Time (Whitechapel – Documents of Contemporary Art)

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Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. This anthology reconsiders crucial aspects of abstraction's resurgence in contemporary art, exploring three equally significant strategies explored in current practice: formal abstraction, economic abstraction, and social abstraction. In the 1960s, movements as diverse as Latin American neo-concretism, op art and “eccentric abstraction” disrupted the homogeneity, universality, and rationality associated with abstraction. These modes of abstraction opened up new forms of engagement with the phenomenal world as well as the possibility of diverse readings of the same forms, ranging from formalist and transcendental to socio-economic and conceptual. Part of the Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art.

Lucy Steeds is an editor of the Exhibition Histories series for Afterall Books and pathway leader in Exhibition Studies at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. This anthology provides a definitive historical context for documentary, exploring its roots in modernism and its critique under postmodernism; it surveys current theoretical thinking about documentary; and it examines a wide range of work by artists within, around or against documentary through their own writings and interviews. Julian Stallabrass teaches Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. His books include Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture (1996), High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art (1999) Internet Art: The Online Clash Between Culture and Commerce (2003) and Art Incorporated (2004). Amelia Groom is a London-based critic and curator who writes regularly for frieze and other publications. She held a teaching fellowship at the University of Sydney while she was writing her doctoral dissertation in the Art History and Theory department.Artists surveyed include Marina Abramović, Joseph Beuys, Tacita Dean, Walter De Maria, A K Dolven, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Jitka Hanzlová, Gary Hill, Susan Hiller, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor, Mike Kelley, Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein, Richard Long, Barnett Newman, Tony Oursler, Cornelia Parker, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo, Lorna Simpson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Fred Tomaselli, James Turrell, Luc Tuymans, Bill Viola and Zhang Huan. MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide. Artists surveyed include Rasheed Araeen, Art & Language, AA Bronson, Daniel Buren, Graciela Carnevale, Andrea Fraser, Piero Gilardi, Group Material, Richard Hamilton, Huang Rui, Laboratoire Agit-Art, Louise Lawler, Glenn Ligon, Konrad Lueg, Matsuzawa Yutaka, Palle Nielsen, OHO (Marko Pogagnik), Hélio Oiticica, Philippe Parreno, Victor Pasmore, Raqs Media Collective, Gerhard Richter, Ruangrupa, Situationist International, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Andy Warhol and Katsuhiro Yamaguchi.

The object is this thing that refuses to go away. Virtual reality, conceptual art and numerous philosophical and psychological traditions have sought to de-thingify the world, but the object, in its many forms, persists. This anthology surveys reappraisals of what constitutes the ‘objectness’ of production, with art as its focus. Among the topics it examines are the relation of the object to subjectivity; distinctions between objects and ‘things’; the significance of the object’s transition from inert mass to tool or artefact; and the meanings of the everyday in the found object, repetition in the replicated or multiple object, loss in the absent object, and abjection in the formless or degraded object. It also explores artistic positions that are anti-object; theories of the experimental, liminal or mental object; and the role of objects in performance. The object becomes a prism through which to re-read contemporary art and better understand its recent past.

This exciting collection is a pleasure to read from beginning to end...This is a welcome introduction to, and provocative rethinking of the object, in all its many formal and theoretical formations.' Terry R. Myers is a Chicago and Los Angeles-based writer, educator and independent curator. A regular contributor since 1988 to numerous international journals, including The Brooklyn Rail, Art Review, Parkett, and Modern Painters, he is the author of Mary Heilmann: Save the Last Dance for Me (Afterall Books, 2007). He is Associate Professor of Painting & Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition. Antony Hudek is Senior Lecturer at Liverpool School of Art and Design, Liverpool John Moores University. He is a translator of works by Jean-François Lyotard, a writer on contemporary art, independent curator and co-publisher of Occasional Papers. Writers include Marco Belpoliti, John Berger, Paul Crowther, Jacques Derrida, Okwui Enwezor, Jean Fisher, Barbara Claire Freeman, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Doreet LeVitte-Harten, Eleanor Heartney, Lynn M. Herbert, Luce Irigaray, Fredric Jameson, Lee Joon, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, Thomas McEvilley, Vijay Mishra, David Morgan, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Gene Ray, Robert Rosenblum, Philip Shaw, Marina Warner, Thomas Weiskel and Slavoj Žižek.

MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. Tracing its various emergences through the shadows of modernity, the circuitries of ritual media, and declarations of psychic self-defence, Magic deciphers the evolution of a ‘magical-critical’ thinking that productively complicates, contradicts and expands the boundaries of our increasingly weird present.Writers include Glenn Adamson, Elissa Auther, Reyner Banham, Jean Baudrillard, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Joan Key, Ulrich Lehmann, Sarat Maharaj, Karl Marx, Sadie Plant, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Roberts, Jenni Sorkin. Writers include Giorgio Agamben, Emily Apter, Karen Archey, St Augustine, Mieke Bal, Geoffrey Batchen, Hans Belting, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Henri Bergson, Daniel Birnbaum, Yve-Alain Bois, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Gilles Deleuze, Georges Didi-Huberman, Brian Dillon, Elena Filipovic, Elizabeth Grosz, Boris Groys, Rachel Kent, Rosalind Krauss, George Kubler, Quinn Latimer, Bruno Latour, Doreen Massey, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel Serres, Michel Siffre, Mark von Schlegell, Nancy Spector, Jan Verwoert and Dōgen Zenji. Dan Byrne-Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts, London. His published work includes Traces of Modernity (2012).