One Day Only Giveaway

An Announcement from ICA bookstore

ICA galleries will be renovating soon! As part of clearance of storage spaces, the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore will be giving away free copies of selected ICA publications and various art exhibition catalogs for ONE DAY only. Available titles include MIKE- Lim Tzay Chuen, In and Out- Contemporary Chinese Art from China and Australia as well as Text and Subtext-Contemporary Asian Women Artists and many others.

All current students and staff members of LASALLE College of the Arts are entitled to collect their free copies upon presentation of their student/staff ID card.

Date: Wednesday, 18 Feb 2009
Time: 10am- 6pm
Venue: Outside ICA Gallery, B1-04

Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism

Selling price: $141.80
Student discount: $113.40
Staff discount: $99.30

Hal Foster
Rosalind Krauss
Yve-Alain Bois
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Destined to become the standard work on the subject,
Art Since 1900 is a landmark study in the history of modern art and essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of art in the modern age.

Arguably the four most important and influential art historians of our time, Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh have collectively transformed the study of modern art. Now, in this extraordinary book, they have come together to provide the most comprehensive critical history of art in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries ever published.

Groundbreaking in both content and presentation, Art Since 1900 will set the agenda for many years to come. With a clear and factual year-by-year structure, the authors present more than one hundred easy-to-follow articles, each focusing on a crucial event. All the key turning-points of modernism and postmodernism are explored in depth, as are the frequent antimodernist reactions.

The book’s flexible structure and extensive cross-referencing enable readers to plot their own course through the century and to follow any one of the many narratives that unfold – the history of a medium such as painting, the development of art in a particular country, the influence of a movement, or the emergence of a stylistic or conceptual body of work such as abstraction or minimalism.

Illustrating the text are reproductions of more than six hundred works, most reproduced in colour. Background information on key events, places and people is provided in highlighted boxes, while a comprehensive glossary and full bibliography add to the reference value of this outstanding volume.

Each of the authors has contributed an introduction exploring the methodologies that now govern art history, informing and enhancing the reader’s understanding of its practice today.
They have also taken part in two round-table discussions – one positioned at mid-century, the other at the end of the book – that consider some of the questions raised by the preceding decades and look ahead to the art of the future.

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.
Rosalind Krauss is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University.
Yve-Alain Bois is the Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Professor of Modern Art at Harvard University.
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh is Virginia B. Wright Professor of Twentieth Century and Contemporary Art at Barnard College/Columbia University.

2004 Thames & Hudson

Land and Environmental Art

Selling price: $135.50
Student discount: $108.40
Staff discount: $94.90

The definitive survey of Land Art and contemporary environmental art.

Edited by Jeffrey Kastner, with a survey by Brian Wallis

The traditional landscape genre was radically transformed in the 1960s when many artists stopped merely representing the land and made their mark directly in the environment. Drawn by vast, uncultivated spaces of desert and mountain as well as by post-industrial wastelands, artists such as Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson moved earth to create colossal primal symbols. Others punctuated the horizon with man-made signposts, such as Christo’s Running Fence and Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field. For Richard Long, journeys became works of art while Dennis Oppenheim immersed his entire body in the contours of the land.

Survey Brian Wallis discusses the key artists, works and issues that define Land Art historically, as well as its later ramifications.

Works This book fully documents the 1960s Land Art movement and surveys examples of Environmental Art to the present day. Earthworks, environments, performances and actions by artists ranging from Ana Mendieta in the 1970s and 80s to Peter Fend in the 1990s are illustrated with breathtaking photographs, sketches and project notes.

Documents Jeffrey Kastner has compiled an invaluable archive of statements by all the featured artists alongside related texts by art historians, critics, philosophers and cultural theorists including Jean Baudrillard, Edmund Burke, Guy Debord, Michael Fried, Dave Hickey, Rosalind Krauss, Lucy R Lippard, Thomas McEvilley and Simon Schama.

Phaidon Press

Conceptual Art

One of the most rigorous, authoritative surveys of this influential movement.

Edited by Peter Osborne

Selling price: $135.50
Student discount: $108.40
Staff discount: $94.90

This book marks a new, original and authoritative re-examination of a major turning point in late twentieth-century art. Since the mid 1960s Conceptual art – an art that consists of ideas, written down, enacted or simply carried in your head – has directly challenged the very notion that a work of art is by definition an object of visual pleasure. Conceptual art is first and foremost an art of questions. As this book demonstrates, Conceptual art continues today to raise fundamental questions not only about the definition of art itself but about politics, the media and society.

Conceptual art, since its zenith from 1966 to 1972, has influenced not only all subsequent art but made a major contribution to the history of ideas. It, in turn, drew much of its inspiration from the writings of thinkers ranging from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to the playwright Samuel Beckett. For the first time, excerpts from these key influential writings are included alongside the major original texts by artists, critics, curators and art historians.

An international movement, Conceptual art encompasses not only North America and Western Europe but also South America, Eastern Europe, Russia, China and Japan. Its legacy is global, ranging from small local participatory projects to large-scale installations at major museums and biennales.

Survey Philosopher and art historian Peter Osborne traces Conceptual art’s origins in Europe, Japan and the USA, its development throughout the 1960s and 70s, and its legacy in contemporary art.

Works provides an extensive colour plate section with extended captions for every artwork. Introducing the foundations with ‘Pre-history: 1950-1960′, chapters are then divided usefully into six distinctive types of Conceptual art – Instruction, Performance, Documentation; Process, System, Series; Word and Sign; Appropriation, Intervention, Everyday; Politics and Ideology; Institutional Critique – before concluding with ‘Afterwards’.

Documents mirrors the Works section by chapter, including texts by philosophers and writers who crucially influenced the movement, alongside key original texts by artists, critics and art historians.

Phaidon Press

Surrealism

A comprehensive survey of the 20th-century’s longest lasting art movement.

Edited by Mary Ann Caws

Selling price: $135.50
Student discount: $108.40
Staff discount: $94.90

Surrealism is a survey of the twentieth century’s longest lasting and, arguably, most influential art movement. Championed and held together by André Breton for over forty years, Surrealism was France’s major avant-garde artistic tendency from 1924 onwards, rapidly spreading around the globe to become an international phenomenon. During World War II, Surrealism’s exiled artists and writers had a major impact on American art and were a primary influence for the Abstract Expressionist generation. The official Surrealist movement continued to the end of Breton’s life in 1966, and its legacy is still pervasive today, in contemporary art as well as in numerous quotations from surrealist imagery in cinema, advertising and the media.

Survey Mary Ann Caws – a distinguished scholar, translator and associate of the surrealists – describes in clear, perceptive and lively prose the essential characteristics that define Surrealism, as well as tracing a concise path through the chronology of this prolific and wide-ranging movement. The text also demonstrates how Surrealist art and writing are interdependent.

Works provides an extensive colour plate section with extended captions for every artwork. Following the movement from its beginnings in the 1920s up to the 40s and950s, its six sections trace the themes that predominated at different stages.

Artists include Eileen Agar, Jean Arp, Antonin Artaud, Hans Bellmer, Jacques-André Boiffard, Brassaï, Victor Brauner, André Breton, Jacques Brunius, Luis Bunel, Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Giorgio de Chirico, Joseph Cornell, Salvdor Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Oscar Domínguez, Marcel Duchamp, Nusch Eluard, Max Ernst, Léonor Fini, Esteban Francés, Wilhelm Freddie, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Jindrich Heisler, Geores Hugnet, Valentine Hugo, Marcel Jean, Frida Kahlo, André Kertész, Frederick Kiesler, Greta Knutson-Tzara, Wifredo Lam, Jacqueline Lamba , Len Lye, Dora Maar, F.E. McWilliam, René Magritte, Man Ray, André Masson, Roberto Matta, Henri Michaux, Lee Miller, Joan Miró, Pierre Molinier, Henry Moore, Max Morise, Paul Nougé, Gordon Onslow Ford, Meret Oppenheim, Wolfgang Paalen, Roger Parry, Roland Penrose, Pablo Picasso, Kay Sage, Kurt Seligmann, Jindrich Styrsky, Maurice Tabard, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning, Toyen, Tristan Tzara, Raoul Ubac, Remedios Varo, Wols

Documents section includes important rediscovered writings alongside the key texts by leading figures. Many of the texts have been specially translated for this volume by Mary Ann Caws and Jonathan Eburne.

Phaidon Press

Minimalism

Selling price: $135.50
Student discount: $108.40
Staff discount: $94.90

Edited by James Meyer

Minimalism comprises one of the key movements in post-war art. The term ‘minimalism’ was coined to describe the work of a group of American artists who, in the 1960s, produced a decidedly unexpressionistic, reductive work with a hard industrial feel. While numerous minimalist painters exist, among them Robert Ryman, Robert Mangold and Brice Marden, most of the key Minimalists – Andre, Flavin, Judd, LeWitt and Morris – produced sculptures or, as some put it, ’specific objects’ or ‘objects in a world of objects’.

Although none of the artists actually accepted the term ‘Minimalism’, their common use of serial, modular or repeating forms (from Carl Andre’s floor sculptures of readymade bricks or Judd’s stacked boxes) as well as the abstraction and industrial production of the work, drew these artists’ work together. As opposed to the vulgar and populist Pop Art, Minimalism, like conceptualism, considered itself ‘high art’. These artists’ aim was to create an art that was non-hierarchical (no single part of the work takes precedence over any other) and thus entirely democratic.

With direct access to many of the artists’ archives, this book is the most comprehensive and definitive sourcebook on Minimalism available.

Survey Critic and art historian James Meyer, a leading authority on Minimalism, examines the movement from its beginnings to its broader cultural influence.

Works provides an extensive colour plate section with extended captions for every artwork. The excellent selection of images illustrates the surprising variety of work, and also relates it to other artists such as Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson.

Documents includes seminal texts, previously unpublished material and documents from little-known or out-of-print catalogues.

Phaidon Press

Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels

The history of the comic from 19th-century to today’s graphic novels.

By Roger Sabin

Selling price: $54.10
Student discount: $43.30
Staff discount: $37.90

Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels is the first ever fully documented study to explore the graphic qualities of the comic book, and the development of the genre into a sophisticated and culturally revealing popular art form.

This book traces the history of the comic from early cartoon-like woodcuts through to the graphic strips of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Organized thematically it explores the various genres of the comic book – including humour, adventure, girls’ comics, underground and alternative.

The fascinating careers of the creators of the best-known characters – from Superman and Tintin to Tank Girl – are revealed in depth, as are the stories behind the much-loved comics such as Beano and The Incredible Hulk. The most recent artists are also illustrated and discussed, including Harvey Kurtzman (Mad), Chris Donald (Viz), Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira).

Roger Sabin is an arts journalist and lecturer at Central St Martin’s College of Art, London. He is the author of the highly acclaimed Adult Comics: An Introduction.

Phaidon Press

Berlin Art Now

Text by Mark Gisbourne
Photographs by Jim Rakete

Ever since the collapse of Communism and the subsequent reunification of Germany in 1990, Berlin has been a city on the up – economically, politically and culturally. Aside from regaining its previous position as national capital, it has also gained a significant and diverse colony of artists – not just from Germany but from all over the world.

Here curator and critic Mark Gisbourne asks what it is about Berlin that has drawn so many artists to live and work there. Mixing revealing interviews with thoughtful commentary, he offers profiles of nineteen of the most important practitioners in the city:

Norbert Bisky, John Bock, Monica Bonvicini, Candice Breitz, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Martin Eder, Tim Eitel, Mona Hatoum, Bernhard Martin, Jonathan Meese, Bjorn Melhus, Daniel Pflumm, Thomas Rentmeister, Cornelia Renz, Julian Rosefeldt, Yehudit, Sasportas, Thomas Scheibitz, Michael Wesely.

The profiles are accompanied by visual essays from renowned photographer Jim Rakete, exploring the studios, creative life and secret places of Berlin, and capturing the city’s excitement, chaos and sheer vitality.

Mark Gisbourne, art historian, curator and critic, has written and published extensively on modern and contemporary art. A former teacher at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Slade School of Fine Art and many other art institutions, he now lives and works in Berlin.
Jim Rakete is one of Germany’s most prolific portrait photographers whose pictures of international celebrities have been exhibited extensively. He also lives and works in Berlin.
Ulf Meyer zu Küingdorf is a prolific Berlin-based designer and publisher.

2006 Thames & Hudson

Evolution and Theory: Zadok Ben-David

Earl Lu Gallery Imprint

Selling price: $15.00
Student price: $12.00
Staff discount: $10.50

The Earl Lu Gallery is presenting to Singapore the work of Zadok Ben-David. Zadok was born in Yemen and raised in Israel. Since the early 1970s he has been dividing his time between London and Israel. Zadok is seen as one of the practitioners invovled in the resurgence of sculpture in Britain during the 70s and 80s. The work presented to us here entitled “Evolution and Theory” was first exhibited in Israel and since then Australia, Turkey, America, and now Singapore. Each time the work is exhibited it takes on the characteristic of the pace in which it is installed.

The varieties of locations around the world that have hosted the exhibition add additional layers to the understanding of the work. It will be very interesting to examine the re-actions of an Asian audience to the elements of this exhibition. This exhibition centers on the context of thought (scientific) that has only recently been adopted in Asia. There exists in the history of Asian thought a significantly separate approach to the faith in science evident in the West. Asian understandings of science ar in many ways  viewed with noticeably less religious fervour than in the West. Faith in traditional belief still has currency here. We are however rapidly embracing many of the West’s concepts. It is in essence a fundamentally different approach to the analytical system  accepted in the West that may have a new dynamic interpretation in the world of contemporary Asia.

Published in 1999

Situation: Collaborations, Collectives and Artist Networks from Sydney, Singapore, Berlin

Selling Price: $40.90
Student discount: $32.70
Staff discount: $28.60

Situation: Collaborations, Collectives and Artist Networks from Sydney, Singapore Berlin
Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, Australia)

Situation brings into the MCA a variety of artistic activities and processes that usually operate within artist-run and alternative spaces and public sites. Focusing on three artist networks based in Sydney, Singapore and Berlin, it aims to provide a context for these practices, which often involve collaboration. These three cosmopolitan cities, distinct from the traditional centres of London, Paris, New York. They also share strong histories of artist-generated activities, in response to specific social cultural, economic and political conditions.

The artist in the exhibition take diverse approaches to their work, often working in several fields simultaneously. Performance, video, painting, installation and sculpture  are produced alongside writing, publishing, music-making and curating. By bringing together the work of artists involved in artist-run spaces and collectives, curator Russel Storer highlights the important contribution that these networks play in supporting artistic practice and in contributing to a dynamic artistic culture.

Excerpt from foreword by Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Director of Contemporary Art

2005 Museum of Contemporary Art Limited

The Artist’s Body

Edited by Tracey Warr, with a survey by Amelia Jones

Beginning with such key artists as Marcel Duchamp and Jackson Pollock, this book examines a selection of the most significant players who have used their bodies to create their art – among them, in the 1960s Carolee Scheemann, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Yoko Ono; in the 1970s, Chris Burden, Ana Mendieta, Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic; up to the turn of the millennium, Matthew Barney, Marc Quinn, Tracey Emin and Mona Hatoum.

Survey Amelia Jones,among the world experts in the field, discusses performance and body art against the background of social history. She examines the breakdown of barriers between art and life, visual and sensual experience – how artists have expanded and renewed the age-old tradition of self-portraiture, moving art out of the gallery into unexpected spaces and media.

Works Each image is accompanied by an extended caption. The book is organized thematically:

• ‘Painting Bodies’, concerns work that shows the trace, stain or imprint of the artist’s body in response to the paint-on-canvas tradition.
• ‘Gesturing Bodies’, examines artists who transform the body – its acts, its gesture – into art; gesture, behaviour and situations are used in place of art objects.
• ‘Ritualistic and Transgressive Bodies’, looks at work which uses the body to enact challenges to the social expecations of the body, often in rituals that perform a cathartic function. Mutilation and sacrifice are used to rupture personal and social homogeneity.
• ‘Body Boundaries’, examines boundaries between the individual body and the social environment and between the inside and outside of the body itself.
• ‘Performing Identity’, looks at issues of representation and identity.
• ‘Absent Bodies’, explores absence and the mortality of the body through photography, casting, imprints or remnants of the body.
• In ‘Extended and Prosthetic Bodies’, the body is extended through prosthetics or technology, to explore cyberspace and alternative states of consciousnes

Phaidon Press

MAAP in Singapore

Selling price: $25.00
Student discount: $20.00
Staff discount: $17.50

“Essentially MAAP is a sum of others, a conduit and attention point that gives form to a growing clan of relationships – some new, some established but all continuing with dynamic flux and development. at the centre of MAAP’s activities, in the beginning and in the end, artists are our centre of gravity.  For artists in our region, it is usually not secure of financially rewarding path, but one driven through the pursuit of goals that so many others often gain benefit. “

- Kim Machan, director, MAAP

Art in Europe 1990 – 2000

Selling price: $40.40
Student discount: $32.30
Staff discount: $28.30

Edited by Gianfranco Maraniello

Art in Europe 1990-2000 brings together the essays of some of today’s most aware art critics, together with extensive photographic documentation of the works of the more significant European artists to have emerged in the 1990s. It was a period characterized by rapid transformations and by attempts at economic, social and political reconfiguration following events such as the fall of Berlin Wall, the fragmentation into new states, the wars in the former Yogoslavia, the introduction of the euro and the debate on the role of the European Union. It was a decade when the concept known as “globalization” imposed itself, but at the same time it saw the rise of nationalisms and claims to specific cultural identity.

Apparantly contradictory tendencies occurred in the visual arts too. On one hand, a transnational scenario seems to have been consolidated through museums, specialist reviews, the spreading of I.T communication and the birth of important new exhibitions (not only European). At the same time, new-found vigour was acquired by artistic expression with a local character, often little known outside the respective national confines. The essays collected here offer a first clean, informed mapping of these phenomena.

Art in Europe 1990-2000 is in fact an introduction to the artistic production of the last decade in the Old Continent, an overview, an interweaving of testimonies, of arbitrary stories, of paths trodden between history and chronicle. A didactic tool, a prologue, a premise for an in-depth critical analysis, the sketch for a new kind of essay, a non-compilative forumula to find our bearings in today’s tidal, fleeting consumption of art.

2002 Skira Paperbacks

The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life

Selling price: $52.40
Student discount: $47.30
Staff discount: $44.60

by Joseph Thompson (Foreword, Editor), Nato Thompson (Editor), (Editor)

Art made to attach to buildings or to be given away? Wearable art for street demonstrations or art that sets up a booth at a trade show? This is the art of the interventionists, who trespass into the everyday world to raise our awareness of injustice and other social problems. These artists don’t preach or proselytize; they give us the tools to form our own opinions and create our own political actions. The Interventionists, which accompanies an exhibit at MASS MoCA, serves as a handbook to this new and varied work. It’s a user’s guide to art that is exciting, provocative, unexpected, inspiring (artistically and politically), and fun. From Michael Rakowitz’s inflatable homeless shelter and William Pope.L’s “Black Factory” truck with pulverizer, gift shop, and giant inflatable igloo to the Biotic Baking Brigade’s political pie-throwing, the art of The Interventionists surveys a growing genre and offers a guide for radical social action.

The book classifies the artists according to their choice of tactics: the Nomads, who create mobile projects; Reclaim the Streets, artists who act in public places; Tools for Resistance: Ready to Wear, artists who produce fashion for political action; and the Experimental University, artists whose work engages pedagogy and theory. The accompanying text includes essays by noted scholars putting the work in a broader cultural and social context as well as texts by the artists themselves.

About the Author
Nato Thompson is Associate Curator at MASS MoCA and curator of the MASS MoCA exhibition Becoming Animal. He is the editor of The Interventionists (MIT Press, 2004) and was curator of the MASS MoCA exhibit it accompanied.

Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, cofounder of REPOhistory artists’ collective and Batza Family Chair of Art and Art History at Colgate University.

2006, MIT Press

Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction

Selling Price: $63.00
Student discount: $56.70
Staff discount: $53.60

By Marcia Brennan

In the era of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit—when social pressures on men to conform threatened cherished notions of masculine vitality, freedom, and authenticity—modernist paintings came to be seen as metaphorical embodiments of both idealized and highly conflicted conceptions of masculine selfhood. In Modernism’s Masculine Subjects, Marcia Brennan traces the formalist critical discourses in which work by such artists as Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock could stand as symbolic representations that at once challenged and reproduced such prevailing cultural conceptions of masculinity. Rejecting the typical view of formalism’s exclusive engagement with essentialized and purified notions of abstraction and its disengagement from issues of gender and embodiment, Brennan explores the ways in which these categories were intertwined, historically and theoretically.

Brennan makes new use of writings by Clement Greenberg and other powerful critics describing the works of Matisse, the postwar New York School abstract expressionists, and their successors, the post-painterly abstractionists. The paintings of Matisse, she argues, were represented in part as intellectually engaged and culturally respectable centerfolds. Brennan examines de Kooning’s Woman series —perhaps the most significant effort to incorporate feminine presence within abstract expressionist imagery—as extended cultural metaphors for bourgeois masculinity’s conflicted relationship with its feminine “others.” She also shows how the aggressive energy of Pollock’s nonfigural painterly idiom became domesticated in the press by the repeated pairing of his work with images of Pollock in the studio and at home with his wife, the artist Lee Krasner. Finally, discussing the rise of the post-painterly abstractionists in the sixties, Brennan shows how, both despite and because of the critical presence of Helen Frankenthaler, formalist responses to the works of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland provided an opportunity to promote idealized conceptions of masculine creativity.

About the Author

Marcia Brennan is Associate Professor of Art History at Rice University. She has previously taught art history at Brown University and the College of the Holy Cross.

2004 MIT Press