Charles Green: The Third Hand. Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (2001)

A major reevaluation of collaboration’s role in art since 1968.

The lone artist is a worn cliché of art history but one that still defines how we think about the production of art. Since the 1960s, however, a number of artists have challenged this image by embarking on long-term collaborations that dramatically altered the terms of artistic identity. In The Third Hand, Charles Green offers a sustained critical examination of collaboration in international contemporary art, tracing its origins from the evolution of conceptual art in the 1960s into such stylistic labels as Earth Art, Systems Art, Body Art, and Performance Art. During this critical period, artists around the world began testing the limits of what art could be, how it might be produced, and who the artist is. Collaboration emerged as a prime way to reframe these questions.

Green looks at three distinct types of collaboration: the highly bureaucratic identities created by Joseph Kosuth, Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden and other members of Art & Language in the late 1960s; the close-knit relationships based on marriage or lifetime partnership as practiced by the Boyle Family—Anne and Patrick Poirier, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison; and couples-like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Gilbert & George, or Marina Abramovic and Ulay—who developed third identities, effacing the individual artists almost entirely. These collaborations, Green contends, resulted in new and, at times, extreme authorial models that continue to inform current thinking about artistic identity and to illuminate the origins of postmodern art, suggesting, in the process, a new genealogy for art in the twenty-first century.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2001
ISBN 0868405884, 9780868405889
248 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)

Charlie Gere: Art, Time, and Technology (2006)

Art, Time and Technology examines the role of art in an age of ‘real time’ information systems and instantaneous communication. The increasing speed of technology and of technological development since the early nineteenth century has resulted in cultural anxiety. Humankind now appears to be an ever-smaller component of dauntingly complex technological systems, operating at speeds beyond human control or even perception. This perceived change forces us to rethink our understanding of key concepts such as time, history and art. Art, Time and Technology explores how the practice of art – in particular of avant-garde art – keeps our relation to time, history and even our own humanity open. Examining key moments in the history of both technology and art from the beginnings of industrialization to today, Charlie Gere explores both the making and purpose of art, and how much further it can travel from the human body.

Published by Berg, 2006
ISBN 1845201353, 9781845201357
195 pages

Key terms: net.art, Staiti, avant-garde, conceptual art, Bernard Stiegler, real-time computing, Lyotard, John McHale, Suprematism, Jacques Derrida, Suprematist, Hans Haacke, mail art, DEW Line, Vincent Van Gogh, Roy Ascott, Buckminster Fuller, Douglas Huebler, Metal Machine Music

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)

Craig J. Saper: Networked Art (2001)

“Outlines an exciting new approach to this confluence of art, media, and poetry.

The experimental art and poetry of the last half of the twentieth century offers a glimpse of the emerging networked culture that electronic devices will make omnipresent. Craig J. Saper demarcates this new genre of networked art, which uses the trappings of bureaucratic systems—money, logos, corporate names, stamps—to create intimate situations among the participants.

In Saper’s analysis, the pleasures that these aesthetic situations afford include shared special knowledge or new language among small groups of participants. Functioning as artworks in themselves, these temporary institutional structures—etworks, publications, and collective works—give rise to a gift-exchange community as an alternative economy and social system. Saper explains how this genre developed from post-World War II conceptual art, including periodicals as artworks in themselves; lettrist, concrete, and process poetry; Bauhaus versus COBRA; Fluxus publications, kits, and machines; mail art and on-sendings. The encyclopedic scope of the book includes discussions of artists from J. Beuys to J. S. G. Boggs, and Bauhaus’s Max Bill to Anna Freud Banana. Networked Art is an essential guide to the digital artists and networks of the emerging future.”

Key words and phrases: Fluxus, concrete poetry, mail art, mail artists, visual poetry, Dick Higgins, Big Dada, conceptual art, Ray Johnson, George Maciunas, sound poetry, Ken Friedman, Guy Bleus, Bauhaus, detournement, neoist, Max Bill, Augusto de Campos, George Brecht, Joseph Beuys

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2001
ISBN 0816637075, 9780816637072
198 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2018-9-21)