Moving Pictures: Contemporary Photography and Video from the Guggenheim Collection
by
Editorial Reviews
During the late 1960s and 70s, a paradigm shift occurred within visual culture: photography and the moving image were absorbed into critical art practices. In particular, these mediums were used to record ephemeral or performative events and to render visible conceptual systems or to question the supposed objectivity of representation itself. This volume focuses primarily on artworks from the last decade and proposes that the extensive use of reproducible mediums in today's art has its roots in an earlier formative period. By the end of the 70s, many artists turned to photography as a vehicle through which to critique photographic representation and to subvert an art system premised on the notion of the original. While this practice came to define much of the 80s postmodern art, its legacy for the 90s was essentially the license to indulge in photographic fantasy, image construction, and cinematic narrative. Artists working today freely manipulate their representations of the empirical world or invent entirely new cosmologies. They process their subject matter through conceptual systems or use digital processes to alter their images. Some directly intervene in the environment, subtly shifting components of the found world and establishing their quiet presence in it; others fabricate entire architectural environments for the camera lens. This current state of the arts and its recent history are represented via more than 150 works by 55 artists, including Nam June Paik, Kara Walker, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Fischli & Weiss, Ann Hamilton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager, Cindy Sherman, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Elger Esser, Andreas Gursky, Candida H fer, Thomas Ruff, J rge Sasse, Thomas Struth, Olafur Eliasson, Roni Horn, Gabriel Orozco, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Matthew Barney, Gregory Crewdson, Anna Gaskell, Sam Taylor-Wood, Oliver Boberg, James Casebere, Thomas Demand, Vanessa Beecroft, Wolfgang Tillmans, Patty Chang, Trisha Donnelly, Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, William Kentridge, Steve McQueen, Shirin Neshat, John Pilson and Gillian Wearing.Customer Reviews
Essays & Photography Great, But Hard to Appreciate Videos, 2004-02-21
The body of the book ("Catalogue Entries") consists of text about and photographs or video stills by 50 artists in alphabetical order (Marina Abramovic through Jane and Louise Wilson). Each of the artists is given up to one page of text. For most of the artists there is only one page of images, but Francis Alys, Matthew Barney, Miles Coolidge, Gregory Crewdson, Rineke Dijkstra, Olafur Eliasson, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Anna Gaskell, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Andreas Gursky, Ann Hamilton, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Mariko Mori, Aika Noguchi, Catherine Opie, Gabriel Orozco, Pipilotte Rist, Michal Rovner, Thomas Struth, Sam Taylor-Wood, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Kara Walker have at least three pages. Some works by Dijkstra, Gaskell, Goldin, Gursky, Anthony Hernandez, Manglano-Ovalle, Mori, Orozco, Rovner, Thomas Ruff, Taylor-Wood, and Tillmans are not reproduced in the book but were in the exhibition (per the list on pages 205-216). Virtually all of the works are dated 1990-2002; some images of Goldin's were taken in the 1970s and 1980s but were published later. For each artist, 2-4 "selected readings" are listed in the back of the book.
The photography is mostly great, but the book does not really do the videos justice for a couple reasons. First, there are not enough stills to give the reader a good idea of the course of each video. I would have preferred a larger number of smaller-sized stills. Second, the one-page-of-text limit for each video artist gives the same amount of space for the massive Cremaster series by Barney as for a three-minute video by Patty Chang. You'll have to travel to Spain to fully appreciate the videos, but meanwhile buy the book from Amazon.com!
Book Details
| Pages | 300 |
| ISBN | 0892072695 |
| Publisher | Guggenheim Museum |
| Publication Date | 2003-11 |
| Sales Rank | #733747 |
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