In April of 1950, about two dozen of the artists who came to be known as the Abstract Expressionists met for a series of discussions about their own work as well as about the modern scene. Nearly 60 years after the actual meetings took place, the transcript of "Artists Sessions at Studio 35 (1950)" still pulses with the heated discussions around basic artistic issues like titling, process, relationship to history, community, and professionalism. Often referenced, but rarely fleshed out, this series of closed meetings allows readers fly-on-the-wall access to the artists' discussions.

Artists' Sessions at Studio 35 (1950)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Soberscove

Before gaining widespread recognition for his sculpture and public art, Scott Burton produced a substantial body of art writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. An eclectic and wide-ranging critic, he wrote such important texts as the introduction to the groundbreaking exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form and served as an editor for both ARTnews and Art in America. In these same years, Burton became known as a performance artist, developing themes he pursued in his writing. Yet, his role as an artist-critic has rarely been discussed.Edited by David Getsy, SCOTT BURTON: COLLECTED WRITINGS ON ART AND PERFORMANCE, 1965-1975 brings together for the first time Burton's essays and unpublished manuscripts from these years, tracing his work as an art critic as well as his early statements on performance. In his writing, Burton championed positions that others held as mutually exclusive and antagonistic. He advocated for reductive abstract art while defending figuration, and he argued for the urgency of time-based and ephemeral art practices in the same years that he curated exhibitions of realist painting. Distinct in these diverse texts are Burton's increasing concerns with art's appeal to affects, empathies, and subjective responses; the early formulation of his desire to make art public and demotic; and his critical grasp on the implications and exclusions of mainstream narratives of art. This collection offers rich new context for Burton's sculptural work and reveals him as an important voice in the rapidly changing art world of the 1960s and 1970s.Artists and movements examined include Minimalism and Postminimalism, Tony Smith, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Willem de Kooning, Ralph Humphrey, Alex Katz, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Philip Pearlstein, Al Held, David Smith, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and performance art.Art. Art History. Art Movements: Minimalism, Postminimalism, Realism, Performance Art. Art Criticism. Performance Studies. LGBT Studies. Literary Nonfiction. 

Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965-1975

Scott Burton

David Getsy

Beginning in 1968, the University of California, Irvine, was host to an experiment in intercultural exchange and artistic and social scientific learning through practice. Located on the edges of William Pereira's California Brutalist campus, the Farm was a space for craftspeople from Guatemala, Mexico, and Samoa to demonstrate their skills; a laboratory for new methods in education and research; and an unexpected countercultural gathering site. Learning by Doing at the Farm reflects upon this unusual experiment, which brought together Cold War politics, modern development, and indigenous peoples drawn into the strange intellectual and cultural circumstances of 1960s California. Through a critical introduction and previously unpublished archival documentation, this book offers a glimpse of various actors' dreams of what the Farm could become and the collaborations that actually unfolded there.

Learning by Doing at the Farm: Craft, Science and Counterculture in Modern California

Starting from ‘I Don't Know' documents a 2011 week-long workshop at Sitterwerk, St. Gallen, in which Studio Mumbai's Bijoy Jain joined expert craftspeople from Switzerland to share the knowledge, techniques, and insights from their own practices with students, artists, and architects. The interviews in this book explore the creative potential of hands-on learning, local knowledge, and open experimentation. Celebrating the role of chance and collaboration in the process of making, Starting from ‘I Don't Know' makes an argument for bringing together the oft-separated areas of architecture and craft early in the design process.

Starting from I Don't Know: Interviews on Architecture and Craft

SMITH, SAMUEL

Architecture

Rosemarie Beck (1923–2003) emerged from the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, though her tenure as an abstract painter was brief. By 1958, she had moved completely away from non-objective painting into figuration, a decision that would alter the course of her career. In addition to her five decades of visual work, Beck left behind volumes of letters, journals, and essays on art―ranging from formal analysis of the canon, her own work, and the works of her peers to Letters to a Young Painter, an epistolary lecture project. In the writings gathered here, Beck approaches her subjects in the same manner as she would have approached a complex narrative painting: through a richly textured combination of literary allusion, metaphor, direct observation, and autobiography. Rosemarie Beck: Letters to a Young Painter and Other Writings brings together a selection of Beck's writings for the first time, situating her distinctive voice within the milieu of mid-century artist-writers.

Rosemarie Beck: Letters to a Young Painter and Other Writings

Beck, Rosemary

Individual Artists

"I did one of my most bizarre lectures up at the Rhode Island School of Design. It consisted of my trying to move a piano across a stage, and people kept coming up to ask if they could help, and I said, 'Certainly not! I mean the point is that I can't move this piano, and I'm struggling to move it, and it's obviously not going to get moved across the stage, and I'm putting out a great exertion of energy, and I'm on a public platform, and you are all viewing me, which is the whole point of this thing.' I said, 'You figure it out.'"–Ray Johnson
Ray Johnson (1927–1995) was a singular artist, for whom life and work were inextricably linked. Born in Detroit, Johnson attended Black Mountain College before moving to New York, where his work anticipated Pop art and he was active in early Fluxus circles. Best known for his collages and Mail art activities, including his New York Correspondence School, he operated fluidly in a wide range of modes. For Johnson, everything and everyone were potential material for his art―any form could become a space for artistic activity―and the form of the interview proved no exception.
That Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson brings together a selection of eleven interviews and conversations from 1963 to 1987 that offer unique access to Johnson’s distinctive thinking and working methods. These materials, which include exhibition ephemera, an oral history, radio transcripts, and magazine articles, are marked throughout by his humor and close attention to language. Gathering these exchanges for the first time, That Was the Answer serves as an exceptional introduction to Ray Johnson as well as a resource for those who are interested in gaining deeper insight into the artist and his kaleidoscopic body of work.

That Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson

Thomson, Julie J.

The marble workers laboring on the decades-long restoration of the Acropolis are the invisible force rebuilding one of the world’s most storied monuments. Inheritors of a millennia-old tradition, few carvers exist today; fewer pass the Acropolis entrance exams. Their work is a highly technical, fascinating amalgam of past and present, yet what these master marble carvers do and how they do it was previously undocumented. As the Acropolis restoration enters its final phases in the midst of political and economic crises in Greece, this book of interviews (in English, with Greek translation) conducted by American artist Allyson Vieira presents the marble carvers’ stories in their own words. The workers describe their craft, techniques, training and their specific roles in the restoration; and consider how the Greek crisis has changed the way they think about their jobs and their citizenship.

On the Rock: The Acropolis Interviews

Business & Money

Economics

In 1970, galvanized in part by the musical experiments of John Cage, Gavin Bryars, and Cornelius Cardew, students at Portsmouth College of Art formed their own symphony orchestra. Christened the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the primary requirement for membership specified that all players, regardless of skill, experience, or musicianship, be unfamiliar with their chosen instruments. This restriction, coupled with the decision to play "only the familiar bits" of classical music, challenged the Sinfonia's audience to reconsider the familiar, as the ensemble haplessly butchered the classics at venues ranging from avant-garde music festivals to the Royal Albert Hall. By the end of the decade, after three LPs of their anarchic renditions of classical and rock music and a revolving cast of over one hundred musicians-including Michael Nyman and Brian Eno-the Sinfonia would cease performing, never officially retiring.The World's Worst: A Guide to the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the first book devoted to the ensemble, examines the founding tenets, organizing principles, and collective memories of the Sinfonia, whose reputation as "the world's worst orchestra" underplays its unique accomplishment as a populist avant-garde project. In the simple constraint that defined the ensemble, the trappings of European concert hall traditions commingled with an experimental approach to music, producing a sense of joyful collectivism that was shared with the Sinfonia's audiences. The unorthodox journey of the Portsmouth Sinfonia unfolds here through interviews with the orchestra's original members and publicist/manager, magazine publications, photographs, and unseen archival material, alongside an essay by Christopher M. Reeves.

The World's Worst: A Guide to the Portsmouth Sinfonia

Music

Where the Future Came From focuses on the role of feminist artist-run activities in Chicago from the late 19th century to the present. This catalogue is a documentation of a symposium, a participatory research exhibition, and a series of programs contextualizing the role of feminism within the history Chicago's artist-run collective projects.

Where the Future Came From: A Collective Research Project on the Role of Feminism in Chicago's Artist-Run Culture from the Late-Nineteenth Century to the Present

An intimate account of everyday life and art in 1970s New York from a pioneering feminist artist Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014) produced a vast body of work that includes sculptures, outdoor installations, drawings, illustrations, artist's books, lyrical essays and art criticism. In 1971 she began to focus on the use of fabric as a primary medium for sculpture and to participate in a feminist consciousness-raising group which contributed to her involvement in A.I.R., the first cooperative gallery for women in the US. This was a pivotal period in Mayer's life and career, and she documented it in remarkable detail in her 1971 journal, where her plans, enthusiasms, ambitions and insecurities, as well as her opinions about the art around her, are recorded with self-awareness and honesty, along with her concerns about friendship, money and love. This illustrated edition of Excerpts from the 1971 Journal of Rosemary Mayer--previously published in a limited run of 300 copies--includes a new introduction and is expanded to twice the size of the first edition.

Excerpts from the 1971 Journal of Rosemary Mayer

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