Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968 (1998) [EN, JP]

Yayoi Kusama’s work combines elements of expressionism, minimalism, surrealism and pop art.

“Although an active experimental artist throughout her time in New York during the ’50s and ’60s, Kusama had been largely forgotten by the United States public after her return to Japan in the ’70s. That is, until her artwork began circulating across the US and globe again in the mid-’90s. One of these major retrospectives, Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968, was co-organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Art and The Japan Foundation, and travelled from Los Angeles to New York City and to Minneapolis.

Kusama described this moment in her autobiography Infinity Net: “My exhibition at Robert Miller Gallery that year… won an AICA award. A review in Time Out said that ‘Kusama has kept out of sight, ensconcsed in her own infinite world, but now she’s back to reclaim her rightful place in the history of postmodernism…’ But the biggest highlight came in March 1998 when Love Forever opened at the Los Angeles Museum of Art. This grand retrospective cemented the reassessment of Kusama as a major avant-garde artist. It included some eighty pieces and had taken five years to compile.””

With essays by Lynn Zelevansky, Laura Hoptman, Akira Tatehata, and Alexandra Munroe.

Publisher Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1998
ISBN 087587181X, 9780875871813
195 pages
via MoMA

Online companion to exhibition (MoMA)
WorldCat

PDF (English, 1998)
PDF (Japanese, 1999)

Daniel Buren: Five Texts (1973)

Artist Daniel Buren’s writings on minimal and conceptual art.

Contents:
Preface : Why write texts, or, The place from where I act —
I. Beware —
II. It rains, it snows, it paints —
III. Standpoints —
IV. Critical limits —
V. Function of the museum.

Publisher John Weber Gallery, New York, and Jack Wendler Gallery, London, 1973
64 pages
via x

WorldCat

PDF

Robert Morris: Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (1993)

“Robert Morris is best known for his significant contributions to minimalist sculpture and antiform art, as well as for a number of widely influential theoretical writings on art. Illustrated throughout, this collection of his seminal essays from the 1960s to the 1980s addresses wide-ranging intellectual and philosophical problems of sculpture, raising issues of materiality, size and shape, anti-illusionism, and perceptual conditions.

Included are the influential ‘Notes on Sculpture’ which in four parts carefully articulates the shifting terrains of sculpture during the 1960s, tracing its movement from the gestalt-driven unitary forms of minimalism, through permutable pieces to the formally dispersed process-oriented antiform art that appeared later in the decade, and Morris’s landmark essay on ‘Anti Form’, which marked a departure from art as object. In ‘The Art of Existence’, Morris deftly and humorously invents three artists, who in their movement away from object-art and toward the extra-visual, reveal the limits and conditions of modern sculpture. Essays of the 1970s and 1980s reveal Morris’s preoccupation with the broad conditions of memory and space, which were explored in his experiments with land reclamation and land art, with labyrinthine environments and carceral imagery. In the later essays, Morris looks at modern art’s development in America, based on a framework of strategies produced by Duchamp, Pollock, and other key figures. And in a refiguration of an interview with Roger Denson, Morris acts out a subtle mockery of himself and his art, collapsing the high seriousness of the intended format into a playful scheme.”

Publisher MIT Press, 1993
An October Book
ISBN 026213294X, 9780262132947
xi+326 pages

Reviews: Gary Shapiro (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 1997), Tony Godfrey (Art Book 1994).

WorldCat

PDF (45 MB)