In Adversarial Design, Carl DiSalvo examines the ways that technology design can provoke and engage the political. He describes a practice, which he terms “adversarial design,” that uses the means and forms of design to challenge beliefs, values, and what is taken to be fact. It is not simply applying design to politics--attempting to improve governance for example, by redesigning ballots and polling places; it is implicitly contestational and strives to question conventional approaches to political issues.
China is on the verge of a design revolution. A “third generation” of the People’s Republic of China that came of age during China’s “opening up” period of the 1980s now strives for fame, fortune, and self expression. This generation, workers in their thirties and forties, has more freedom to create--and to consume--than their parents or grandparents. In China’s Design Revolution, Lorraine Justice maps the evolution of Chinese design and innovation.
Camouflage is an adaptive logic of escape from photographic representation. In Hide and Seek, Hanna Rose Shell traces the evolution of camouflage as it developed in counterpoint to technological advances in photography, innovations in warfare, and as-yet-unsolved mysteries of natural history. Today camouflage is commonly thought of as a textile pattern of interlocking greens and browns.
From late medieval reenactments of the Deposition from the Cross to Sol Lewitt’s Buried Cube, Depositions is about taking down images and about images that anticipate being taken down.
The fact that Canada has a vibrant contemporary art scene is no secret to Canadians, but in other parts of the world, including the United States, this is not as recognized as it deserves to be. This wide-ranging, comprehensive survey of contemporary Canadian art, showcasing the work of artists from all across the country, will change that. These artists include those who have risen to international prominence--Michael Snow, Garry Neill Kennedy, and Marcel Dzama, among others—as well as many artists who have yet to be discovered outside Canada.
Nature, as both subject and object, has been repeatedly rejected and reclaimed by artists over the last half century. With the dislocation of disciplinary boundaries in visual culture, art that is engaged with nature has also forged connections with a new range of scientific, historical, and philosophical ideas. Developing technologies make our interventions into natural systems both increasingly refined and profound. Advances in biological and telecommunication technology continually modify the way we present ourselves.
“We didn’t think of our movies as underground or commercial or art or porn; they were a little of all of those, but ultimately they were just ‘our kind of movie.’” --Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol was a remarkably prolific filmmaker, creating more than 100 movies and nearly 500 of the film portraits known as Screen Tests. And yet relatively little has been written about this body of work. Warhol withdrew his films from circulation in the early 1970s and it was only after his death in 1987 that they began to be restored and shown again.
With the emergence of conceptual art in the mid-1960s, the traditional notion of the studio became at least partly obsolete. Other sites emerged for the generation of art, leading to the idea of “post-studio practice.” But the studio never went away; it was continually reinvented in response to new realities.
How did a small art college in Nova Scotia become the epicenter of art education--and to a large extent of the postmimimalist and conceptual art world itself--in the 1960s and 1970s? Like the unorthodox experiments and rich human resources that made Black Mountain College an improbable center of art a generation earlier, the activities and artists at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (aka NSCAD) in the 1970s redefined the means and methods of art education and the shape of art far beyond Halifax.
Over the past twenty years, an abundance of art forms have emerged that use aesthetics to affect social dynamics. These works are often produced by collectives or come out of a community context; they emphasize participation, dialogue, and action, and appear in situations ranging from theater to activism to urban planning to visual art to health care. Engaged with the texture of living, these art works often blur the line between art and life.
Jeff BrouwsWendy BurtonRiffs, revisions, knockoffs, and homages: artists pay tribute to Ed Ruscha’s famous photo-conceptual small books.
Hans BeltingAndrea BuddensiegMapping the new geography of the visual arts, from the explosion of biennials to the emerging art markets in Asia and the Middle East.
Close readings of ostensibly “blank” works—from unprinted pages to silent music—that point to a new understanding of media.
Not only does contemporary art have a history, but all works of art were once contemporary to the artist and culture that produced them.
The first sustained examination of a canonical and widely exhibited work by a leading artist of the former Yugoslavia.
An illustrated study that casts a new light on Oiticica’s most important work of “quasi-cinema” on its fortieth anniversary.
Jeff BrouwsWendy Burton
Hans BeltingAndrea Buddensieg
