Time (Whitechapel – Documents of Contemporary Art)

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Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art. Amelia Groom is a London-based critic and curator who writes regularly for frieze and other publications. She held a teaching fellowship at the University of Sydney while she was writing her doctoral dissertation in the Art History and Theory department.

This anthology reconsiders crucial aspects of abstraction's resurgence in contemporary art, exploring three equally significant strategies explored in current practice: formal abstraction, economic abstraction, and social abstraction. In the 1960s, movements as diverse as Latin American neo-concretism, op art and “eccentric abstraction” disrupted the homogeneity, universality, and rationality associated with abstraction. These modes of abstraction opened up new forms of engagement with the phenomenal world as well as the possibility of diverse readings of the same forms, ranging from formalist and transcendental to socio-economic and conceptual. Artists surveyed include Marina Abramović, Joseph Beuys, Tacita Dean, Walter De Maria, A K Dolven, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Jitka Hanzlová, Gary Hill, Susan Hiller, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor, Mike Kelley, Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein, Richard Long, Barnett Newman, Tony Oursler, Cornelia Parker, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo, Lorna Simpson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Fred Tomaselli, James Turrell, Luc Tuymans, Bill Viola and Zhang Huan. Documentary has undergone a marked revival in recent art, following a long period in which it was a denigrated and unfashionable practice. This has in part been led by the exhibition of photographic and video work on political issues at Documenta and numerous biennials and, since the turn of the century, issues of injustice, violence and trauma in increasing zones of conflict. Aesthetically, documentary is now one of the most prominent modes of art-making, in part assisted by the linked transformation and recuperation of photography and video by the gallery and museum world. Unsurprisingly, this development, along with the close attention paid to photojournalism and mainstream documentary-making in a time of crisis, has been accompanied by a rich strain of theoretical and historical writing on documentary. MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide.From the hexing of presidents to a renewed interest in herbalism and atavistic forms of self-care, magic has furnished the contemporary imagination with mysterious and often disorienting bodies of arcane thought and practice. This volume brings together writings by artists, magicians, historians and theorists, that illuminate the vibrant correspondences animating contemporary art’s varied encounters with magical culture, inspiring a reconsideration of the relationship between the symbolic and the pragmatic.

Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art. This anthology provides a definitive historical context for documentary, exploring its roots in modernism and its critique under postmodernism; it surveys current theoretical thinking about documentary; and it examines a wide range of work by artists within, around or against documentary through their own writings and interviews. Wild writing on wild thought! This is a crucial, far-ranging primer for all those who have never considered themselves modern. A thrilling bricolage text that posits magic as a radical curriculum, galvanic DIY-ism, queer spirituality, a haven for the deviant and deemed, a recipe for cosmic connectedness, a form of anti-colonial politics, a hex on self-serving theocratic and technocratic mendacities."Artists surveyed include Rasheed Araeen, Art & Language, AA Bronson, Daniel Buren, Graciela Carnevale, Andrea Fraser, Piero Gilardi, Group Material, Richard Hamilton, Huang Rui, Laboratoire Agit-Art, Louise Lawler, Glenn Ligon, Konrad Lueg, Matsuzawa Yutaka, Palle Nielsen, OHO (Marko Pogagnik), Hélio Oiticica, Philippe Parreno, Victor Pasmore, Raqs Media Collective, Gerhard Richter, Ruangrupa, Situationist International, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Andy Warhol and Katsuhiro Yamaguchi. Terry R. Myers is a Chicago and Los Angeles-based writer, educator and independent curator. A regular contributor since 1988 to numerous international journals, including The Brooklyn Rail, Art Review, Parkett, and Modern Painters, he is the author of Mary Heilmann: Save the Last Dance for Me (Afterall Books, 2007). He is Associate Professor of Painting & Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. Part of the Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art. Julian Stallabrass teaches Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. His books include Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture (1996), High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art (1999) Internet Art: The Online Clash Between Culture and Commerce (2003) and Art Incorporated (2004).Writers include Marco Belpoliti, John Berger, Paul Crowther, Jacques Derrida, Okwui Enwezor, Jean Fisher, Barbara Claire Freeman, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Doreet LeVitte-Harten, Eleanor Heartney, Lynn M. Herbert, Luce Irigaray, Fredric Jameson, Lee Joon, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, Thomas McEvilley, Vijay Mishra, David Morgan, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Gene Ray, Robert Rosenblum, Philip Shaw, Marina Warner, Thomas Weiskel and Slavoj Žižek. Writers include Daniel Birnbaum, Norman Bryson, Douglas Crimp, Gilles Deleuze, Sebastian Egenhofer, Hal Foster, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Isabelle Graw, David Joselit, Shirley Kaneda, Geeta Kapur, Thomas Lawson, Midori Matsui, Lane Relyea, Rene Ricard, Jerry Saltz, Mira Schor, Barry Schwabsky and Adrian Searle.

Lucy Steeds is an editor of the Exhibition Histories series for Afterall Books and pathway leader in Exhibition Studies at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. This exciting collection is a pleasure to read from beginning to end...This is a welcome introduction to, and provocative rethinking of the object, in all its many formal and theoretical formations.' Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art. I welcome this new book about materiality. It explores questions of embodiment in our age of virtuality, and that is no small matter.' Simon Morley is a British artist and art historian who has contributed to international art journals including Art Monthly, Untitled, Contemporary Visual Art, TATE Etc. and Tema Celeste. A lecturer at Winchester School of Art, England, he is the author of Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art (2003).Tracing its various emergences through the shadows of modernity, the circuitries of ritual media, and declarations of psychic self-defence, Magic deciphers the evolution of a ‘magical-critical’ thinking that productively complicates, contradicts and expands the boundaries of our increasingly weird present. Petra Lange-Berndt is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at University College London and a leading researcher in the field of material studies in art history. She is co-editor of Sigmar Polke: We Petty Bourgeois! Contemporaries and Comrades, the 1970s (2011). Dan Byrne-Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts, London. His published work includes Traces of Modernity (2012). The object is this thing that refuses to go away. Virtual reality, conceptual art and numerous philosophical and psychological traditions have sought to de-thingify the world, but the object, in its many forms, persists. This anthology surveys reappraisals of what constitutes the ‘objectness’ of production, with art as its focus. Among the topics it examines are the relation of the object to subjectivity; distinctions between objects and ‘things’; the significance of the object’s transition from inert mass to tool or artefact; and the meanings of the everyday in the found object, repetition in the replicated or multiple object, loss in the absent object, and abjection in the formless or degraded object. It also explores artistic positions that are anti-object; theories of the experimental, liminal or mental object; and the role of objects in performance. The object becomes a prism through which to re-read contemporary art and better understand its recent past.