David Joselit – författare

“The work of the sculptor Rachel Harrison is both the zeitgeist and the least digestible in contemporary art. It may also be the most important, owing to an originality that breaks a prevalent spell in an art world of recycled genres, styles, and ideas.”—Peter Schjeldahl, The New YorkerIn her sculptures, room-sized installations, drawings, photographs, and artist’s books, Rachel Harrison (b. 1966) delves into themes of celebrity culture, pop psychology, history, and politics. This publication, created in close collaboration with the artist, explores twenty-five years of her practice and is the first comprehensive monograph on Harrison in nearly a decade. Its centerpiece is an in-depth plate section, which doubles as a chronology of Harrison’s major works, series, and exhibitions. Objects are illustrated with multiple views and details, and accompanied by short texts. This thorough approach elucidates Harrison’s complicated, eclectic oeuvre—in which she integrates found materials with handmade sculptural elements, upends traditions of museum display, and injects quotidian objects with a sense of strangeness. Six accompanying essays cover Harrison’s earliest works to her most recent output. The book also includes a handful of photo-collages that the artist created specifically for this project. Published here for the first time, these pieces superimpose found images with reproductions of Harrison’s own past work.Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American ArtExhibition Schedule:Whitney Museum of American Art, New York(October 25, 2019–January 12, 2020)

Art Since 1900 introduces students to the key theoretical approaches to modern and contemporary art. A flexible year-by-year structure and extensive cross-referencing allow teachers and students to pursue a chronological approach and/or to study the currents of art since 1900 by medium, theme, country, or region. This completely updated and expanded third edition contains over 125 essays, each focusing on a crucial event in the history of art from 1900 to the present. Ten new essays cover subjects such as Moscow conceptualism, abstract film, postmodern architecture, and queer art, as well as artists from emerging economies and the impact of the market on current art practice.Text boxes provide further information on key figures and issues. Five introductions explain the different methods of art history at work in the book. There are two roundtable discussions between the authors, and all reference material has been updated.

Art Since 1900 introduces students to the key theoretical approaches to modern and contemporary art. A flexible year-by-year structure and extensive cross-referencing allow teachers and students to pursue a chronological approach and/or to study the currents of art since 1900 by medium, theme, country, or region. This completely updated and expanded third edition contains over 125 essays, each focusing on a crucial event in the history of art from 1900 to the present. Ten new essays cover subjects such as Moscow conceptualism, abstract film, postmodern architecture, and queer art, as well as artists from emerging economies and the impact of the market on current art practice.Text boxes provide further information on key figures and issues. Five introductions explain the different methods of art history at work in the book. There are two roundtable discussions between the authors, and all reference material has been updated.

Art as we know it is dramatically changing, but popular and critical responses lag behind. In this trenchant illustrated essay, David Joselit describes how art and architecture are being transformed in the age of Google. Under the dual pressures of digital technology, which allows images to be reformatted and disseminated effortlessly, and the exponential acceleration of cultural exchange enabled by globalization, artists and architects are emphasizing networks as never before. Some of the most interesting contemporary work in both fields is now based on visualizing patterns of dissemination after objects and structures are produced, and after they enter into, and even establish, diverse networks. Behaving like human search engines, artists and architects sort, capture, and reformat existing content. Works of art crystallize out of populations of images, and buildings emerge out of the dynamics of the circulation patterns they will house.Examining the work of architectural firms such as OMA, Reiser + Umemoto, and Foreign Office, as well as the art of Matthew Barney, Ai Weiwei, Sherrie Levine, and many others, After Art provides a compelling and original theory of art and architecture in the age of global networks.

A revisionist reading of modern art that examines how artworks are captured as property to legitimize powerIn this provocative new account, David Joselit shows how art from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries began to function as a commodity, while the qualities of the artist, nation, or period themselves became valuable properties. Joselit explores repatriation, explaining that this is not just a contemporary conflict between the Global South and Euro-American museums, noting that the Louvre, the first modern museum, was built on looted works and faced demands for restitution and repatriation early in its history. Joselit argues that the property values of white supremacy underlie the ideology of possessive individualism animating modern art, and he considers issues of identity and proprietary authorship.Joselit redefines art’s politics, arguing that these pertain not to an artwork’s content or form but to the way it is “captured,” made to represent powerful interests—whether a nation, a government, or a celebrity artist collected by oligarchs. Artworks themselves are not political but occupy at once the here and now and an “elsewhere”—an alterity—that can’t ever be fully appropriated. The history of modern art, Joselit asserts, is the history of transforming this alterity into private property.Narrating scenes from the emergence and capture of modern art—touching on a range of topics that include the Byzantine church, French copyright law, the 1900 Paris Exposition, W.E.B. Du Bois, the conceptual artist Adrian Piper, and the controversy over Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket—Joselit argues that the meaning of art is its infinite capacity to generate experience over time.

Why modern and contemporary art—and art conservation—can’t be understood without taking account of the revolutionary impact of plasticsModern and contemporary art wouldn’t exist without the invention of plastics. From sculpture to paint, and photography to film, plastics have shaped every major medium of art. In turn, plastics have revolutionized art conservation, transforming the possibilities of preservation but also producing new challenges for conservators struggling to preserve toxic and degrading material. Hailed as utopian in the twentieth century, plastics today are often understood as pollution and waste—a central cause of ecological crisis. Plastics is the first book to address the multifaceted history of plastics from the perspective of artists, art historians, conservators, and environmental scientists.Plastics demonstrates that this material cannot easily be summarized as toxic or utopian, catastrophic or necessary. Instead, plastics define the modern world in both its possibility and failures. The book also reveals how artists have been a critical overlooked voice in debates about plastics, and how they have offered theories of the material through works that explore its potential and harmfulness.Presenting a variety of perspectives on the world of plastics through the lens of art, artmaking, art history, and art conservation, Plastics shows why and how coming to terms with this material is critical to understanding not only modern and contemporary art and art conservation but also the crises of the twenty-first century.