Wu Hung (ed.): Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (2010)

This sourcebook and anthology is “a collection of selected texts that includes artists’ manifestos, exhibition catalogue texts, essays by critics, and interviews with key artists, many of them available in English translation for the first time. Arranged in chronological order and framed by contextual explanations, these documents guide readers through the developments in the Chinese art scene from the late 1970s to the 2000s.”

Edited with the assistance of Peggy Wang
Publisher Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010
ISBN 9780822349433, 0822349434
xvi+455 pages

Reviews: Bloomer (China J 2011), Winterton (Taipei Times 2011), Pearlman (Leonardo 2011), Dal Lago (ARTmargins 2014).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (21 MB, updated on 2023-9-19)
Additional texts (PDFs)

Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, Piotr Piotrowski (eds.): Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe, 1945-1989 (2016)

“This book presents and analyzes artistic interactions both within the Soviet bloc and with the West between 1945 and 1989. During the Cold War the exchange of artistic ideas and products united Europe’s avant-garde in a most remarkable way. Despite the Iron Curtain and national and political borders there existed a constant flow of artists, artworks, artistic ideas and practices. The geographic borders of these exchanges have yet to be clearly defined. How were networks, centers, peripheries (local, national and international), scales, and distances constructed? How did (neo)avant-garde tendencies relate with officially sanctioned socialist realism?

The literature on the art of Eastern Europe provides a great deal of factual knowledge about a vast cultural space, but mostly through the prism of stereotypes and national preoccupations. By discussing artworks, studying the writings on art, observing artistic evolution and artists’ strategies, as well as the influence of political authorities, art dealers and art critics, the essays in Art beyond Borders compose a transnational history of arts in the Soviet satellite countries in the post war period.”

Publisher CEU Press, Budapest/New York, 2016
Leipzig Studies on the History and Culture of East-Central Europe series, 3
Open access
ISBN 9789633860830, 9633860830
xii+494+24 pages
via x

Publisher
OAPEN
WorldCat

PDF (126 MB, updated on 2020-11-25)

Mladen Stilinović: 1+2 ≡ (2015) [English/Spanish]

Catalogue for an exhibition held from 5 September 2015 – 3 January 2016 at MUAC in Mexico City. The show comprising work dating from the 1970s up to the first decade of the 21st century included video, painting, collage, documentation of actions and installations, and aimed to demonstrate how Mladen Stilinović (1947-2016) questioned the aesthetic and social legacy of the avant-garde.

“His work comprises exercises that are frequently tautological, with citations that range from the aesthetic of the street to that of the Russian avant-garde, but always based on a dual axis that combines the formal simplicity with the deconstructive power of the absurd. The practice of this Croatian artist is governed by a specific question: ‘how to manipulate that which manipulates you’. Though he is considered a conceptual artist, the work of Stilinović is never cold nor rational, but moves in a register of humor and irony whose simple gestures appeal to the emotions and produce experiences that insist on personal responsibility. All his artistic strategies, starting with his auctioning off the color red, exchanging the definition of all the words in the dictionary for the word pain, or selling self-censorship, are connected—in the artist’s own words—with respecting the anarchy in himself and proposes the absurd as an antidote to ideology—whichever ideology is waiting for us around the next corner.”

Contains three texts by Mladen Stilinović, an interview by Branka Stipančić, essays by Alejandra Labastida and Boris Groys, and reproductions of selected works.

Publisher Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico City, 2015
Folio MUAC series, 35
ISBN 607025175X, 9786070251757
95 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (2 MB)