Bøger udgivet af WEXNER CTR FOR THE ARTS

The first in an ongoing series of exhibitions and related catalogues, Forces of the Fifties presents one of the premier museum collections of Abstract Expressionist paintings, that of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY. This concise survey also features a timeline and selected bibliography for further reading.

S-337473 accompanies Sarah Oppenheimer's (born 1972) exhibition at the Wexner Center. The project spotlights Oppenheimer's current investigation of the switch, and how such a device might be able to work in space to generate a matrix of views that cannot be experienced by an individual simultaneously. The illustrated catalog includes new photography of the work in situ and documentation of her cross-disciplinary collaborations, along with newly commissioned essays by scholars, including Alexander R. Galloway (Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU) and Laurent Stalder (Chair for the Theory of Architecture at the ETH in Zurich).

The work of Paul Sietsema (born 1968) might be described as a sequence of multimedia suites, each of which begins with a phase of intensive research into historical-political themes, and which results in a body of interrelated sculptures, photographs, drawings, collages and films that propose an "exploded" model of historical progress. In general, these suites, such as Empire (2003) and Figure 3 (2008), have been discussed and exhibited individually. This publication, by contrast, brings together major elements from projects of the past decade, along with new works, which are being facilitated by the support of a Wexner Center Artist Residency Award in visual arts. The publication, like the exhibition it accompanies, is the most comprehensive survey of Sietsema's work to date. It includes his most recent sequence, Chinese Box, done through the support of the Wexner Artist Residency Award.

"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."

This publication borrows critic Harold Rosenberg's memorable phase "apocalyptic wallpaper" to describe the work of contemporary artists who have created wallpaper of their own design or appropriated the patterns of others, finding entirely new possibilities within this medium. Andy Warhol's celebrated Jersey Cow wallpaper, for example, humorously subverts the landscape motifs conventional wallpapers often use to bring nature indoors. Featured artists include Warhol, Robert Gober, Abigail Lane and Virgil Marti.