Using the HTML5 Filesystem API

An illustrated examination of Donald Rodney’s seminal digital media work Autoicon (1997–2000).Donald Rodney's Autoicon, a work originally produced as both a website and CD-ROM, was conceived by the artist in the mid-1990s but not completed until two years after his death in 1998. Referencing Jeremy Bentham’s infamous nineteenth-century "Auto-Icon," the work proposes an extension of the personhood and presence of Rodney, while critically challenging dominant conceptions of the self, the body, and historicity. Grounded in a partial collection of medical documents that constitute biomedicine’s attempts to comprehensively "know" and maintain Rodney’s body during his lifelong experience of sickle-cell aneamia, Autoicon pursues the artist’s address, from the mid-1980s onward, of the British social and institutional body’s cellular composition through racialized, biopolitical power. Autoicon consists of a Java-based AI and neural network that engages the user in text-based "chat," and provide

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

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

This book delves into the specific challenges Girlfriends presents -- both for viewers and for art historians -- whilst simultaneously situating it in relation to the extended work of Polke across a r

One wintry day in 1983, alongside other street sellers in the East Village, David Hammons peddled snowballs of various sizes. He had neatly laid them out in graduated rows and spent the day acting as

Warhol Marilyn (1965) is not a work by Andy Warhol but by the artist Elaine Sturtevant (1930--2014). Throughout her career, Sturtevant (as she preferred to be called) remade and exhibited works by oth

Lee Friedlander's The Little Screens first appeared as a 1963 photo-essay inHarper's Bazaar, with commentary by Walker Evans. Six untitled photographs show television screens broadcasting eerily glowi

One of the most influential artists of our time, Mike Kelley (1954--2012) produced a body of innovative work mining American popular culture as well as modernist and postmodernist art -- relentless ex

Part-text, part-sculpture, part-architecture, part-junk heap, Thomas Hirschhorn'soften monumental but precarious works offer a commentary on the spectacle of late-capitalistconsumerism and the global

The artist Lee Lozano (1930--1999) began her career as a painter; her work rapidlyevolved from figuration to abstraction. In the late 1960s, she created a major series of elevenmonochromatic Wave pain

Throughout his career, Philip Guston's work metamorphosed from figural to abstractand back to figural. In the 1950s, Guston (1913--1980) produced a body of shimmering abstractpaintings that made him -

Rodney Graham's The Phonokinetoscope (2001) is a five-minute 16mmfilm loop in which the artist is seen riding his Fischer Original bicycle through Berlin'sTiergarten while taking LSD, to the soundtrac

Helio Oiticica (1937--1980) occupies a central position in the Latin Americanavant-garde of the postwar era. Associated with the Rio de Janeiro-based neo-concretist movement atthe beginning of his car

Almost a half-century after Yayoi Kusama debuted her landmark installationInfinity Mirror Room--Phalli's Field (1965) in New York, the work remainschallenging and unclassifiable. Shifting between the

Michael Asher (born in 1943), one of the foremost installation artists of theConceptual art period, is a founder of site-specific practice. Considered a progenitor ofinstitutional critique, he spearhe

In The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1974--1975)Martha Rosler bridged the concerns of conceptual art with those of political documentary. The work,a series of twenty-one black-and-whit

One of the defining paintings of British Pop art, Richard Hamilton's Swingeing London67 (f) depicts two men--Mick Jagger and Hamilton's art dealer Robert Fraser--handcuffed together inthe back of a po

In Jeff Koons's One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985), a Spalding basketball floatsin the center of a glass tank that stands on a four-legged black metal structure. It has been calledone of the defin

Opening with a prolonged salvo of fiery explosions accompanied by the warning cry of a siren, Dara Birnbaum's video Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79) is a concise, action-packed

Following Marcel Duchamp's death in 1968, the Philadelphia Museum of Art stunned the art world by unveiling a project on which he had been working secretly for twenty years, long after he had suppose

In 1966, at the height of minimal art in New York, artist Michael Snow chose not to make another object to be placed in a room but instead spent a year planning a film of a room: Wavelength, a forty-

Chris Marker's legendary "cine roman" ("film novel") La Jetee is considered one of the greatest and most influential experimental films of all time. This short film—a postap

Hanne Darboven's Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983 (Cultural History 1880-1983) (1980-1983) is an overwhelming and encyclopedic installation consisting of 1,590 works on paper and 19 sculptural objects. The

In 1971 Alighiero e Boetti commissioned Afghan embroiderers to create a map of the world, with each country bearing the colours and pattern of its flag. The commission grew into a beautifully crafted

In Andy Warhol's silent black-and-white movie, Blow Job (1964), a youth is filmed as he is apparently being given the sex act named in the title. The 35-minute film is accentuated by the paucity of e

An illustrated discussion of Fischli and Weiss's famous film The Way Things Go,marking the twentieth anniversary of its first screening, explores why this captivating workcontinues to fascinate viewer

"You want beauty? I'll give you beauty!" ;Mary HeilmannMary Heilmann is one of themost important abstract painters of her generation. Her distinctively fluid, humorous, and brightcanvases combine the

Joan Jonas approaches video as a drawing tool, a mirror, and a framing device. Since1968, she has used video and performance to explore ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and thearchetypal authori

In Richard Prince's 1977 work Untitled (couple), difference mixes uncannily with sameness. We can't quite tell whether the shiny couple we see is human or android; their clothing seems curiously out

In his 1971 short film, (nostalgia) , American artist and writer Hollis Frampton oveturned the conventional narrative roles of words and images. In his account of an artists's transformation from pho

The fictitious hero of this 1984 installation is a lonely dreamer who develops an impossible project: to fly alone in cosmic space. But this dream is also an individual appropriation of a collective

In the mid-1980s, the Canadian art group General Idea (AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal) created a symbol using the acronym AIDS, arranging the letters in a manner that resembled Robert Indi

Jeff Wall's Picture for Women (1979) marks the transition of photography as an art form from the printed page to the gallery wall. Before this, photographs—from the orthodox photographic work o

Gordon Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect (1975) was a torqued, spiraling"cut" into two derelict seventeenth-century Paris buildings adjacent to the constructionsite of the controversial Centre Pompidou.

In 1967, Richard Long, then twenty-two years old and a student at Saint Martin's School of Art in London, walked back and forth along a straight line in the grass in the English countryside, leaving

"It is my overall concern to reveal people as they are engaged in various kinds of activities—alone, with each other, with objects—and to weight the quality of the human body towards that of objects a

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