ARTH 438 Contemporary Art: Books on Artists

Profiles and portraits of 50 artists and art entrepreneurs challenging the status quo in the art world.

"The concept of the beautiful has undergone profound changes during the last half of the twentieth century, as has our way of considering everything that is called art. We need a new key to help us "know how to see" so that we can stay attuned to what is going on in the contemporary world of art where new aesthetic styles are appearing and being challenged one after the other." "This book by Lea Vergine, which discusses seventeen different art movements in separate chapters, offers, within the panorama of contemporary art criticism books, a blend between a handy art-history manual and an assessment of a cultural adventure that has passed through and overturned the parameters of taste of the last forty years. The clear and incisive writing style guides the reader, student or specialist, whatever his or her specific interests and curiosities, like an essential travel kit for understanding today's reality, grasping its raison d'etre, and above all, plunging into its multiple mutations."

Traces the history of Abstract Expressionism, and examines its political implications and the cultural context in which it developed.

This book marks a new, original and authoritative re-examination of a major turning point in late twentieth-century art. Since the mid 1960s Conceptual art - an art that consists of ideas, written down, enacted or simply carried in your head - has directly challenged the very notion that a work of art is by definition an object of visual pleasure. Conceptual art is first and foremost an art of questions. The book is one of the most rigorous, authoritative surveys of this influential movement.

Boettger's narrative is the first comprehensive history of Earthworks, setting the movement in its cultural, art historical, and political contexts of the late 1960s. The Earthworks movement, the forerunner of Land Art, began in the U.S. with Robert Smithson in the late 1960s and included Walter DeMaria, Michael Heizer, Carl Andre, and Jan Dibbets.

"Far from being the latest movement or a new development in contemporary art, installation art, one could argue, is only the most recent manifestation of the oldest tradition in art, going as far back as the prehistoric paintings on cave walls at Lascaux. Fundamental to this work are its habitation and incorporation of a physical site, a connection to real conditions - be they visual, historical, or social - and often, a bridging of traditional art boundaries." "Blurring the Boundaries examines the subject of installation art through the permanent collection and exhibition record of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, an institution with a unique heritage in support of such art dating back to the 1960s."-

Through the work of minimalism's five key practitioners (Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol le Witt and Robert Morris), this book examines in words and pictures the defining characteristics, and the debates, of minimalist art.

The abstract art movement Op art came to international attention in the mid-1960s, an era of global social and technological change. The movement, which placed emphasis on viewer perception by exploring optical effects in painting, sculpture and light installation, quickly gained in popularity but met with considerable criticism. This important book published to accompany the first major Op art exhibition by on American museum in twenty-five years, examines the development of the movement, its cultural context and its widespread impact on advertising, fashion and film-making. Featuring visually stunning works by such key figures as Josef Albers, Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, Optic Nerve offers a timely reappraisal of this highly influential movement.

"Illustrated survey of performance from the 1960s to the present ... features sections on politics; theater, music, and opera; the body; identity; feminism and multiculturalism; new dance; the spoken word; video; rock and roll; and much more. Artists' biographies, a chronology, and a bibliography are included ..."

Who branded painting in the Pop age more brazenly than Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha? And who probed the Pop revolution in image and identity more intensely than they? In The First Pop Age, leading critic and historian Hal Foster presents an exciting new interpretation of Pop art through the work of these Pop Five. Beautifully illustrated in color throughout, the book reveals how these seminal artists hold on to old forms of art while drawing on new subjects of media; how they strike an ambiguous attitude toward both high art and mass culture; and how they suggest that a heightened confusion between images and people is definitive of Pop culture at large.

"Abundantly illustrated with frames and sequences, Video Art offers a history of the medium seen through the perspectives of its early practitioners - such as Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci, who used the video camera as an extension of their own bodies - through the vast array of conceptual, political, personal and lyrical installations of the 1980s and 1990s by such artists as Gary Hill, Bill Viola, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Mary Lucier and Michal Rovner, in which the possibilities of narrative were expanded, to the present digital revolution. In this postmedium age, artists from Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon, Rodney Graham and Doug Aitken to Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Lynn Hershman are exploring the hybridization of technology, combining and recombining video with a vast array of other materials - digital video, film, DVD, computer art, CD-roms, graphics, animation and virtual reality - to form new artistic expressions.

Published to accompany a landmark exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from March 15 through June 18, 2008, California Video presents the first comprehensive survey of the history of video art in California. Since the late 1960s, California artists have been at the forefront of an international movement that has expanded video into the realm of fine art. This illustrated volume focuses on fifty-eight artists, from early video pioneers such as John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, and William Wegman, to Martha Rosler, Diana Thater, Bill Viola, and other established and emerging talents. Thirty-five recent interviews shed new light on these artists--their influences, creative processes, and impact. Together with commissioned essays, rare reprints, and unpublished video transcripts, California Video chronicles a distinctly West Coast aesthetic located within the broader history of video art.

Modern and contemporary art can be both baffling and beautiful; it can also be innovative, political, and disturbing. This book sets out to provide the first concise interpretation of the period as a whole, clarifying the artists and their works along the way. Closely informed by new critical approaches, it concentrates on the relationship between American and European art from the end of the Second World War to the eve of the new millennium. Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, and Damien Hirst are among many artists discussed, with careful attention being given to the political and cultural worlds they inhabited. Moving along a clear timeline, the author highlights key movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Postmodernism, and performance art to explain the theoretical and issue-based debates that have provided the engine for the art of this period.

This show highlighted American artists whose paintings, sculptures, and photographs the Broads have acquired in depth, among them Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman, and Cy Twombly, Johns, Koons, and the Los Angeles artists John Baldessari, Sharon Lockhart, Charles Ray, Ed Ruscha, and Robert Therrien. German artists such as George Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer were also represented. Together, these works form an invaluable record of the artistic achievements of the past forty years.

In this highly accessible introduction to American art since the 1970s, Linda Weintraub offers art lovers a readable exploration of some of the most important artists and movements of the past three decades. Today artists routinely dissolve the old boundaries of art by creating works that neither hang on walls nor adorn pedestals, and often willfully overturn conventions of aesthetic value, permanence and optical reward. Curator and educator Weintraub has researched and/or interviewed 35 prominent radical artists and here explores their common concerns, creative processes and media.

This volume provides an overview of 12 significant and internationally successful female artists. Within the context of the broad cultural shifts that occurred in 1970s America, many art historians and curators have questioned the exclusion of women from both the pantheon of famous artists and the display floors of contemporary museums. This work describes the impact of women artists on contemporary art since the advent of the feminist movement.

Through in-depth profiles and dynamic behind-the-scenes footage featuring artists speaking directly about their inspirations and ideas, Season Five shows a broad range of artistic practice, technical innovation, and experimentation, from artists tackling large-scale collaborative projects in hangar-like studios to those working in the quiet of more intimate studio settings.

Unparalleled in access to today's young artists, this unique series takes viewers into artists' studios, homes, and communities to provide an intimate view of their lives, work, creative processes, and sources of inspiration. The four one-hour programs present 18 artists working in the United States

"Born in Brooklyn in 1960, Jean-Michel Basquiat lived to the age of only twenty-seven. His meteoric career as an artist had lasted no more than eight years "Borrowing from graffiti and street imagery, cartoons, mythology and religious symbolism, Basquiat's drawings and paintings explore issues of race and identity, providing social commentary that is both shrewdly observed and biting. Characterized by their intensely personal nature and the raw, almost aggressive handling of paint, these works have an enduring power to move and to confound."

John Cage has been described as the most influential composer of the last half of the twentieth century. His work and ideas - about silence, indeterminacy, nonintention, art's role in bringing the everyday object to our attention, the singularity of performance - have had influence not only in the world of music but also in dance, painting, printmaking, video art, and poetry. Among his friends and collaborators have been longtime associate Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, Morton Feldman, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The biography includes comprehensive chronologies of his musical and visual works.

One of the most controversial artists of our time, Judy Chicago is most famous for her groundbreaking installationsThe Dinner Party,Birth Project, and Holocaust Project. While these works have been analyzed extensively from artistic and historical perspectives, this book's in-depth discussion also embraces many of the artist's lesser-known pieces. Using a great variety of techniques, from drawing, painting, and printmaking to needlework and sculpture, her search for a personal means of expression is examined through lavish illustrations and edifying text.

These essays and pieces on Marcel Duchamp include his obituary from "Artforum"; Octavio Paz on the ready-mades; a Duchamp post-mortem by Hans Richter; and Donald Judd's investigation of Rose Slavy. The guide is illustrated with photographs of Duchamp's seminal pieces.

Born in 1965 in Providence, Rhode Island, Ellen Gallagher is one of the most acclaimed contemporary painters to have emerged from North America. Her paintings, collages, drawings, sculpture, animation and film installations, which shift between abstraction and figuration, create dynamic encounters between the historic and the present through commentary about race, racism, and cultural identity.

Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is one of the most significant figures in the history of postwar art. His work from 1955 to 1965 was pivotal, exercising an enormous impact on the subsequent development of pop, minimalism, and conceptual art in the United States and Europe. This is the first publication to approach Johns' work of this ten-year period through a thematic framework. In this book, leading scholars, a conservator, and a contemporary artist consider Johns activity in this critical decade and discuss many of his iconic paintings, such as Target with Four Faces (1955), Diver (1962), Periscope ( Hart Crane ) (1963), and Arrive-Depart (1963).

Red Blue Green, a monumental rectangular oil work, considered a crucial fulcrum point in the artist's career, represents Kelly's concerns about the tension between the figure and the ground, offering two precisely shaped and balanced red and blue forms set against a strongly contrasting green ground. These works, made from the late 50s to the mid-60s, established the artist's singular style and his reputation as one of the most innovative abstract painters of the latter half of the 20th century, one who boldly broke with the strictures of the abstract expressionist movement, which dominated painting in the United States in the 50s.

The first comprehensive LeWitt monograph published since the artist's death, and the first overview since 2000. Besides gathering visual documentation of LeWitt's wall drawings and his sculptures-or "structures" as he preferred-the publication also includes his complete writings; spreads from his artist's books; plus interviews and essays by virtually every artist and author closely associated with LeWitt, among them Lucy Lippard, Rosalind Krauss, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham and Robert Smithson.

The most iconic works of Roy Lichtenstein are widely known, reproduced, copied, and even parodied. However, the true diversity and complexity of his oeuvre is little understood, and the full scope of his career is largely absent from the existing literature. Presenting over 130 paintings and sculptures, as well as over thirty seldom- or never-before-seen drawings and collages, this book examines all periods in Lichtenstein's career, going well beyond his brushstrokes and the classic Pop romance and war cartoon paintings that made him famous.

One of the most innovative, provocative, and influential of America's contemporary artists, Bruce Nauman spent his formative years in Northern California--first as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, then living in and around San Francisco. This splendidly illustrated book explores Nauman's relationship to the place where he created his earliest and most strikingly original works during the mid to late 1960s. Curator Constance M. Lewallen describes how the late 1960s were not only a time of political and social change in the San Francisco Bay Area; this was also a watershed period in art internationally, when Minimalism gave way to Post-minimalism and Conceptual Art, expanding into performance, film and video, installation, text works, and the photographic documents.

A survey of the Korean-American artist's vital, visionary and varied career. From his earliest work as a composer/performance artist in the '60s neo-Dada Fluxus movement in Europe and the Happening scene in New York, to his multiscreen television installations, whimsical robots, singular television sculptures and global satellite productions, Paik has always been at the forefront in employing technology to serve creative expression

Eduardo Paolozzi is a major figure in postwar British art: a father of pop art, a creator of key icons of the nuclear age, a brilliant manipulator of the images produced by the media, an iconoclast and traditionalist, an outsider and academician.

"In 1972 the artist Adrian Piper began periodically dressing as a persona called the Mythic Being, striding the streets of New York in a mustache, Afro wig, and mirrored sunglasses with a cigar in the corner of her mouth. Her Mythic Being performances critically engaged with popular representations of race, gender, sexuality, and class..."

A revised edition of a retrospective on the Venice Biennale grand prize-winning artist incorporates the last ten years of his career including his retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1997, in a lavishly illustrated portrait that traces his early years, the creation of his famous combines and his work with new technologies.

Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) initially gained attention in the early 1960s with paintings, drawings, and photographic books that focused on his fascination with the unique culture, vernacular, and sensibility of his adopted home of Los Angeles. This book is the first monograph on Ruscha's work; it looks with discernment and insightful detail at the prolific and many-faceted career of an artist whose work has been variously described as pop, conceptual, or surrealist; a painter as well as a print-, book-, and filmmaker.

"This book offers a detailed presentation of Richard Serra's entire career, from his early experiments with materials like rubber, neon, and lead to the environmentally scaled steel works of recent years, including three monumental new sculptures created for the exhibition that this book accompanies."

This catalogue accompanying a blockbuster retrospective traveling exhibition opening at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in Sept. 2004 is THE major study of Robert Smithson (1938-1973), who is most renowned as an early Earthworks artist and creator of Spiral Jetty, a fifteen-hundred-foot rock coil dramatically situated in the Great Salt Lake.

The art of Frank Stella (born 1936) transcends the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture. Over the course of a five-decade career the artist has consistently reinvented himself, to such an extent that today we are faced with seven or eight Stellas, ranging from austere minimalist to baroque maximalist.

The pictorial creations by American artist Cy Twombly have represented, for more than 50 years, a sort of enigma that reinforces the mythic status of the artist. This book, takes into consideration Twombly's immense and complex body of work from the 1950s up through his current works, offers a thematic and chronological interpretation of his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and collages.