Ina Blom Livres

Since the 1960's, artistic practice has been increasingly focused on interventions in social reality and the way in which everyday life is formed, designed or stylized. Faced with artistic activities that challenge traditional ideas of art and its relationship to aesthetics, critical paradigms and language must be recalibrated to correspond to these shifts. In this groundbreaking essay, Ina Blom, art historian at the University of Oslo, uses the work of the artists Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Philippe Parreno, Olafur Eliasson, Tobias Rehberger, Carsten Höller, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick and Jorge Pardo, to reassess the relationship between art and (life)style. Consequently, "Style site" should be seen as an extension of what is generally known as site-specific art. "Style site" also works to radically challenge the notion of the political in art and may be best used as a device to reinterpret the life-art practices of the avant-garde.

In this innovative take on early video art, Ina Blom considers the widespread notion that analog video was endowed with lifelike memory and agency. Reversing standard accounts of artistic uses of video, she follows the reflexive unfolding of a technology that seemed to deploy artists and artistic frameworks in the creation of new technical and social realities. She documents, among other things, video's emergence through the framework of painting, its identification with biological life, its exploration of the outer limits of technical and mental time control, and its construction of new realms of labor and collaboration. Enlisting a distinctly media-archaeological approach, Blom's new book—her second from Sternberg Press—is a brilliant look at the relationship between video memory and social ontology.