Monthly Archive: February 2013

In this text, which takes the form of a conversation and is preceded by a short introduction, the ARTMargins collective seeks to draw the readers’ attention to a global artistic community known as Stuckism. The contribution highlights some of the most conspicuous issues raised by the Stuckists. For more than a decade Stuckism has critiqued the mainstream contemporary art world, accusing it of being at the mercy of global speculative capital; Stuckism also questions the mainstream aesthetics of conceptualism and its insistence upon de-materialized artistic practices. Instead Stuckism calls for respect for traditional or fine arts media, providing in the … Read more

The first biennial founded outside Venice opened in São Paulo Brazil in 1951, providing a fulcrum between “dependency” and “developmentalism” (to use economic terms). In terms of art history, it presents a useful anomaly in which an international style (“concrete abstraction,” a European import) was used simultaneously to eradicate local difference and to declare a cosmopolitan, up-to-date Brasilidade (Brazilianness). More crucially, I argue that the São Paulo Bienal was the precondition for the newly rigorous conceptualism that followed, as Brazilian artists in the late ′60s rejected “Concretismo” to craft a new world picture, radically transforming margin and center through the … Read more

The two texts presented here were written by members of conceptual artists’ group ACT operating in Armenia in 1994–1996. The group developed affirmative artistic actions and exhibitions to support the constitution of the new state based on the principles of liberal democracy and market capitalism. Its conceptual interventions and actions, both in conventional spaces of exhibition, but also on the street and in the already dysfunctional factories, were often formally minimal and austere, but almost always prescriptive in terms of offering a model of political and aesthetic participation.

Japanese art critics of the 1950s perceived the locus of a new materialist aesthetics in the new trends of informal abstraction emanating from the United States and France. This revealed a stark contrast with the idea of individual freedom that informed North-American discourse on Abstract Expressionism. Focusing on the writings of Miyakawa Atsushi, Haryū Ichirō, and Segi Shinichi, this article explores the political significance of the question of matter in Japanese postwar art criticism and indicates its importance for the subsequent development of avant-garde art in 1960s Japan.

This article examines the cultural, economic and political context of the Art Dubai art fair and its symposium the Global Art Forum, as well as the commercial, educational and curatorial role of the recent flourishing of galleries in Dubai. It unpacks the complex connections that exist in the MENA region between art as a critical practice, and art a marker of modernity and a commodity of hyper-capitalist consumption. The article evaluates the consequences of importing internationalist and activist art discourses to a conservative and absolutist monarchies in the Gulf with curtailed freedom of speech and of expression.

The two texts presented here were written by members of conceptual artists’ group ACT operating in Armenia in 1994–1996. The group developed affirmative artistic actions and exhibitions to support the constitution of the new state based on the principles of liberal democracy and market capitalism. Its conceptual interventions and actions, both in conventional spaces of exhibition, but also on the street and in the already dysfunctional factories, were often formally minimal and austere, but almost always prescriptive in terms of offering a model of political and aesthetic participation.

This article traces a provisional history of the early years of the conceptual performance art group Collective Actions through an examination of three critical terms—action, documentation, and factography—that came to figure prominently in the group’s definition of its aesthetic project. A close reading of several of the group’s actions and key theoretical texts from this period (1976–1981) reveals a dialectic of performance and documentation wherein the photographic and textual recording of actions, first carried out for purely pragmatic purposes, begins to acquire an independent aesthetic dimension that challenges the primacy of the live action. This shifting understanding of action—away from … Read more

The two texts presented here were written by members of conceptual artists’ group ACT operating in Armenia in 1994–1996. The group developed affirmative artistic actions and exhibitions to support the constitution of the new state based on the principles of liberal democracy and market capitalism. Its conceptual interventions and actions, both in conventional spaces of exhibition, but also on the street and in the already dysfunctional factories, were often formally minimal and austere, but almost always prescriptive in terms of offering a model of political and aesthetic participation.

“Transatlantic”—interdisciplinary project by two emerging Polish artists Radek Szlaga and Honza Zamojski presented in the FOCUS section at Frieze Art Fair New York from 4–7 May 2012 by LETO Gallery. First Issue: of the newspaper “One Hour Retard” was presented during the fairs.