Parachute: The Anthology, Vol. III

Following two precious volumes of writings from the 1970s–90s Canadian magazine Parachute— Museums, Art History, and Theory and Performance & Performativity—the essays collected in this third volume focus on photography, film, video and new media. These genres were discussed in some of the earliest volumes of Parachute. Photography received particular attention in the early 1980s, film and video later in that decade and through the beginning of the 1990s. Discussing what were then still relatively new and overlooked artistic fields, these texts are particularly useful as signposts to how these new media and works were approached. The essays discuss works by artists such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila, James Coleman, Nan Goldin, Bill Viola and Rodney Graham. The texts by Georges Didi-Huberman, Douglas Crimp and Laura Mulvey, written in the early 1980s, are among their most seminal.