Chris Kraus: Lost Properties: Some Arguments For and Against the Dematerialization of Art (2014)

“Everyone wants to be an artist. The number of undergraduate students completing fine arts degrees at US colleges doubled in the years between 1985–2010, according to the Digest of Education Statistics. But being an artist doesn’t necessarily mean making drawings or paintings or sculpture or even installations or videos. The desire to pursue a life in ‘fine art’ simply means a desire to respond creatively to the present, just as the disciplines of ‘poetry’ or ‘rock & roll’ were ciphers for countercultural lifestyles in other eras. The only real difference lies in credentialing. As the definition of what constitutes ‘fine art’ expands to include journalism, social work, landscape architecture, theater, poetry, school-teaching, and literary nonfiction under the banners of ‘social practice,’ ‘research,’ and ‘art writing,’ institutions respond by offering specialized, low-residency degrees in these areas taught by itinerant, poorly-paid faculty. Participants travel between cities within and beyond Europe to dialogue about ‘communities’ during brief residencies.”

Publisher Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2014
Number 19 in a series of 22 publications produced on the occasion of the 2014 Whitney Biennial
ISBN 9781584351573
31 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

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Marcel Duchamp (1973)

Catalogue for a retrospective exhibition co-curated by Anne d’Harnoncourt of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Kynaston McShine of The Museum of Modern Art. In addition to these venues, the show traveled to The Art Institute of Chicago. This exhibition, the third retrospective dedicated to Marcel Duchamp and the first organized following the artist’s death, was also an inaugural exhibition of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s newly formed 20th Century Art Department. The museum has a substantial collection of Duchamp works, the majority of which came to it through the 1950 gift of the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.

The book contains a documented photographic survey of Duchamp’s works (over 90 pp), passages from Duchamp’s lectures, comments and tributes from 50 contemporaries, documentary illustrations, a chronology (over 20 pp), a bibliography (10 pp), and ten original essays by scholars and critics: Michel Sanouillet, Richard Hamilton, Lawrence D. Steefel, Jr., Arturo Schwarz, David Antin, Lucy R. Lippard, Kynaston McShine, Robert Lebel, Octavio Paz, and John Tancock. The essays cover Duchamp’s explorations in the areas of language, poetry, the machine, alchemy, and the epistemology of art; on a more personal level, they treat the milieux and the friend ships that shaped his character, the life style to which he adhered, the influence his example has exerted.

Edited by Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine
Publisher Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 1973
ISBN 0870702963, 9780870702969
345 pages
via MoMA

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (86 MB)

Too Much World: The Films of Hito Steyerl (2014)

“Hito Steyerl is considered one of the most exciting artists working today who speculates on the impact of the Internet and digitization on the fabric of our everyday lives. Her films and writings offer an astute, provocative, and often funny analysis of the dizzying speed with which images and data are reconfigured, altered, and dispersed, many times over, accelerating into infinity or crashing into oblivion.

Published to accompany the artist’s survey exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Too Much World gathers a series of essays and close readings of Steyerl’s films from 2004-2014. Newly commissioned texts by Sven Lütticken, Karen Archey, Ana Teixeira Pinto, and Nick Aikens, alongside writings by Thomas Elsaesser, Pablo Lafuente, David Riff, and Steyerl, are spliced with over one hundred pages of color stills.”

Edited by Nick Aikens
Publisher Sternberg Press, Berlin; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2014
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License
ISBN 9783956790577
247 pages

Exh. reviews: Amelia Groom (2014), Paula Albuquerque (Necsus 2015), Dylan Rainforth (LEAP 2015), Kate Woodcroft (Artlink 2015), Scott Redford (Ran Dian 2015).

Exhibition (Van Abbemuseum)
Exhibition (IMA)
Publisher (Sternberg)
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (single pages, 4 MB)
PDF, PDF (spreads, 4 MB)