Bøger af Helen Molesworth

A dynamic new look at the legendary college that was a major incubator of the arts in midcentury America

An illustrated reader featuring a collection of essays from trailblazing curator and writer Helen Molesworth - the first book of her collected writings

"Landscape Confection brings together a group of emerging and mid-career artists involved in expanding the historical practice of landscape painting. Long considered one of the primary categories of Western painting, landscape has traditionally been dialectically structured by the production of either realistic or idealized representations of the natural world. The artists in "Landscape Confection work in the realm of imaginary landscape. Many of the paintings derive from the unconscious space of dreams, some borrow from the discipline of topography, and still others reside at the boundary between landscape and abstraction. Most of the pictures have a high degree of whimsy and call to mind the "fetes galantes of Watteau, redolent as they are with bodily and visual pleasure. Artist included in the exhibition and catalogue are Rowena Drig, Pia Fries, Jason Gubbiotti, Jim Hodges, Katie Pratt, Michael Raedecker, Neil Rock, Lisa Sanditz, Amy Sillman, and Janaina Tschape.

Image Stream brings together eight gallery-based film and video works, each of which explore the limits of this new medium, returning to narrative and changing conventional modes of viewing. Curator Helen Molesworth in this her first exhibition for the Wexner Art Center has selected works by Kutlug Ataman, Matthew Barney, Tacita Dean, Andrea Fraser, Pierre Huyghe, Neil Jordan, Donald Moffett and Lorna Simpson, each of which is accompanied by an individual short analytical essay. As Molesworth writes in her introduction, "the hygenic isolation of the white cube has slowly, but steadily, been overtaken by an increasingly promiscuous black box. As any turn-of-the-century member of the art public knows, darkened rooms and heavy black curtains signal the omnipresent film and/or video installation." If an earlier generation of film and video artists were concerned with the formal properties of film, she argues, today's contemporary artists "willingly explore visual forms borrowed from both Hollywood and auteur film, as well as television, MTV, CNN and the theater. This profligate borrowing of mass-media forms has been accompanied by a strong impulse towards narrative." It is what Molesworth calls this "reciprocity" between art world and mass culture that is a "defining characteristic of contemporary projected images."

Cosmology and universe in works of glass, mirror, light, and color

I remain fascinated by the tricky nature of Duchamp's readymades--objects transformed into art, but not quite. They always retain their original identity of function. This is why many people refer to Fountain in a casual way as "the urinal." For me this is an acknowledgement that the work is part art, part not-part object, part sculpture. In insist that we see the readymades produced in the 1960s as quite different from the readymades that were purchased by Duchamp in the teens. They are different objects, with different sets of rules. Hence they behave differently in the gallery and ultimately mean different things. I have also tried to keep Duchamp's readymades in dialogue with his lifelong interest in eros. These two strains of his thought have been kept separate--wrongly, I think--in the American reception of Duchamp. I am trying to map a genealogy of postwar sculpture that challenges the Minimalist/Post-Minimalist sequence maintained in most accounts of the period. The exhibition begins in the 1950s and comes up to the present. Also, it has become increasingly difficult to narrate postwar art as predominantly or exclusively American. Artists have been engaging in an enormous transatlantic dialogue. No, not at all. It is precisely the constellation of figures like Burri, Duchamp, and Bourgeois, and then Duchamp and Hesse and Johns, and then Duchamp and Kusama and Gober, and then Duchamp and McElheney and Orozco, that makes the exhibition so potentially interesting. I asked writers who were working on the artists in the show and have won my admiration for the sensitivity of their writing and the unconventional nature of their thought. I then allowed them to write what they pleased.The outcome is a book to be considered as another site where the counter-genealogy is being built and argued for.

During the 1960s, artists such as Alan Kaprow, Yoko Ono and Andy Warhol stopped making "art", they staged performances that mixed everyday life with theatre and challenged the system of marketing, display and aesthetic discourses. This work brings together a cross- section of such endeavours.