Accompanying a major exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, this book explores the life and work of renowned feminist artist Alice Neel, 1900-1948.
Larne Abse Gogarty Livres
The birth of the SPACE artist initiative in London, 1968 coincided with student protests and autonomous interventions in cities across Europe. Asserting the rights to space was a theme common to student sit-ins, squatting and free festivals. The unique contribution made by SPACE to the city is that artist founders Bridget Riley and Peter Sedgley negotiated vast amounts of space for creativity through legitimate means. They persuaded authorities and landlords to lease them property to which the artists brought new life and creative uses. Many have subsequently benefitted from the example set. This timely book celebrates the contribution of this artist-run initiative to London. The focus is on 1968-75, when SPACE and its sister organisation AIR came into fruition, a period which has much influence for artists and policy today. The story of SPACE is relevant to artists in cities across the world who face challenges of working in ever-more expensive and congested cities. Essays by artists Bridget Riley and Peter Sedgley, plus Mel Dodd, Will Fowler, Larne Abse Gogarty, Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, Robert Kudielka, Courtney J. Martin, Alicia Miller, David Morris, Neil Mulholland, Naomi Pearce, Ana Torok and Andrew Wilson. Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Archive display at SPACE HQ, London (January - March 2018). -- Publisher's website.
On the aesthetic and intellectual affinities between recent art and conspiracy. Written in the wake of the far-right populist turn in Europe, the US, and beyond, What We Do Is Secret addresses aesthetic and intellectual affinities between recent art and conspiracy, proposing a theory of conspiracy that is not primarily concerned with conspiracy theory. This inquiry takes shape across chapters on the politics of post-internet art aesthetics; the sublime and possessive individualism in recent “critical” art; Cady Noland’s security fences, and silkscreens of the Symbionese Liberation Army; and mutuality, secrecy, and improvisation in the work of Ima-Abasi Okon. Larne Abse Gogarty discusses the relationship between culture and contemporary politics, following on from David Lloyd’s proposition that through its compensatory qualities, the aesthetic sphere naturalizes forms of life lived under the rule of property. What kind of art can work against this? Can art exist as a conspiracy capable of corroding that rule?
Usable Pasts zeros in on two periods in the United States that saw the state increase its financial support for socially engaged works of culture. In the 1990s the political artworks by Suzanne lacy, Rick Lowe, and Martha Rosler helped usher in an era of social practice art, while in the 1930s saw the creation of the leftist Cultural Front and its proliferation of experiential theatre, modern dance, and photography. By analyzing these trends and their relationship to one another this book unpicks the mythic and material afterlives of the New Deal in American cultural politics, and in so doing writes a new history of social practice art in the United States. From teenage mothers organising exhibitions that challenged welfare reform, to communist dance troupes choreographing their struggles as domestic workers, Usable Pasts addresses the aesthetics and politics of these attempts to transform society through art in relation to questions of state formation.
The mood of systemic crisis that has marked the early 21st century has been accompanied by an upsurge in Marxist thought in a whole range of domains and extends to art history. In this volume 19 scholars from different generations, different national contexts and with different relationships to Marxism reflect on the status of 18 "keywords" with special pertinence to Marxist art-historical inquiry today. Starting point of the researches was the knowledge that while certain keywords have been crucial to recent developments in Marxist art history and cultural theory more broadly, others seem to have slipped out of view. The scholars are not so much interested in the "historical semantics" of words – although that plays some role in the essays – as in the present state of Marxist art history.