An illustrated investigation into the critical motives behind the last, unfinished work that has defined the romantic legacy of conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader. In 1975 Bas Jan Ader disappeared at sea while trying to sail from the East Coast of the United States to Europe as part of a project titled In Search of the Miraculous. Ader's considerable influence on later conceptual artists stems from the way in which he used the cool analytic and antisubjective aesthetics of conceptual art to explore experiences that would seem definitively subjective—the emotional intensity of tragedy and the romantic quest for the sublime. In Search of the Miraculous was conceived as a three-part project: a lonely nighttime walk from the hills of Los Angeles down to the sea, documented in photographs; the Atlantic crossing; a night walk through Amsterdam, mirroring the LA photographs.The circumstances of his disappearance have led many interpreters to identify Ader (as a person) with the role of the tragic romantic hero. The cult status of the artist as a hero whose work is authenticated through his death, however, has obscured the fact that Ader's art was a critical investigation of precisely those romantic motives his persona has now come to be identified with. This book unpicks these ties in Ader's work in order to highlight the specific and unique way in which Ader explores the existential and emotional with an artistic approach that is as conceptual and analytic as it is poetic and personal. Afterall Books are distributed by The MIT Press.
This first compilation of writings by art critic Jan Verwoert galvanizescentral themes he has been developing in pursuit of a language todescribe art's transformative potential in conceptual, performative andemotional terms. He analyzes the power of public gestures toconstitute communities as well as the pressure to perform that governsthe sphere of creative labor, in order to show how particular artistsperform gestures and invoke community differently. Exploring theemotional power games that shape social relations, Verwoert looks foran alternative ethos of action and feeling, asking: How can a modernistapproach to artistic form as a means of social critique be expandedto fully avow its subliminal affective undercurrents, and produce apleasurably crooked form of criticality in art and writing?
In March 2008 the artist Michael Stevenson self-published a slender document entitled Fables to accompany his project Lender of Last Resort at the Kroller-Muller Museum in the Netherlands. It was a series of some nine texts in fable form, and each suggested further allegorical readings on a tableau the artist assembled in the museum. All were co-written by Stevenson and the art critic Jan Verwoert. The project itself was developed around the notion of the bilateral loan contract, both in the financial sense, but also regarding the museological. The publication was only available in the space itself and has long since been out of print. Animal Spirits: Fables in the Parlance of Our Times is an artist's book by Michael Stevenson and Jan Verwoert which expands upon the themes of this earlier document and re-examines them more specifically in the light of our current times. It is based on a collaborative process, a process that resembles a game. Stevenson and Verwoert developed a working method in which plot structure remained open, a kind of partial exquisite corpse, i.e. text fragments passed back and forth without prior discussion as to any through line. These stories were co-illustrated in a similar way by the artist and Margaret Stevenson, his mother--the moral guide; the results were then made into a publication by Christoph Keller. A page at the end of the book announces the contributors thus: artist, mother, critic, and spirit maker. The stories themselves take classic fable form and so most are concerned with arrangements between two parties or what could be called informal bilateral contracts. Galvanized and translated within parallel realities they produce a world in which the Beginning of the World has a voice and dares to question the might of the Bull. A world where the Shareholder sips wine at the dinner table with the Jackal, and the Lion, in a crisis, calls on his Hairdresser for council in matters of sovereign security. Haircuts ...Severe haircuts! The publication is part of the series of artists' projects edited by Christoph Keller and has been supported by Creative New Zealand"--Publisher's website.
The Blue One Comes in Black offers a new take on Canadian sculptor and installation artist Liz Magor's (born 1948) influential four-decade practice. Gathering new critical texts, creative writing and texts by the artist herself, the volume highlights pieces from throughout Magor's career alongside her most recent work.
Ayşe Erkmen (1949, Istanbul) and Ann Veronica Janssens (1956, Folkestone) are sculptors of roughly the same generation. In both their cases, sculpture is a concept that goes far beyond the three-dimensional nature of the work of art and the spatial relationship between the work and the viewer. Ayse Erkmen's artistic practice is characterised by a marked interest in the historical and social context in which a work of art is born. She makes invisible elements and structures in the surroundings temporarily or permanently visible. Ann Veronica Janssens is engaged with the sensory experience and the moment when the body and space meet. She experiments with the intangible and employs light, colour and sound in her research into the perception of space and movement. In 2016, at the invitation of the City of Ghent, Erkmen and Janssens will each be installing a permanent sculpture on the Korenmarkt. The S.M.A.K., in a double exhibition (31 October 2015 - 14 February 2016), takes the opportunity to set the designs in the broader context ocf the two artists' oeuvres and to examine how these two relate to each other. Exhibition: S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium (31.10.2015-14.02.2016).
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