Is the artist's monograph an endangered species or a timeless genre? This critical history traces the formal and conceptual trajectories of art history's favorite form, from Vasari onward, and reconsiders the validity of the life-and-work model for the twenty-first century.
The narrative of the artist's life and work is one of the oldest models in the Western literature of the visual arts. In Art as Existence, Gabriele Guercio investigates the metamorphosis of the artist's monograph, tracing its formal and conceptual trajectories from Vasari's sixteenth-century Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (which provided the model and source for the genre) through its apogee in the nineteenth century and decline in the twentieth. He looks at the legacy of the life-and-work model and considers its prospects in an intellectual universe of deconstructionism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonialism.
Since Vasari, the monograph has been notable for its fluidity and variety; it can be scrupulous and exact, probing and revelatory, poetic and imaginative, or any combination of these. In the nineteenth century, the monograph combined art-historical, biographical, and critical methods, and even added elements of fiction. Guercio explores some significant books that illustrate key phases in the model's evolution, including works by Gustav Friedrich Waagen, A. C. Quatremère de Quincy, Johann David Passavant, Bernard Berenson, and others. 
The hidden project of the artist's monograph, Guercio claims, comes from a utopian impulse; by commuting biography into art and art into biography, the life-and-work model equates art and existence, construing otherwise distinct works of an artist as chapters of a life story. Guercio calls for a contemporary reconsideration of the life-and-work model, arguing that the ultimate legacy of the artist's monograph does not lie in its established modes of writing but in its greater project and in the intimate portrait that we gain of the nature of creativity.

Art As Existence: The Artist's Monograph And Its Project

Arts & Photography

Guercio, Gabriele

History & Criticism

Mit Pr

Art as Existence: The Artist's Monograph and Its Project

South African artist William Kentridge (b. 1955) has produced an outstanding body of work in multiple mediums―drawings, animations, sculptures, theater and stage design―all of which trace the fraught political and cultural history of South Africa. This book is the first to explore Kentridge’s extraordinary new series of seventeen large-scale tapestries, created under his artistic direction by a team of South African weavers between 2001 and 2007. The tapestries depict shadowy figures that resonate with his collages of itinerant characters set against the weblike backgrounds of 19th-century maps of Europe and Johannesburg. 
A distinguished group of authors relate the tapestries to the rest of Kentridge’s multifaceted oeuvre, underline the centrality of drawing in his practice, and illuminate the connection between the tapestries and South African geography and history. Together they contribute to an understanding of Kentridge’s tapestries as a precise critical examination of issues surrounding memory and conflict in the context of societies that, while rife with violence, strive for peace and reconciliation.

William Kentridge: Tapestries

VLADISLAVIC, Ivan

ENWEZOR, Okwui

Basualdo, Carlos

Yale University Press

Arte Povera

Beccaria, Marcella

Cafagna, Fabio

Passoni, Riccardo

Dilecta

The first comprehensive survey of Joseph Kosuth's work, centering on The Second Investigation (1968–74) 
This first comprehensive survey of Joseph Kosuth's work with public media centers on his pioneering project The Second Investigation (1968–74). This indexical work takes the form of anonymous advertisements in media—newspapers, magazines, billboards, television—based on a taxonomy of the world developed in the early nineteenth century by Roget for use in his thesaurus. Marking the start of Kosuth's sustained engagement with public media, this work anticipated the media orientation of New York postmodernism beginning in the late 1970s. 
Featuring a significant reexamination of Kosuth's work with language and media by art historian John C. Welchman, an appendix by art historian Gabriele Guercio, as well as the artist's own reflections on art and media, the book is richly illustrated with unpublished material from the artist's archive along with documentation of the artist's eponymous 1997 exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and his 2004 retrospective at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

Joseph Kosuth: Redefining the Context of Art, 1968 and After: The Second Investigation and Public Media

Welchman, John C.

Sternberg Press

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