circles, but it has never taken its rightful place at the heart of modern art theory. This study will introduce a new(...)
Hollis Frampton (nostalgia)
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Frampton's (nostalgia) is a formal masterpiece, long overlooked and understudied. It emerges from a body of film work that is rarely screened, the prints damaged and difficult to locate. Frampton's work is valued in artist filmmaking and film theory circles, but it has never taken its rightful place at the heart of modern art theory. This study will introduce a new generation to a critical moment in art history—when (nostalgia) confirmed both the essence and fragility of cinema itself. Rachel Moore is Lecturer in International Media for the Media and Communications Department at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Art Theory