Afterall Books / One Work

A strikingly original analysis of Isa Genzken’s move towards merging sculptural and architectural morphologies into the critique of commodity culture.Fuck the Bauhaus, made in the year 2000 out of quotidian objects and cheap materials foraged from New York City by the German artist Isa Genzken, marked a poetic and provocative departure from Genzken’s earlier work. Since the 1970s, Genzken’s “post-Minimalist” works had been like ruins in reverse, conjuring the haunting specters of recent catastrophe, destruction, and failure in the United States, while also playfully suggesting a degree of freedom and elevation. Analyzing how this mode gave way to a new penchant for appropriation, collage, and montage, André Rottmann offers a strikingly original analysis of Genzken’s move towards merging sculptural and architectural morphologies into the critique of commodity culture. In this new addition to the One Work series, Rottmann draws on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, Bruno Latour, and

An illustrated exploration of Helen Chadwick’s erotic, playful, and fierce 1986 installation. In 1986 the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London showed a new commission by the artist Helen Chadwick (1954–1996). What Chadwick conceived for the ICA exhibition explored her characteristic themes―the female body (her own), the aesthetics of pleasure, the material variety and wonder of phenomena―but took them in a new, flamboyant direction. In this illustrated volume, Marina Warner examines one part of Chadwick’s installation, The Oval Court. This work was erotic, playful, and fierce; it showed imaginative ambition on an exceptional scale and a unique, piquant sensibility, both raunchy and delicate. Despite the work’s recognition as a feminist monument of rare intensity, it has rarely been shown or discussed since the author’s catalogue essay for the original exhibition. Warner here reconsiders Chadwick’s influence as an artist who helped to shift conventional aesthetics and transvalue

A nuanced reading of an artwork that explores a place, transitory and pastoral, where childhood might be lived and imagined differentlySharon Lockhart's Pine Flat (2006) takes its name from a small ha

An illustrated examination of Mark Leckey's celebrated video montage. In 1999, the British artist Mark Leckey released his video-montage Fiorucci made me Hardcore, a dreamscape vignette that commune

An examination of one of Walker Evans's iconic photographs of the Great Depression.Kitchen Corner, Tenant Farmhouse, Hale County, Alabama shows a painstakingly clean-swept corner in the house of an Al

An illustrated examination of Glenn Ligon's iconic Untitled (I Am a Man) (1988) -- a quotation, an appropriated text turned into an artifact.The iconic work Untitled (I Am a Man) (1988) by the impor