Kirjahaku

How global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present, combating modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism.If European modernism was premised on the new—on surpassing the past, often by assigning it to the “traditional” societies of the Global South—global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present. In this account of what globalization means for contemporary art, David Joselit argues that the creative use of tradition by artists from around the world serves as a means of combatting modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism. Modernism claimed to live in the future and relegated the rest of the world to the past. Global contemporary art shatters this myth by reactivating various forms of heritage—from literati ink painting in China to Aboriginal painting in Australia—in order to propose new and different futures. Joselit analyzes not only how heritage becomes contemporary through the practice of individual artists but also how a cultural infrastructure of museums, biennials, and art fairs worldwide has emerged as a means of generating economic value, attracting capital and tourist dollars.Joselit traces three distinct forms of modernism that developed outside the West, in opposition to Euro-American modernism: postcolonial, socialist realism, and the underground. He argues that these modern genealogies are synchronized with one another and with Western modernism to produce global contemporary art. Joselit discusses curation and what he terms “the curatorial episteme,” which, through its acts of framing or curating, can become a means of recalibrating hierarchies of knowledge—and can contribute to the dual projects of decolonization and deimperialization.

In a world where politics is conducted through images, the tools of art history can be used to challenge the privatized antidemocratic sphere of American television.American television embodies a paradox: it is a privately owned and operated public communications network that most citizens are unable to participate in except as passive specators. Television creates an image of community while preventing the formation of actual social ties because behind its simulated exchange of opinions lies a highly centralized corporate structure that is profoundly antidemocratic. In Feedback, David Joselit describes the privatized public sphere of television and recounts the tactics developed by artists and media activists in the 1960s and 1970s to break open its closed circuit.The figures whose work Joselit examines-among them Nam June Paik, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas, Abbie Hoffman, Andy Warhol, and Melvin Van Peebles-staged political interventions within television's closed circuit. Joselit identifies three kinds of image-events: feedback, which can be both disabling noise and rational response-as when Abbie Hoffman hijacked television time for the Yippies with flamboyant stunts directed to the media; the image-virus, which proliferates parasitically, invading, transforming, and even blocking systems-as in Nam June Paik's synthesized videotapes and installations; and the avatar, a quasi-fictional form of identity available to anyone, which can function as a political actor-as in Melvin Van Peebles's invention of Sweet Sweetback, an African-American hero who appealed to a broad audience and influenced styles of Black Power activism. These strategies, writes Joselit, remain valuable today in a world where the overlapping information circuits of television and the Internet offer different opportunities for democratic participation.In Feedback, Joselit analyzes such midcentury image-events using the procedures and categories of art history. The trope of figure/ground reversal, for instance, is used to assess acts of representation in a variety of media-including the medium of politics. In a televisual world, Joselit argues, where democracy is conducted through images, art history has the capacity to become a political science.

In Infinite Regress, David Joselit considers the plurality of identities and practices within Duchamp's life and art between 1910 and 1941, conducting a synthetic reading of his early and middle career.There is not one Marcel Duchamp, but several. Within his oeuvre Duchamp practiced a variety of modernist idioms and invented an array of contradictory personas: artist and art dealer, conceptualist and craftsman, chess champion and dreamer, dandy and recluse. In Infinite Regress, David Joselit considers the plurality of identities and practices within Duchamp's life and art between 1910 and 1941, conducting a synthetic reading of his early and middle career. Taking into account underacknowledged works and focusing on the conjunction of the machine and the commodity in Duchamp's art, Joselit notes a consistent opposition between the material world and various forms of measurement, inscription, and quantification. Challenging conventional accounts, he describes the readymade strategy not merely as a rejection of painting, but as a means of producing new models of the modern self.

No other introductory book presents the diversity and complexity of postwar American art from Abstract Expressionism to the present as clearly and succinctly as this groundbreaking survey.David Joselit traces and analyses the often contradictory formal, ideological and political conditions during this period which made American art predominant throughout the world. Social and cultural transformations rooted in mass-media technologies – photography, television, video and the Internet – elevated consumer commodities to the status of legitimate art subjects, as in Pop and Installation art, and brought about a mechanization of the creative act. Artists also increasingly engaged with issues of gender, race, identity and power.Canonical movements and figures are discussed – Pollock, Rothko, Krasner, Oldenburg, Johns, Warhol, Paik, Ruscha, Sherman, Holzer, Koons and Barney – in juxtaposition with lesser known contemporary artists and practices.

Art as we know it is dramatically changing, but popular and critical responses lag behind. In this trenchant illustrated essay, David Joselit describes how art and architecture are being transformed in the age of Google. Under the dual pressures of digital technology, which allows images to be reformatted and disseminated effortlessly, and the exponential acceleration of cultural exchange enabled by globalization, artists and architects are emphasizing networks as never before. Some of the most interesting contemporary work in both fields is now based on visualizing patterns of dissemination after objects and structures are produced, and after they enter into, and even establish, diverse networks. Behaving like human search engines, artists and architects sort, capture, and reformat existing content. Works of art crystallize out of populations of images, and buildings emerge out of the dynamics of the circulation patterns they will house. Examining the work of architectural firms such as OMA, Reiser + Umemoto, and Foreign Office, as well as the art of Matthew Barney, Ai Weiwei, Sherrie Levine, and many others, After Art provides a compelling and original theory of art and architecture in the age of global networks.

A revisionist reading of modern art that examines how artworks are captured as property to legitimize powerIn this provocative new account, David Joselit shows how art from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries began to function as a commodity, while the qualities of the artist, nation, or period themselves became valuable properties. Joselit explores repatriation, explaining that this is not just a contemporary conflict between the Global South and Euro-American museums, noting that the Louvre, the first modern museum, was built on looted works and faced demands for restitution and repatriation early in its history. Joselit argues that the property values of white supremacy underlie the ideology of possessive individualism animating modern art, and he considers issues of identity and proprietary authorship.Joselit redefines art’s politics, arguing that these pertain not to an artwork’s content or form but to the way it is “captured,” made to represent powerful interests—whether a nation, a government, or a celebrity artist collected by oligarchs. Artworks themselves are not political but occupy at once the here and now and an “elsewhere”—an alterity—that can’t ever be fully appropriated. The history of modern art, Joselit asserts, is the history of transforming this alterity into private property.Narrating scenes from the emergence and capture of modern art—touching on a range of topics that include the Byzantine church, French copyright law, the 1900 Paris Exposition, W.E.B. Du Bois, the conceptual artist Adrian Piper, and the controversy over Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket—Joselit argues that the meaning of art is its infinite capacity to generate experience over time.