Value: Art: Politics – serie

Dada formed in 1916, embedded in a world of rational appearances that belied a raging confusion – in the middle of the First World War, in the neutral centre of a warring continent, fundamentally at the heart of Western art. This book sets out new coordinates in revision of a formation that Western art history routinely exhausts through its characterisation as a ‘revolutionary movement’ of anarchic cultural dissent, and does so in order to contest the perpetuated assumptions about Dada that underlie the popular myth. Dada is difficult and the response to it is not easy, and what emerge from the theoretical readings developed here are profoundly rational bases to the Dada non-sense that pitted itself against its civilised age, critically and implicitly to propose that Dada courses as vitally today as it did in 1916.The Zurich Dada formation initiated deliberate and strategic cultural engagements that struggled then, as they do now, to cohere in any sense as a ‘movement’, extreme in their ranges as diametrically hostile oppositionalities. Dada may be given art historically as identifiable along a trajectory of sustained ruptures and seizures, but it confounds all attempts at defined or definitive readings. This book duly offers not a history of Dada in Zurich but theoretical engagements of the emergencies and now the residue of the years 1916–19 – from ‘lautgedichte’ to laughter, masks to manifestos, chance to chiasmata – rounding to the ‘permanent’ Dada by which the formation ultimately breaks the containment and deep peace of art historical chronology.

What happened in art following the consolidation of capitalist globalisation after 1989? Drawing on work in art history, curating, critical theory, political economy and sociology, essays in Economy: Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century frame and substantiate the increasing attendance to economic relations as a defining trend in contemporary art’s history and one that brought to an end the hegemony of the cultural subject encountered in postmodern discourse.Contributions include reflections on art in its relation to property as well as to speculation and finance, immaterial labour and the avant-garde, the lessons of the past in pursuing an aesthetics of the economy, the ethics of care and the role of the art document, queer politics and class, the new feminist critique of economic subjects, migration, precarity and empowerment, the ambivalence of the commons, and a range of perspectives on the possibility of opposition, in the art world and beyond, to the biopolitical rule of global capital as the arbiter of human relations.Building on, extending and querying the curatorial project ECONOMY (Edinburgh and Glasgow 2013), the book puts forward a proposition that cuts across a number of ‘turns’ in the art of the past two decades, including socially engaged practices, seeking to connect localised approaches with the broader organisation of production and the unprecedented apparentness of the economy in the passage from the 20th to the 21st century.Contributors: Massimo de Angelis, Angela Dimitrakaki, Melanie Gilligan, Kirsten Lloyd, Renate Lorenz, Dimitris Papadopoulos & Vassilis Tsianos, Andrea Phillips, John Roberts, Alberto Toscano, Gregory Sholette, Marina Vishmidt.Editors: Angela Dimitrakaki is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of EdinburghKirsten Lloyd is Teaching Fellow in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh and Associate Curator at Stills, Edinburgh

What happens to art when feminism grips the curatorial imagination? How do sexual politics become realised as exhibits? Is the struggle against gender discrimination compatible with the aspirations of museums led by market values? Beginning with the feminist critique of the art exhibition in the 1970s and concluding with reflections on intersectional curating and globalisation after 2000, this pioneering collection offers an alternative narrative of feminism’s impact on art. The essays provide rigorous accounts of developments in Scandinavia, Eastern and Southern Europe as well as the UK and US, framed by an introduction which offers a politically engaging navigation of historical and current positions. Delivered through essays, memoirs and interviews, discussion highlights include the Tate Modern hang, relational aesthetics, the global exhibition, feminism and technology in the museum, the rise of curatorial collectivism, and insights into major exhibitions such as Gender Check on Eastern Europe. Bringing together two generations of curators, artists and historians to rethink distinct and unresolved moments in the feminist re-modelling of art contexts, this volume dares to ask: is there a history of feminist art or one of feminist presentations of artworks?Contributors include Deborah Cherry, Jo Anna Isaak, Malin Hedlin Hayden, Lubaina Himid, Amelia Jones, Kati Kivimaa, Alexandra Kokoli, Kuratorisk Aktion, Suzana Milevska, Suzanne Lacy, Lucy Lippard, Sue Malvern, Nancy Proctor, Bojana Pejić, Helena Reckitt, Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, Jeannine Tang and Catherine Wood.

Marx’s ideas are now subject to worldwide reappraisal, with conferences attracting the most important critical thinkers on the left. Marx and the Aesthetic (Amsterdam, 2012) reappraised Marx in the context of his own creative inspirations and contemporary art today. Max Raphael’s Proudhon, Marx, Picasso (1933), published in Paris by the exiled German art historian, a contemporary of Walter Benjamin, included the first attempt at a Marxist critique of Picasso. His book appeared when the global crisis of capitalism coincided with the birth of fascism.Picasso/Marx looks backwards and perhaps forwards, resituating Picasso in dialectical terms. His context as player in the little-known Communist West, centred on Paris, brings into play the Marxist theory of his times. From the 1930s to the 1970s, Marx, Lenin and Stalin’s own theories on art and literature were discussed together with Plekhanov, Bogdanov and Zhdanov. John Berger’s Success and Failure of Picasso (1965), dedicated to Raphael, offered a critique of Picasso’s art and Communist politics within the lifetime of the painter. Picasso/Marx presents a critical view of Picasso to his new audiences from Melbourne to Moscow.

Phenomenal Difference grants new attention to contemporary black British art, exploring its critical and social significance through attention to embodied experience, affectivity, the senses and perception.Featuring attention to works by the followingartists:Said Adrus, Zarina Bhimji, Sonia Boyce, VanleyBurke, Chila Burman, Mona Hatoum, Bhajan Hunjan, Permindar Kaur, Sonia Khurana,Juginder Lamba, Manjeet Lamba, Hew Locke, Yeu-Lai Mo, Henna Nadeem, KoriNewkirk, Johannes Phokela, Keith Piper, Shanti Thomas, Aubrey Williams, MarioYbarra Jr. Much before scholars in the arts and humanities took their recent ‘ontological turn’ toward the new materialism, black British art had begun to expose cultural criticism’s overreliance on the concepts of textuality, representation, identity and difference. Illuminating that original field of aesthetics and creativity, this book shows how black British artworks themselves can become the basis for an engaged and widely-reaching philosophy.Numerous extended descriptive studies of artworks spell out the affective and critical relations that pertain between individual works, their viewers and the world at hand: intimate, physically-involving and visceral relations that are brought into being through a wide range of phenomena including performance, photography, installation, photomontage and digital practice.Whether they subsist through movement, or in time, through gesture, or illusion, black British art is always an arresting nexus of making, feeling and thought. It celebrates particular philosophical interest in:- the use of art as a place for remembering the personal or collective past;- the fundamental ‘equivalence’ of texture and colour, and their instances of ‘rupture’;- figural presence, perceptual reversibility and the agency of objects;- the grounded materialities of mediation;- and the interconnections between art, politics and emancipation.Drawing first hand on the founding, historical texts of early and mid-twentieth century phenomenology (Heidegger; Merleau-Ponty), and current advances in art history, curating and visual anthropology, the author transposes black British art into a freshly expanded and diversified intellectual field. What emerges is a vivid understanding of phenomenal difference: the profoundly material processes of interworking philosophical knowledge and political strategy at the site of black British art.

This volume is the first publication to examine in detail the phenomenon of collective art practice in the continental Western Europe of the late 1950s and of the 1960s. The book elaborates a comparative perspective, engaging with a cultural history of art deeply concerned with political ideas and geopolitical conflicts. Groups of artists and activists including Equipo 57, Equipo Cronica, Equipo Realidad, N, GRAV, Spur, Geflecht and Kommune I, have often been neglected in the English-speaking world. This happened partly because they were active in allegedly minor art centres such as Valencia, Padua, Cordoba, West-Berlin and Munich. However, their works, debates and intellectual networks cast new light on both the art produced during the Cold War and the heightened interest in participatory and collaborative art practices that has characterised the art world of the 2000s and 2010s. Individuals against Individualism tells the stories of these artists and activists, and focuses on their attempts to depict and embody forms of egalitarianism opposing the Eastern bloc authoritarianism as much as the Free world’s ethos. By setting their political use of collective authorship, resistance to institutional co-optation and attack on the 'ideology of freedom, against the backdrop of the Cold War, the book largely speaks to the present.

This groundbreaking book surveys the shifts in the aesthetic discourse and artistic practises that decisively influenced the shaping of the avant-garde during Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). On the basis of extensive, so far unpublished, archival material, it discusses the intellectual and cultural field as an important battlefield for fighting the regime from within.The study opens with a comprehensive historical overview on the cultural world from the end of the Spanish Civil War throughout Francoism and reveals for the first time the broader intellectual and cultural context of vanguard art considering the special relations and negotiation processes between artist, critics and institutions during a major gap in the historiography of post-war Spanish culture: the late Franco dictatorship (1959-1975). It then analyses in depth the important role that a group of art critics played as theoreticians and peers in key artistic movements from the 1950s onwards. Using their extensive international networks in the midst of the Cold War period, they decisively influenced the aesthetic and cultural debates of their time and very concretely helped shaping a completely new discourse for the avant-garde in Spain.This book discusses the creation of this new discourse that linked culture and ethics/politics and analyses its impact on the intellectual and artistic landscape (visual, print and exhibition culture) during the last decades of Franco’s regime. It is indebted to a cultural historic approach that takes high culture, popular culture, politics as well as the history of ideas in account studying the reciprocal transfer processes within these fields and across European and American geographies. This study and its interdisciplinary approach will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual, cultural and museum studies of modern Spain in particular and Europe in general.

Phenomenal Difference grants new attention to contemporary black British art, exploring its critical and social significance through attention to embodied experience, affectivity, the senses and perception.Featuring attention to works by the followingartists:Said Adrus, Zarina Bhimji, Sonia Boyce, VanleyBurke, Chila Burman, Mona Hatoum, Bhajan Hunjan, Permindar Kaur, Sonia Khurana,Juginder Lamba, Manjeet Lamba, Hew Locke, Yeu-Lai Mo, Henna Nadeem, KoriNewkirk, Johannes Phokela, Keith Piper, Shanti Thomas, Aubrey Williams, MarioYbarra Jr. Much before scholars in the arts and humanities took their recent ‘ontological turn’ toward the new materialism, black British art had begun to expose cultural criticism’s overreliance on the concepts of textuality, representation, identity and difference. Illuminating that original field of aesthetics and creativity, this book shows how black British artworks themselves can become the basis for an engaged and widely-reaching philosophy.Numerous extended descriptive studies of artworks spell out the affective and critical relations that pertain between individual works, their viewers and the world at hand: intimate, physically-involving and visceral relations that are brought into being through a wide range of phenomena including performance, photography, installation, photomontage and digital practice.Whether they subsist through movement, or in time, through gesture, or illusion, black British art is always an arresting nexus of making, feeling and thought. It celebrates particular philosophical interest in:- the use of art as a place for remembering the personal or collective past;- the fundamental ‘equivalence’ of texture and colour, and their instances of ‘rupture’;- figural presence, perceptual reversibility and the agency of objects;- the grounded materialities of mediation;- and the interconnections between art, politics and emancipation.Drawing first hand on the founding, historical texts of early and mid-twentieth century phenomenology (Heidegger; Merleau-Ponty), and current advances in art history, curating and visual anthropology, the author transposes black British art into a freshly expanded and diversified intellectual field. What emerges is a vivid understanding of phenomenal difference: the profoundly material processes of interworking philosophical knowledge and political strategy at the site of black British art.

This volume is the first publication to examine in detail the phenomenon of collective art practice in the continental Western Europe of the late 1950s and of the 1960s. The book elaborates a comparative perspective, engaging with a cultural history of art deeply concerned with political ideas and geopolitical conflicts. Groups of artists and activists including Equipo 57, Equipo Cronica, Equipo Realidad, N, GRAV, Spur, Geflecht and Kommune I, have often been neglected in the English-speaking world. This happened partly because they were active in allegedly minor art centres such as Valencia, Padua, Cordoba, West-Berlin and Munich. However, their works, debates and intellectual networks cast new light on both the art produced during the Cold War and the heightened interest in participatory and collaborative art practices that has characterised the art world of the 2000s and 2010s. Individuals against Individualism tells the stories of these artists and activists, and focuses on their attempts to depict and embody forms of egalitarianism opposing the Eastern bloc authoritarianism as much as the Free world’s ethos. By setting their political use of collective authorship, resistance to institutional co-optation and attack on the 'ideology of freedom, against the backdrop of the Cold War, the book largely speaks to the present.

The texts gathered in this volume embrace women artists-only exhibitions, festivals, collective art projects, groups and associations, organised in the long 1970s in Europe (1968-1984). These all-women art initiatives are closely related to developments within the political and politicized women's movement in Europe and America but what emerges is the varied and plural manner of their engagements with feminism(s) alongside their creation of `heterotopias' in relation to specific sites/ politics/ collaborative art practices. This book presents examples from Italy, Spain, UK, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Denmark, Germany (East and West), The Netherlands, France and Sweden. While each chapter is largely devoted to one country, the authors point to how the local and specific political situation in which these initiatives emerged is linked to global tendencies as well as inter-European exchanges. Each chapter of this book thus assesses the impact of travelling views of feminism, by considering connections made between women artists (often when travelling abroad) or their knowledge of art practices from abroad. Distinct and highly varied attitudes towards political activism (from strong engagement to a clearly pronounced distance and even hostility) are shown in each essay and, what is more, they are shown as based on radically different premises about feminism, politics and art.

This is the first full-length biography of Dorothy Morland (1906–99), to date the only female director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. Based on unpublished letters and other archival sources, as well as interviews and personal recollections, this book traces her busy private and public life from the 1930s up until the 1990s. It tells the story of one of theunacknowledged contributors to the success of the ICA and to the understandingof the international avant garde in post-war Britain. As a female arts administrator, Dorothy Morland’s work has been largely overlooked, and this book aims to highlight her significant contribution to the public understanding of modernism. She was part of a network which included theSurrealist Roland Penrose, art critic Herbert Read, architect Jane Drew andwealthy philanthropists, Peter Gregory and Peter Watson. She was also theprotector and advocate for the Independent Group. Dorothy Morland always mixed business with pleasure (dancing with Picasso in Antibes while there on ICA business), and tirelessly oversaw the chaotic organisation that was the ICA in Dover Street from 1950 until 1968. After leaving the ICA she worked hard onassembly the organisation’s archives and securing their safekeeping at Tate.

This is the first full-length biography of Dorothy Morland (1906–99), to date the only female director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. Based on unpublished letters and other archival sources, as well as interviews and personal recollections, this book traces her busy private and public life from the 1930s up until the 1990s. It tells the story of one of theunacknowledged contributors to the success of the ICA and to the understandingof the international avant garde in post-war Britain. As a female arts administrator, Dorothy Morland’s work has been largely overlooked, and this book aims to highlight her significant contribution to the public understanding of modernism. She was part of a network which included theSurrealist Roland Penrose, art critic Herbert Read, architect Jane Drew andwealthy philanthropists, Peter Gregory and Peter Watson. She was also theprotector and advocate for the Independent Group. Dorothy Morland always mixed business with pleasure (dancing with Picasso in Antibes while there on ICA business), and tirelessly oversaw the chaotic organisation that was the ICA in Dover Street from 1950 until 1968. After leaving the ICA she worked hard onassembly the organisation’s archives and securing their safekeeping at Tate.

Dada formed in 1916, embedded in a world of rational appearances that belied a raging confusion – in the middle of the First World War, in the neutral centre of a warring continent, fundamentally at the heart of Western art. This book sets out new coordinates in revision of a formation that Western art history routinely exhausts through its characterisation as a ‘revolutionary movement’ of anarchic cultural dissent, and does so in order to contest the perpetuated assumptions about Dada that underlie the popular myth. Dada is difficult and the response to it is not easy, and what emerge from the theoretical readings developed here are profoundly rational bases to the Dada non-sense that pitted itself against its civilised age, critically and implicitly to propose that Dada courses as vitally today as it did in 1916.The Zurich Dada formation initiated deliberate and strategic cultural engagements that struggled then, as they do now, to cohere in any sense as a ‘movement’, extreme in their ranges as diametrically hostile oppositionalities. Dada may be given art historically as identifiable along a trajectory of sustained ruptures and seizures, but it confounds all attempts at defined or definitive readings. This book duly offers not a history of Dada in Zurich but theoretical engagements of the emergencies and now the residue of the years 1916–19 – from ‘lautgedichte’ to laughter, masks to manifestos, chance to chiasmata – rounding to the ‘permanent’ Dada by which the formation ultimately breaks the containment and deep peace of art historical chronology.

What happened in art following the consolidation of capitalist globalisation after 1989? Drawing on work in art history, curating, critical theory, political economy and sociology, essays in Economy: Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century frame and substantiate the increasing attendance to economic relations as a defining trend in contemporary art’s history and one that brought to an end the hegemony of the cultural subject encountered in postmodern discourse.Contributions include reflections on art in its relation to property as well as to speculation and finance, immaterial labour and the avant-garde, the lessons of the past in pursuing an aesthetics of the economy, the ethics of care and the role of the art document, queer politics and class, the new feminist critique of economic subjects, migration, precarity and empowerment, the ambivalence of the commons, and a range of perspectives on the possibility of opposition, in the art world and beyond, to the biopolitical rule of global capital as the arbiter of human relations.Building on, extending and querying the curatorial project ECONOMY (Edinburgh and Glasgow 2013), the book puts forward a proposition that cuts across a number of ‘turns’ in the art of the past two decades, including socially engaged practices, seeking to connect localised approaches with the broader organisation of production and the unprecedented apparentness of the economy in the passage from the 20th to the 21st century.Contributors: Massimo de Angelis, Angela Dimitrakaki, Melanie Gilligan, Kirsten Lloyd, Renate Lorenz, Dimitris Papadopoulos & Vassilis Tsianos, Andrea Phillips, John Roberts, Alberto Toscano, Gregory Sholette, Marina Vishmidt.Editors: Angela Dimitrakaki is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of EdinburghKirsten Lloyd is Teaching Fellow in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh and Associate Curator at Stills, Edinburgh

This groundbreaking book surveys the shifts in the aesthetic discourse and artistic practises that decisively influenced the shaping of the avant-garde during Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). On the basis of extensive, so far unpublished, archival material, it discusses the intellectual and cultural field as an important battlefield for fighting the regime from within.The study opens with a comprehensive historical overview on the cultural world from the end of the Spanish Civil War throughout Francoism and reveals for the first time the broader intellectual and cultural context of vanguard art considering the special relations and negotiation processes between artist, critics and institutions during a major gap in the historiography of post-war Spanish culture: the late Franco dictatorship (1959-1975). It then analyses in depth the important role that a group of art critics played as theoreticians and peers in key artistic movements from the 1950s onwards. Using their extensive international networks in the midst of the Cold War period, they decisively influenced the aesthetic and cultural debates of their time and very concretely helped shaping a completely new discourse for the avant-garde in Spain.This book discusses the creation of this new discourse that linked culture and ethics/politics and analyses its impact on the intellectual and artistic landscape (visual, print and exhibition culture) during the last decades of Franco’s regime. It is indebted to a cultural historic approach that takes high culture, popular culture, politics as well as the history of ideas in account studying the reciprocal transfer processes within these fields and across European and American geographies. This study and its interdisciplinary approach will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual, cultural and museum studies of modern Spain in particular and Europe in general.

The texts gathered in this volume embrace women artists-only exhibitions, festivals, collective art projects, groups and associations, organised in the long 1970s in Europe (1968-1984). These all-women art initiatives are closely related to developments within the political and politicized women’s movement in Europe and America but what emerges is the varied and plural manner of their engagements with feminism(s) alongside their creation of ‘heterotopias’ in relation to specific sites/ politics/ collaborative art practices. This book presents examples from Italy, Spain, UK, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Denmark, Germany (East and West), The Netherlands, France and Sweden. While each chapter is largely devoted to one country, the authors point to how the local and specific political situation in which these initiatives emerged is linked to global tendencies as well as inter-European exchanges. Each chapter of this book thus assesses the impact of travelling views of feminism, by considering connections made between women artists (often when travelling abroad) or their knowledge of art practices from abroad. Distinct and highly varied attitudes towards political activism (from strong engagement to a clearly pronounced distance and even hostility) are shown in each essay and, what is more, they are shown as based on radically different premises about feminism, politics and art.Contributors: Fabienne Dumont, Annika Öhrner, Katy Deepwell, Elke Krasny, Nina Hoechtl, Julia Wieger, Monika Kaiser, Kathleen Wentrack, Katia Almerini, Márcia Oliveira, Agata Jakubowska, and Susanne Altmann.

Few art critics in Western art history have ever had the broad-ranging impact over several decades of Donald Kuspit, a philosopher and psychoanalyst who from 1970 until the present has been a commanding figure on the international stage. A student of German thinker Theodor Adorno under whom he earned the first of his three doctorates, Kuspit introduced a new type of philosophical art criticism into the art world. He drew on both phenomenology and Critical Theory before he then increasingly adopted psychoanalysis. Since Kuspit himself has always measured his own place in the history of art criticism by how rigorously he engages with competing approaches, this book is a searching survey of Kuspit’s role in triggering several historic shifts within art criticism, beginning with his now legendary 1974 article in Artforum, “A Phenomenological Approach to Artistic Intention.” Dense and demanding, yet deft and incisive, Kuspit’s multi-faceted art criticism has become world famous for reasons that artists, critics, art historians, and philosophers from at least ten different nations explain from various points of view.Divided into three parts and introduced by a lengthy introduction, the book features comments by recognized artists like Rudolf Baranik, Anselm Kiefer, and April Gornik, as well as critical commentaries by many scholars and critics from around the world on the richness of Kuspit’s insights into art.

What happens to art when feminism grips the curatorial imagination? How do sexual politics become realised as exhibits? Is the struggle against gender discrimination compatible with the aspirations of museums led by market values? Beginning with the feminist critique of the art exhibition in the 1970s and concluding with reflections on intersectional curating and globalisation after 2000, this pioneering collection offers an alternative narrative of feminism’s impact on art. The essays provide rigorous accounts of developments in Scandinavia, Eastern and Southern Europe as well as the UK and US, framed by an introduction which offers a politically engaging navigation of historical and current positions. Delivered through essays, memoirs and interviews, discussion highlights include the Tate Modern hang, relational aesthetics, the global exhibition, feminism and technology in the museum, the rise of curatorial collectivism, and insights into major exhibitions such as Gender Check on Eastern Europe. Bringing together two generations of curators, artists and historians to rethink distinct and unresolved moments in the feminist re-modelling of art contexts, this volume dares to ask: is there a history of feminist art or one of feminist presentations of artworks?Contributors include Deborah Cherry, Jo Anna Isaak, Malin Hedlin Hayden, Lubaina Himid, Amelia Jones, Kati Kivimaa, Alexandra Kokoli, Kuratorisk Aktion, Suzana Milevska, Suzanne Lacy, Lucy Lippard, Sue Malvern, Nancy Proctor, Bojana Pejić, Helena Reckitt, Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, Jeannine Tang and Catherine Wood.

This book provides the most comprehensive survey of contemporary Palestinian art to date. The development of contemporary practice, theory and criticism is understood as integral to the concomitant construction of Palestinian national identities. In particular the book explores the intricate relationship between art and nationalism in which the idea of origin plays an important and problematic role. The book deconstructs the existing narratives of the history of Palestinian art, which search for its origins in the 19th century, and argues that Palestinian contemporary art demonstrates pluralistic, politically and philosophically complex attitudes towards identity and nation that confound familiar narratives of origin and belonging.The book builds upon theories of art, nationalism and post-colonialism particularly in relation to the themes of fragmentation and dispersal. It takes the Arabic word for Diaspora Shatat (literally broken apart) as a central concern in contemporary understanding of Palestinian culture and develops it, along with Edward Said’s paradoxical formula of a ‘coherence of dispersal’ as the organising concept of the book. This aspect of contemporary Palestinian art is peculiarly suited to the conditions produced by the globalisation of art and we show how Palestinian artists, despite not having a state, have developed an international profile.