Chantal Pontbriand – författare

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.

Parachute was founded in 1975 by Chantal Pontbriand and France Morin. Following the previous three Parachute volumes, this last title of the Parachute anthology focuses on painting, sculpture, installation and architecture. These topics are approached from several perspectives: from new theories of aesthetic production, especially painting, to the expansion of the art world to other artistic territories during the 1980s and 1990s (Russia and South America, for instance), from the "lessons" of postmodernism to the proliferation of installation art. The essays discuss works by artists such as Lothar Baumgarten, Mona Hatoum, Guillermo Kuitca, Louise Lawler, Reinhard Mucha, Jackson Pollock, Robert Ryman, Michael Snow and Sots Art artists, and include two particularly seminal artist's essays: Dan Graham on Gordon Matta-Clark, and Jeff Wall on Édouard Manet.