Katsuhiro Yamaguchi: ロボット・アヴァンギャルド―20世紀芸術と機械 (Robot Avant-Garde: 20th Century Art and the Machine, 1985) [Japanese]

A historical treatise on art and technology written by the Japanese pioneer of media art Katsuhiro Yamaguchi (山口勝弘, 1928-2018), a founding member of the avant-garde group Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop, 1951-1957).

The Yamaguchi Katsuhiro Archive contains documentation of the artist’s oeuvre, including scans of his publications.

Publisher Parco, Tokyo, 1985
ISBN 4891940980, 9784891940980
257 pages
via Yamaguchi Katsuhiro Archive

PDF (80 MB)
DOCX

Give Them the Picture: An Anthology of La Mamelle and ART COM, 1975-1984 (2011)

“An anthology of essays taken from La Mamelle and ART COM magazines. It collects and places in dialogue 24 articles penned by critics and artists such as La Mamelle / ART COM founder Carl Loeffler, Lynn Hershman, Richard Irwin, Anna Couey, and Linda Montano, plus interviews with artists such as Douglas Davis and Eleanor Antin.

This collection represents the complexity of the ideas presented in the exhibition as they were grappled with at the time of their original publication, and it also positions them as contemporary questions; particularly relevant is the mediation of performance. It also features conversations between the curators and two of La Mamelle / ART COM’s key figures, Nancy Frank and Darlene Tong.”

Edited by Liz Glass, Susannah Magers, and Julian Myers
Publisher Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice/CCA & CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, 2011
ISBN 9780980205572, 0980205573
202 pages
via editor

Exhibition
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (5 MB)

Annet Dekker: Enduring Liveness: An Imaginary Retrospective of Tino Sehgal’s Constructed Situations (2018)

“The key functions of a museum are the collection, presentation, preservation and education of cultural and artworks for the enjoyment of, and to educate, the public. Performance art has been notoriously difficult for museums to handle, despite the ‘easy’ presentation the non-materiality of the art form challenges the conventional methods and practices of a museum. Artist Tino Sehgal had added to these problems, persisting in having no documentation of his performances, or better his ‘constructed situations’, in whatever form or way. While several books and some catalogues are written about his work, none of them show visual representations of the actual performances.

While I sympathize with Sehgal’s aims and ideas, I’m also intrigued by the numerous ways in which documentation developed and expanded in the last two decades with more and more photos and videos appearing online. In this catalogue three perspectives are presented that open up the potential of documentation as a method to generate new articulations and ways of understanding, thinking and performing. Countering the “no photos allowed” from the press statements of the museums, with the documentation used by online news outlets and those created by visitors, the experience of being present at the performance can no longer be considered as a fixed or even final perspective. Instead the constructed situations continue to act through viewing, capturing and circulation. Navigating the various documents that are created idiosyncratically according to access (having a camera and an Internet connection) or choice (having the willingness or courage to take an image and change the rules), the Imaginary Retrospective of Tino Sehgal adds to what theatre and performance scholar Sarah Bay-Cheng beautifully describes as “a multi-valent experience that is shaped and constructed by the individual experiences, choices, and negotiations of all parties within a connected network of information, sensations, and varying access points” (2012). At the same time, it might open up a desire for new performance to emerge.”

Produced for Monoskop’s Exhibition Library in the 2018 Seoul Mediacity Biennale, 6 September–18 November 2018 at the Seoul Museum of Art.

Self-published in collaboration with Monoskop, Amsterdam, August 2018
89 pages

Author

PDF (14 MB)