Unpackaging Art of the 1980s

Unpackaging Art of the 1980s PDF Author: Alison Pearlman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226651453
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
American art of the 1980s is as misunderstood as it is notorious. Critics of the time feared that market hype and self-promotion threatened the integrity of art. They lashed out at contemporary art, questioning the validity of particular media and methods and dividing the art into opposing camps. While controversies have since subsided, critics still view art of the 1980s as a stylistic battlefield. Alison Pearlman rejects this picture, which is truer of the period's criticism than of its art. Pearlman reassesses the works and careers of six artists who became critics' biggest targets. In each of three chapters, she pairs two artists the critics viewed as emblematic of a given trend: Julian Schnabel and David Salle in association with Neo-Expressionism; Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring vis-à-vis Graffiti Art; and Peter Halley and Jeff Koons in relation to Simulationism. Pearlman shows how all these artists shared important but unrecognized influences and approaches: a crucial and overwhelming inheritance of 1960s and 1970s Conceptualism, a Warholian understanding of public identity, and a deliberate and nuanced use of past styles and media. Through in-depth discussions of works, from Haring's body-paintings of Grace Jones to Schnabel's movie Basquiat, Pearlman demonstrates how these artists' interests exemplified a broader, generational shift unrecognized by critics. She sees this shift as starting not in the 1980s but in the mid-1970s, when key developments in artistic style, art-world structures, and consumer culture converged to radically alter the course of American art. Unpackaging Art of the 1980s offers an innovative approach to one of the most significant yet least understood episodes in twentieth-century art.

Unpackaging Art of the 1980s

Unpackaging Art of the 1980s PDF Author: Alison Pearlman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226651453
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

Book Description
American art of the 1980s is as misunderstood as it is notorious. Critics of the time feared that market hype and self-promotion threatened the integrity of art. They lashed out at contemporary art, questioning the validity of particular media and methods and dividing the art into opposing camps. While controversies have since subsided, critics still view art of the 1980s as a stylistic battlefield. Alison Pearlman rejects this picture, which is truer of the period's criticism than of its art. Pearlman reassesses the works and careers of six artists who became critics' biggest targets. In each of three chapters, she pairs two artists the critics viewed as emblematic of a given trend: Julian Schnabel and David Salle in association with Neo-Expressionism; Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring vis-à-vis Graffiti Art; and Peter Halley and Jeff Koons in relation to Simulationism. Pearlman shows how all these artists shared important but unrecognized influences and approaches: a crucial and overwhelming inheritance of 1960s and 1970s Conceptualism, a Warholian understanding of public identity, and a deliberate and nuanced use of past styles and media. Through in-depth discussions of works, from Haring's body-paintings of Grace Jones to Schnabel's movie Basquiat, Pearlman demonstrates how these artists' interests exemplified a broader, generational shift unrecognized by critics. She sees this shift as starting not in the 1980s but in the mid-1970s, when key developments in artistic style, art-world structures, and consumer culture converged to radically alter the course of American art. Unpackaging Art of the 1980s offers an innovative approach to one of the most significant yet least understood episodes in twentieth-century art.

Urban Theater: New York Art in the 1980s

Urban Theater: New York Art in the 1980s PDF Author:
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 0847844544
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Set to accompany a groundbreaking exhibition, this volume is the first to focus exclusively on New York’s 1980s art scene, reuniting many of today’s internationally renowned artists in relation to the urban context that shaped and inspired them. Vibrant and vital, discordant and even obscene, the New York art scene of the 1980s gave rise to some of the contemporary art world’s most recognizable features. As the artists who emerged in that decade now set records at auction, the era is ripe to be reexamined. Representing in turns a cool irony, reflections on media culture, consumerism, cartoons, and street art, the work collected here re-creates the tense energy of a grittier New York. This volume is richly illustrated with works by the decade’s most critically acclaimed artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ross Bleckner, Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl, Nan Goldin, Peter Halley, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Robert Mapplethorpe, Allan McCollum, Richard Prince, David Salle, Kenny Scharf, Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, Donald Sultan, Philip Taaffe, Andy Warhol, and Christopher Wool.

Brand New

Brand New PDF Author:
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 0847862410
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
An eye-opening book about the 1980s New York art scene, its far-reaching effects on contemporary art, and the rise of some of the biggest names in the art world today. This groundbreaking book, accompanying a major exhibition at the Hirshhorn, tells the story of the evolution of New York’s downtown art scene in the 1980s—from a DIY counterculture in the East Village to a legitimate gallery business in SoHo. Coinciding with the rise of modern branding and the onset of the information age, artists’ focus on commodities and consumerism began as satire but came to be much more complex: commodities and associated phenomena, such as advertising, now served as vessels for ideas, politics, and personal relationships in “brand-new” types of painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and performance. In a book full of visual surprises, newly commissioned essays shed new light on this pivotal period: curator Gianni Jetzer provides a comprehensive overview, while Leah Pires illuminates lesser-known conceptual collaborations, and Bob Nickas offers an eyewitness account of the East Village gallery scene. These texts, together with an illustrated chronology, provide a fresh account of the moment at which contemporary artists such as Felix González-Torres, Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman grabbed the ball from Andy Warhol and ran with it, changing the rules of the game forever.

Tom Warren

Tom Warren PDF Author: Anthony Haden-Guest
Publisher: Hatje Cantz Verlag
ISBN: 3775751815
Category : Photography
Languages : de
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Die 1980er-Jahre in New York waren eine ambivalente Zeit: einerseits war die Stadt geprägt von hoher Kriminalität und der AIDS-Krise, andererseits boomte die Wirtschaft und verhalf ihren Profiteuren zu einem dekadenten Leben. Kunst- und Kulturschaffende wurden von der Stadt der Gegensätze angezogen. Sie beschäftigten sich kritisch mit Themen wie Politik und Gentrifizierung – aber genossen auch das hedonistische Leben. Der Fotograf Tom Warren wurde zu einem der wichtigsten Dokumentaristen dieser Zeit. Er war ein bedeutender Teil der New Yorker Kunstszene und erlangte mit der künstlerischen Umnutzung vakanter Räume im East Village Bekanntheit. Mit seinen Porträts der Menschen und des Lebens von New York schuf er Erinnerungen und Zeitdokumente. Die Monografie zeigt seine Fotografien aus dieser Zeit und erweckt eine vergangene Dekade zum Leben.

This Will Have Been

This Will Have Been PDF Author: Helen Anne Molesworth
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
A fascinating examination of the cultural and political forces that shaped the art of a tumultuous decade

VHS: Video Cover Art

VHS: Video Cover Art PDF Author: Thomas Hodge
Publisher: Schiffer Publishing
ISBN: 9780764348679
Category : Commercial art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Video cover art is a unique and largely lost artform representing a period of unabashed creativity during the video rental boom of the 1980s to early 1990s. The art explodes with a succulent, indulgent blend of design, illustration, typography, and hilarious copywriting. Written and curated by Tom "The Dude Designs" Hodge, poster artist extraordinaire and VHS obsessive, with a foreword by Mondo's Justin Ishmael, this collection contains over 240 full-scale, complete video sleeves in the genres of action, comedy, horror, kids, sci-fi, and thriller films. It's a world of mustached, muscled men, buxom beauties, big explosions, phallic guns, and nightmare-inducing monsters. From the sublime to the ridiculous, some are incredible works of art, some are insane, and some capture the tone of the films better than the films themselves. All are amazing and inspiring works of art that captivate the imagination. It's like stepping back in time into your local video store!

Art Demonstration

Art Demonstration PDF Author: Claire Grace
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0262543524
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A study of Group Material, the influential but underexamined New York–based artist collective, investigating a series of key works. Key predecessor of contemporary art’s most radical activist gestures, the 1980s collective Group Material seized upon the temporary exhibition as a prime mode of intervention. Projects sited on walls, subways, and billboards targeted some of the most sensitive political conflicts of the era, from U.S. military interventions in Latin America to the AIDS crisis. In Art Demonstration, Claire Grace examines Group Material’s New York–based collaboration across a decade that saw a wave of renewed interest in art as a domain of political mobilization. As Grace argues here, Group Material’s art was never just a means to an end; looking itself held urgency. Grace distinguishes between two types of Group Material projects: room-scale interiors featuring distinctive wall treatments, soundtracks, and boundary-crossing arrangements of objects, and works in spaces usually reserved for advertising. Grace analyzes the group’s practice in both categories, examining such well-known projects as AIDS Timeline (1989) and Democracy (1988–1989) and lesser-known works including Subculture (1983) and The Castle (1987). Grace shows that the politics running through Group Material’s practice ultimately resides in the artists’ particular recourse to the exhibition form. With that bearing, Group Material’s work insisted on the material in the face of postmodern theory’s privileging of the discursive, and redistributed authorship within protean and pivotally diverse collective structures, testing in so doing the ever fragile contours of democratic participation as art became a commodity for speculative investment.

The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s–1980s

The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s–1980s PDF Author: Catherine Dossin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317017676
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
In The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s-1980s, Catherine Dossin challenges the now-mythic perception of New York as the undisputed center of the art world between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, a position of power that brought the city prestige, money, and historical recognition. Dossin reconstructs the concrete factors that led to the shift of international attention from Paris to New York in the 1950s, and documents how ’peripheries’ such as Italy, Belgium, and West Germany exerted a decisive influence on this displacement of power. As the US economy sank into recession in the 1970s, however, American artists and dealers became increasingly dependent on the support of Western Europeans, and cities like Cologne and Turin emerged as major commercial and artistic hubs - a development that enabled European artists to return to the forefront of the international art scene in the 1980s. Dossin analyses in detail these changing distributions of geopolitical and symbolic power in the Western art worlds - a story that spans two continents, forty years, and hundreds of actors. Her transnational and interdisciplinary study provides an original and welcome supplement to more traditional formal and national readings of the period.

The Long 1980s

The Long 1980s PDF Author: Nick Aikens
Publisher: Valiz/L'Internationale
ISBN: 9789492095497
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
The 1980s triggered a fundamental reorientation in the relationship between governments and their publics, in turn shaping the imaginative landscape of the 21st century. Art and culture played a central role in responding to, pre-empting, and articulating these changes. Although globalisation has produced greater inequality and mixed economic results, it has also permitted the emergence of new regional cultural and activist networks, along with the possibility of a new global or transnational culture. How the effects of this shift have impacted our contemporary condition is told in diverse microhistories which compare very different geopolitical situations in Europe and beyond.

Pacific Standard Time

Pacific Standard Time PDF Author: Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin, Germany)
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606060724
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
"This volume is published for the occasion of the Getty's citywide grant initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945-1980 and accompanies the exhibition Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture 1950- 1970, held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles."