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The article analyzes Öyvind Fahlström’s (1928–1976) performance Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, which took place as part of the festival 9 Evenings: art&engineering in New York (1966). It situates the performance’s use of multimedia material as continuations of earlier investigations into manipulating language that played a central part in the artist’s practice of both visual art and concrete poetry. It further argues that in Kisses Sweeter Than Wine such manipulations form a series of ruptures into the wider circulation of mass-media images, ruptures that locate Fahlström’s use of media images in relation to both Pop Art and the beginning media activism … Read more

This introduction situates the conversation between Hsieh Teh-Ching, Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing within a larger historic and socio-cultural framework, as well as elaborates a brief history of the publication in which the conversation was first published, The Black Cover Book. The text also elaborates on the unarticulated issues informing their discussion, such as their émigré status, and briefly outlines a history of the artists’ work at the time of the conversation. The work of other avant-garde artists in the Chinese diaspora whose work was published in The Black Cover Book is also touched upon briefly. This introduction reclaims some … Read more

Framed as posthumous, or that which lives on past its death, the survivor is tagged by official postwar discourses and practices an impediment to the reconstruction of society along normative guidelines. But the persistent conditions of protracted civil war in Lebanon call for a re-conceptualization of the figure of the survivor along another temporal axis. No longer posthumous, the survivor is not an over-liver who aimlessly questions the significance of his brute survival but rather a witness who knows too much, carrying the weight of an unwelcome knowledge gathered from within war and crisis that challenges the official closure of … Read more

This project chronicles the significant changes in Singapore’s natural and urban landscape. The images in this volume have been carefully selected to capture the changing face of this tropical island-state. They touch on issues of land reclamation, national boundaries, ecological changes, pollution, conservation and the ever-evolving skyline. The pictures capture an ongoing dialogue between the city’s man-made infrastructure and its natural spaces and creatures. While Singapore architecture is documented in aerial views of the country’s tallest buildings, and its ubiquitous public housing, there are also photographs the island’s wildlife.

This article discusses the ongoing pertinence to the present of Fredric Jameson’s work on postmodernism in the context of recent elaborations of “the contemporary” and “contemporaneity” in art history, theory and criticism. It is argued that, while postmodernism is fraught with contradiction and in any case irretrievable by now as a periodization of the present, it nonetheless remains crucially instructive for a fuller understanding and politicization of contemporaneity. In particular, both the nature of the relationship between culture and capital, as well as the theoretical imperative to totalize remain central to Jameson’s problematic in ways that the discourse on the … Read more

This article discusses the relationship between Native American art and place as a curatorial strategy in the recent exhibition Before and After the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes. It is argued that while the Anishinaabe connection to the Great Lakes region as a spiritual, cultural, and epistemological center is essential to the art of the exhibition, the curators present this place as timeless and unchanging. The result is an interpretation of the Native American relationship to place that is idealized, ahistorical, and inaccurate to the tumultuous legacy of colonialism. Rather, as the art on display makes clear despite … Read more

This is a translation of a 1993 conversation involving three artists from the Chinese diaspora Hsieh Teh-Ching, Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing. Through candid dialog they tease out the motivations behind their conceptually driven artistic practices, their individual perceptions of social systems and politics, a “Western” art system from which they are marginalized, the concept “Modern art,” the Duchampian imagination, contingency, and postmodernism, etc. Their dialogue helps to situate the frame of mind of émigré artists working and living in New York in the early 1990s, with particular attention to the spiritual and social motivations behind art-making, while elaborating the … Read more

This article discusses different modes of delegation in Martin Kippenberger’s work. Drawing both on the artist’s work as a painter in post-II WW Berlin and on his performance of his own life as part of his artistic work, the article contends that Kippenberger keeps in the balance a modernist logic of art as deskilling and delegation that endorses the artist as an entrepreneur; and a postmodern position that emphasizes more performative elements in subjectivity.

Nihonga (literally “Japanese painting”) is a term that arose in 1880s Japan in order to distinguish existing forms of painting from newly popularized oil painting, and even today it is a category of artistic production apart from contemporary art at large. In this sense, nihonga is the oldest form of a broader worldwide category of “tradition-based contemporary art.” While nihonga was supposed to encompass any form of “traditional” painting, however, in practice it was held together by a recognizable style. When nihonga stopped fulfilling certain material or stylistic criteria, it ceased to be distinguishable from the rest of artistic production. … Read more

Olga’s Notes is a script for a movie. This project tells a story composed of various collected notes, written mainly while reading Al-Hilal magazine (an Egyptian publication from the 1960s), thinking about the disciplined body, labor, and nation-state building through dance.

This article comparatively discusses the 14th International Architecture Biennale of Venice, directed by Rem Koolhaas, and the pilot exhibit and architectural design of Louvre Abu Dhabi undertaken by Jean Nouvel, in the context of recent big art events and world museums. Curatorial, historiographical, and installation strategies in these venues are differentiated in order to think through the question of displaying a global history of architecture. I make a distinction between the curatorial practices carried out in the Fundamentals and Absorbing Modernity sections of Venice’s Central and National Pavilions as curator-as-author and curators-as-chorus, which I map onto recent historiographical and museum … Read more

This introduction and commentary on Saloua Raouda Choucair’s article “How the Arab Understood Visual Art” (translation by author in this issue) sets the context in which a private rebuke Choucair addressed to a former colleague for his ethnocentric cultural criticism became a quasi-manifesto for art (and social) modernism. It inventories the conceptual shifts Choucair pursued in her reevaluation of cultural criticism: shifts in the approach to time, matter, visuality, and Arabness. It explicates the lessons Choucair learned from Sufic Arab science, math, and philosophy (particularly Alhazenian optics) toward extracting an essentialist view of matter, which allowed art a serious public … Read more

This article examines conflicting racial, archaeological and art historical interpretations of Olmec art produced in the United States in the early 1960s. It inscribes shifting approaches to the study of monumental Olmec art by figures like George Kubler within the contexts of violent modernization of the Olmec ‘heartland’ of Veracruz and Tabasco, the politicized display of this artistic tradition in museums and traveling exhibitions, and the unstable horizons of U.S.-Mexico diplomatic relations during that period.

This introduction and commentary on Saloua Raouda Choucair’s article “How the Arab Understood Visual Art” (translation by author in this issue) sets the context in which a private rebuke Choucair addressed to a former colleague for his ethnocentric cultural criticism became a quasi-manifesto for art (and social) modernism. It inventories the conceptual shifts Choucair pursued in her reevaluation of cultural criticism: shifts in the approach to time, matter, visuality, and Arabness. It explicates the lessons Choucair learned from Sufic Arab science, math, and philosophy (particularly Alhazenian optics) toward extracting an essentialist view of matter, which allowed art a serious public … Read more

Aiming to contextualize Turkish artist İsmail Saray’s artist book Leonardo da Vinci (1976), this text centers around the artist’s educational formation and the early years of his artistic practice between the years of 1973–1980, when he was based in Turkey. Tracing key moments in this period including his participation in the Paris Biennial of 1977, the Yeni Eğilimler [New Trends in Art] exhibition of 1979 in Istanbul as well as his guest appearance in the exhibition Sanat Olarak Betik [Book as Art] organized by the conceptualist artist collective Sanat Tanım Topluluğu. This essay also gives a glimpse of the conditions … Read more

This essay is a review of the Iran Modern Exhibition, which took place at the Asia Society in New York from September 6, 2013, to January 5, 2014. The show was the first major international retrospective of Iranian art of the 1960s and 1970s. While shedding light on the featured art from a period that is lesser known outside of Iran, this essay mainly elaborates on the curatorial strategies at work in the exhibit.

This essay reviews the book Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents edited by Wu Hung and published by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2010, as part of an ongoing series aiming to introduce art critical texts produced in non-mainstream art locales to an English-speaking audience. Gathering a large number of translated critical essays, the book outlines the production of Chinese Contemporary Art since what is normally accepted as its onset in the late 1970s. This essay argues that this process of definition, legitimized by the prominent publisher of this book, amounts to a form of canonization performed at … Read more

In Four Encounters with Sculpture, Rayyane Tabet combines found material and short diary entries to explore four encounters with places, objects, and events. The project attempts to question sculpture as concept and material.

This essay examines Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo Cina (China) (1972), a documentary made in and about the People’s Republic of China during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Detailing the documentary’s controversial reception and analyzing Chung Kuo’s emphasis on visual reality in opposition to the PRC’s official socialist realism, I argue that Chung Kuo constituted a critical cross-cultural project, while providing a unique portrayal of quotidian life in Maoist China.

Aiming to contextualize Turkish artist İsmail Saray’s artist book Leonardo da Vinci (1976), this text centers around the artist’s educational formation and the early years of his artistic practice between the years of 1973–1980, when he was based in Turkey. Tracing key moments in this period including his participation in the Paris Biennial of 1977, the Yeni Eğilimler [New Trends in Art] exhibition of 1979 in Istanbul as well as his guest appearance in the exhibition Sanat Olarak Betik [Book as Art] organized by the conceptualist artist collective Sanat Tanım Topluluğu. This essay also gives a glimpse of the conditions … Read more

At nearly the same late-1980s moment, two of the most important artists of India’s twentieth century, Tyeb Mehta (1925–2009) and K. G. Subramanyan (b. 1924), turned to the goddess as a subject for painting. Although Mehta and Subramanyan represented different strands of Indian modernism, they had both hitherto largely limited themselves to secular subject matter. This essay accounts for the significance of their goddess turn by discussing it as an example of late style, as theorized by Edward Said. It finds in these paintings the intransigence, anachronism, and negative intervention championed by Said, but also a critique of the secularism … Read more

This roundtable article investigates the “critical archive” as a material concept in the fields of artistic production, art historiography, curatorial practice, and criticism. We invited twelve critics, artists, art historians, and curators to respond to a series of questions related to the idea of the archive as a critical agent in the field of art. The roundtable examines different historical and institutional permutations of conceptions of a (self-) critical archive and its possible impact on our understanding of the relationship between art and historical evidence.

In the 1990s, contemporary art’s “global turn” was vividly demonstrated by artists whose works directly reflected upon their experiences of moving across vast geographical distances. Coinciding with a multidisciplinary crisis over globalization as expressed through different approaches to the question of scale, the ambivalence towards the global turn’s expansionism was vividly taken up by the large number of Asian artists whose rise to international prominence was enabled by this “turn.” Artists like Suh Do-Ho, Naoya Hatakeyama, and Danh Vo engaged with scale not simply as metonymical reflections of the world, but as a means of responding to those systems, standards, … Read more

This review concerns Osbel Suarez, Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America (1934–1973), an exhibition presented by the Fundación Juan March in Madrid, Feb 11–May 15, 2011 and Alejandro Crispiani’s book Objetos para transformar el mundo: Trayectorias del arte concreto-invención, Argentina y Chile, 1940–1970 [Objects to Transform the World: Trajectories of Concrete-Invention Art, Argentina and Chile, 1940–1970] (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2011). The review briefly assesses the state of the literature on Latin American Geometric Abstractio and analyzes these two publications from 2011, which stand precisely for traditional approaches and new developments in the field.

This paper centers on the problem of influence in Latin American art analyzing some of the changes its conceptualization underwent during the 1970s and 1980s. Taking the case of Chilean conceptual practices during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship known as “escena de avanzada,” particularly the art actions of the collective CADA, and the isolationist discourses woven around it, this article attempts to reconnect what has been regarded as original political art forms to larger networks of relations where the question of what is proper to Latin American art was disputed.

Perhaps the earliest manifesto in Iranian art, “The Nightingale’s Butcher Manifesto” fights for an Iranian avant-garde—an avant-garde based on new modes of abstraction so as to break the chains of both Iran’s artistic traditions and the social concerns of figuration.

Rat Diaries is a series of drawings that attempts to map the intensity of everyday life in Egypt intertwined with intuitive visual and verbal comments on art practice. The drawings are multi-layered juxtapositions of various forms and contrasting types of lines that move from controlled shapes to seemingly uncontrolled scribbling, from figures to abstract shapes. What this layering achieves is a proposition of form that is ultimately unattainable. With all their pretension to ground the subject within the given coordinates of experiential reality, El-Noshokaty’s maps refuse to communicate daily life as objectively mapable. The grid that is supposed to provide … Read more

For the wave of ecological consciousness that spread on the counter-cultural currents of the 1968 uprisings across the globe, the Iron Curtain proved to be as porous as it was in the case of contemporary art’s turn towards conceptualism. This article examines East European artists’ approaches to the natural environment and their engagement with green thought against the political, social and environmental background of real existing socialism, in which the party not only attempted to cover up the actual state of environment pollution but also to keep control over access to ecological discourse. Through the dematerialised practices of Slovenian OHO … Read more

This second manifesto marks a shift from abstraction to conceptualism in Iranian art worlds. It lays the foundation for contemporary art as it has developed in the country, albeit set in tension with, and written amid, the massive social upheaval in Iran just before the 1979 Revolution.

The introductory text introduces two pre-revolution Iranian manifestos of modern art, namely the “Nightingale’s Butcher Manifesto” (1951) and “Volume & Environment 2” (1976). It describes the socio-political context in which the texts emerged and compares them as different responses to similar issues separated by a time span of 25 years. It argues that these rare examples of Iranian art manifestos can be regarded as milestones of an entry into and an exit from modernism in Iranian art.