Rosalyn Deutsche

Since the 1980s a great deal has been written about the relationship between art, architecture, and design, on the one hand, and the city or social space on the other. In Evictions Rosalyn Deutsche investigates the dominant uses of this interdisciplinary discourse, exploring topics that range from public art and homelessness to the repression of feminism in critical theories of public space. The book also intervenes in debates taking place in art, architecture, and urban studies about the meaning of public space, and places these struggles within broader contests over the definition of democracy. Opposing the nostalgic belief that democracy's survival demands a return to the ideal of a unitary public sphere, Deutsche contends that plurality and conflict, far from undermining public space, are the conditions of its possibility and extension.

Art and Spatial Politics

Evictions

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

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

"Rosalyn Deutsche argues for a certain modesty---or perhaps, I should say, a modest uncertainty---with regard to the demands placed upon art in response to war. She brings a deep knowledge of both contemporary art and the psychoanalytic literature on war to her study as well as the careful exposition and lucid prose we've come to expect from her work."---Douglas Crimp, author of Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics --

Three Studies in Art and War

Hiroshima After Iraq

Elena Volpato

Martha Rosler

Jewish Museum (New York, N.Y.)

The politically engaged work of Martha Rosler is fascinating and provocative; this wide-ranging survey brings timely insights at a moment of resurgence for political activism and feminism.

Rosalyn Deutsche

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