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
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
In 1968, the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti renamed himself Alighiero e("and") Boetti, effectively expressing the duality of his personality and his work--and,by extension, the dichotomies of society
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
The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge) is a thirty-minute film by Swiss artists PeterFischli and David Weiss featuring a series of chain reactions involving ordinary objects. It is alsoone of the trul
"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
A richly illustrated study of Marc Chaimowicz's groundbreaking 1972 post-Pop installation-performance piece Celebration? Realife. Marc Camille Chaimowicz (born in 1947) was one of the first artists
The artistic map of Europe contains different degrees of detail and resolution. Italy, France, and Spain are presented in fine grain, but the Balkan peninsula is little more than a vague outline. Eng
An extended illustrated account of the Hollis Frampton film that marks critical moment in art history when photography meets filmmaking. In his 1971 short film, (nostalgia), American artist and writ
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
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
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
One of the defining paintings of British Pop art, Richard Hamilton's Swingeing London 67 (f) depicts two men--Mick Jagger and Hamilton's art dealer Robert Fraser--handcuffed together in the back of a
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 ortho
Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect (1975) was a torqued, spiraling “cut” into two derelict seventeenth-century Paris buildings adjacent to the construction site of the controver
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
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
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 yea
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-
In 1968, toward the end of a decade that witnessed civil rights protests, the escalation of the war in Vietnam and an expanded notion of artistic practice, Yvonne Rainer presented her evening length w
In Richard Prince's 1977 work Untitled (couple), difference mixes uncannily withsameness. We can't quite tell whether the shiny couple we see is human or android; their clothingseems curiously out of
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
The artistic map of Europe contains different degrees of detail and resolution. Italy, France, and Spain are presented in fine grain, but the Balkan peninsula is little more than a vague outline. Engl
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
