Fred Forest's Utopia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael F. Leruth
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Second Life ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Art World ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Modus Operandi ◽  
Interactive Communication ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Internet Art ◽  
The 1960S

This book introduces readers to the iconoclastic work of the French media artist Fred Forest. A pioneer in the fields of video art in the 1960s and internet art in the 1990s, and cofounder of the Sociological Art Collective (1974) and the Aesthetics of Communication International Group (1983), Forest is best known as an ironic media hijacker and tinkerer of unconventional interfaces and alternative platforms for interactive communication that are accessible to the general public outside the exclusive precincts of the art world. He has also made headlines as an outspoken critic of the French contemporary art establishment, most famously by suing the Centre Pompidou in 1994 over its opaque acquisitions practices. This book surveys Forest’s work from the late 1960s to the present with particular emphasis on his prankster modus operandi, his advocacy of an existentially relevant form of counter-contemporary art―or “invisible system-art”―based on the principle of metacommunication (i.e., tasked with exploring the “immanent realities” of the virtual territory in which modern electronic communication takes place), his innovative “social” and “relational” use of a wide range of media from newspapers to Second Life, his attention-grabbing public interventions, and the unusual utopian dimension of his work. Never a hot commodity in the art world, Forest’s work has nonetheless garnered the attention and appreciation of a wide range of prominent intellectuals, critics, curators, technology innovators, and fellow artists including Marshall McLuhan, Edgar Morin, Vilém Flusser, Abraham Moles, Jean Duvignaud, Paul Virilio, Pierre Lévy, Pierre Restany, Frank Popper, Harald Szeeman, Robert C. Morgan, Vinton Cerf, Roy Ascott, and Eduardo Kac.

Le fonti, i metodi e le narrazioni della storia della videoarte in Italia negli anni Settanta

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Parola
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Selection For ◽  
The Many ◽  
Art And Architecture ◽  
Selection Of

This essay derives from the primary need to make order between direct and indirect sources available for the reconstruction of the history of video art in Italy in the seventies. In fact, during the researches for the Ph.D. thesis it became clear that in most cases it is difficult to define, in terms of facts, which of the different historiographies should be taken into consideration to deepen the study of video art in Italy. Beyond legitimate differences of perspectives and methods, historiographical narratives all share similar issues and narrative structure. The first intention of the essay is, therefore, to compare the different historiographic narratives on Italian video art of the seventies, verifying their genealogy, the sources used and the accuracy of the narrated facts. For the selection of the corpus, it was decided to analyze in particular monographic volumes dealing with the history of the origins of video art in Italy. The aim was, in fact, to get a wide range of types of "narrations", as in the case of contemporary art and architecture magazines, which are examined in the second part of the essay. After the selection, for an analytical and comparative study of the various historiography, the essay focuses only on the Terza Biennale Internazionale della Giovane Pittura. Gennaio ’70. Comportamenti, oggetti e mediazioni (Third International Biennial of Young Painting. January '70. Behaviors, Objects and Mediations, 1970, Bologna), the exhibition which - after Lucio Fontana's pioneering experiments - is said to be the first sign of the arrival of videotape in Italy (called at the time videorecording), curated by Renato Barilli, Tommaso Trini, Andrea Emiliani and Maurizio Calvesi. The narration given so far of this exhibition appeared more mythological than historical and could be compared structurally to that of the many numerous beginnings that historiographyies on international video art identify as ‘first’ and ‘generative’. In the first part of the essay the 'facts' related to Gennaio ’70, as narrated by historiography on video art, are compared. In the second part the survey is carried out through some of the direct sources identified during the research, with the aim of answering to questions raised by the comparison between historiographies. Concluding, it is important to underline that the tapes containing the videos transmitted have not been found and seem to have disappeared since the ending of the exhibition. Nevertheless, the deepening of the works and documentation transmitted during the exhibition is possible thanks to other types of sources which give us many valuable information regarding video techniques and practices at the beginning of 1970 in Italy.

Nervous Systems

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Systems Thinking ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Nervous Systems ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Global Logistics ◽  
Contemporary Artists

The contributors to Nervous Systems reassess contemporary artists' and critics' engagement with social, political, biological, and other systems as a set of complex and relational parts: an approach commonly known as systems thinking. Demonstrating the continuing relevance of systems aesthetics within contemporary art, the contributors highlight the ways that artists adopt systems thinking to address political, social, and ecological anxieties. They cover a wide range of artists and topics, from the performances of the Argentinian collective the Rosario Group and the grid drawings of Charles Gaines to the video art of Singaporean artist Charles Lim and the mapping of global logistics infrastructures by contemporary artists like Hito Steyerl and Christoph Büchel. Together, the essays offer an expanded understanding of systems aesthetics in ways that affirm its importance beyond technological applications detached from cultural contexts. Contributors. Cristina Albu, Amanda Boetzkes, Brianne Cohen, Kris Cohen, Jaimey Hamilton Faris, Christine Filippone, Johanna Gosse, Francis Halsall, Judith Rodenbeck, Dawna Schuld, Luke Skrebowski, Timothy Stott, John Tyson

Contemporary Art

Art History ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Smith
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Art World ◽  
Local Language ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Public Media ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many

As an art-critical or historical category––one that might designate a style of art, a tendency among others, or a period in the history of art––“contemporary art” is relatively recent. In art world discourse throughout the world, it appears in bursts of special usage in the 1920s and 1930s, and again during the 1960s, but it remains subsidiary to terms––such as “modern art,” “modernism,” and, after 1970, “postmodernism”––that highlight art’s close but contested relationships to social and cultural modernity. “Contemporary art” achieves a strong sense, and habitual capitalization, only in the 1980s. Subsequently, usage grew rapidly, to become ubiquitous by 2000. Contemporary art is now the undisputed name for today’s art in professional contexts and enjoys widespread resonance in public media and popular speech. Yet, its valiance for any of the usual art-critical and historical purposes remains contested and uncertain. To fill in this empty signifier by establishing the content of this category is the concern of a growing number of early-21st-century publications. This article will survey these developments in historical sequence. Although it will be shown that use of the term “contemporary art” as a referent has a two-hundred-year record, as an art-historical field, contemporary art is so recent, and in such volatile formation, that general surveys of the type now common for earlier periods in the history of art are just beginning to appear. To date, only one art-historiographical essay has been attempted. Listed within Contemporary Art Becomes a Field, this essay (“The State of Art History: Contemporary Art” (Art Bulletin 92.4 [2010]: 366–383; Smith 2010, cited under Historiography) is by the present author and forms the conceptual basis of this article. Contemporary art’s deep immersion in the art market and auction system is profiled in the separate Oxford Bibliographies article Art Markets and Auction. This article does not include any of the many thousands of books, catalogues, and essays that are monographic studies of individual contemporary artists, because it would be invidious to select a small number. For similar reasons, entries on journals, websites, and blogs are omitted. A select listing of them may be found in Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011; Smith 2011 cited under Surveys). Books on art movements are not to be found because contemporary art, unlike modern art, has no movements in the same art-historical sense. It consists of currents, tendencies, relationships, concerns, and interests and is the product of a complex condition in which different senses of history are coming into play. With regret, this article confines itself to publications in English, the international language of the contemporary art world. This fact obscures the importance and valiance of certain local-language publications, even though many key texts were issued simultaneously both in the local language and English, and many others have subsequently been translated. In acknowledgment of this lacuna, a subsection on Primary Documents has been included.

scholarly journals What Does Developing a Ranking of Leading Contemporary Art Galleries Unveil about the Importance of the National Factor? An Analysis of Art Basel Art Fair

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
Alain Quemin
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Art Market ◽  
Art World ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Art Galleries ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact

Since the French sociologist Raymonde Moulin developed her pioneering research in the 1960s, the art market has been continuously studied by social scientists. For several years now, art market studies have rapidly proliferated. Collectors and collections, though, have tended to draw more attention than professionals and dealers, which remain less analyzed. In this article, we intend to study the impact of the national factor on the gallery sector by using a ranking of the leading contemporary art galleries in the world that we ourselves developed. Having analyzed the construction of the most significant rankings in the art world that all focus entirely or partly on artists, we decided to create one for contemporary art galleries. The methodology that we used will be presented in the first part of the article. In its second part, we will analyze the territorial/national dimension that can be identified in the most important art fair in the world, Art Basel. We will comment on what is revealed by our ranking in terms of countries of origin associated with their share and diverse positions in the ranking. Finally, we will address the contribution that our ranking brings to the knowledge of so-called globalization.

6. Fracture

2020 ◽  
pp. 130-148
Author(s):  
Julian Stallabrass
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
Art World ◽  
Global Event ◽  
Activist Art ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Event Driven ◽  
Internet Art ◽  
Technological Means

‘Fracture’ explains that in contemporary art, a profound rift has opened up between the marketized art directed at the super-rich, extravagantly expensive, and often familiarly standardized, and a world of artistic social activism. The restless, global, event-driven art world has become ever more environmentally damaging. It is thus unsurprising that art fairs have occasionally been the site of protest. One response was found in increasingly activist art practices of online art or Internet art. In digital art, the use of new technological means to make and distribute work came into conflict with the craft-based practice, patronage, and elitism of the art world.

Contemporary Asian American Art

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Kina
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
American Art ◽  
Video Art ◽  
War Trauma ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
The 1960S

Contemporary Asian American art includes artworks created by artists of Asian heritage in the Americas as well as contemporary works that engage with Asian American or Asian diasporic communities, history, aesthetics, politics, theory, and popular culture. This includes Modern and Postmodern works created in the post-World War II era to the present. Asian American art is closely tied to the birth of the Asian American movement of the 1960s and 70s as well as a wide range of art movements of the same time period from minimalism, to community murals, to the birth of video art, to international conceptual movements such as Fluxus. “Asian American art” is associated with identity based works and began to be institutionalized during the multicultural era of the 1980–1990s. From the early 2000s onwards, Asian American art has shifted to more transnational framework but remains centered on issues of representation, recovery, reclaiming, recuperation, and decolonization of marginalized bodies, histories, and memories. Common themes in Asian American art include narratives of immigration, migration, war, trauma, labor, race and ethnicity, assimilation, dislocation, countering stereotypes, and interrogating histories of colonization and U.S. imperialism.

scholarly journals Meanwhile in China … Miao Ying and the Rise of Chinternet Ugly

ARTMargins ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-57
Author(s):  
Ros Holmes
Keyword(s):  
World Wide Web ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Art World ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Vernacular Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Internet Art ◽  
Online Culture

This article examines a series of internet artworks by the artist Miao Ying (b. 1985). Contextualizing her digital collages in relation to China's online culture and media spheres, it situates the contemporary art world's engagement with internet art in relation to anti-aesthetics and the rise of what has been termed Internet ugly. Interrogating the assumption that internet art emerging from China can only belatedly repeat works of Euro-American precedent, it argues that Miao's work presents a dramatic reframing of online censorship, consumerism and the unique aspects of vernacular culture that have emerged within China's online realm. Demonstrating a distinctly self-conscious celebration of what has often disparagingly been labeled The Chinternet, Meanwhile in China can be seen to emerge out of the broader contradictions of internet art practices that parody the relationships between The Chinternet and the World Wide Web, global capitalism and Shanzhai [fake or pirated] aesthetics, online propaganda and media democracy, and the art market's relationship to the virtual economies of an art world online.

scholarly journals GALERI SENI RUPA KIWARI DI SURAKARTA

Arsitektura ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Radityo Aryanto ◽  
Rachmadi Nugroho ◽  
Mohamad Muqoffa
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Environmental Art ◽  
Art World ◽  
Art Gallery ◽  
Art Installation ◽  
Display Systems

<p><em>Designing a Contemporary Art Gallery is considered by the rapid development of the art world, and contemporary art is part of the development which has great potential and practice in Surakarta, but the lack of  facilities such as a gallery to display contemporary art. The  purpose to be achieved is to design a gallery which is able to accommodate contemporary art and its development, to increase the appreciation of contemporary art, the quality of the artists, and the produced works of art. The method to be used is a method of architectural design. The main issues to be solved are: to choose and design the site as required location, the land use of Surakarta, and to be able to support the activities of contemporary art; to design spaces with the display systems which can answer the need of various contemporary art such as painting, printmaking, sculpture, video art, installation art, and environmental art. The result to be obtained is an art gallery which be able to display contemporary art in various forms and presentation, with the design of the building which is also contemporary, so that it can represents the works of contemporary art itself.</em></p><p> </p><p><strong><em>Keywords: </em></strong><em>Gallery, Art, Contemporary, Display Rooms, Display, Surakarta</em></p>

Short Films from a Small Nation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Claire Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Public Information ◽  
Industrial Process ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Documentary Films ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Short Films ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Art And Architecture

The first book-length study in English of a national corpus of state-sponsored informational film, this book traces how Danish shorts on topics including social welfare, industry, art and architecture were commissioned, funded, produced and reviewed from the inter-war period to the 1960s. For three decades, state-sponsored short filmmaking educated Danish citizens, promoted Denmark to the world, and shaped the careers of renowned directors like Carl Th. Dreyer. Examining the life cycle of a representative selection of films, and discussing their preservation and mediation in the digital age, this book presents a detailed case study of how informational cinema is shaped by, and indeed shapes, its cultural, political and technological contexts.The book combines close textual analysis of a broad range of films with detailed accounts of their commissioning, production, distribution and reception in Denmark and abroad, drawing on Actor-Network Theory to emphasise the role of a wide range of entities in these processes. It considers a broad range of genres and sub-genres, including industrial process films, public information films, art films, the city symphony, the essay film, and many more. It also maps international networks of informational and documentary films in the post-war period, and explores the role of informational film in Danish cultural and political history.

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