Monthly Archive: October 2013

This article addresses David Lamelas’s 1970 work Publication, arguing that it represents a subtle critique of the internationalization of conceptual art by a recent entrant into the West European milieu. Exhibited at Nigel Greenwood Gallery in London after the artist’s 1968 relocation from Argentina, Publication consists of thirteen written responses to three statements about the possible use of “language as an Art Form” that were sent by Lamelas to international figures in conceptual art such Daniel Buren, Gilbert and George, Lucy Lippard, and Lawrence Wiener. A close reading of this and others of Lamelas’s experiments works leading up to this … Read more

This essay analyzes the recent book Fifteen Ways to Leave Badiou, produced by the Egyptian curator Bassam El Baroni for the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF). For the project, which was carried out in 2011, concurrent with the events of the Arab Spring, El Baroni invited a group of artists from the Middle East to produce works responding to Alain Badiou’s text “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art”. The essay has three objectives, the first of which is to situate Fifteen Ways… relative to the ongoing encounter between contemporary global art and Western philosophy. Next, it considers how the works in … Read more

The text presented here constitutes the first time that Ronald Kay’s work has been rendered and published in English translation. A fundamental figure within Chile’s art scene during its recent dictatorial period (1973–1990), Kay’s written, pedagogic, and editorial contributions were instrumental in shaping the sophisticated and insurgent discourse of the artists working under the rubric now known as the neovanguardia. The first chapter of Ronald Kay’s Del Espacio de Acá (1980), “On photography Time split in two” lays out, in a style and rhetoric that are both lyrical and rigorous, Kay’s theorization of the photographic phenomenon as a miniature geological … Read more

The text presented here constitutes the first time that Ronald Kay’s work has been rendered and published in English translation. A fundamental figure within Chile’s art scene during its recent dictatorial period (1973–1990), Kay’s written, pedagogic, and editorial contributions were instrumental in shaping the sophisticated and insurgent discourse of the artists working under the rubric now known as the neovanguardia. The first chapter of Ronald Kay’s Del Espacio de Acá (1980), “On photography Time split in two” lays out, in a style and rhetoric that are both lyrical and rigorous, Kay’s theorization of the photographic phenomenon as a miniature geological … Read more

In 1932, Paul Strand travelled to Mexico. The work he completed during his two-year stay has framed our histories of Strand’s practice in the 1930s and 1940s as a history of his turning away from his commitment to formalism in the 1920s. Paul Strand’s Living Labor challenges this history through an examination of The Wave, a documentary film Strand shot in 1934. A study of labor struggles in post-revolutionary Mexico, The Wave, this essay argues, reanimates Strand’s investigation of the relationship between man and machine evident in his first film, Manhatta (1921). Focusing on Strand’s obsession with the close-up and … Read more

The text analyzes the early activity of the Romanian artist Horia Bernea (1938–2000), putting it in conjunction with various aspects of conceptual art. It emphasizes points of contact between Bernea’s practice and the existing narratives of conceptual art (including the Eastern European ones) and it provides contextual information about the artistic and socio-political environment in Romania during the period of liberalization which debuted at the end of the 1960s and lasted for a few years. The text mainly focuses on a close reading of some Bernea’s works which were made in this timeframe, namely the Production Charts series and his … Read more