Kirjahaku

"Chance Aesthetics" explores how artists used chance in modernist art from the beginning of the twentieth century through the early 1970s. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, this volume brings together a broad range of artistic practices that cede an element of authorial intent. Dropping pieces of cut paper onto a surface and gluing them down where they lay; dripping or flinging paint across a canvas; letting the progressive decay of organic materials determine a composition; and, flipping coins to compose a musical score - these are some of the processes used by artists included in this volume that tap into the creative potential of chance while directing its operation. Though many artists throughout the twentieth century have championed the creative possibilities of chance and indeterminacy in the creation of works of art, both as an attack on reason and logic and as a counterpoint to officially sanctioned aesthetic tastes, artistic subjectivity is never truly sublimated. Including more than sixty artworks by over thirty avant-garde artists from across Europe and America, this volume examines that fundamental tension between chance and choice, between the liberation from artistic agency and the continuous reassertion of authorship - the central paradoxes resting at the heart of the exhibition. Featured artists include Jean Arp, George Brecht, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Max Ernst, Ellsworth Kelly, Francois Morellet, Robert Morris, Jackson Pollock, and Niki de Saint Phalle, among many others. Featuring essays by Susan Laxton, Meredith Malone, and Janine Mileaf that draw connections across media and disciplines while linking the genesis and meaning of artistic production through chance to larger sociocultural, historical, and theoretical contexts, "Chance Aesthetics" also includes extended entries on all works in the exhibition, focusing on the processes employed and the rhetoric used to describe and theorize them.

Spanning a decade of its subject's multifaceted career, "Cosima von Bonin: Character Appropriation" features the Cologne-based artist's signature textile paintings, architectural sculptures, and absurdly outsized stuffed animals. In addition to a generous selection of colorful images of Cosima von Bonin's playful yet deeply thoughtful and suggestive work, the book features an essay by exhibition curator Meredith Malone as well as the latest hilariously confounding installment in a series of fictional "conversations" between von Bonin and Daffy Duck: "Up a Chic Creek", written by von Bonin's longtime collaborator Dirk von Lowtzow, a musician and art critic. Arriving at the same time as von Bonin's new Lazy Susan series of exhibitions touring across Europe - with stops in Rotterdam, Bristol, Geneva, and Cologne - "Cosima von Bonin" provides a valuable snapshot of this leading international artist's work.

In 1959 Daniel Spoerri pioneered the first programmatic series of multiples-three-dimensional objects issued in edition-to be broadly distributed. With a radical emphasis on multiplication and movement, Edition MAT (Multiplication d’art transformable) presented an international selection of work by key figures in postwar kinetic and Op art. Multiplied is the first in-depth English-language study of this seminal project in the history of postwar art. The catalog presents the entirety of the three collections—1959, 1964, and 1965—consisting of 48 artworks by 35 European and US artists associated with kinetic and Op art, including such leading figures as Marcel Duchamp, Dieter Roth, and Jean Tinguely, alongside lesser known artists. With four essays, artist entries, and an appendix of newly translated historical texts, this volume sheds light on under-studied artworks as well as the body of critical thought connecting art, commerce, and display in the postwar period. Artists: Yaacov Agam, Josef Albers, Arman, Jean Arp, Enrico Baj, Davide Boriani, George Brecht, Pol Bury, Christo, Gabriele De Vecchi, Marcel Duchamp, Bo Ek, Robert Filliou, Karl Gerstner, Maurice Henry, Julio Le Parc, Roy Lichtenstein, Heinz Mack, Frank J. Malina, Enzo Mari, Christian Megert, François Morellet, Bruno Munari, Arnulf Rainer, Man Ray, Dieter Roth, Jesús Rafael Soto, Daniel Spoerri, Paul Talman, André Thomkins, Jean Tinguely, Victor Vasarely, Jacques Villeglé, Emmett Williams