“FRANÇOIS MORELLET’S CONCRETE ART OF THE 1950s”

“When François Morellet abandoned figurative paitning, sometime between 1949 and 1950, he was faced with the problem of what to design, what to render, and what the make. He also began to ask what might transpire as he left mimesis behind.”

in François Morellet, ed. Béatrice Gross, Yale University Press, 2019 | Essay

“EDWARD KRASINSKI’S DYNAMIC LINE”

“Krasinski himself often insisted that there was an ‘inner dynamic’ to his art works, which endowed them with vitality and an open-endedness that could only be completed by the beholder. Yes this dynamisim is mostly overlooked by observers of his oeuvre who find it easier to locate that body of work within the context of constructivism, or surrealism, or conceptual art.”

in Edward Krasinski: Spears, Warsaw, Poland, Foksal Gallery Foundation, 2019 | Essay

“‘LIKE THE SKIN OF A WHALE’: THE PLURI-SENSORIAL ART OF LYGIA PAGE”

“When sometime around 1950 Lygia Pape began to identify as a visual artist, she was quickly caught up in the fascination with geometric abstraction that had recently gripped the most ambitious elements of Brazil’s art scene. But over the course of her long career, Pape’s investigation of space and perception was to bring her to an art that was focused not on optical but on haptic visuality, expressed in pluri-sensorial works that mobilize and appeal to the spectator’s participatory and embodied experience.”

in Lygia Pape, ed. Olivier Renaud-Clément, New York, Hauser & Wirth, 2018 | Essay

“SCULPTURE PALIMPSETS: MICHAEL ASHER IN MÜNSTER”

“Like Borges’s Mendard, Michael Asher’s decision to exhibit the same make and model of a modest travel trailer unmoored in the same sites and serial order in four contiguous iterations of the decennial exhibition Skulptur Project (1977, 1987, 1997 and 2007) serves as a salutary reminder of the spuriousness of the original and copy binary…His always-meticulous interventions encouraged spectators to reconsider the ways they thought about art, including how and why they valued it and what they valued it for.”

in Out of Time, Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017, 2016 | Essay

“TO FIND, TO CREATE, TO REVEAL: TORRES-GARCÍA AND THE MODELS OF INVENTION IN MID-1940S RIO DE LA PLATA”

“For Torres-García, invention was essential to a definition of art practice different from those that defined art solely in terms of its imitative or manifest (and sensual) properties, such as those that asserted a relationship between mimeticism and expressionism — between the artwork and the artist’s perception and feelings. Instead, Torres-García started from the belief that what generates aesthetic experience is a fusion of emphatic and nonsensical properties, a fusion performed in order to find essential concepts and experiences.”

in Joaquín Torres-Garcia: The Arcadian Modern, Museum of Modern Art, 2015 | Essay

“LIFE MODELS”

What kind of role does art actually play in society? From the Bauhaus to Thomas Hirschhorn, and from The Yes Men to Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Alberro asks whether art circulates beyond the sphere of the art world.

Frieze, 148 June/July/August 2012 | Article

“PICTURING RELATIONS: IMAGES, TEXTS AND SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT IN THE WORK OF BARBARA KRUGER”

“Barbara Kruger’s work is neither moralistic nor judgmental. Rather, it is observational — it observes the complexities of cultural codes. These codes determine an array of social phenomena, including not only the dynamics of reciprocity, kindness, and benevolence but also those of cruelty, humiliation, and oppression. The work questions what it means to construct those codes.”

in Barbara Kruger, Rizzoli, 2010 | Essay

“INSTITUTIONS, CRITIQUE, AND INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE”

“Like the institutions of the university and the library or public archive, the art institution was advanced by Enlightenment philosophy as dualistic. The aesthetic, discursively realized in salons and museums through the process of critique, was coupled with a promise: the production of public exchange, of a public sphere, of a public subject. It also functioned as a form of self-imagining, as an integral element in the constitution of bourgeois identity.”

in Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, MIT Press, 2009 | Introduction

“PERIODISING CONTEMPORARY ART”

“By summoning the concept of a hegemonic formation, I mean to signal that I do not think that the consolidation of the contemporary is just a question of periodisation. I use periodisation as a model to be able to think the whole social formation, a model that allows us to think the society in its totality. But I use the concept of hegemony as a tool to think about totality and difference at the same time: hegemony as an ensemble of economic, political, cultural, and ideological practices that are organised in a complex way, but still lie within a larger overdetermining structure of domination.”

in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, Convergence, Proceedings of the 32nd Congress of the International Committee for the History of Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson, Melbourne University Press, 2009 | Essay

“BEAUTY KNOWS NO PAIN”

“To put it polemically…recent attempts to revalidate the experience of the beautiful are, first, driven by intensely nostalgic impulses; they promote ahistorical views of the past in the hope of returning us to a state uncoiled by insights and advances made in a wide range of theoretical and discursive practices, including critical theory, sociology, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis.”

Art Journal, 63:2, 2004 | Article

“THE BIG PICTURE: ANDREAS GURSKY’S BIG PICTURE”

Cerebral seer or cynical celebrant? How does the art of Andreas Gursky stand in relation to the globalizing, late-phase-consumerist moment his spectacular photographs reflect, refract, and reconstitute? In anticipation of the German artist’s upcoming retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, his first in the U.S., Katy Siegel and Alex Alberro consider the oeuvre and come up with very different answers.

Artforum International, 39:5, 2001 | Essay

“RECONSIDERING CONCEPTUAL ART, 1966-1977”

“From its inception, and continuing to this very day, conceptual art has been entangled in controversy by those who stake claims to its foundational moment. This phenomenon is highly paradoxical given that, as with avant-garde practice in general, the emergence of conceptual art was the result of complicated processes of selection, fusion, and rejection of antecedent forms and strategies.”

in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, MIT Press, 1999 | Introduction

“THE TURN OF THE SCREW: DANIEL BUREN, DAN FLAVIN, AND THE SIXTH INTERNATIONAL GUGGENHEIM INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION”

“In this increasingly reactionary environment the idea of avant-garde art once again became emblematic of the forces threatening the safety of the United States. In the process of reaffirming traditional culture, the new conservatism targeted its attack not only on avant-garde art and artists, but also, as conservatives had done int he decade following World War II, on the sophisticated liberals who were promoting the idea of avant-garde culture.”

October, 80, 1997 | Article