Beginning with the first comprehensive account of the discourse of appropriation that dominated the art world in the late 1970s and 1980s, Art After Appropriation suggests a matrix of inflections and refusals around the culture of taking or citation, each chapter loosely correlated with one year of the decade between 1989 and 1999. The opening chapters show how the Second World culture of the USSR gave rise to a new visibility for photography during the dissolution of the Soviet Union around 1989. Welchman examines how genres of ethnography, documentary and travel are crossed with fictive performance and social improvisation in the videos of Steve Fagin. He discusses how hybrid forms of subjectivity are delivered by a new critical narcissism, and how the Korean-American artist, Cody Choi converts diffident gestures of appropriation from the logic of material or stylistic annexation into continuous incorporated events. Art After Appropriation also examines the creation of public art from covert actions and social feedback, and how bodies participate in their own appropriation. Art After Appropriation concludes with the advent of the rainbow net, an imaginary icon that governs the spaces of interactivity, proliferation and media piracy at the end of the millennium.John Welchman is Professor of Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Modernism Relocated (1995) and Invisible Colors (1997); and editor of Rethinking Borders (1996), and a forthcoming three-volume anthology of the writings of LA artist MIke Kelley. Welchman has contributed to numerous journals, magazines, museum catalogues and newspapers, including Artforum; New York Times; Los Angeles Times; International Herald Tribune; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Gallery; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Reina Sofia, Madrid; Haus der Kunst, Munich

Product Description: Vitrines and glass cabinets are familiar apparatuses that have in large part defined modern modes of display and visibility, both within and beyond the museum. They separate objects from their contexts, group them with other objects, both similar and dissimilar, and often serve to reinforce their intrinsic or aesthetic values...read more

Product Description: Black Sphinx collects 12 essays on comedy in contemporary art by leading philosophers, art historians and theorists. Philosopher Simon Critchley and art historian Janet Whitmore consider the origins of comedic genres and survey some of the key theoretical articulations of laughter and wit, by Freud, Bergson and others; John C...read more

Product Description: This anthology of essays, images and dialogues exploring contemporary art's engagements with risk--physical, social, political and aesthetic--brings readers into the conference from which the book takes its title, a third annual collaboration between the Getty Research Institute and the Southern California Consortium of Art Schools (SoCCAS)...read more

Product Description: This contemporary reassessment of the Institutional Critique movement, launched in the late 1960s by artists including Michael Asher and Hans Haacke, grew out of a symposium held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It looks at Institutional Critique's central aim, the exposure and ironization of the structures and logic of museums and art galleries, and recent developments that engage with and echo it...read more

Product Description: What do Mike Kelley and his cronies and sometime collaborators Jim Shaw, Paul McCarthy and Tony Oursler talk about when they talk about art? You'll have to crack this book to find out, but expect a heady mix of pop culture, sex, violence, politics and, as always, a strong dose of humor...read more

Product Description: This first volume of a series of anthologies, each based on a symposium held in Los Angeles by a consortium of the art schools of Southern California, brings out some heavy hitters for its inaugural number. A cross-disciplinary endeavor, the contributors include Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant; novelist Dennis Cooper (“the most important transgressive literary artist since William S...read more

Product Description: What John C. Welchman calls the "blazing network of focused conflations" from which Mike Kelley's styles are generated is on display in all its diversity in this second volume of the artist's writings. The first volume, Foul Perfection, contained thematic essays and writings about other artists; this collection concentrates on Kelley's own work, ranging from texts in "voices" that grew out of scripts for performance pieces to expository critical and autobiographical writings...read more

Product Description: This text presents a critical history of how modern artworks receive their titles. It examines the crucial titling modes on which modernism depends and shows that titles can rarely be understood outside the institutional parameters that made them visible - exhibitions, criticism and catalogues...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The condition of borders has been crucial to many recent exhibitions, conferences and publications. But there does not yet exist a convincing critical frame for the discussion of border discourses. Rethinking Borders offers just such an introduction...read more

Product Description: art book