John Welchman – författare

Beginning with the first comprehensive account of the discourse of appropriation that dominated the art world in the late 1970s and 1980s, Art After Appropriation suggests a matrix of inflections and refusals around the culture of taking or citation, each chapter loosely correlated with one year of the decade between 1989 and 1999. The opening chapters show how the Second World culture of the USSR gave rise to a new visibility for photography during the dissolution of the Soviet Union around 1989. Welchman examines how genres of ethnography, documentary and travel are crossed with fictive performance and social improvisation in the videos of Steve Fagin. He discusses how hybrid forms of subjectivity are delivered by a new critical narcissism, and how the Korean-American artist, Cody Choi converts diffident gestures of appropriation from the logic of material or stylistic annexation into continuous incorporated events. Art After Appropriation also examines the creation of public art from covert actions and social feedback, and how bodies participate in their own appropriation. Art After Appropriation concludes with the advent of the rainbow net, an imaginary icon that governs the spaces of interactivity, proliferation and media piracy at the end of the millennium.John Welchman is Professor of Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Modernism Relocated (1995) and Invisible Colors (1997); and editor of Rethinking Borders (1996), and a forthcoming three-volume anthology of the writings of LA artist MIke Kelley. Welchman has contributed to numerous journals, magazines, museum catalogues and newspapers, including Artforum; New York Times; Los Angeles Times; International Herald Tribune; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Gallery; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Reina Sofia, Madrid; Haus der Kunst, Munich

A study and a guidance device, the first book on the Royal Book Lodge (RBL) is the culmination of a three-year exploration by renowned art historian John C. Welchman. It examines the contribution of the RBL to an array of art, film and performance practices including photography, ceramics, writing, and publishing—centered on the creation of artist books and the powerful and wide-ranging dialogue and material experimentations they engender. The volume unfolds from various cultural and political geographies, including in the Parisian suburb of Montreuil which served as an HQ, beginning in 1989; and narratives of migrations and travels, art-inflected or otherwise, in Iceland, Paraguay, Eastern Europe, Los Angeles and on the Ligurian coast of Italy. It unpacks questions caught up in constructs of autobiography, fiction, ideas and images of remote control, and the relation of RBL to the aftermath of the Situationist International, concluding with the RBL’s socially urgent inquiry into experiences—and culturally pharmacological contestations—of violence. Royal Book Lodge The Royal Book Lodge emerged from a collaboration between artists Juli Susin and Veronique Bourgoin in mid-1980's expanding its Collection and Archive and other activities after the turn of the millennium with the assistance of Yasha Gofman. For more than three decades RBL’s projects have been sparked by a porous but a distractedly nimble network of artists from France, Germany, Russia, Iceland, Paraguay, and other locations, working with painting, sculpture, photography, film, installations, ceramics, writing, publishing, and curating.RBL affiliates include: Raisa Aid, Kai Althoff, Abel Auer, Linda Bilda, André Butzer, matali crasset, Les Schlag (Grems, Tex, Virassamy), Gudny Guðmundsdóttir, Beate Günther, Tobias Hauser, Andy Hope 1930, Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir, Dorota Jurczak, Bruce Kalberg, Armin Krämer, Alexandre Kalinkine, Lutz Krüger, Charlet Kugel, Jean-Louis Leibovitch, Anne Lefebvre, Jochen Lempert, Jonathan Meese, Birgit Mergele, Anna Parkina, Raymond Pettibon, Jason Rhoades, Lucia Sotnikova, Julia Rublow, Ralph Rumney, Gianfranco Sanguinetti.