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An examination of a work that captures the spirit of the 1980s—commodification, seduction, and political inactivity.In Jeff Koons's One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985), a Spalding basketball floats in the center of a glass tank that stands on a four-legged black metal structure. It has been called one of the defining works of the 1980s—but also described (by such critics as Craig Owens, Rosalind Krauss, and Hal Foster) as "an endgame,” "misleading,” and "repulsive.” The work presents what the artist called "the ultimate state of being”—neither death nor life but the absence of change. It captured a spirit of the time, characterized by commodification, seduction, and political inactivity. Its stillness embodied the opposite of social revolution. But the "total equilibrium” of the work is actually temporary. For purely physical reasons, the equilibrium is lost every six months and must be reset. In this extended essay on Koons's famous work, Michael Archer puts One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank in an art historical framework, describing its initial exhibition at International With Monument in New York and related issues of media, commercialism, and class. He discusses the wider context of the 1980s art world, in which a renewed attention to painting practices met the legacy of Pop and appropriation art—setting the stage for the negative critical reception Koons's artwork first received. Archer goes on to consider sport as celebrity-maker and industry; the physical science of equilibrium; and the implications of the fact that the equilibrium of One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank is indeed total—but temporary.

A richly illustrated survey of Alfredo Jaar s Studies on Happiness (1979 1981) and its deep political stakes in the historical context of Chile s neoliberal transition.

An illustrated examination of Donald Rodney’s seminal digital media work Autoicon (1997–2000).Donald Rodney's Autoicon, a work originally produced as both a website and CD-ROM, was conceived by the artist in the mid-1990s but not completed until two years after his death in 1998. Referencing Jeremy Bentham’s infamous nineteenth-century "Auto-Icon," the work proposes an extension of the personhood and presence of Rodney, while critically challenging dominant conceptions of the self, the body, and historicity. Grounded in a partial collection of medical documents that constitute biomedicine’s attempts to comprehensively "know" and maintain Rodney’s body during his lifelong experience of sickle-cell aneamia, Autoicon pursues the artist’s address, from the mid-1980s onward, of the British social and institutional body’s cellular composition through racialized, biopolitical power. Autoicon consists of a Java-based AI and neural network that engages the user in text-based "chat," and provides responses by drawing from a dense body of "data points" related to Rodney and his work, including documentation of artworks, medical records, interviews, images, notes, and video. Pulling both from this internal archive and the external archive of the Internet, a "montage machine" composes constantly mutating images according to a rule-based system established around Rodney’s working process. In this One Work edition, curator Richard Birkett traces the distinct contemporary presence of Autoicon, and the ideas and relations that emerged around its conception before and after Rodney’s death, particularly linking the work to the artist’s seminal 1997 exhibition 9 Night in Eldorado. Birkett addresses Autoicon as both an index of entangled social and material relations around Rodney—a form of dispersed memory—and a vector of critical creative production that continues to resonate with contemporary artistic practices and radical thought. While attuned to late twentieth century discourse around the body’s dissolution into the "virtual" and the technological potential for extending consciousness, in its content and structure Autoicon locates these discourses of the human and posthuman in relation to the durable productive forces of post-Enlightenment racialization and ableism. The workings of the mind that Autoicon presents are intrinsically tied to Rodney’s wider use in his work of bodily matter, and genealogically bound to a Black history of displacement, dispossession, and resistance experienced physiologically, socially, and familially by the artist. Autoicon offers up a counter-manifestation of the subject as formed and multiplied through temporal disjuncture, affectability and acts of preservation, care, and collectivity.

A nuanced reading of an artwork that explores a place, transitory and pastoral, where childhood might be lived and imagined differently

An illustrated examination of a work-a Warhol that isn't by Warhol-that embodies a shift in attitudes about artistic authorship and originality.

An illustrated examination of one of Hirschhorn's "precarious" monuments, now dismantled.

An examination of the complex and subtle world on display in Rodney Graham's film of an LSD-inflected bicycle ride.

An examination of a major 1992 installation by a pioneer of site-specific experimentation.

An illustrated study that casts a new light on Oiticica's most important work of "quasi-cinema" on its fortieth anniversary.

The first sustained examination of a canonical and widely exhibited work by a leading artist of the former Yugoslavia.

An examination of Pierre Huyghe''s post-apocalyptic Untitled (Human Mask), which asks whether our human future may be one of remnants and mimicry.Pierre Huyghe''s 2014 film Untitled (Human Mask) combines images of a post-apocalyptic world (actual footage of deserted streets close to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of March 2011) with a haunting scene of a monkey working in an empty restaurant wearing a human mask and a wig. She''s a girl! The flat, emotionless almost automaton state of the mask and the artificial glossy hair topped even with a child''s bow, suggests that she, the monkey, might be a character from Japanese Noh theatre. But there''s no music. Instead Huyghe''s film evinces the terrifying possibility that our own, human, future might just be one of remnants and mimicry; that the deserted streets of Fukushima and the monkey''s recognizable, alienating chimeric performance is all that might survive us. Untitled (Human Mask) presents a pluperfect world with extinction the endgame for a civilization that cared little for the present, dreaming only of a future that inevitably and necessarily could not include it.

An illustrated examination of a 1995 work by Mike Kelley that marked a significant change in his work.

A critical close-up of Warhol's famous film and its cultural impact

An illustrated discussion of Fischli and Weiss's famous film The Way Things Go, marking the twentieth anniversary of its first screening, explores why this captivating work continues to fascinate viewers.

A richly illustrated study of Marc Chaimowicz's groundbreaking 1972 post-Pop installation-performance piece Celebration? Realife.

An extended illustrated account of the Hollis Frampton film that marks critical moment in art history when photography meets filmmaking.

A critical examination of Dara Birnbaum's action-packed and riveting video of Wonder Woman's transformations.

An illustrated study of Mary Heilmann's seductive 1979 abstract painting in hot pink and black, Save the Last Dance for Me.

A year after Richard Prince's Untitled (cowboy) photograph set a record for the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction, a study of a work from Richard Prince's series of Untitled (couples) considers the long history of the image and Prince as a pioneer of the approproated image.

Drawing on unpublished documents and oral histories, an illustrated examination of an iconic artwork of an artist who has made a lifework of tactical evasion.

An examination of one of Walker Evans's iconic photographs of the Great Depression.