Karen Kelly

Barbara Schroeder

A long-overdue appreciation of the influential sculpture of Liz Larner and its radically adventurous formal and conceptual vocabulary Los Angeles-based sculptor and installation artist Liz Larner (born 1960) was originally a photographer: in some of her earliest projects, she documented the volatility of bacterial cultures in petri dishes. However, she soon realized that she was more compelled by the dishes themselves and how they presented questions about what an art object can entail. Since then, she has continued to pursue her interest in formal unpredictability through a focus on sculpture and architectural space. Composed of a diverse variety of materials, her sculptures frequently function as optical illusions that seem to bend the space around them. Sometimes rigidly technical in their geometry and at other times soft-edged and amorphous, Larner's sculptures are striking both for their fluctuation of form and for their representation of spatial politics. Repositioning her enduring formal and material concerns alongside her relationship to a feminist sculptural position, this monograph offers an opportunity to consider Larner's artistic project within today's expanded discourses of embodiment, gender and posthumanism, and to recalibrate our understanding of it in relation to male-dominated Postminimalism and installation art, which have often underpinned Larner's critical reception. Poet Ariana Reines, cultural critic and theorist Catherine Liu, and curators Connie Butler and Mary Ceruti consider the physical properties and sociopolitical implications of the materials present in Larner's work, which range from ceramic to steel chain to surgical gauze to human hair.

Liz Larner: Don't Put It Back Like It Was

Henriette Huldisch

The work of Rosa Barba (born 1972) encompasses sculpture, installation, text pieces and publications. Her film sculptures examine the physical properties of the projector, celluloid and projected light. Barba's longer projected works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative, and are indeterminately situated in the past or the future. These speculative stories probe into the relationship of historical record, personal anecdote and filmic representation. For this first survey of her work in North America, Barba premiers The Color out of Space (2015), a new film incorporating images of stars and planets collected over the last year at Hirsch Observatory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The work expands upon Barba's ongoing interrogation of geological time as measured against the span of a human lifetime. The exhibition includes works made over the last ten years including two of Barba's cinematic large projections, which focus on natural landscapes and man-made interventions into the environment, as well as a group of small projector sculptures and wall works.

Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space

Previously uncollected dance writings from the legendary art critic who defined the Pictures Generation, in a handsome clothbound edition Pioneering AIDS activist, art critic, educator and curator Douglas Crimp is known for the fluidity and acuity of his writing on an array of passions. His book AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (1987) deconstructed the art world's complicated and mostly disheartening responses to the AIDS crisis; On the Museum's Ruins (1993) explored postmodernist art practices in relation to the politics of institutions; and Before Pictures (2016), a brilliant combination of memoir and criticism, chronicled Crimp's first decade in 1970s New York. This new book collects the critic's incisive pieces on dance (a lifelong interest) and dance on film, which, according to Artforum, "galvanized the field and synthesized histories of ballet, modern dance and postmodern performance." Written from 2006 to 2010, these in-depth essays are devoted to choreographers and filmmakers such as Charles Atlas, Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, Tacita Dean, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Yvonne Rainer. Before his death in July 2019, Crimp penned a new essay specifically for this book that probes the idea and definition of the "dance film." This beautifully designed clothbound volume, which shows Crimp as an outstanding and ever-evolving writer, includes an introduction by curator Lynne Cooke, who co-curated Crimp's landmark 2010 show at the Museo Reina Sofia, Mixed Use, Manhattan. Douglas Crimp (1944-2019) is famed for his scholarly contributions to the fields of postmodern theory and art, institutional critique, dance, film, queer theory and feminist theory. His writings are marked by his desire to merge the often disjunctive worlds of politics, art and academia. From 1977 to 1990, he was the managing editor of the journal October. Before his death, Crimp was Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York.

Dance Dance Film Essays

Fabian Schöneich

Published on the occasion of of the exhibition Amy Sillman : the ALL-OVER, on view at Portikus, Frankfort, July 2-September 11, 2016, curated by Fabian Schöneich.

Barbara Schroeder

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