Catherine Craft - Böcker

The term Neo-Dada surfaced in New York in the late 1950s and was used to characterize young artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns whose art appeared at odds with the serious emotional and painterly interests of the then-dominant movement, abstract expressionism. Neo-Dada quickly became the word of choice in the early 1960s to designate experimental art, including assemblage, performance, pop art, and nascent forms of minimal and conceptual art. "An Audience of Artists" turns this time line for the postwar New York art world on its head, presenting a new pedigree for these artistic movements. Drawing on an array of previously unpublished material, Catherine Craft reveals that Neo-Dada, far from being a reaction to abstract expressionism, actually originated at the heart of that movement's concerns about viewers, originality, and artists' debts to the past and one another. Furthermore, she argues, the original Dada movement was not incompatible with abstract expressionism. In fact, Dada provided a vital historical reference for artists and critics seeking to come to terms with the radical departure from tradition that abstract expressionism seemed to represent.Tracing the activities of artists such as Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock alongside Marcel Duchamp's renewed embrace of Dada in the late 1940s, Craft composes a subtle exploration of the challenges facing artists trying to work in the wake of a destructive world war and the paintings, objects, writings, and installations that resulted from their efforts. Providing the first examination of the roots of the Neo-Dada phenomenon, this groundbreaking study significantly reassesses the histories of these three movements and offers new ways of understanding the broader issues related to the development of modern art.

Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008) was one of the most prolific and innovative artists of the post-war period, whose work, ranging across a number of disciplines, has had a profound influence on avant-garde art since the 1950s.By working in what he called ‘the gap between art and life’, Rauschenberg aimed to bring a new scale and physicality to his paintings. Early on in his career, Rauschenberg produced groups of monochrome paintings, white, followed by black, and red. The White Paintings (1951), canvases painted with white latex house-paint, function as hypersensitive surfaces that register changes in their surroundings. This new emphasis encouraged viewers to attend to phenomena ordinarily ignored when looking at a painting, such as the play of shadows across its surface.In his Combines, works melding painting and sculpture, Rauschenberg brought elements of popular culture and everyday life into his art through the process of collage, integrating a staggering array of materials into his compositions. His first and most famous combines was titled Monogram, a 1959 work that consisted of a stuffed angora goat, a tire, a police barrier, the heel of a shoe, a tennis ball, and paint. Rauschenberg’s ‘gap’ became the site of more than half a century of endeavours through which he redefined not only what materials could comprise a work of art but what a work of art could be. From the Combines, Rauschenberg branched out into printmaking, silkscreen paintings, performance, works involving technology and many other activities.Widely illustrated with Rauschenberg's works and photographs of the artist in performance and in his studio, this book also examines Rauschenberg's extensive involvement in the performing arts, tracing his connections to avant-garde dance in America and addressing his own performances and work with the well-known choreographers Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown.

New sculptures and installations that critically examine the formal, social and linguistic roles of live modelsPublished with Nasher Sculpture Center.Over the past three decades, Iranian-born, German-based artist Nairy Baghramian (born 1971) has created sculptures and installations that upend expected modes of presentation and challenge the architectural, social, political and historical contexts that inform them.The new works featured in this publication explore the provisional body as the site of trauma—drawing inspiration from the tradition of the “modèle vivant,” the French term for a live model in an art class. In her "ambivalently abstract" works, the artist takes unconventional approaches to materials associated with sculptural traditions of casting, including aluminum, lead, steel and wax. In conversation with sculptures from the Nasher’s permanent collection by Louise Bourgeois, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and others, Baghramian’s works offer new ways to think about representations of bodies and the unseen labor of models, as well as the linguistic play afforded by different meanings of the word “model” and its linguistic relatives, such as “modulate” and “modify.”

Carol Bove: Collage Sculptures presents an extensive look into the contemporary artist’s work over the past five years and her ongoing exploration of scale, color, material, and artistic traditions of the twentieth century. Bove’s recent work engages the conceptual concerns of mid-century sculpture, such as spontaneity, industrial materials, and the potential of painted sculpture. However, within this space of familiar sculptural traditions, Bove has discovered new approaches that lead to places previously unknown. Bove’s “collage sculptures” are created from scrap metal and stainless steel that has been carefully worked into sinuous forms and are frequently painted. Considering the hard rigidity of the steel, the works possess an appearance of almost impossible softness, as if steel could become as pliable as clay. Such works range from small pedestal sculptures to large, imposing compositions. Bove’s interest in scale and how a viewer’s understanding of an artwork shifts depending on its context are explored through a selection of small works from the collection of the Nasher Sculpture Sculpture.Published by the Nasher Sculpture Center, the catalogue features beautiful reproductions of Bove’s work and an introduction as well as an essay by curator Catherine Craft on the development of the collage sculptures and their relationship to other artists and traditions of modern sculpture. Also included is an essay by Lisa Le Feuvre that explores Bove’s complex work by means of a thematic alphabet related to the artist’s interests.