Art theorists - Rosalind Krauss and Shannon Jackson


Rosalind Krauss – key texts
Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971.
The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 73. New York: Garland, 1977.
Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge Mass: The MIT Press, 1977. “Studies major works by important sculptors since Rodin in the light of different approaches to general sculptural issues to reveal the logical progressions from nineteenth-century figurative works to the conceptual work of the present.” https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/passages-modern-sculpture
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985.
L'Amour fou: Photography & Surrealism. London: Arts Council, 1986. Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, July to September 1986.
Le Photographique : Pour une théorie des écarts. Translated by Marc Bloch and Jean Kempf. Paris: Macula, 1990.
The Optical Unconscious (1993)
Formless: A User's Guide (with Yve-Alain Bois) (1997)
The Picasso Papers (1999)
A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (1999) “In her text A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, critic Rosalind Krauss expands Clement Greenberg's description of the modernist desire for "pure" art forms in order to encompass the forms and issues of art today, the art of the "post-medium" age” http://csmt.uchicago.edu/annotations/kraussvoyage.htm
Bachelors (2000) “Since the 1970s Rosalind Krauss has been exploring the art of painters, sculptors, and photographers, examining the intersection of these artists concerns with the major currents of postwar visual culture: the question of the commodity, the status of the subject, issues of representation and abstraction, and the viability of individual media.” https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bachelors
Perpetual Inventory (2010) “The job of an art critic is to take perpetual inventory, constantly revising her ideas about the direction of contemporary art and the significance of the work she writes about. In these essays, which span three decades of assessment and reassessment, Rosalind Krauss considers what she has come to call the “post-medium condition”—the abandonment by contemporary art of the modernist emphasis on the medium as the source of artistic significance.”https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/perpetual-inventory
Under Blue Cup. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2011. “In Under Blue Cup, Rosalind Krauss explores the relation of aesthetic mediums to memory—her own memory having been severely tested by a ruptured aneurysm that temporarily washed away much of her short-term memory.”https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/under-blue-cup

“Rosalind Krauss was a critic and contributing editor for Artforum and one of the founders of the quarterly art theory journal October. She has been a highly influential critic and theorist in the post-Abstract Expressionist era…Krauss became enthralled with newer artistic movements that she believed required a different theoretical approach, which focused less on the aesthetic purity of an art form … and more on aesthetics that captured a theme or historical and/or cultural issue. Krauss still teaches Art History at Columbia University in New York.” http://www.theartstory.org/critic-krauss-rosalind.htm
Key ideas:
“Krauss viewed Abstract Expressionism as a singular movement whose practitioners adhered to strict standards of medium purity and anti-commercialism.
Abstract Expressionism: a development of abstract art which originated in New York in the 1940s and 1950s and aimed at subjective emotional expression with particular emphasis on the spontaneous creative act (e.g. action painting).
Leading figures were Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
Medium purity:  A work of art is pure only by limiting itself to a single medium. By remaining within those limits, Greenberg argued, the medium of abstraction may explore a virtually limitless number of possibilities.
Leading figures were Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman
Anti-commercialism:  unconcerned with or hostile toward commercial interests or commercialism anti-commercial policies.

With the arrival of new artistic styles in the 1960 and 70s, Krauss observed a variety of young artists experimenting with radically new perceptions of art and space. In her writing, Krauss placed a particular emphasis on artists who worked in sculpture and artwork that occupied the three dimensional plane.
As a critic and art historian, Krauss celebrated innovative post-AbEx styles as part of a new enlightenment in the history of Modernism; she deemphasized the importance of medium purity in art, and directed her attention toward matters of feminism, post-structuralism and post-minimalism.”

Shannon Jackson

“Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Chair in the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. In the fall of 2015, she was appointed to be the first Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts and Design (AVCAD).”
“Shannon Jackson’s own research and teaching focuses on two broad, overlapping domains 1) collaborations across visual, performing, and media art forms and 2) the role of the arts in social institutions and in social change.
Her most recent book is The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater (M.I.T. Press, 2015). 
Her previous books include  Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Routledge 2011), Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, and Hull-House Domesticity (2000) and Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (2004). 
“Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Commons,” co-edited with Johanna Burton and Dominic Willsdon, is forthcoming from the New Museum/M.I.T. Press.
Other projects include the guest-edited Valuing Labor in the Arts with Art Practical, a forthcoming special issue of Representations on time-based art, and an online platform of keywords in experimental art and performance, In Terms of Performance, created in collaboration with the Pew Center for Art and Heritage. Her writing has also appeared in dozens of museum catalogues, journals, blogs, and edited collections.”

https://www.amazon.com/Social-Works-Performing-Supporting-Publics/dp/0415486017

“At a time when art world critics and curators heavily debate the social, and when community organizers and civic activists are reconsidering the role of aesthetics in social reform, this book makes explicit some of the contradictions and competing stakes of contemporary experimental art-making.”
“Social Works is an interdisciplinary approach to the forms, goals and histories of innovative social practice in both contemporary performance and visual art. Shannon Jackson uses a range of case studies and contemporary methodologies to mediate between the fields of visual and performance studies. The result is a brilliant analysis that not only incorporates current political and aesthetic discourses but also provides a practical understanding of social practice.”



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