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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

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

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 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

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

Dan Graham's Rock My Religion (1982--1984) is a video essaypopulated by punk and rock performers (Patti Smith, Jim Morrison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and EddieCochran) and historical figures (including Ann L

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

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

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 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

In Sanja Ivekovic's Triangle ( Trokut, 1979),four black-and-white photographs and written text capture an eighteen-minute performance from May10, 1979. On that date, a motorcade carrying Josip Broz Ti

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

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

Agnes Martin's Night Sea (1963) is a large canvas of hand-drawn rectangular grids painted in luminous blue and gold. In this illustrated study, Suzanne Hudson presents th

"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

An examination of Pierre Huyghe's post-apocalyptic Untitled (Human Mask), which asks whether our human future may be one of remnants and mimicry. Pierre Huyghe's 2014 film Untitled (Human Mask) comb

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 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

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

Marc Camille Chaimowicz was one of the first artists to merge the realms of performance and installation art. Chaimowicz distinguished himself in an era of stark minimalism by his unabashed pursuit o

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 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

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

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

Amna Malik opens her study of Sarah Lucas's Au Naturel (1994) by asking "Doesart have a sex? And if so, what does it look like?" Au Naturel is an assemblage of objects--amattress, a bucket, a pair of

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

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

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

Hanne Darboven's Cultural History 1880-1983 (1980-1983) is an overwhelming and encyclopedic installation that weaves together cultural, social and historical references. Juxtaposing found and crafted

Dan Graham's Rock My Religion (1982--1984) is a video essaypopulated by punk and rock performers (Patti Smith, Jim Morrison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and EddieCochran) and historical figures (including Ann L

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

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

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

'Does art have a sex? And if so, what does it look like?' With these questions Amna Malik opens her study of Sarah Lucas's Au Naturel (1994), an assemblage of objects that suggest male and female body

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 London 67 (f) depicts two men--Mick Jagger and Hamilton's art dealer Robert Fraser--handcuffed together in the back of a

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 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 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