Kirjahaku

During the mid-twentieth century, Latin American artists working in several different cities radically altered the nature of modern art. Reimagining the relationship of art to its public, these artists granted the spectator a greater role than ever before in the realization of the artwork. The first book to explore this phenomenon on an international scale, Abstraction in Reverse traces the movement as it evolved across South America and parts of Europe. Alexander Alberro demonstrates that artists such as Tomas Maldonado, Jesus Soto, Julio Le Parc, and Lygia Clark, in breaking with the core tenets of the form of abstract art known as Concrete art, redefined the role of both the artist and the spectator. Instead of manufacturing autonomous artworks prior to the act of viewing, these artists presented a range of projects that required the spectator in order to be complete. Importantly, as Alberro shows, these artists set aside regionalist art in favor of a modernist approach that transcended the traditions of any nation-state. Along the way, the artists fundamentally altered the concept of the subject and of how art should address its audience, a revolutionary development with parallels in the greater art world.

An exploration of innovative practices flourishing at the margins of Western art. With this book, Alexander Alberro engages decolonial theory to explore the dynamic exchanges that occur where the ideals and values of different artistic frameworks meet. Resisting notions of a singular art world and global contemporary art, Alberro explores what lies outside of Western art’s hegemonic presence, recognizing the rich multitude of art formations at its periphery, each with its own artistic narratives and conventions. Alberro brings into focus the complex negotiations that are cultivating innovation and transformation at the margins of Western art, showing how this seemingly monolithic framework is both crucial to and insufficient for a comprehensive understanding of contemporary art. His examples include artists and collectives from around the world, including Iosu Aramburu, Subhankar Banerjee, Yto Barrada, Mabe Bethônico, El Colectivo, Maria Galindo and Mujeres Creando, Bouchra Khalili, Multiplicity, Lucy Orta, Raqs Media Collective, Tracey Rose, Doris Salcedo, Yinka Shonibare, World of Matter, and Yin Xiuzhen. As notions of transculturation and decoloniality continue to drive conversations about contemporary art, Interstices offers a critical explanation of what is at stake, showing how the tensions at the edges of the Western art framework are pushing it toward its discursive limits.

An exploration of innovative practices flourishing at the margins of Western art. With this book, Alexander Alberro engages decolonial theory to explore the dynamic exchanges that occur where the ideals and values of different artistic frameworks meet. Resisting notions of a singular art world and global contemporary art, Alberro explores what lies outside of Western art’s hegemonic presence, recognizing the rich multitude of art formations at its periphery, each with its own artistic narratives and conventions. Alberro brings into focus the complex negotiations that are cultivating innovation and transformation at the margins of Western art, showing how this seemingly monolithic framework is both crucial to and insufficient for a comprehensive understanding of contemporary art. His examples include artists and collectives from around the world, including Iosu Aramburu, Subhankar Banerjee, Yto Barrada, Mabe Bethônico, El Colectivo, Maria Galindo and Mujeres Creando, Bouchra Khalili, Multiplicity, Lucy Orta, Raqs Media Collective, Tracey Rose, Doris Salcedo, Yinka Shonibare, World of Matter, and Yin Xiuzhen. As notions of transculturation and decoloniality continue to drive conversations about contemporary art, Interstices offers a critical explanation of what is at stake, showing how the tensions at the edges of the Western art framework are pushing it toward its discursive limits.

Winner, Canadian Museums Association Outstanding Achievement in Publication Winner, Melva J. Dwyer AwardIain Baxter legally changed his name to IAIN BAXTER& in 2005. He appended an ampersand to his name to underscore that art is about connectivity — about contingency and collaboration with a viewer. He also effected the name change to perpetuate a strategy of self re-definition that is central to his creative project. BAXTER& began making art in the late-1950s under his birth name but quickly realized that the name itself was creative material, to be deployed, manipulated, and shared. In 1965, he formed a collaborative art-making entity which evolved into N.E. Thing Company, a corporate-styled entity whose co-presidents were BAXTER& and his wife Ingrid. Producing a diverse array of projects that encompassed conceptually based photography, pioneering works of appropriation art, and gallery transforming installations, the N.E. Thing Company offered a new model of art making, allowing the artists to remain anonymous and masquerade in the guise of business people. Following the dissolution of N.E. Thing Company in 1978, BAXTER& produced extensive bodies of work with Polaroid film, created numerous installations that blended painting and sculpture, and made pedagogy a focus of his creative enterprise. Consistent themes permeate his work and vector through his thinking. And by assessing these themes — a relentless emphasis on reaching out to the viewer, a core concern with ecology and the environment, and a belief that art must assume plural means and media — one discerns BAXTER&'s creative credo, understanding that "art is all over." This comprehensive book reviews BAXTER&'s remarkable career across all media. It accompanies a major international touring exhibition, which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in November 2011 and at the Art Gallery of Ontario in April 2012. Featuring more than 160 reproductions of BAXTER&'s work, it also includes essays by the exhibition's curator, David Moos, along with contributions by Michael Darling (James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago), Alex Alberro (Associate Professor, University of Florida), and others. The book will also feature a comprehensive bibliography compiled by Adam Lauder (W.P. Scott Chair for Research in E-Librarianship, York University).

Justice and rebirth: a visual chronicle of the artist who fused Afro-Cuban visual culture with European modernism This chronological survey traces the Cuban painter and sculptor Wifredo Lam’s (1902–82) career from the late 1930s to the ’70s, spotlighting the radically syncretic visual language he developed in response to modernism’s Eurocentricity. Born to a Chinese father and Congolese Iberian mother, Lam placed heritage centrally in his work. Early in his career, he associated with major figures such as Picasso, Matisse and Braque, and he was struck by their integration of African iconography. Although he greatly respected these European artists, the dissonance between their aesthetic choices and cultural experience was not lost on him—especially given the racism and exploitation that characterized Cuban society under the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Lam spent the rest of his career endeavoring to decolonize modernist art. From his early Surrealist works to his later preference for geometric abstraction, African sculpture and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora consistently informed his practice. Published for an exhibition at Pace, The Imagination at Work includes paintings, works on paper and rarely seen bronze sculptures, as well as a biography of Lam’s life and career by the Latin American art scholar and curator Michaëla de Lacaze Mohrmann, who made curatorial contributions to the gallery’s exhibition. Essays by scholars Alexander Alberro, Kaira Cabañas, Samantha A. Noël and Alexandra Chang also feature.