Stephen Johnstone (ed.): The Everyday (2008)

“Numerous international exhibitions and biennales have born witness to the range of contemporary art engaged with the everyday and its antecedents in Dada and Surrealism, Pop, Situationism and Fluxus. Art’s turn to the ordinary is symptomatic of a desire to address things in the world, rather than the history and institutions of art. It shows a recognition of ordinary dignity or the accidentally miraculous; an engagement with a new kind of anthropology; an immersion in the pleasures of popular culture; or a meditation on what happens, when nothing happens. The celebration of the everyday has oppositional and dissident overtones, offering a voice to the silenced and proposing possibilities for change. This collection of writings by artists, theorists and critics assembles for the first time a comprehensive anthology on the everyday in the world of contemporary art.”

Publisher Whitechapel, 2008
Documents of Contemporary Art series
ISBN 0262600749, 9780262600743
239 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-7-15)

Camilla Gray: The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863-1922 (1962–) [EN, SC]

When the original edition of this book was published, John Russell hailed it as a ‘massive contribution to our knowledge of one of the most fascinating and mysterious episodes in the history of modern art.’ It still remains the most compact survey of sixty years of creative dynamic activity that profoundly influenced the progress of Western art and architecture.

Publisher Thames and Hudson, 1962, 1970
Revised and enlarged edition by Marian Burleigh-Motley, 1986
ISBN 0500202079, 9780500202074
324 pages

Reviews: Wladimir Weidlé (Slavic Review 1963), Vyacheslav Zavalishin (Russian Review 1963), Nina Juviler (Slavic and East European Journal 1964).

Publisher

PDF (1970 US edition, 45 MB; added on 2014-3-2)
PDF (1971 UK edition, 111 MB, no OCR; added on 2018-11-4)
PDF (1986 UK edition, 35 MB, no OCR; updated on 2012-7-17)
PDF (Serbo-Croatian, 1978, 28 MB, added on 2024-2-17)

Yve Alain Bois, Rosalind E. Krauss: Formless: A User’s Guide (1996/1997)

“In a work that will become indispensable to anyone seriously interested in modern art, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss convincingly introduce a new constellation of concepts to our understanding of avant-garde and modernist art practices. Formless constitutes a decisive and dramatic transformation of the study of twentieth-century culture. Although it has been over sixty years since Georges Bataille undertook his philosophical development of the term informe, only in recent years has the idea of the “formless” been deployed in theorizing and reconfiguring the very field of twentieth-century art. This is partly because that field has most often been crudely set up as a battle between form and content, whereas “formless” constitutes a third term that stands outside the opposition of form and content, outside the binary thinking that is itself formal.

In Formless, Bois and Krauss, two of the most influential and respected art historians of our time, present a rich and compelling panorama of the formless. They map out its persistence within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery, and they assess its destiny within current artistic production. In the domain of practice, they analyze it as an operational tool, the structural cunning of which has repeatedly been suppressed in the service of a thematics of art. Neither theme nor form, formless is, as Bataille himself expressed it, a “job.” The job of Formless is to explore the power of the informe. A stunning new map of twentieth-century art emerges from this innovative reconceptualization and from the brilliantly original analyses of the work of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Lucio Fontana, Cindy Sherman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.”

First published as L’Informe: mode d’emploi, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1996.

Publisher Zone Books, 1997
ISBN 0942299434, 9780942299434
304 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2013-1-15)