Rosalind E. Krauss
Related: art criticism - American art
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985) - Rosalind E. Krauss [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
The toe depicted on the cover of the book is by Jacques-Andre Boiffard, The Big Toe (1929).
Like many, Krauss had been drawn to the criticism of Clement Greenberg, as a counterweight to the highly subjective, poetic approach of Harold Rosenberg. [Jun 2006]
From the 1980s, Krauss became increasingly concerned with using a psychoanalytic understanding of drives and the unconscious, owing less to the Freudianism of an André Breton or a Salvador Dalí, and much more to the structuralist Lacan and the "dissident surrealist" Bataille. See "No More Play," her 1984 essay on Giacometti, as well as "Corpus Delicti," written for the 1985 exhibition L'Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, Cindy Sherman: 1975-1993 and The Optical Unconscious (both 1993) and Formless: A User's Guide with Yve-Alain Bois, catalog to the exhibition L'Informe: Mode d'emploi (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1996). [Dec 2006]
Biography
Rosalind Krauss is an American art critic, professor, and theorist. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_E._Krauss [Jan 2006]
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985) - Rosalind E. Krauss
As Hal Foster... writes, miss Krauss cannot be blamed of the conceptual limitations of the time... if read within a historical context, this book Is very enlightning and very compromised with structural analisis, as it is with it's by- products (of wich, we often make so much of a deal these days) ... as it is with deconstructive readings. It seems to me that her efforts have not been scaled to the dimension they have. It is (still) a formidable introduction for anyone interested in really getting involved in post- structural thinking. I would even say... fundamental, to art practitioners and related. It should be taken,i believe, as a precious, self aware, golden thread for contemporary thinking. Her, "scupture on the expanded field", is illuminating, don't miss it. I really regret having rated "the optical unconscious" 4 stars, it must also be 5. Such risks taken by an art historian must not be taken lightly. She has taken first, as few others,the steps to construct--- the difference---, as they say. - Nicolas Ceron
Formless: A User's Guide (1997) - Yve-Alain Bois, Rosalind Krauss
Formless: A User's Guide (1997) - Yve-Alain Bois, Rosalind Krauss
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Book Description
In a work that will become indispensable to anyone seriously interested in modern art, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss introduce a new constellation of concepts to our understanding of avant-garde and modernist art practices. Formless: A User's Guide constitutes a decisive and dramatic transformation of the study of twentieth-century culture. Although it has been over sixty years since Georges Bataille undertook his philosophical development of the term informe, only in recent years has the idea of the "formless" been deployed in the theorizing and reconfiguring of the field of twentieth-century art. This is partly because that field has most often been crudely set up as a battle between form and content; "formless" constitutes a third term standing outside that opposition, outside the binary thinking that is itself formal.In Formless: A User's Guide, Bois and Krauss present a rich and compelling panorama of the formless. They chart its persistence within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery, and they assess its destiny within current artistic production. In the domain of practice, they analyze it as an operational tool, the structural cunning of which has repeatedly been suppressed in the service of a thematics of art. Neither theme nor form, formless is, as Bataille himself expressed it, a "job." The job of Formless: A User's Guide is to explore the power of the informe. A stunning new map of twentieth-century art emerges from this reconceptualization and from the brilliantly original analyses of the work of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Lucio Fontana, Cindy Sherman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.
Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism (2004) - Various
Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism (2004) - Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Synopsis
In this groundbreaking and original work of scholarship, four of the most influential and provocative art historians of our time have come together to provide a comprehensive history of art in the 20th and 21s centuries, an age when artists have sought constantly to overturn the traditions of the past and expectations of the present in order to invent new practices and forms. Adopting an innovative year-by-year approach, Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh present more than one hundred short essays, each focusing on a crucial event - such as the creation of a seminal work, the publication of an artistic manifesto, or the opening of a major exhibition - to tell the story of the dazzling diversity of practice and interpretation that characterized the art of the period. All the key turning-points and breakthroughs of modernism and postmodernism are explored in depth, as are the frequent and sustained antimodernist reactions that proposed alternative visions of art and the world. Illustrating the authors' fine texts are more than six hundred of the most important works of the century, most reproduced in full colour. The book's flexible structure and extensive cross-referencing allow readers to plot their own course through the book and to follow any one of the many narratives that unfold through the century, whether that be the history of a medium such as photography or painting, the development of art in a particular country, the influence of a movement such as Surrealism or feminism, or the emergence of a stylistic or conceptual category like abstraction or minimalism. Boxes give further background information on some of the important figures and issues surrounding the art. In their perceptive introductions, the four authors set out and explain the different methods of art history at work in the book, providing the reader with the conceptual tools to further his or her own study. Two roundtable discussions - one at mid-century, the other at the close of the book - consider some of the questions raised by the preceding decades and look ahead to the art of the future. A glossary of terms and concepts completes this extraordinary volume. --via Amazon.com
see also: Hal Foster - Rosalind Krauss - art
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