DAN ADLER - Böcker

Tainted Goods. In this book, Dan Adler addresses recent tendencies in contemporary art toward assemblage sculpture and how these works incorporate tainted materials often things left on the side of the road and combine them in ways that allow each element to retain a degree of empirical specificity.

In this book, Dan Adler addresses recent tendencies in contemporary art toward assemblage sculpture and how these works incorporate tainted materials – often things left on the side of the road, according to the logic and progress of the capitalist machine – and combine them in ways that allow each element to retain a degree of empirical specificity. Adler develops a range of aesthetic models through which these practices can be understood to function critically. Each chapter focuses on a single exhibition: Isa Genzken’s "OIL" (German Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2007), Geoffrey Farmer’s midcareer survey (Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal, 2008), Rachel Harrison’s "Consider the Lobster" (CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, 2009), and Liz Magor’s "The Mouth and Other Storage Facilities" (Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, 2008).

As the first book-length study of Nakanishi Natsuyuki’s sculptural practice, this volume explores his assemblages in dialogue with the postwar history of sculpture as a global phenomenon in the 1960s and beyond.Nakanishi’s series of Compact Objects (produced from 1962 to 1968) allow for a reconsideration of the role of assemblage within cultural tendencies of the postwar and contemporary periods, both within and without Japan. This role forefronts the concepts of intimacy and interactivity—as well as ritual and process—within the context of sculptural experience. Nakanishi’s critique of consumerism and conformity within these works—along with his experimentation with new plastic technologies—allows for a comparative treatment that includes a variety of movements and tendencies in Japan, Europe, and the US, including Minimalism, Fluxus, Neo-Dada, and Nouveau réalisme, among others. The final portions of the book offer a wider and global context of postwar and contemporary tendencies towards assemblage, including an in-depth study of a multisensory exhibition by Yuko Mohri, held at the Venice Biennale in 2024.The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, and Japanese studies.

In this book, Dan Adler addresses recent tendencies in contemporary art toward assemblage sculpture and how these works incorporate tainted materials – often things left on the side of the road, according to the logic and progress of the capitalist machine – and combine them in ways that allow each element to retain a degree of empirical specificity. Adler develops a range of aesthetic models through which these practices can be understood to function critically. Each chapter focuses on a single exhibition: Isa Genzken’s "OIL" (German Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2007), Geoffrey Farmer’s midcareer survey (Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal, 2008), Rachel Harrison’s "Consider the Lobster" (CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, 2009), and Liz Magor’s "The Mouth and Other Storage Facilities" (Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, 2008).

This book brings together essays that engage with mainstream entertainment, experimental film and historical scholarship as part of a larger context for examining the grammar of 3D cinema, its histories and its futures. From cinema and television to video games and augmented reality, the essays consider an 'expanded field' of stereoscopic visual culture. Contributors explore historic and emerging technologies, singular and trendsetting practices, narrative and documentary approaches and the overall perceptual experiences of 3D media. This groundbreaking collection includes Sergei Eisenstein’s extraordinary 1947 essay 'On Stereocinema,' translated for the first time in its entirety; a landmark address by Wim Wenders; and the last essay written by 3D-pioneer researcher Ray Zone. The first book of its kind to investigate 3D arts in its various forms, it will be admired for its rigour and accessibility by scholars across disciplines in the visual arts.