Pamela M. Lee - Böcker

How the approaches and methods of think tanks—including systems theory, operational research, and cybernetics—paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism.In Think Tank Aesthetics, Pamela Lee traces the complex encounters between Cold War think tanks and the art of that era. Lee shows how the approaches and methods of think tanks—including systems theory, operations research, and cybernetics—paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism and set the terms for contemporary neoliberalism. Lee casts these shadowy institutions as sites of radical creativity and interdisciplinary practice in the service of defense strategy. Describing the distinctive aesthetics that emerged from such institutions as the RAND Corporation, she maps the multiple and overlapping networks that connected nuclear strategists, mathematicians, economists, anthropologists, artists, designers, and art historians.Lee recounts, among other things, the decades-long colloquy between Albert Wohlstetter, a RAND analyst, and his former professor, the famous art historian Meyer Schapiro; the anthropologist Margaret Mead's deployment of innovative visual aids that recall midcentury abstract art; and the combination of cybernetics and modernist design in an “Opsroom” for the short-lived socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1970s Chile (and its restaging many years later as a work of art). Lee suggests that we think of these connections less as disciplinary border crossings than as colonization of the specific interests of arts by the approaches and methods of the sciences. Hearing the echoes of think tank aesthetics in today's pursuit of the interdisciplinary and in academia's science-infused justification of the humanities, Lee wonders what territory has been ceded in a laboratory approach to the arts.

Pol Bury (1922-2005) was a painter, sculptor, jewelry designer, writer, and graphic artist, but is perhaps best known to the general public for his fountains and sculpture in public spaces throughout the world. Acclaimed as one of the first proponents of “moving” works, driven by a motor, he became one of the protagonists of kinetic art and was without doubt one of Belgium’s most important postwar artists. Accompanying a major exhibition in Belgium, this publication presents an opportunity to rediscover Bury’s multifaceted oeuvre.   Distributed for MercatorfondsExhibition Schedule:BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels(02/23/17–06/04/17)

Pamela M. Lee’s New Games revisits postmodernism in light of art history's more recent embrace of "the contemporary." What can the theories and practices associated with postmodernism tell us about the obsession with the contemporary in both the academy and the art world? In looking at work by Dara Birnbaum, Öyvind Fahlström and Richard Serra, among others, Lee returns to Jean-Francois Lyotard's canonical text The Postmodern Condition as a means to understand more recent art-critical interests in interactivity, collectivism and neo-liberalism. She reads Lyotard's well-known treatment of language games relative to the game theory associated with the Cold War and the rise of the information society. New Games asks readers to think critically about our recent past and the embattled state of our contemporary preoccupations.With a critical introduction by Johanna Burton, New Games is the fourth and penultimate volume in Routledge’s series of short books on the theories of modernism by leading art historians on twentieth-century art and art criticism.

Pamela M. Lee’s New Games revisits postmodernism in light of art history's more recent embrace of "the contemporary." What can the theories and practices associated with postmodernism tell us about the obsession with the contemporary in both the academy and the art world? In looking at work by Dara Birnbaum, Öyvind Fahlström and Richard Serra, among others, Lee returns to Jean-Francois Lyotard's canonical text The Postmodern Condition as a means to understand more recent art-critical interests in interactivity, collectivism and neo-liberalism. She reads Lyotard's well-known treatment of language games relative to the game theory associated with the Cold War and the rise of the information society. New Games asks readers to think critically about our recent past and the embattled state of our contemporary preoccupations.With a critical introduction by Johanna Burton, New Games is the fourth and penultimate volume in Routledge’s series of short books on the theories of modernism by leading art historians on twentieth-century art and art criticism.