Ursula Meyer: Conceptual Art (1972)

A compendium of conceptual works and texts by 40 artists.

Publisher E.P. Dutton, New York, 1972
ISBN 0525472711, 9780525472711
xx+227 pages

Review: Donald Brook (Leonardo, 1975).

WorldCat

PDF (49 MB, no OCR)

Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (2005)

“Andrea Fraser’s work, writes Pierre Bourdieu in his foreword to Museum Highlights, is able to ‘trigger a social mechanism, a sort of machine infernale whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself.’ It often does this by incorporating and inhabiting the social role it sets out to critique—as in a performance piece in which she leads a tour as a museum docent and describes the men’s room in the same elevated language that she uses to describe seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Influenced by the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism, Fraser’s interventionist art draws on four primary artistic and intellectual frameworks—institutional critique, with its site-specific examination of cultural context; performance; feminism, with its investigation of identity formation; and Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology. Fraser’s writings form an integral part of her artistic practice, and this collection of texts written between 1985 and 2003—including the performance script for the docent’s tour that gives the book its title—both documents and represents her work.

The writings in Museum Highlights are arranged to reflect different aspects of Fraser’s artistic practice. They include essays that trace the development of critical ‘artistic practice’ as cultural resistance; performance scripts that explore art institutions and the public sphere; and texts that explore the ambivalent relationship of art to the economic and political interests of its time. The final piece, ‘Isn’t This a Wonderful Place? (A Tour of a Tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao),’ reflects on the role of museums in an era of globalization. Among the book’s 30 illustrations are stills from performance pieces, some never before published.”

Edited by Alexander Alberro
Publisher MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262062445, 9780262062442
xxxvii+291 pages

Reviews: Kirsi Peltomaki (Afterimage, 2005), Melissa Gronlund (Frieze, 2005), Louis Byrne (Art Book, 2007), N.A. Hayes (PopMatters, 2008).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (104 MB, no OCR)

Cosmic Shift: Russian Contemporary Art Writing (2017)

“In this, the first anthology of Russian contemporary art writing to be published outside Russia, many of the country’s most prominent contemporary artists, writers, philosophers, curators and historians come together to examine the region’s various movements of contemporary art, culture, and theory, from communism, cosmism and conceptualism to past and future futures.

With contributions from Barte de Baere, Boris Groys, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Anton Vidokle, Bogdan Mamonov, Pavel Pepperstein, Dmitri Prigov and Masha Sumnina amongst many others, this definitive collection reveals a compelling portrait of a vast and complex nation built on a contradicting dialectic between the material and the ideal and a culture battling its own histories and ideologies.”

Edited by Elena Zaytseva and Alex Anikina
Foreword by Bart De Baere
Publisher Zed Books, London, 2017
ISBN 9781786993243, 1786993244
xvii+516 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

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