Jo Applin

Ida Applebroog

Artist \Applebroog uses a wide variety of media to express themes of struggles within gender and political roles. Scripts is a facsimile of a compilation of handwritten notes, storyboards, mise-en-sc ne drawings and musical notations where Ssilences are the undercurrent of all dramatic events.

Angry Birds of America

Almost a half-century after Yayoi Kusama debuted her landmark installation 'Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field' (1965) in New York, the work remains challenging and unclassifiable. Jo Applin looks at the installation in detail and places it in the context of subsequent art practice and theory as well as Kusama's own (as she called it) 'obsessional art'.

Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field

Yayoi Kusama

Briony Fer

Alison Wilding is one of Britain's foremost sculptors. Tracing the trajectory of her artistic evolution, this book provides a critical survey of Wilding's rich career.

Alison Wilding

Kirsten Swenson

Todd Alden

In 1964 the industrialist Friedrich Arnhard Scheidt invited Eva Hesse (1936–1970) and her husband, Tom Doyle, to a residency in Kettwig an der Ruhr, Germany. The following fifteen months marked a significant transformation in Hesse’s practice. The artist’s studio space was located in an abandoned textile factory that contained machine parts, tools, and materials that served as inspiration for her complex, linear mechanical drawings and paintings. In 1965 Hesse expanded on this theme and began using objects found in the factory and papier-mâché to produce a series of fourteen vibrantly colored reliefs that venture into three-dimensional space with such materials as wood, metal, and cord protruding from the picture plane. With dynamic new scholarship and previously unpublished illustrations, Eva Hesse 1965 highlights key drawings, paintings, and reliefs from this pivotal time and demonstrates how the artist was able to rethink her approach to color, materials, and dimensional space and begin moving toward sculpture, preparing herself for the momentous strides that she would take upon her return to New York.

Eva Hesse 1965

In America during the 1960s, sculpture as an artistic practice underwent a series of radical transformations. Artists including Lee Bontecou, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, H. C. Westermann, and Bruce Nauman offered alternative ways of imagining the three-dimensional object. The objects they created were variously described as erotic, soft, figurative, aggressive, bodily, or, in the words of the critic Lucy Lippard, "eccentric." Looking beyond the familiar and canonic artworks of the 1960s, the book challenges not only how we think about these artists, but how we learn to look at the more familiar narratives of 1960s sculpture, such as Pop and Minimalism. Ambivalent and disruptive, the work of this decade articulated a radical renegotiation—rejection, even—of contemporary paradigms of sculptural practice. This invigorating study explores that shift and the ways in which the kinds of work made in this period defied established categories and questioned the criteria for thinking about sculpture.

Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America

Eccentric Objects

Amy Tobin

Catherine Spencer

The essays in this collection explore the extraordinarily rich networks of international artists and art practices that emerged in and around London during the 1960s and ’70s, a period that saw an explosion of new media and fresh attitudes and approaches to making and thinking about art. The contributors to London Art Worlds examine the many activities and movements that existed alongside more established institutions in this period, from the rise of cybernetics and the founding of alternative publications to the public protests and new pedagogical models in London’s art schools. The essays explore how international artists and the rise of alternative venues, publications, and exhibitions, along with a growing mobilization of artists around political and cultural issues ranging from feminism to democracy, pushed the boundaries of the London art scene beyond the West End’s familiar galleries and posed a radical challenge to established modes of making and understanding art. Engaging, wide-ranging, and original, London Art Worlds provides a necessary perspective on the visual culture of the London art scene in the 1960s and ’70s. Art historians and scholars of the era will find these essays especially valuable and thought provoking. In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume are Elena Crippa, Antony Hudek, Dominic Johnson, Carmen Juliá, Courtney J. Martin, Lucy Reynolds, Joy Sleeman, Isobel Whitelegg, and Andrew Wilson.

Mobile, Contingent, and Ephemeral Networks, 1960–1980

London Art Worlds

A study of Kusama's era-defining work, a “sublime, miraculous field of phalluses,” against the background of abstraction, eroticism, sexuality, and softness. Almost a half-century after Yayoi Kusama debuted her landmark installation Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli's Field (1965) in New York, the work remains challenging and unclassifiable. Shifting between the Pop-like and the Surreal, the Minimal and the metaphorical, the figurative and the abstract, the psychotic and the erotic, with references to “free love” and psychedelia, it seemed to embody all that the 1960s was about, while at the same time denying the prevailing aesthetics of its time. The installation itself was a room lined with mirrored panels and carpeted with several hundred brightly polka-dotted soft fabric protrusions into which the visitor was completely absorbed. Kusama simply called it “a sublime, miraculous field of phalluses.” A precursor of performance-based feminist art practice, media pranksterism, and “Occupy” movements, Kusama (born in 1929) was once as well known as her admirers—Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, and Joseph Cornell. In this first monograph on an epoch-defining work, Jo Applin looks at the installation in detail and places it in the context of subsequent art practice and theory as well as Kusama's own (as she called it) “obsessional art.” Applin also discusses Kusama's relationship to her contemporaries, particularly those working with environments, abstract-erotic sculpture, and mirrors, and those grappling with such issues as abstraction, eroticism, sexuality, and softness. The work of Lee Lozano, Claes Oldenburg, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse is seen anew when considered in relation to Yayoi Kusama's.

An illuminating study of an overlooked artist from the 1960s whose work has recently returned to the limelight This is the first in‑depth study of the idiosyncratic ten‑year career of Lee Lozano (1930-1999), assuring this important artist a key place in histories of post‑war art. The book charts the entirety of Lozano's production in 1960s New York, from her raucous drawings and paintings depicting broken tools, genitalia, and other body parts to the final exhibition of her spectacular series of abstract "Wave Paintings" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970. Highly regarded at the time, Lozano is now perhaps best known for Dropout Piece (1970), a conceptual artwork and dramatic gesture with which she quit the art world. Shortly afterwards she announced she would have no further contact with other women. Her "dropout" and "boycott of women" lasted until her death, by which time she was all but forgotten. This book tackles head‑on the challenges that Lozano poses to art history--and especially to feminist art history--attending to her failures as well as her successes, and arguing that through dead ends and impasses she struggled to forge an alternative mode of living. Lee Lozano: Not Working looks for the means to think about complex figures like Lozano whose radical, politically ambiguous gestures test our assumptions about feminism and the "right way" to live and work.

Jo Applin

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