Global biennials have proliferated in the contemporary art world, but artists’ engagement with large-scale international exhibitions has a much longer history that has influenced the present in important ways. Going back to the earliest world’s fairs in the nineteenth century, this book argues that “globalism” was incubated in a century of international art contests and today constitutes an important tactic for artists. As world’s fairs brought millions of attendees into contact with foreign cultures, products, and processes, artworks became juxtaposed in a “theater of nations,” which challenged artists and critics to think outside their local academies. From Gustave Courbet’s rebel pavilion near the official art exhibit at the 1855 French World’s Fair to curator Beryl Madra’s choice of London-based Cypriot Hussein Chalayan for the off-site Turkish pavilion at the 2006 Venice Biennale, artists have used these exhibitions to reflect on contemporary art, speak to their own governments back home, and challenge the wider geopolitical realm—changing art and art history along the way. Ultimately, Caroline A. Jones argues, the modern appetite for experience and event structures, which were cultivated around the art at these earlier expositions, have now come to constitute contemporary art itself, producing encounters that transform the public and force us to reflect critically on the global condition.

The Global Work of Art: World's Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience

Arts & Photography

Jones, Caroline A.

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Taking a fresh look at the art world of the 1960s, Caroline Jones argues that far from the countercultural stance associated with the decade, the artists she examines—including Stella, Warhol, and Smithson—identified their work with postwar industry and corporate culture. Drawing on extensive interviews with artists and their assistants as well as close readings of artworks, Jones explains that much of the major work of the 1960s was compelling precisely because it was central to the visual and economic culture of its time. "Jones manages to analyze art works in their historical, political, and conceptual context, giving them a thickness of description rarely possible in standard art history. . . . This is one of the best books on the period I have read so far. To paraphrase Clement Greenberg, it gives contemporary art history a good name."—Serge Guilbaut, Bookforum "Though we are some 30 years past the events of the '60s, our world is still largely responding to them, as this marvelous book amply demonstrates."—David McCarthy, New Art Examiner

Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist

Even a decade after his death, Clement Greenberg remains controversial. One of the most influential art writers of the twentieth century, Greenberg propelled Abstract Expressionist painting-in particular the monumental work of Jackson Pollock-to a leading position in an international postwar art world. On radio and in print, Greenberg was the voice of "the new American painting," and a central figure in the postwar cultural history of the United States. Caroline Jones's magisterial study widens Greenberg's fundamental tenet of "opticality"-the idea that modernist art is apprehended through "eyesight alone"-to a broader arena, examining how the critic's emphasis on the specular resonated with a society increasingly invested in positivist approaches to the world. Greenberg's modernist discourse, Jones argues, developed in relation to the rationalized procedures that gained wide currency in the United States at midcentury, in fields ranging from the sense-data protocols theorized by scientific philosophy to the development of cultural forms, such as hi-fi, that targeted specific senses, one by one. Greenberg's attempt to isolate and celebrate the visual was one manifestation of a large-scale segmentation-or bureaucratization-of the body's senses. Working through these historical developments, Jones brings Greenberg's theories into contemporary philosophical debates about agency and subjectivity. Eyesight Alone offers artists, art historians, philosophers, and all those interested in the arts a critical history of this generative figure, bringing his work fully into dialogue with the ideas that shape contemporary critical discourse and shedding light not only on Clement Greenberg but also on the contested history of modernism itself.

Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses

One of the most influential and provocative art critics of the twentieth century, Clement Greenberg propelled Abstract Expressionist painting—in particular the monumental work of Jackson Pollock—to a leading position in an international postwar art world. Here, Caroline Jones’s magisterial study widens Greenberg’s fundamental tenet of opticality—the idea that modernist art is apprehended through “eyesight alone”—to a broader arena, examining how the critic’s emphasis on the specular resonated with a society increasingly invested in positivist approaches to the world.      Jones argues that Greenberg’s modernist discourse developed in relation to the rationalized procedures that gained wide currency in the United States at midcentury, in fields ranging from the sense-data protocols theorized by scientific philosophy to the development of cultural forms, such as hi-fi, that targeted specific senses, one by one. Greenberg’s attempt to isolate and celebrate the visual was one manifestation of a large-scale segmentation or bureaucratization of the body's senses.      Eyesight Alone offers artists, art historians, and twentieth-century art lovers a critical history of this essential thinker that brings his work into dialogue with contemporary critical discourse, illuminating the contested history of modernism itself.

Bay Area Figurative Art: 1950-1965

During the 1950s a few painters in the San Francisco Bay Area began to stage personal, dramatic defections from the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism, creating what would come to be known as Bay Area Figurative Art. In 1949 David Park destroyed many of his nonobjective canvases and began a new style of consciously naive figuration. Soon Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn joined Park and other painters such as Nathan Oliveira, Theophilus Brown, James Weeks, and Paul Wonner in the move away from abstraction and toward figurative subject matter. When artists such as Bruce McGaw, Manuel Neri, and Joan Brown emerged as a second generation of figurative artists, the momentum grew for a powerful new development in American painting. The achievement of Bay Area Figurative painters and sculptors has become directly relevant to current debates regarding abstraction and representation, as well as to discourses on modernism and postmodernism. Indeed, the historical phenomenon of the movement is an important case study in the evolution of modernism in America, serving as an early example of rupture in the formalist "mainstream." Bay Area Figurative Art 1950-1965 was written to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, it is the first study of the movement as a whole and is the broadest and most accurate account of the careers and interactions of ten Bay Area artists who worked in this new style.

Reference

University of California Press

Modern Art at Harvard: The Formation of the Nineteenth-And Twentieth-Century Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Abbeville Pr

Major works of Picasso, Gris, Beckmann, Brancusi, Matisse, Pollock, Kiefer on early collecting of modern art; enlivening text on art galleries, dealers, artists, critics.

Modern Art at Harvard

Harvard Univ Art Museum

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jones, Caroline A.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Jones, Caroline A.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jones, Caroline A.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Global Work of Art: World's Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience

Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist

Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist

Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses

Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses

Bay Area Figurative Art: 1950-1965

Bay Area Figurative Art: 1950-1965

Modern Art at Harvard: The Formation of the Nineteenth-And Twentieth-Century Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums

Modern Art at Harvard