Marcus Verhagen Livres

Contemporary art and the culture of speed How have artists responded to our market-driven, tech-enabled culture of speed? Viewing Velocities explores a contemporary art scene caught in the gears of 24/7 capitalism. It looks at artists who embrace the high-octane experience economy and others who are closer to the slow movement. Some of the most compelling artworks addressing the cadences of contemporary work and leisure play on distinct, even contradictory conceptions of time. From Danh Vo's relics to Moyra Davey's photographs of dust-covered belongings, from Roman Ondak's queuing performers and Susan Hiller's outdoor sleepers to Maria Eichhorn's art strike and Ruth Ewan's giant reconstruction of the French revolutionary calendar, artists have drawn out aspects of the present temporal order that are familiar to the point of near-invisibility, while outlining other, more liberating ways of conceiving, organising and experiencing time. Marcus Verhagen builds on the work of theorists Jonathan Crary, Hartmut Rosa and Jacques Rancière to trace lines of insurgent art that recast struggles over time and history in novel and revealing terms.

Over the past 25 years, artists have vigorously engaged the debate around globalization, examining cross-border exchange from mass migration to the dynamics of translation, and devising new conceptual categories and new formal and metaphorical resources along the way. Noted art critic Marcus Verhagens timely examination of artistic interventions, Flows and Counterflows tells the story of projects that draw out both the dangers and tangible benefits of global exchange. In seven thought-provoking illustrated essays Verhagen maps the global art worlds shifting terrain and offers an incisive and original account of contemporary arts relationship to the processes of globalisation. The softcover survey covers how art addresses global markers such as tourism and border control; how the art system itself has been reshaped; and how artists resist by building informal networks. Packed with clearly explained and illustrated contemporary artworks, it is an indispensable history of art for our current times. Verhagen teaches in the United States and Europe and has published extensively in LeftReview, Art Monthly, Frieze along with many other publications.