New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, N.Y.)

Cindy Tower

Home on the Range with Cindy Tower

Rosalyn Deutsche

Hans Haacke

For the past fifteen years, Hans Haacke's work has been concerned with issues that are at the core of postmodern investigations - the nature of art as institution, the authorship of the artist, the social behavior of the art world, the network of cultural policies such as the role and function of the museum, the critic, and the public, and many other sociological problems. This book is based on a major retrospective exhibition of Haacke's work, the first in an American museum. The works selected show the different ways in which he has addressed the social and political concerns affecting art production. By laying bare the explicit functioning and interconnectedness of systems of finance, social organization, and representations, Haacke demonstrates how these employ art and other forms of presentation and representation as formalized means of power and coercion. In this important respect, his work has set a precedent for that of many younger, social concerned artists. A group of significant essays by Leo Steinberg, Fredric Jameson, Rosalyn Deutsche, and an introduction and overview by Brian Wallis place Haacke's work in a larger social and aesthetic context. Hans Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1936 and, since 1967, has taught at the Cooper Union in New York. Earlier retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, the Tate Gallery, London, and museums in Berlin and Bern. His work has also been included in many major international group exhibitions, including the Tokyo Biennal, the Venice Biennale, and Documenta. Brian Wallis is Adjunct Curator at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and editor of Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representationand of the magazine Wedge. Hans Haackeis copublished with The New Museum of Contemporary Art and distributed by The MIT Press.

Hans Haacke, Unfinished Business

Pictured in two centuries of images, the hypermuscular and physically strong woman is studied here for the first time as a major player in popular culture and contemporary art. Using the bodybuilder as prototype, a rich variety of authors engage with her particular physicality, and how it resonates with social issues such as female pleasure and gender stereotypes. From the sublime to the gritty, this volume presents modern amazons as a culture with a history, a dazzling and transgressive current phenomenon, and avatars of the future. Packed with illustrations, "Picturing the Modern Amazon" investigates the representation of hypermuscular women in a range of visual sources. Historical images and archival materials dating from the late 1700s through the present century illustrate older notions of female strength, providing a solid base of comparison for the modern materials. Contemporary art explores a diversity of issues surrounding the physically strong woman; artists represented include Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Nicole Eisenman, Annie Leibovitz, Alison Saar, Andre Serrano, Cindy Sherman, and Nancy Spero. Comic artists address the amazon through comic strips, comic books, and unique art works that focus on muscular female characters and superheros; artists include Robert Crumb, Diane DiMassa, Roberta Gregory, John Howard, and Turtel Onli. Photographs of some of today's top bodybuilding competitors capture the stunning strength and definition of the hypermuscular woman. Co-edited by Joanna Frueh, Laurie Fierstein, and Judith Stein, the volume's contributors are Michael Cunningham, Nathalie Gassel, Leslie Heywood, Irving Lavin, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Al Thomas, Jan Todd, Steve Wennerstrom, and Carla Williams. Interviews with noted bodybuilders-both the sport's pioneers and today's top competitors-provide a personal perspective.

Picturing the Modern Amazon

Lynn Gumpert

Contemporary Visions of the Apocalypse

The End of the World

Faith Ringgold

Akron Art Museum

Includes reproductions of Ringgold's story quilts--some of them accompanied by the text

Faith Ringgold's French Collection and Other Story Quilts

Dancing at the Louvre

Dan Cameron

Carolee Schneemann

Up to and Including Her Limits

France Morin

The Interrupted Life

Marcia Tucker

Markus Rätz

Markus Raetz

In the Realm of the Possible : Essay

John Waters

Lisa Phillips

Marvin Heiferman

Lisa Phillips et al.

Known as a highly entertaining and controversial filmmaker, John Waters is also an artist and photographer. "John Waters: Change of Life" is a collection of his still photographic works made over the past decade. Includes essays by guest authors and an interview with Waters.

Change Of Life

Carlo McCormick

Martin Wong

Illinois State University. University Galleries

Lydia Lee

Barry Blinderman

Yasmin Ramirez

Entirely self-taught, Wong creates intricate compositions that combine gritty social documents, cosmic witticisms, and highly charged symbolic languages - customized manual alphabets for the deaf, street graffiti, Nuyorican poetry, hand-lettered signs, meticulously rendered brick facades, rearrangements of Zodiac signs - sometimes within a single painting.

The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong

Sweet Oblivion

Wim Delvoye

Borrowing its name from the ancient sewer in Rome, Belgian conceptualist Wim Delvoye's new and improved "Cloaca" is a room-sized shit-making machine whose bowels process two meals a day, serving up a mouthful of complex themes: scatalogy and disgust, high and low culture, man as machine and vice-versa, and the inversion of art semiotics. Many of these same concerns are processed in Delvoye's other work, like the life-sized carved walnut replica of a cement truck, the wood cabinet stocked with 32 circular saw blades painted with scenes in Delft China blue, and a herd of pigs tatooed by Antwerp's finest needle-men. Feces and other anal subjects are parsed in accompanying essays by such luminaries as Milan Kundera, Gerardo Mosquera, Dan Cameron, Georges Bataille and Salvador Dali.

Cloaca

New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, N.Y.)

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