Karen Kelly – författare

Traces the origins of the black rage defense in criminal court historyIn 1971, Paul Harris pioneered the modern version of the black rage defense when he successfully defended a young black man charged with armed bank robbery. Dubbed one of the most novel criminal defenses in American history by Vanity Fair, the black rage defense is enormously controversial, frequently dismissed as irresponsible, nothing less than a harbinger of anarchy. Consider the firestorm of protest that resulted when the defense for Colin Ferguson, the gunman who murdered numerous passengers on a New York commuter train, claimed it was considering a black rage defense.In this thought-provoking book, Harris traces the origins of the black rage defense back through American history, recreating numerous dramatic trials along the way. For example, he recounts in vivid detail how Clarence Darrow, defense attorney in the famous Scopes Monkey trial, first introduced the notion of an environmental hardship defense in 1925 while defending a black family who shot into a drunken white mob that had encircled their home.Emphasizing that the black rage defense must be enlisted responsibly and selectively, Harris skillfully distinguishes between applying an environmental defense and simply blaming society, in the abstract, for individual crimes. If Ferguson had invoked such a defense, in Harris's words, it would have sent a superficial, wrong-headed, blame-everything-on-racism message. Careful not to succumb to easy generalizations, Harris also addresses the possibilities of a white rage defense and the more recent phenomenon of cultural defenses. He illustrates how a person's environment can, and does, affect his or her life and actions, how even the most rational person can become criminally deranged, when bludgeoned into hopelessness by exploitation, racism, and relentless poverty.

Music industry insiders on the nature of fameOur cultural darlings make music; we make them mythic. Every musical genre begets a community of listeners, performers, and critics, and quite often those categories are blurred. From the principled punk refusal of celebrity to hip-hop's celebration of its power, the music world is self-obsessed.Stars Don't Stand Still in the Sky assembles scholars, music writers, industry workers, and musicians, who offer a range of opinions and experience of the nature of fame. The collection focuses on commerce, the crowd, performance and image, history and memory, and romance. Contributors discuss black women icons, love-songs, the legacy of the blues, the image of the tortured rock star, MTV, the politics of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the joy of line-dancing, and more.The contributors are James Bernard, Anthony DeCurtis, Katherine Dieckmann, Chuck Eddy, Paul Gilroy, Daniel Glass, Lawrence Grossberg, Jessica Hagedorn, Kathleen Hanna, James Hannaham, Dave Hickey, Jon Langford, Greil Marcus, Angela McRobbie, Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky), Barbara O'Dair, Ann Powers, Toshi Reagon, Simon Reynolds, Robert Santelli, Jon Savage, Danyel Smith, Arlene Stein, Deena Weinstein, and Ellen Willis.

Our cultural darlings make music; we make them mythic. Every musical genre begets a community of listeners, performers, and critics, and quite often those categories are blurred. From the principled punk refusal of celebrity to hip-hop's celebration of its power, the music world is self-obsessed. Stars Don't Stand Still in the Sky assembles scholars, music writers, industry workers, and musicians, who offer a range of opinions and experience of the nature of fame. The collection focuses on commerce, the crowd, performance and image, history and memory, and romance. Contributors discuss black women icons, love-songs, the legacy of the blues, the image of the tortured rock star, MTV, the politics of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the joy of line-dancing, and more. The contributors are James Bernard, Anthony DeCurtis, Katherine Dieckmann, Chuck Eddy, Paul Gilroy, Daniel Glass, Lawrence Grossberg, Jessica Hagedorn, Kathleen Hanna, James Hannaham, Dave Hickey, Jon Langford, Greil Marcus, Angela McRobbie, Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky), Barbara O'Dair, Ann Powers, Toshi Reagon, Simon Reynolds, Robert Santelli, Jon Savage, Danyel Smith, Arlene Stein, Deena Weinstein, and Ellen Willis.

This book documents a year-long exhibition entitled Knots + Surfaces, at Dia Center for the Arts from January 2001 through January 2002, in which Diana Thater presented a large-scale, multiprojection video installation specifically designed to interact with the open architectural space of Dia's third-floor gallery. A charged environment, combining layered projections with a wall of clustered monitors, becomes a metaphorical charting of multidimensional space. Referring to a recent mathematical hypothesis that correlates a complex, six-dimesional spatial model to a map of a honey bee's dance, Thater expands her abiding concern with the intersection of nature and culture. Along with an introduction to both her work and the exhibition by Lynne Cooke, the book will include an essay on Thater's work by Akira Lippit.

This third volume of collected theoretical and critical essays focuses on Dia's exhibitions from 1998 through 2000. As in the first two volumes, nine diverse contributors are included, ranging from art historian Jonathan Crary and philosopher Boris Groys to film theoretician Peter Wollen, from curator Russell Ferguson to cultural critic Elaine Showalter. These writers, among others, take on the challenges of illuminating, analyzing, and exploring the work of a disparate group of internationally recognized artists, including Joseph Beuys, Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon, Rodney Graham, Bruce Nauman and Andy Warhol. Together, the essays in this book present a broad-based account of contemporary artistic practice, criticism, scholarship and theory.

Finally Available Since 1992, Dia has presented the Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art. Like the Foundation's “Discussions in Contemporary Culture” symposia series, the Lehman lectures are an example of Dia's ongoing commitment to cross-disciplinary critical and intellectual discourse. The long-term, often site-specific, exhibitions at Dia offer a fertile space for discussion.Edited by Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, together with Bettina Funcke, this second volume of collected theoretical and critical essays are by a multidisciplinary group of lecturers, and are focused on the exhibitions mounted at Dia from 1995 through 1998. Nine diverse contributors range in scope from art historian David Sylvester and philosopher Sarat Maharaj to architectural theoretician Beatriz Colomina, from philosopher Mark Taylor to fiction writer and cultural critic Marina Warner. These writers, among others, take on the challenges of illuminating, analyzing, and exploring the work of a disparate group of internationally recognized artists, including Alighiero e Boetti, Jessica Stockholder, Gerhard Richter, Juan Muñoz, Fred Sandback and Andy Warhol. Together, the essays in this book present a broad-based account of contemporary artistic practice, criticism, scholarship and theory.

Since 1992, the Dia Center for the Arts has presented the Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art—an example of Dia's ongoing commitment to cross-disciplinary critical discourse. This fourth volume of collected theoretical and critical essays focuses on Dia's exhibitions from 2001 through 2002, with contributions by Alexander Alberro, Jan Avgikos, Colin Gardner, Dave Hickey, Rosalind Krauss, Miwon Kwon, Ulrich Loock, Richard Shiff and Dirk Snauwaert. These writers analyze the work of internationally recognized artists such as Roni Horn, Alfred Jensen, Bruce Nauman, Max Neuhaus, Panamarenko, Jorge Pardo, Gerhard Richter, Bridget Riley, Diana Thater and Gilberto Zorio.

Taking William Cordova's (born 1971) exhibition ankaylli: spatial and ideological terrain at Marfa Contemporary as a point of departure, this publication highlights the way the artist (who was born in Lima and is based in Miami) layers referents and histories across cultures. Bringing together a constellation of Cordova's artworks in a wide variety of medium—sculptures, collages, Polaroids, a video, objects around town, a free newspaper and a website—in which Pre-Columbian traditions, modern art and architecture, and spiritualism overlap, the exhibition stages these objects in the fitting home of Marfa, a town equally known for Native American history, minimalism and star-gazing. This book includes references to all three: stepped pyramid patterns, geometric concrete forms and symbols of the cosmos.

Ranging from figurative representation to gestural abstraction, monumental landscape paintings to more intimate portraits, the oeuvre of American painter Leidy Churchman (born 1979) channels his artistic and literary influences, friendships, moods, surrounding landscapes and the visual iconography of divergent religions and philosophies.Crocodile highlights the artist's investigations into consciousness in his renderings of anthropomorphic animals and psychological states; his appropriation of existing artworks and aesthetics; and his recasting of various signs and symbols, from his depiction of the Buddhist symbol of the protector deity in Mahakala (2017) to the Mastercard logo in Mastercard (2013).Churchman, who divides his time between New York and Maine, emerges here as a dynamic protagonist of contemporary American painting. In addition to collecting 90 reproductions of works, the book features artwork made especially for it, plus texts by Ruba Katrib, Alex Kitnik and Arnisa Zeqo, in addition to a conversation between Churchman and Lauren Cornell.

The Secret is an international blockbuster, topping the bestseller lists around the world. Now in The Secret of 'The Secret' Karen Kelly delves into this extraordinary phenomenon. What is the secret? Where did it come from and does it really work? She also investigates why this little book has struck such a chord. Why are we drawn to seek answers and change our destiny using the power of the mind and the universe? Scholars and popular culture experts provide perspective on what makes the idea so appealing.Several participants from The Secret share their behind-the-scenes stories and insights. Renowned psychologists, scientists and theologians weigh in on the power and limits of positive thinking and the Law of Attraction (the basis behind The Secret). Uncover the scientific and religious roots that form the building blocks of The Secret as experts evaluate the author's claims about the various connections between these principles and 'the Secret'.

Our time at the wheel is done. Driving will become illegal, as human drivers will be demonstrably more dangerous than cars that pilot themselves. Is this an impossible future, or a revolution just around the corner?Sam Schwartz, America's most celebrated transportation guru, describes in this book the revolution in self-driving cars. The ramifications will be dramatic, and the transition will be far from seamless. It will overturn the job market for the one in seven Americans who work in the trucking industry. It will cause us to grapple with new ethical dilemmas-if a car will hit a person or a building, endangering the lives of its passengers, who will decide what it does? It will further erode our privacy, since the vehicle can relay our location at any moment. And, like every other computer-controlled device, it can be vulnerable to hacking.Right now, every major car maker here and abroad is working on bringing autonomous vehicles to consumers. The fleets are getting ready to roll and nothing will ever be the same, and this book shows us what the future has in store.

Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist Jeanine Oleson (born 1974) created a 2017 exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, presenting her ongoing sharply absurdist response to research on the ways copper is produced and used in 21st-century capitalism.Through a video installation, objects and a performance including a copper-based instrument that reacted to human touch and a handwoven rug based on perspectives visible in three-dimensional modeling the exhibition focused on the confused entwinement of the human into contemporary material, as well as the relation with representation and art when these activities are now, more often than not, mediated through the digital for which copper is an essential material component. With humor, pathos and intellectual rigor, Oleson explores issues of labor, the environment, craft and performance.Conduct Matters features an introduction by Connie Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum, and texts by cultural historian Jaleh Mansoor and legal scholar K-Sue Park, along with the full script of Oleson's video.

Technological evolution and obsolescence on Earth and in outer space, in a new project by artist Julia ChristensenThis volume documents an ongoing investigation by artist Julia Christensen (born 1976) into how our relentless "upgrade culture"—the perceived notion that we need to constantly upgrade our electronics to remain relevant—fundamentally impacts our experience of time. In a personal narrative interspersed with related interdisciplinary artwork and conversations with experts from different fields (other artists, archivists, academics), Christensen takes readers along a path from the international "e-waste" industry to institutional archives, eventually leading her to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).At JPL, Christensen began a dialog with a group of exo-planetary scientists, engineers and machine learning experts to develop long-lived space mission concepts that include an update of the Voyager spacecrafts’ 1977 "Golden Record," to be embedded on a hypothetical future interstellar spacecraft. She and the scientists are designing an artwork generated by an extraterrestrial system that tells a distinctly new story of life on Earth. In taking on this challenge, Christensen—a female pioneer redefining the intersection of art, technology, and outer space—must envision an artwork for an evolving, autonomously-upgrading spaceship headed toward a potentially habitable planet in another star system. Her years-long investigation into upgrade culture leads to design concepts that potentially transcend technological obsolescence altogether.

Colorful explosions of “bad objects”: the eccentric constructions of two American artists generations apartThis volume brings together the paintings and drawings of Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007) and the work of New York–based sculptor Jessi Reaves (born 1986). Despite the generations that separate Murray and Reaves, this publication highlights each artist’s lyrical, playful and rigorous engagements with the decorative, domestic and bodily.Published to accompany an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Wild Life explores Murray and Reaves’ often ambiguous conceptions of the body and the home, wherein both body and home are continuously coming together and falling apart.This book features a newly commissioned conversation between Reaves and Johanna Fateman as well as a reprint of a historical interview between Murray and Kate Horsfield, which together chart the two artists’ irreverent plays with color and form, high and low cultural references, and notions of masculinity and femininity.

Previously uncollected dance writings from the legendary art critic who defined the Pictures Generation, in a handsome clothbound editionPioneering AIDS activist, art critic, educator and curator Douglas Crimp is known for the fluidity and acuity of his writing on an array of passions. His book AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (1987) deconstructed the art world's complicated and mostly disheartening responses to the AIDS crisis; On the Museum's Ruins (1993) explored postmodernist art practices in relation to the politics of institutions; and Before Pictures (2016), a brilliant combination of memoir and criticism, chronicled Crimp's first decade in 1970s New York. This new book collects the critic's incisive pieces on dance (a lifelong interest) and dance on film, which, according to Artforum, "galvanized the field and synthesized histories of ballet, modern dance and postmodern performance." Written from 2006 to 2010, these in-depth essays are devoted to choreographers and filmmakers such as Charles Atlas, Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, Tacita Dean, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Yvonne Rainer. Before his death in July 2019, Crimp penned a new essay specifically for this book that probes the idea and definition of the "dance film." This beautifully designed clothbound volume, which shows Crimp as an outstanding and ever-evolving writer, includes an introduction by curator Lynne Cooke, who co-curated Crimp's landmark 2010 show at the Museo Reina Sofia, Mixed Use, Manhattan. Douglas Crimp (1944-2019) is famed for his scholarly contributions to the fields of postmodern theory and art, institutional critique, dance, film, queer theory and feminist theory. His writings are marked by his desire to merge the often disjunctive worlds of politics, art and academia. From 1977 to 1990, he was the managing editor of the journal October. Before his death, Crimp was Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York.

A long-overdue appreciation of the influential sculpture of Liz Larner and its radically adventurous formal and conceptual vocabularyLos Angeles–based sculptor and installation artist Liz Larner (born 1960) was originally a photographer: in some of her earliest projects, she documented the volatility of bacterial cultures in petri dishes. However, she soon realized that she was more compelled by the dishes themselves and how they presented questions about what an art object can entail. Since then, she has continued to pursue her interest in formal unpredictability through a focus on sculpture and architectural space. Composed of a diverse variety of materials, her sculptures frequently function as optical illusions that seem to bend the space around them. Sometimes rigidly technical in their geometry and at other times soft-edged and amorphous, Larner’s sculptures are striking both for their fluctuation of form and for their representation of spatial politics.Repositioning her enduring formal and material concerns alongside her relationship to a feminist sculptural position, this monograph offers an opportunity to consider Larner’s artistic project within today’s expanded discourses of embodiment, gender and posthumanism, and to recalibrate our understanding of it in relation to male-dominated Postminimalism and installation art, which have often underpinned Larner’s critical reception. Poet Ariana Reines, cultural critic and theorist Catherine Liu, and curators Connie Butler and Mary Ceruti consider the physical properties and sociopolitical implications of the materials present in Larner’s work, which range from ceramic to steel chain to surgical gauze to human hair.

Documentation and testimony from Da Corte's 2020 reinvention of a classic 1960s happeningIn early March 2020, on the cusp of the COVID-19 shutdown, an audience gathered to witness a reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s happening, Chicken, by Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte (born 1980). Performed at the site of Kaprow’s original—the Gershman Y at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia—Da Corte’s first live performance reimagined Kaprow’s chaotic event, which had been orchestrated in 1962 under the auspices of the first Pop art exhibition on the East Coast. While the focus of activity for the performers of Kaprow’s Chicken involved the hawking of live and boiled chickens and their eggs, Da Corte’s performers frantically peddled exquisite yellow orbs made from a variety of materials that represented the moon.Including sketches and reproductions of the objects and costumes constructed for Da Corte’s revision, as well as performance images, scripts, essays and personal accounts reflecting on the event’s impact and significance over the ensuing year, this publication becomes a living document of a moment in time.

In 1914, Marcel Duchamp purchased a bottle rack, called it a sculpture, put his name to it and the “readymade” artwork was born. It Is What It Is. Or Is It? considers the legacy of the readymade in contemporary artistic practice as the form approaches its 100th anniversary and attempts to recuperate the radicality of Duchamp’s foundational gesture. Taking stock of the readymade’s simple materiality and its economy of means, this catalogue includes work by 18 artists working in a variety of media from sculpture to photography, painting, video and installation-based works. It Is What It Is. Or Is It? includes works by Ellen Altfest, Fayçal Baghriche, Bill Bollinger, William Cordova, Latifa Echakhch, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Claire Fontaine, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rachel Hecker, Jamie Isenstein, Luis Jacob, Patrick Killoran, Jirí Kovanda, Klara Lidén, Catherine Murphy and Pratchaya Phinthong.

A long-form collaborative exploration of images and their enduring traces on the American landscapeIn 2012, Leslie Hewitt (born 1977) and Bradford Young (born 1977) produced Untitled (Structures), a series of silent, nonlinear film vignettes that grew out of an invitation from the Menil Collection, Houston, to consider the museum’s civil rights–era photograph collection. The invitation, which inspired years of research into the aftereffects of the Great Migration, the civil rights movement and the ongoing struggle for human rights, prompted Hewitt and Young to shoot new work in Chicago, Memphis and Arkansas in an array of important sites, found and not found in the museum’s photographs. Exposing the tensions between still photography and moving images, Hewitt and Young’s project interrogates the ways in which history is embedded in contemporary topographic, corporeal and psychological landscapes. Taking the film as its point of departure, this publication furthers the artists’ inquiries into the project’s poetic and political themes, including psychogeography, anti-monumentalism and the intersections of image, memory and architecture.

Fifty years of media critique from the leading exponent of feminist video artThroughout her five-decade career, New York–based artist Dara Birnbaum (born 1946) has relentlessly dissected the process of watching and has argued against the passive absorption of mass media, information and ideology, through various techniques—many of which can be described as subversive reactions or reversals. As media itself has evolved over the years, from the monolithic nature of TV broadcast networks to the Internet’s decentralization of information, Birnbaum’s work has remained consistently prescient and vital, incorporating new technologies and providing a touchstone for generations of younger artists.Including original scholarship by leading critics and curators of moving image and media art, this book examines Birnbaum's key works and concepts to illustrate how much her practice has to teach in a technology and media laden culture that demands constant participation and response.

An exploration of the nature of visibility through a series of camera obscuras paired with silver gelatin prints of the sunIn the two related bodies of work that form this volume’s centerpiece, New York–based photographer Zoe Leonard (born 1961) poses fundamental questions about the medium of photography and the nature of sight. In a series of large-scale installations, the artist employed the principle of the camera obscura, pairing it with gelatin silver photographs of the sun. The image in Leonard’s room-size camera obscuras is immersive and continuous, shifting constantly in response to the fleeting light of the outside world and unraveling in the surrounding space to come into its full vibrancy.Leonard’s camera obscuras have been sited in cities in Europe and the United States, from Venice and London to New York and Marfa. This title explores this body of work through photographs that document these installations in five international cities.

Chronicling an epic multimedia project 10 years in the making, A.K. Burns’ first monograph grapples with climate change, community and sociopolitical agencyDeploying science fiction, material feminism, eco-anarchism, queer theory and technoscience, New York–based artist A.K. Burns (born 1975) explores the fraught relationships between humanity and nature in an epic multimedia work, Negative Space (2015–23). This nonlinear allegory provokes questions about marginalized bodies, environmental fragility and technology. Developed as a cycle of four video installations, Negative Space imagines new relationships to the spaces we occupy and the impact of our bodies in these spaces through imagery, research and critical and creative writings. Set in a speculative present, the tetralogy envisions a new materialist cosmology wherein hierarchical relations are transformed.

Leaving fingerprints and tool marks behind, a São Paulo artist evokes the cycles of the cosmosThis volume takes an expansive view of the bold and influential practice of Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti (born 1971), surveying more than 60 pieces made over the past 15 years. In Verzutti’s art, moons recur as symbols of renewal and the multiple phases that a person or entity can pass through. Her work presents novel modes of perception by orbiting outside set systems of being—zooming out, in a telescopic sense, to the point where the relations we take so seriously here on Earth can be rethought. Vibrant illustrations of individual works and installation views of New Moons, the artist’s first US museum survey, highlight how her approaches to display and presentation reveal such relationships. Presenting original scholarship on the art historical and theoretical aspects of Verzutti’s practice as well as the artist’s own writing, this book offers insights on the inspiration and multifaceted ideas at play across her work.

Exploring the decades-long working relationship between Fred Sandback and Dia Art Foundation, which served as a venue for his “situational” sculptureIn 1968, sculptor Fred Sandback (1943–2003) mounted his first solo exhibition at Heiner Friedrich’s Munich gallery, displaying works made from elastic cord or acrylic yarn that traced planes and volumes in space. Thus began a long-term relationship that extended to Dia Art Foundation, the institution cofounded by Friedrich in 1974. Until now, there has been little published on Sandback’s extraordinary alliance with Dia. Essayists Julian M. Rose, Corinna Thierolf and Edward A. Vazquez, as well as conversation partners Matilde Guidelli-Guidi and Curtis Harvey, unearth and explore archival documents, sketches and photographs to reveal how the institution offered Sandback both space and time to meticulously hone his sculptural interventions in the architectural environments of Dia, including the Fred Sandback Museum in Winchendon, Massachusetts, and Dia Beacon, New York.

Himid invites readers into her process through an intimate view of two new bodies of work that engage themes of power and memoryPublished with The Contemporary Austin and The FLAG Art Foundation, New York.Best known for her paintings that excavate the legacy of colonialism and expand the possibilities of Black representation, Lubaina Himid (born 1954) played a pivotal role in the British Black Arts Movement in the 1980s and became the first Black woman to win the Turner Prize in 2017. Published on the occasion of Himid’s most recent solo exhibition for The Contemporary Austin’s 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, Make Do and Mend provides readers with a rare behind-the-scenes look into Himid’s process for two new bodies of work: a suite of 10 Strategy Paintings depicting Black men and women seated around tables invested in problem-solving the dynamics of power, and 64 sculptural plank paintings, entitled Aunties, that formally evoke East African funerary objects and Postminimalism, as they pay tribute to the relationships between women.