Jane Goodall

Amelia Jones

Brian Massumi

Arthur Kroker

Marilouise Kroker

Stelarc

Timothy Druckrey

A user's guide to Stelarc, the international performance artist whose extreme performances explore the borderland between bodies and machines.

The Monograph

"With great originality and scholarship, Amelia Jones maps out an extraordinary history of body art over the last three decades and embeds it in the theoretical terrain of postmoderism. The result is a wonderful and permissive space in which the viewer...can wander"...-Moira Roth, Trefethen professor of art history, Mills College.

Body Art/performing the Subject

A Novel

Stage Kiss

Anne Rice

Stephen King

Michel Foucault

Judith Halberstam

William Gibson

Robert Louis Stevenson

Andrew O'Hagan

Umberto Eco

Slavoj Žižek

Sigmund Freud

Jean Baudrillard

Mike Kelley

Beatriz Colomina

James Sampson Meyer

Mary Shelley

Patrick McGrath

Jeff Wall

Jacques Lacan

Marina Warner

Hal Foster

Jerry Saltz

Damien Hirst

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Nancy Spector

Julia Kristeva

Edmund Burke

Mark Edmundson

Richard Dyer

Bret Easton Ellis

Edgar Allan Poe

Richard Davenport-Hines

Douglas Crimp

Gianni Jetzer

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Carol J. Clover

Trevor J. Fairbrother

Anthony Vidler

Elisabeth Bronfen

Bruce Hainley

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Kate Ferguson Ellis

Kobena Mercer

Stan Douglas

Alex Farquharson

Jane D. Marsching

Mark Alice Durant

Nike Bätzner

Michael Cohen (kustos.)

Tacita Dean

Christoph Grünenberg

Jonathan Jones (likovni kritik.)

Shamim Momin

Andrew Ross (Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis.)

Jaques Derrida

Part of the acclaimed 'Documents of Contemporary Art' series of anthologies. This collection of writings examines the pervasive and influential role of the Gothic in contemporary art, providing the first comprehensive overview of its uses within contemporary visual culture. The Gothic includes artists' writings by Mike Kelley, Damien Hirst, Tacita Dean, Jonathan Meese and Catherine Sullivan, complemented by literary extracts from Horace Walpole, William Gibson, Bret Easton Ellis and Stephen King, and theoretical writings by such key thinkers as Carol Clover, Beatriz Colomina, Julia Kristeva, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Marina Warner and Slavoj Žižek. Artists surveyed include Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Tacita Dean, Sue de Beer, Janet Cardiff, Mark Dion, Stan Douglas, Robert Gober, Douglas Gordon, Dan Graham, Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Teresa Margolles, Jonathan Meese, Raymond Pettibon, Paul Pfeiffer, Gregor Schneider, Cindy Sherman, Catherine Sullivan, Andy Warhol, and Jane and Louise Wilson. Writers include Jean Baudrillard, Elizabeth Bronfen, Edmund Burke, Carol Clover, Beatriz Colomina, Douglas Crimp, Jacques Derrida, Richard Dyer, Umberto Eco, Bret Easton Ellis, Trevor Fairbrother, Alex Farquharson, Hal Foster, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, William Gibson, Christoph Grunenberg, Bruce Hainley, Judith Halberstam, Amelia Jones, Jonathan Jones, Mike Kelley, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Patrick McGrath, Kobena Mercer, James Meyer, Edgar Allan Poe, Andrew Ross, Jerry Saltz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Mary Shelley, Nancy Spector, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Vidler, Jeff Wall, Horace Walpole, Marina Warner, Anne Williams and Slavoj Žižek.

The Gothic

Andrew Stephenson

Exploring performativity in art theory and practice, this volume examines ways of rethinking processess in visual culture. Since the 1960s, visual art practices have taken contemporary art outside the museum and gallery, exploding the normal boundaries.

Performing the Body/performing the Text

A Companion to Contemporary Art is a major survey covering the major works and movements, the most important theoretical developments, and the historical, social, political, and aesthetic issues in contemporary art since 1945, primarily in the Euro-American context. Collects 27 original essays by expert scholars describing the current state of scholarship in art history and visual studies, and pointing to future directions in the field. Contains dual chronological and thematic coverage of the major themes in the art of our time: politics, culture wars, public space, diaspora, the artist, identity politics, the body, and visual culture. Offers synthetic analysis, as well as new approaches to, debates central to the visual arts since 1945 such as those addressing formalism, the avant-garde, the role of the artist, technology and art, and the society of the spectacle.

A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945

Andy Campbell

Ron Athey is one of the most important, prolific, and influential performance artists of the past four decades. A singular example of lived creativity, his radical performances are odds with the art worlds and art marketplaces that have increasingly dominated contemporary art and performance art over the period of his career. Queer Communion, an exploration of Athey's career, refuses the linear narratives of art discourse and instead pays homage to the intensities of each mode of Athey's performative practice and each community he engages. Emphasizing the ephemeral and largely uncollectible nature of his work, the book places Athey's own writing at its center, turning to memoir, memory recall, and other modes of retrieval and narration to archive his performances. In addition to documenting Athey's art, ephemera, notes, and drawings, the volume features commissioned essays, concise "object lessons" on individual objects in the Athey archive, and short testimonials by friends and collaborators by contributors including Dominic Johnson, Amber Musser, Julie Tolentino, Ming Ma, David Getsy, Alpesh Patel, and Zackary Drucker, among others. Together they form Queer Communion, a counter history of contemporary art.

Ron Athey

Queer Communion

The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (Sight: Visual Culture)

Feminism is one of the most important perspectives from which visual culture has been theorised and historicised over the past 30 years. This book brings together a wide array of writings, including classic texts and polemical new pieces.

The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader

Elizabeth A. T. Smith

Cindy Sherman

Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, Ill.)

Amada Cruz

Published to accompany exhibition held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2/11/97 - 1/2/98; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 28/2/98 - 31/5/98.

Retrospective

Lisa Le Feuvre

The art of Kiki Smith is a meditation on the body. The American artist, born 1954, observes every aspect of corporeal materiality and the conditions shaping the time on earth of the body political, spiritual, domestic, fleshly, base, and universal. She uses a wide range of materials and craft techniques, but takes a particular interest in the fragility and expressive potential of paper and its resemblance to skin. Flesh is also suggested by wax and bronze in sculptures, often cast from living models including herself.0This new monograph focuses on the sensory dimension of Kiki Smith?s oeuvre that requires active percipience and a sharpening of our senses. Richly illustrated with around one-hundred of her drawings, prints, sculptures, and videos, the essays confront the reader with his or her own physicality and invites a reflection of our role within our entire environment.00Exhibition: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, Switzerland (09.10.2020? - 10.01.2021).

Hearing You with My Eyes

Kiki Smith

Dan Cameron

Paul McCarthy

"Working from a pioneering fusion of sculpture and conceptually based performance, Paul McCarthy is one of the most influential, yet least recognized artists in the U.S. today. While his architectural installations incorporating video and performance artifacts have received critical and curatorial attention during the present decade, few viewers are familiar with his artistic evolution, or with the impact his work has had on two generations of Los Angeles artists. This publication, covering about 400 works from all areas of his activity, gives an exemplary insight into McCarthy's works from the early 1970s up to the present day. Experts on his work give comprehensive descriptions and analyses of the American artist's performances and installations, examine the unique ties between his works and cinema, and explore the dialogue between New York and Los Angeles, particularly in the formulation and development of conceptual art."--Publisher's description

Erin Silver

While feminist art history and queer theory both have a strong presence in academic discourse, there is no clear existing queer feminist art history. This book examines how and why this is the case. Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories addresses the historiographic and politicalquestions arising from the relationship between art history and queer theory in order to help map exclusions and to offer models of a new queer feminist art historical or curatorial approach in a European-North American context and beyond. Including essays by both emerging scholars and renownedfeminist art historians, critics and queer theorists, as well as an extensive historical chapter contextualising the interrelated but never fully coextensive developments of feminist art and art history, and queer theories of visual culture, Otherwise is a crucial resource for specialists andstudents seeking to enrich the understanding of the relationship between gender politics and visual culture.Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories is oriented towards students at all levels, as well as scholars and practitioners in art and performance, art history and gender studies, visual culture studies, performance studies and other fields in the arts and humanities dealing with queertheory, feminist theory and cultural history. The book will also be of interest to museum-goers and those interested in the visual arts and performance art in general, a growing audience with the popularisation of art and performance across the now global art world.

Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories

Otherwise

Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "world picture" expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond. The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance of a binary model of self and other from Hegel through classic 1970s identity politics) and a political response to the common claim in art and popular political discourse that we are "beyond" or "post-" identity. In challenging this latter claim, Seeing Differently critically examines how and why we "identify" works of art with an expressive subjectivity, noting the impossibility of claiming we are "post-identity" given the persistence of beliefs in art discourse and broader visual culture about who the subject "is," and offers a new theory of how to think this kind of identification in a more thoughtful and self-reflexive way. Ultimately, Seeing Differently offers a mode of thinking identification as a "queer feminist durational" process that can never be fully resolved but must be accounted for in thinking about art and visual culture. Queer feminist durationality is a mode of relational interpretation that affects both "art" and "interpreter," potentially making us more aware of how we evaluate and give value to art and other kinds of visual culture.

A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts

Seeing Differently

Andrew Stephenson Nfa

This book explores the new performativity in art theory and practice, examining ways of rethinking interpretive processes in visual culture. Since the 1960s, visual art practices - from body art to minimalism - have taken contemporary art outside the museum and gallery; by embracing theatricality and performance and exploding the boundaries set by traditional art criticism. The contributors argue that interpretation needs to be recognised as much more dynamic and contingent. Offering its own performance script, and embracing both canonical fine artists such as Manet, De Kooning and Jasper Johns, and performance artists such as Vito Acconci and Gunter Brus, this book offers radical re-readings of art works and points confidently towards new models for understanding art.

Performing the Body/Performing the Text

Essayists Amada Cruz, Elizabeth A. T. Smith, and Amelia Jones offer keen insight and observations from several distinct vantage points, demonstrating that Sherman's work is a lens through which to view contemporary art and its ongoing concern with the profound issues of the structures of the self.

The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance of a binary model of self and other from Hegel through classic 1970s identity politics) and a political response to the common claim in art and popular political discourse that we are "beyond" or "post-" identity. In challenging this latter claim, Seeing Differently critically examines how and why we "identify" works of art with an expressive subjectivity, noting the impossibility of claiming we are "post-identity" given the persistence of beliefs in art discourse and broader visual culture about who the subject "is," and offers a new theory of how to think this kind of identification in a more thoughtful and self-reflexive way.

A History and Theory Identification and the Visual Arts

This volume is a study of the connected ideas of "queer" and "gender performance" or "performativity" over the past several decades, providing an ambitious history and crucial examination of these concepts while questioning their very bases. Addressing cultural forms from 1960s–70s sociology, performance art, and drag queen balls to more recent queer voguing performances by Pasifika and Māori people from New Zealand and pop culture television shows such as RuPaul’s Drag Race, the book traces how and why "queer" and "performativity" seem to belong together in so many discussions around identity, popular modes of gender display, and performance art. Drawing on art history and performance studies but also on feminist, queer, and sexuality studies, and postcolonial, indigenous, and critical race theoretical frameworks, it seeks to denaturalize these assumptions by questioning the US-centrism and white-dominance of discourses around queer performance or performativity. The book’s narrative is deliberately recursive, itself articulated in order performatively to demonstrate the specific valence and social context of each concept as it emerged, but also the overlap and interrelation among the terms as they have come to co-constitute one another in popular culture and in performance and visual arts theory, history, and practice. Written from a hybrid art historical and performance studies point of view, this will be essential reading for all those interested in art, performance, and gender, as well as in queer and feminist theory.

A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance

In Between Subjects

While feminist art history and queer theory both have a strong presence in academic discourse, there is no clear existing queer feminist art history. This book examines how and why this is the case. Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories addresses the historiographic and political questions arising from the relationship between art history and queer theory in order to help map exclusions and to offer models of a new queer feminist art historical or curatorial approach in a European-North American context and beyond. Including essays by both emerging scholars and renowned feminist art historians, critics and queer theorists, as well as an extensive historical chapter contextualising the interrelated but never fully coextensive developments of feminist art and art history, and queer theories of visual culture, Otherwise is a crucial resource for specialists and students seeking to enrich the understanding of the relationship between gender politics and visual culture. Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories is oriented towards students at all levels, as well as scholars and practitioners in art and performance, art history and gender studies, visual culture studies, performance studies and other fields in the arts and humanities dealing with queer theory, feminist theory and cultural history. The book will also be of interest to museum-goers and those interested in the visual arts and performance art in general, a growing audience with the popularisation of art and performance across the now global art world.

Amelia Jones

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