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"An extended, critical appraisal of the contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter"--

Revision of the author's thesis (doctoral)--Harvard University, 2014, under the title: Group Material and the 1980s: a materialist postmodernism.

Artists, art historians, and critics look at the legacies of feminism and critical theory in the work of women artists, more than thirty years after the beginning of the modern women's movement and Linda Nochlin's landmark essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"

The first English-language monograph devoted to the full oeuvre of Alexander Kluge, the prolific German filmmaker, television producer, digital entrepreneur, author, thinker, and public intellectual.Alexander Kluge (born 1932) is a German filmmaker, author, television producer, theorist, and digital entrepreneur. Since 1960, he has made fourteen feature films and twenty short films and has written more than thirty books—including three with Marxist philosopher Oskar Negt. His television production company has released more than 3,000 features, in which Kluge converses with real or fictional experts or creates thematic montages. He also maintains a website on which he reassembles segments from his film and television work. To call Kluge "prolific” would be an understatement. This is the first English-language monograph devoted to the full scope of Kluge's work, from his appearance on the cultural scene in the 1960s to his contributions to New German Cinema in the 1970s and early 1980s to his recent collaborations with such artists as Gerhard Richter. In Toward Fewer Images, Philipp Ekardt offers both close analyses of Kluge's individual works and sustained investigations of his overarching (and perpetual) production. Ekardt discusses Kluge's image theory and practice as developed across different media, and considers how, in relation to this theory, Kluge returns to, varies, expands, and modifies the practice of montage, including its recent manifestations in digital media—noting Kluge's counterintuitive claim that creating montages results in fewer images. Kluge's production, Ekardt argues, allows us to imagine a model of authorship and artistic production that does not rely on an accumulation of individual works over time but rather on a permanent activity of (temporalized) reworking and redifferentiation.

A new perspective on the enormously influential but insufficiently understood work of San Francisco-based artist Bruce Conner (1933-2008).In a career that spanned five decades, most of them spent in San Francisco, Bruce Conner (1933-2008) produced a unique body of work that refused to be contained by medium or style. Whether making found-footage films, hallucinatory ink-blot graphics, enigmatic collages, or assemblages from castoffs, Conner took up genres as quickly as he abandoned them. In this first book-length study of Conner's enormously influential but insufficiently understood career, Kevin Hatch explores Conner's work as well as his position on the geographical, cultural, and critical margins.Generously illustrated with many color images of Conner's works, Looking for Bruce Conner proceeds in roughly chronological fashion, from Conner's notorious assemblages (BLACK DAHLIA and RATBASTARD among them) through his experimental films (populated by images from what Conner called "the tremendous, fantastic movies going in my head from all the scenes I'd seen”), his little-known graphic work, and his collage and inkblot drawings.

Imagining a new self equal to the new art of modernism; primordial and futuristic fictions of origin in the work of Guaguin, Picasso, F. T. Marinetti, Max Ernst, and others.How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or subject equal to them? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this question through the works and writings of such key modernists as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst. These diverse figures were all fascinated by fictions of origin, either primordial and tribal or futuristic and technological. In this way, Foster argues, two forms came to dominate modernist art above all others: the primitive and the machine. Foster begins with the primitivist fantasies of Gauguin and Picasso, which he examines through the Freudian lens of the primal scene. He then turns to the purist obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos, who abhorred all things primitive. Next Foster considers the technophilic subjects propounded by the futurist Marinetti and the vorticist Lewis. These "new egos" are further contrasted with the "bachelor machines" proposed by the dadaist Ernst. Foster also explores extrapolations from the art of the mentally ill in the aesthetic models of Ernst, Paul Klee, and Jean Dubuffet, as well as manipulations of the female body in the surrealist photography of Brassai, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer. Finally, he examines the impulse to dissolve the conventions of art altogether in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the scatter pieces of Robert Morris, and the earthworks of Robert Smithson, and traces the evocation of lost objects of desire in sculptural work from Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti to Robert Gober. Although its title is drawn from Freud, Prosthetic Gods does not impose psychoanalytic theory on modernist art; rather, it sets the two into critical relation and scans the greater historical field that they share.

The paradox at the heart of the return to realism in the interwar years, as seen in work by Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, and others.

How the history of art begins with the myth of the barbarian invasion—the romantic fragmentation of classical eternity.The history of art, argues Éric Michaud, begins with the romantic myth of the barbarian invasions. Viewed from the nineteenth century, the Germanic-led invasions of the Roman Empire in the fifth century became the gateway to modernity, seen not as a catastrophe but as a release from a period of stagnation, renewing Roman culture with fresh, northern blood—and with new art that was anti-Roman and anticlassical. Artifacts of art from then on would be considered as the natural product of "races” and "peoples” rather than the creation of individuals. The myth of the barbarian invasions achieved the fragmentation of classical eternity.This narrative, Michaud explains, inseparable from the formation of nation states and the rise of nationalism in Europe, was based on the dual premise of the homogeneity and continuity of peoples. Local and historical particularities became weapons aimed at classicism's universalism. The history of art linked its objects with racial groups—denouncing or praising certain qualities as "Latin” or "Germanic.” Thus the predominance of linear elements was thought to betray a southern origin, and the "painterly” a Germanic or northern source. Even today, Michaud points out, it is said that art best embodies the genius of peoples. In the globalized contemporary art market, the ethnic provenance of works—categorized, for example, as "African American,” "Latino,” or "Native American”—creates added value. The market displays the same competition among "races” that was present at the foundation of art history as a discipline.

Slavoj Zizek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements that are sweeping Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. Zizek inverts current pedagogical strategies to explain the difficult philosophical underpinnings of the French theoretician and practician who revolutionized our view of psychoanalysis. He approaches Lacan through the motifs and works of contemporary popular culture, from Hitchcock's Vertigo to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, from McCullough's An Indecent Obsession to Romero's Return of the Living Dead—a strategy of "looking awry" that recalls the exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan.Zizek discovers fundamental Lacanian categories the triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, the object small a, the opposition of drive and desire, the split subject—at work in horror fiction, in detective thrillers, in romances, in the mass media's perception of ecological crisis, and, above all, in Alfred Hitchcock's films. The playfulness of Zizek's text, however, is entirely different from that associated with the deconstructive approach made famous by Derrida. By clarifying what Lacan is saying as well as what he is not saying, Zizek is uniquely able to distinguish Lacan from the poststructuralists who so often claim him.

The first collection of Annette Michelson's influential writings on film, with essays on work by Marcel Duchamp, Maya Deren, Hollis Frampton, Martha Rosler, and others.The celebrated critic and film scholar Annette Michelson saw the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s as radically redefining and extending the Modernist tradition of painting and sculpture, and in essays that were as engaging as they were influential and as lucid as they were learned, she set out to demonstrate the importance of the underappreciated medium of film. On the Eve of the Future collects more than thirty years' worth of those essays, focusing on her most relevant engagements with avant-garde production in experimental cinema, particularly with the movement known as American Independent Cinema.This volume includes the first critical essay on Marcel Duchamp's film Anemic Cinema, the first investigation into Joseph Cornell's filmic practices, and the first major explorations of Michael Snow. It offers an important essay on Maya Deren, whose work was central to that era of renewal and reinvention, seminal critiques of Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, and Harry Smith, and overviews of Independent Cinema. Gathered here for the first time, these texts demonstrate Michelson's pervasive influence as a writer and thinker and her role in the establishment of cinema studies as an academic field. The postwar generation of Independents worked to develop radically new terms, techniques, and strategies of production and distribution. Michelson shows that the fresh new forms they created from the legacy of Modernism became the basis of new forms of spectatorship and cinematic pleasure.

How a group of artists and theorists turned to exhibition design as the only medium capable of synthesizing high and low in postwar culture.In 1950s London, a cadre of young artists, theorists, and popular culture aficionados known as the Independent Group (IG) came together for a series of pressing meetings. Their humble goal: to reimagine the structure of postwar culture by situating art in the midst of military-industrial technologies and pop pleasures. In this book, Kevin Lotery argues that the IG turned to the cross-disciplinary form of exhibition design as the only medium capable of getting the measure of these forces, the only technique that could integrate high and low, aesthetic and scientific, and redesign them in turn. At the heart of this story are the IG's most unruly members, including artists Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, and Eduardo Paolozzi; architects Alison and Peter Smithson; and critics Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham. To these upstarts, art was no more privileged an activity than the streamlining of a helicopter blade or the screening of the latest cinema spectacle. In place of the old cultural hierarchies, they saw a continuum that Alloway termed "the long front of culture.” Only exhibition making could redirect this "long front” toward something genuinely, startlingly new. Lotery shows that the IG's exhibitions sought out temporary interfaces with technological invention and scientific research in a search for the form of the new itself. The IG exhibitions he examines drew on biological morphogenesis, anthropology and photography, human-machine prosthetics, American pop, abstraction, and theories of play. The IG is often described as the precursor to the pop art of the 1960s. Lotery shows that it was much more, as entangled with the histories of science, technology, and design as with the dialectics of modern art and mass culture

How global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present, combating modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism.If European modernism was premised on the new—on surpassing the past, often by assigning it to the "traditional” societies of the Global South—global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present. In this account of what globalization means for contemporary art, David Joselit argues that the creative use of tradition by artists from around the world serves as a means of combatting modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism. Modernism claimed to live in the future and relegated the rest of the world to the past. Global contemporary art shatters this myth by reactivating various forms of heritage—from literati ink painting in China to Aboriginal painting in Australia—in order to propose new and different futures. Joselit analyzes not only how heritage becomes contemporary through the practice of individual artists but also how a cultural infrastructure of museums, biennials, and art fairs worldwide has emerged as a means of generating economic value, attracting capital and tourist dollars.Joselit traces three distinct forms of modernism that developed outside the West, in opposition to Euro-American modernism: postcolonial, socialist realism, and the underground. He argues that these modern genealogies are synchronized with one another and with Western modernism to produce global contemporary art. Joselit discusses curation and what he terms "the curatorial episteme,” which, through its acts of framing or curating, can become a means of recalibrating hierarchies of knowledge—and can contribute to the dual projects of decolonization and deimperialization.