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
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
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
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1880-1983 (1980-1983) is an overwhelming and encyclopedic installation that weaves together cultural, social and historical references.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
'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 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 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 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
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
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
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
"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 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
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 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
