Caroline A. Jones

Artists and writers reconsider the relationship between the body and electronic technology in the twenty-first century through essays, artworks, and an encyclopedic "Abecedarius of the New Sensorium." The relationship between the body and electronic technology, extensively theorized through the 1980s and 1990s, has reached a new technosensual comfort zone in the early twenty-first century. In Sensorium, contemporary artists and writers explore the implications of the techno-human interface. Ten artists, chosen by an international team of curators, offer their own edgy investigations of embodied technology and the technologized body. These range from Matthieu Briand's experiment in "controlled schizophrenia" and Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller's uneasy psychological soundscapes to Bruce Nauman's uncanny night visions and François Roche's destabilized architecture. The art in Sensorium—which accompanies an exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center—captures the aesthetic attitude of this hybrid moment, when modernist segmentation of the senses is giving way to dramatic multisensory mixes or transpositions. Artwork by each artist appears with an analytical essay by a curator, all of it prefaced by an anchoring essay on "The Mediated Sensorium" by Caroline Jones. In the second half of Sensorium, scholars, scientists, and writers contribute entries to an "Abecedarius of the New Sensorium." These short, playful pieces include Bruno Latour on "Air," Barbara Maria Stafford on "Hedonics," Michel Foucault (from a little-known 1966 radio lecture) on the "Utopian Body," Donna Haraway on "Compoundings," and Neal Stephenson on the "Viral." Sensorium is both forensic and diagnostic, viewing the culture of the technologized body from the inside, by means of contemporary artists' provocations, and from a distance, in essays that situate it historically and intellectually. Copublished with The MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art

Sensorium

Natalie Bell

Selby Nimrod

Essays, conversations, selected texts, and a rich collection of thought-provoking artworks celebrate a revolution in bio art. Expertly designed by Omnivore and printed on special papers, including chlorophyll cover and crush citrus and crush cocoa pages. The texts and artworks in Symbionts provoke a necessary conversation about our species and its relation to the planet. Are we merely “mammalian weeds,” as evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis put it? Or are we partners in producing and maintaining the biosphere, as she also suggested? Symbionts reflects on a recent revolution in bio art that departs from the late-1990s code-oriented experiments to embrace entanglement and symbiosis (“with-living”). Combining documentation of contemporary artworks with texts by leading thinkers, Symbionts, which accompanies an exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center, offers an expansive view of humanity’s place on the planet. Color reproductions document works by international artists that respond to the revelation that planetary microbes construct and maintain our biosphere. A central essay by coeditor Caroline Jones sets their work in the context of larger discussions around symbiosis; additional essays, an edited roundtable discussion, and selected excerpts follow. Contributors explore, among other things, the resilient ecological knowledge of indigenous scholars and artists, and “biofiction,” a term coined by Jones to describe the work of such theoretical biologists as Jacob von Uexküll as well as the witty parafictions of artist Anicka Yi. A playful glossary puts scientific terms in conversation with cultural ones.

Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere

Symbionts

McKenzie Wark

Chris Csikszentmihályi

Essays by Chris Csikszentmihlyi, Caroline A. Jones and McKenzie Wark.

Skin Control

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

San Francisco Museum of Art

Describes the development of a movement creating figurative, rather than abstract, art in the San Francisco Bay Area, and provides examples of its paintings, drawings and sculpture

Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950-1965

Even a decade after his death, Clement Greenberg remains controversial. One of the most influential art writers of the twentieth century, Greenberg propelled Abstract Expressionist painting-in particular the monumental work of Jackson Pollock-to a leading position in an international postwar art world. On radio and in print, Greenberg was the voice of "the new American painting," and a central figure in the postwar cultural history of the United States. Caroline Jones's magisterial study widens Greenberg's fundamental tenet of "opticality"-the idea that modernist art is apprehended through "eyesight alone"-to a broader arena, examining how the critic's emphasis on the specular resonated with a society increasingly invested in positivist approaches to the world. Greenberg's modernist discourse, Jones argues, developed in relation to the rationalized procedures that gained wide currency in the United States at midcentury, in fields ranging from the sense-data protocols theorized by scientific philosophy to the development of cultural forms, such as hi-fi, that targeted specific senses, one by one. Greenberg's attempt to isolate and celebrate the visual was one manifestation of a large-scale segmentation-or bureaucratization-of the body's senses. Working through these historical developments, Jones brings Greenberg's theories into contemporary philosophical debates about agency and subjectivity. Eyesight Alone offers artists, art historians, philosophers, and all those interested in the arts a critical history of this generative figure, bringing his work fully into dialogue with the ideas that shape contemporary critical discourse and shedding light not only on Clement Greenberg but also on the contested history of modernism itself.

Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses

Eyesight Alone

Global biennials have proliferated in the contemporary art world, but artists’ engagement with large-scale international exhibitions has a much longer history that has influenced the present in important ways. Going back to the earliest world’s fairs in the nineteenth century, this book argues that “globalism” was incubated in a century of international art contests and today constitutes an important tactic for artists. As world’s fairs brought millions of attendees into contact with foreign cultures, products, and processes, artworks became juxtaposed in a “theater of nations,” which challenged artists and critics to think outside their local academies. From Gustave Courbet’s rebel pavilion near the official art exhibit at the 1855 French World’s Fair to curator Beryl Madra’s choice of London-based Cypriot Hussein Chalayan for the off-site Turkish pavilion at the 2006 Venice Biennale, artists have used these exhibitions to reflect on contemporary art, speak to their own governments back home, and challenge the wider geopolitical realm—changing art and art history along the way. Ultimately, Caroline A. Jones argues, the modern appetite for experience and event structures, which were cultivated around the art at these earlier expositions, have now come to constitute contemporary art itself, producing encounters that transform the public and force us to reflect critically on the global condition.

World's Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience

The Global Work of Art

Peter Galison

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Picturing Science, Producing Art

Fredric Jameson

James Elkins

Elaine Scarry

Kathleen Marie Higgins

Dave Hickey

Theodor W. Adorno

Griselda Pollock

Andy Warhol

Thierry De Duve

Gerhard Richter

Christoph Grunenberg

Leon Golub

Rosalind Krauss

Diarmuid Costello

Paul Wood

Arthur Coleman Danto

John Roberts

Mark Cousins

Alexander Alberro

Wendy Steiner

Jason Gaiger

Timothy J. Clark

Richard Woodfield

Rudolf Sagmeister

Robert Smithson

Vito Acconci

Alex Katz

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Nancy Spero

Rasheed Araeen

Agnes Martin

David Raskin

Art & Language

John Currin

Anna Dezeuze

Leo Fitzmaurice

Suzanne Perling Hudson

Mark Hutchinson

Saul Ostrow

Simon O'Sullivan

Dominic Willsdon

Jaques Derrida

Part of the acclaimed 'Documents of Contemporary Art' series of anthologies . Beauty is among the most hotly contested subjects in current discussions on art and culture. After decades of disavowal, beauty's resurgence in recent art has engaged some of the most influential artists and writers. Spanning diverse positions, this anthology assembles the key texts on the cultural politics of this recent phenomenon, as well as contextualizing these debates - both for and against - in artistic practice and the broader history of aesthetics. Artists surveyed include: Vito Acconci, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gustave Courbet, Marcel Duchamp, Marlene Dumas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Gary Hume, Asger Jorn, Alex Katz, Willem de Kooning, Joseph Kosuth, Paul McCarthy, Edouard Manet, Robert Mapplethorpe, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Robert Smithson, Nancy Spero, Frank Stella, Clyfford Still and Andy Warhol. Writers include: Theodor Adorno, Alexander Alberro, Rasheed Araeen, Art & Language, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, T. J. Clark, Mark Cousins, Arthur C. Danto, Jacques Derrida, Thierry de Duve, Fredric Jameson, Christoph Grunenberg, Dave Hickey, Suzanne Perling Hudson, Caroline A. Jones, John Roberts, Elaine Scarry, Wendy Steiner and Paul Wood.

Beauty

Hans Haacke

When invited to do a solo exhibition at MIT in 1967, Hans Haacke was known as a kinetic artist-yet he made it clear upon arriving that his works were now to be called systems, produced with the explicit intention of having their components physically communicate with each other, and the whole communicate physically with the environment, according to the artist's statements in 1967. These early works involved provoking and staging time-based events: wind in water vs. water in wind; the cycles of feedback systems of organic life; the dynamism of water in its solid state-freezing, evaporating, and melting; and the production of artificial climates. The exhibition Hans Haacke 1967 brought together from Haacke's solo 1967 exhibition together again for the first time in fourty-four years. The exhibition was organized for MIT's List Visual Arts Center by Caroline A. Jones, professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism Program at MIT. This catalogue publication features an essay by Jones, writings by Haacke, and the first English publication of a text written by art historian and curator Edward F. Fry. Fry's text served as the introduction to the catalogue accompanying his cancelled survey of Haacke's work which was planned for the Solomon R. Guggenhiem Museum in New York in 1971

Hans Haacke 1967

Jens Hoffmann

Kenneth Goldsmith

The Arcades Project (1927-40), the monumental unfinished work of cultural criticism by Walter Benjamin, is the German philosopher's effort to comprehend urban modernity through the 19th-century Parisian shopping arcade. The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin combines artworks with archival materials and poetic interventions to form an original, multifaceted response to this collagelike cultural text. Jens Hoffmann astutely pairs works by thirty-six well-known and emerging artists, including Lee Friedlander, Andreas Gursky, Pierre Huyghe, and Cindy Sherman, with the thirty-six "Convolutes," or themes, in Benjamin's text. Bound into the main volume is a graphic novelette, from the imagination of Vito Manolo Roma, of Benjamin's dream the night before he committed suicide while fleeing the Nazis. Scholarly essays by Hoffmann and Caroline A. Jones, texts selected by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith, reproductions of Benjamin's handwritten notes, and a list of the main Paris arcades discussed by him round out this extraordinary publication.

Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin

The Arcades

Rebecca Uchill

David Mather

Experience offers a reading experience like no other. A heat-sensitive cover by Olafur Eliasson reveals words, colors, and a drawing when touched by human hands. Endpapers designed by Carsten H�ller are printed in ink containing carefully calibrated quantities of the synthesized human pheromones estratetraenol and androstadienone, evoking the suggestibility of human desire. The margins and edges of the book are designed by Tauba Auerbach in complementary colors that create a dynamically shifting effect when the book is shifted or closed. When the book is opened, bookmarks cascade from the center, emerging from spider web prints by Tom�s Saraceno. Experience produces experience while bringing the concept itself into relief as an object of contemplation. The sensory experience of the book as a physical object resonates with the intellectual experience of the book as a container of ideas. Experience convenes a conversation with artists, musicians, philosophers, anthropologists, historians, and neuroscientists, each of whom explores aspects of sensorial and cultural realms of experience. The texts include new essays written for this volume and classic texts by such figures as William James and Michel Foucault. The first publication from MIT's Center for Art, Science, & Technology, Experience approaches its subject through multiple modes. Publication design by Kimberly Varella with Becca Lofchie, Content Object Design Studio. ContributorsTauba Auerbach, Bevil Conway, John Dewey, Olafur Eliasson, Michel Foucault, Adam Frank, Vittorio Gallese, Ren�e Green, Stefan Helmreich, Carsten H�ller, Edmund Husserl, William James, Caroline A. Jones, Douglas Kahn, Brian Kane, Leah Kelly, Bruno Latour, Alvin Lucier, David Mather, Mara Mills, Alva No�, Jacques Ranci�re, Michael Rossi, Tom�s Saraceno, Natasha Sch�ll, Joan W.Scott, Tino Sehgal, Alma Steingart, Josh Tenenbaum, Rebecca Uchill

Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense

Experience

Drawing on extensive interviews with artists and their assistants as well as close readings of artworks, Jones explains that much of the major work of the 1960s was compelling precisely because it was "mainstream" - central to the visual and economic culture of its time.

Constructing the Postwar American Artist

Machine in the Studio

Caroline A. Jones

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