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This book examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas. The book traces key strategies in contemporary art to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics. The central concept is a reversal of the qualitative assessment made by artist and theorist Joseph Kosuth in 1969. The book overviews the 1960s-1970s shift from disciplinary-based Conceptual Art to an interdisciplinary conceptualism, crediting the influence of contemporaneous politics dominated by identity and issue-based politics. It offers a survey of Adrian Piper's early work, her analytic conceptual investigations, and her transition to a synthetic mode of working with explicit political reference. The book explores how Conceptual Art is political art, analysing several works by synthetic proposition artists. It then surveys several key 1980s events and exhibitions before taking in depth the 1993 Whitney Biennial as its central case study for understanding the debates of the 1980s and the 1990s. Examining the ways in which Hans Haacke's work referenced political subject matter, simultaneously changing the conception of the processes and roles of art-making and art, the book argues against critics who regarded his work to be "about" politics. It also looks at the works of Charles Gaines, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, and Andrea Fraser.
political referent in debate backdrop to understanding the curatorial agenda and reception of the 1993 Whitney Biennial for American Art, as well as a comprehensive examination of the exhibition contributions of Daniel Joseph Martinez, Andrea Fraser, and Lorna Simpson. The 1993 Biennial provides an ideal case study to examine the representation of socio-political issues in art, as it consolidated perspectives on two key terms for the later part of the twentieth century: identity politics and multiculturalism. As detailed in the Introduction and Chapter 1, I define
, presented at the Whitney Biennial DAVIDSON Plates (colour).indd 2 21/11/2019 13:23 6 Patty Chang, Shangri-La, 2005, video still, mirrored mountain on truck 7 Patty Chang, Shangri-La, 2005, video still, monks entering oxygen pod DAVIDSON Plates (colour).indd 3 21/11/2019 13:23 8 Patty Chang, Shangri-La, 2005, video still, cake decorated with mountains and pod 9 Patty Chang and David Kelley, Shangri-La, 2005, video, staged in Taiwanese-style wedding photography DAVIDSON Plates (colour).indd 4 21/11/2019 13:23 10 Patty Chang, The Product Love (Die Ware Liebe
/discursive circumstances. John Rajchman, ed., The Identity in Question (New York: Routledge, 1995). The October roundtable about the 1993 Whitney Biennial of American Art, addressed in Chapter 4, is another example where a form/content division guided the debate around political art. For a more recent reassessment see: Beth Hinderliter et al., eds., Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 25 “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of
–73; Elisabeth Sussman, ‘Then and Now: Whitney Biennial 1993’, 74–9; Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, ‘Ordering the Universe: Documenta II and the Apotheosis of the Occidental Gaze’, 80–9; and Reesa Greenberg, ‘Identity Exhibitions: From Magiciens de la terre to Documenta II’, 90–4. 35 36 Productive failure 43 Johanne Lamoureux, ‘From Form to Platform: The Politics of Representation and the Representation of Politics’, Art Journal (2005), 64–73. The artist as a special subject (in the extreme case as conflated with god) can be traced back at least to Giorgio Vasari’s 1568
Jenny Holzer were very well received by scholars including Craig Owens, Douglas Crimp, or Hal Foster.40 However, while the significance of these artists’ contribution was fully articulated, it was positioned as pioneering rather than part of a longer continuum, and was rarely acknowledged as belonging to the broader thrust of identity politics’ influence. By the mid-1990s, the response to the 1993 Whitney Biennial, addressed in depth in Chapter 4, made evident that practitioners across the political and vocational spectrum of the art field, saw identity politics as
Contemporary Art in New York (1991), which included African artists’ work contextualized ‘from the African perspective;’27 Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives at the Canadian Museum of Civilization with First Nations and Inuit artists (1992); Land, Spirit, Power, an exhibition of First Nations artists at the National Gallery of Canada (1992); and the nowinfamous Whitney Biennial in New York (1993). All of these curatorial efforts wrestled with the complexity of trying to authentically represent diverse artists’ interests and artworks inside a network of global art
About Larry: 2002 Whitney Biennial’, Artforum 40, no. 9 (2002): 162. 20 Thomas McEvilley, William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, ‘Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief: “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art” at the Museum of Modern Art’, Artforum 23 (1984): 59. See Chapter 2, note 10. 21 This could be read as an exoticization of the Other but again in my experience the abstraction of Dean’s work prevents these identifications from being stable. Elisabeth Kley, ‘Mystical Cosmetics: Oliver Herring, Stephen Dean, Berni Searle’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, no. 72 (2002): 103
, Zhang explains the objective of his ‘staged actions’ as aiming to ‘explore migration and relocation, reinscripted meanings, and anxieties about shifting cultural boundaries.’5 The huayi ethnic Chinese who lives outside of China is different from the huaqiao who is staying elsewhere temporarily. Zhang went on to emphasize the personal nature of the performance by adopting the new title, My America, for the series of works initiated by Hard to Acclimatize, including My New York for the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Zhang’s exploration of different forms of ‘acclimatization
attack. Comité invisible, Now, trans. Robert Hurley (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2017). 69 Maurizio Lazzarato, Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work , trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e) and the Whitney Biennial, 2014) , 6. See also Bernard Marcadé, Laisser pisser le mérinos: la paresse de Marcel Duchamp (Paris: L’Échoppe, 2006) ; and Helen Molesworth, ‘Work Avoidance: The Everyday Life of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades’, Art