Andrea Fraser’s work, writes Pierre Bourdieu in his foreword to Museum Highlights, is able to “trigger a social mechanism, a sort of machine infernale whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself.” It often does this by incorporating and inhabiting the social role it sets out to critique—as in a performance piece in which she leads a tour as a museum docent and describes the men’s room in the same elevated language that she uses to describe seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Influenced by the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism, Fraser’s interventionist art draws on four primary artistic and intellectual frameworks—institutional critique, with its site-specific examination of cultural context; performance; feminism, with its investigation of identity formation; and Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology. Fraser’s writings form an integral part of her artistic practice, and this collection of texts written between 1985 and 2003—including the performance script for the docent’s tour that gives the book its title—both documents and represents her work. The writings in Museum Highlights are arranged to reflect different aspects of Fraser’s artistic practice. They include essays that trace the development of critical “artistic practice” as cultural resistance; performance scripts that explore art institutions and the public sphere; and texts that explore the ambivalent relationship of art to the economic and political interests of its time. The final piece, “Isn’t This a Wonderful Place? (A Tour of a Tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao),” reflects on the role of museums in an era of globalization. Among the book’s 30 illustrations are stills from performance pieces, some never before published.

Since the late 1970s, Allan McCollum (born 1944) has addressed the anthropology of art: its distribution, acquisition, display and interpretation. From his first Surrogate Paintings (1978-82) to his Individual Works (1987-89) or recent Shapes Project(since 2005), through his famous series of Plaster Surrogates (begun in 1982), Perpetual Photos (since 1981) and Perfect Vehicles (since 1986), McCollum has revealed art’s mechanisms as a status-generating economy. In the 1990s, his “art objects” were replaced by found objects belonging to a situated context and community, in an effort to explore local micro-politics and to develop projects with specific milieus. His use of multiples, of museums and display aesthetics as compositional elements, all stem from this displacement of context. Working with regional museums, heterogeneous audiences, and references going from paleontology to mineralogy, McCollum today has built a truly unique and intriguing body of work that receives its first comprehensive overview in this monograph.

Con il nome di Performance art si designa genericamente una vasta gamma di operazioni pratiche e concettuali che condividono l’aspirazione a superare il divario tra arte e vita. Nella performance, l’artista agisce con esiti immediati o differiti entro uno spazio non necessariamente deputato, spesso con la complicità di un pubblico che prende in qualche modo parte alla realizzazione dell’evento. Ciò ha ovviamente molte stimolanti implicazioni. Attraverso una serie di saggi, interviste e dichiarazioni di artisti e studiosi stranieri, questa antologia perlustra uno dei territori più complessi e affascinanti dell’odierno panorama artistico. Il volume raccoglie contributi di Philip Auslander, Christopher Bedford, Claire Bishop, Tania Bruguera, Graciela Carnevale, Franko B, Andrea Fraser, Gulliermo Gómez-Pena, Mona Hatoum, Adrian Heathfield, Amelia Jones, Miranda July, Allan Kaprow, Kubra Khademi, Mark McGowan, Bruce Nauman, Piotr Pavlenskij, Santiago Sierra, Koki Tanaka, Ulay, The Yes Men.

The publication looks at contemporary artistic practices that turn spaces into places. Space and place are explored as topics and mediums of playful investigation and serious reflection. Together with artists, designers, architects, curators, historians, theoreticians and philosophers, it questions the experience, imagination and design of spaces and places in theory and practice. The colourful collection of projects, performances, interviews and essays explores these notions within contemporary art and culture in all its complex and diverging, contemporary exposures. The book is published on the occasion of the exhibition cycle Space is the Place curated by Lukas Feireiss at BNKR—current reflections on art and architecture, Munich between September 2018 and July 2019. Contributors: Franz Xaver Baier, Julius von Bismarck, Nuotama Bodomo, Beatriz Colomina, Olafur Eliasson, Andrea Fraser, Jeewi Lee, Bruce Nauman, Tom Sachs, Michael Sailstorfer and many more

Publication containing extracted essays by Lucy R. Lippard, Alan W. Moore, Francis Frascina, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Andrea Fraser. Includes an interview between Hans Haacke and Dario Corbeira, reproduction of Seth Siegelaub and Robert Projansky’s “Artist’s Reserved Right Transfer and Sale Agreement,” as well as reprints of the Art Workers’ Coalition publications “Open Hearing” and “Documents 1” pilfered from Primary Information. Edited by Dario Corbeira and Daniel Patrick Rodriguez. Texts in English and Spanish.

This reflection on the unlikely search for an invisible masterpiece takes on a near-imposible quest. But not in vain–it provides an excuse to consider the very idea of collecting and its limits, while remaining open to doubt and pleasure. In/Visible brings together critical fictions looking at the “(almost) random paths” taken in attempts to circumscribe time, space, and history by artists including Marina Abramovic, Chantal Akerman, Lara Almarcegui, Monica Bonvicini, Marguerite Duras, Esther Ferrer, Andrea Fraser, Dora Garcia, Ann Veronica Janssens, David Lamelas, Teresa Margolles, Tania Mouraud, Karin Sander, Joelle Tuerlinckx and Remy Zaugg.

Institutional critique is an artistic practice that reflects critically on its own housing in galleries and museums and on the concept and social function of art itself. Such concerns have always been a part of modern art but took on new urgency at the end of the 1960s, when–driven by the social upheaval of the time and enabled by the tools and techniques of conceptual art–institutional critique emerged as a genre. This anthology traces the development of institutional critique as an artistic concern from the 1960s to the present by gathering writings and representative art projects of artists from across Europe and throughout the Americas who developed and extended the genre. The texts and artworks included are notable for the range of perspectives and positions they reflect and for their influence in pushing the boundaries of what is meant by institutional critique. Like Alberro and Stimson’s Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology this volume will shed new light on its subject through its critical and historical framing. Even readers already familiar with institutional critique will come away from this book with a greater and often redirected understanding of its significance.Artists represented include Wieslaw Borowski, Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, Hans Haacke, Robert Smithson, John Knight, Graciela Carnevale, Osvaldo Mateo Boglione, Guerilla Art Action Group, Art Workers’ Coalition, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Mel Ramsden, Adrian Piper, The Guerrilla Girls, Laibach, Silvia Kolbowski, Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson, Mark Dion, Maria Eichhorn, Critical Art Ensemble, Bureau d’Études, WochenKlausur, The Yes Men, Hito Steyerl, Andreas Siekmann

With works by Michael Asher, Artist Placement Group, Can Altay, Conrad Atkinson, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Banu Cennetoglu, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Martin Beck, Cevdet Erek, Andrea Fraser, Buckminster Fuller, Ryan Gander, Ella Gibbs, Frederick Kiesler, Lucy Kimbell, James Langdon, El Lissitzky, Peter Nadin, “The offices of Peter Fend, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Jenny Holzer, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince & Robin Winters,” Gordon Matta-Clark, Antoni Muntadas, Lilly Reich, Support Structure, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lawrence Weiner, Christopher Williams, Carey Young, a.o. Support Structures is a manual for what bears, sustains, and props, for those things that encourage, care for, and assist; for that which advocates, articulates; for what stands behind, frames, and maintains: it is a manual for those things that give support. While the work of supporting might traditionally appear as subsequent, unessential, and lacking value in itself, this manual is an attempt to restore attention to one of the neglected, yet crucial modes through which we apprehend and shape the world. Support Structures is a critical enquiry into what constitutes “support,” and documents the collaborative project “Support Structure” by Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade. While registering and collecting reference projects in a new archive of support structures alongside its ten-phase project, different writers, thinkers, and practitioners were invited from various fields to elaborate on frameworks and work on texts , which form the theoretical backbone of the publication. The collection of contributions offers different possibilities for engaging in this unchartered territory, from propositions to projects, existing systems to ones invented for specific creative processes. Support Structures offers support through potential methodologies, inspirations and activations for practice, and addresses important questions for art and architecture practices on forms of display, organization, articulation, appropriation, autonomy, and temporariness, and the manifestations of blindness towards them.

Situation–a unique set of conditions produced in both space and time and ranging across material, social, political, and economic relations–has become a key concept in twenty-first-century art. Rooted in artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s, the idea of situation has evolved and transcended these in the current context of globalization. This anthology offers key writings on areas of art practice and theory related to situation, including notions of the site specific, the artist as ethnographer or fieldworker, the relation between action and public space, the meaning of place and locality, and the crucial role of the curator in recent situation specific art. In North America and Europe, the site-specific is often viewed in terms of resistance to art’s commoditization, while elsewhere situation-specific practices have defied institutions of authority. The contributors discuss these recent tendencies in the context of proliferating international biennial exhibitions, curatorial place-bound projects, and strategies by which artists increasingly unsettle the definition and legitimation of situation-based art.Artists surveyed include [from Ian 1/30]Vito Acconci, Allora & Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Carl Andre, Artist Placement Group, Michael Asher, Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Bik Van der Pol, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Janet Cardiff, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Adam Chodzko, Collective Actions, Tacita Dean, Elmgreen & Dragset, Andrea Fraser, Hamish Fulton, Dan Graham, Liam Gillick, Renée Green, Group Material, Douglas Huebler, Bethan Huws, Pierre Huyghe, Robert Irwin, Emily Jacir, Ilya Kabakov, Leopold Kessler, Július Koller, Langlands & Bell, Ligna, Richard Long, Gordon Matta-Clark, Graeme Miller, Jonathan Monk, Robert Morris, Gabriel Orozco, Walid Ra’ad, Raqs Media Collective, Paul Rooney, Martha Rosler, Allen Ruppersberg, Richard Serra, Situationist International, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Vivan Sundaram, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lawrence Weiner, Rachel Whiteread, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Qiu Zhijie Writers include Arjun Appaduri, Marc Augé, Wim Beeren, Josephine Berry Slater, Daniel Birnbaum, Ava Bromberg, Susan Buck-Morss, Michel de Certeau, Douglas Crimp, Gilles Deleuze, T. J. Demos, Rosalyn Deutsche, Thierry de Duve, Charles Esche, Graeme Evans, Patricia Falguières, Marina Fokidis, Hal Foster, Hou Hanrou, Brian Holmes, Mary Jane Jacob, Vasif Kortun, Miwon Kwon, Lu Jie, Doreen Massey, James Meyer, Ivo Mesquita, Brian O’Doherty, Craig Owens, Irit Rogoff, Peter Weibel

Certificates of authenticity are a critical aspect of art works today. They often embody the artwork itself, while referring to it, serving as its deed, legal statement, and fiscal invoice. Certificates by artists validate the authorship and originality of the work and they allow the work of art to be positioned in the marketplace as a branded product. Providing examples of artists certificates from the past fifty years, this book reveals how roles have shifted and developed, as well as how the materials and content of art have changed. With certificates by: Ruben Aubrecht, Judith Barry, Robert Barry/Stefan Brüggemann, Hemali Bhuta and Shreyas Karle, Pierre Bismuth, George Brecht, Marinus Boezem, Daniel Buren, Andre Caderé, Marcel Duchamp, Maria Eichhorn, Urs Fischer, Dan Flavin, Andrea Fraser, Liam Gillick, The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, Hans Haacke, Edward Kienholz, Yves Klein, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Ken Lum, Piero Manzoni, Gordon Matta-Clark, Josiah McElheny and Allan Kaprow, Jonathan Monk, Robert Morris, Antoni Muntadas, Yoko Ono, Cesare Pietroiusti, Adrian Piper, Emilio Prini, Robert Projansky and Seth Siegelaub, Raqs Media Collective, Robert Rauschenberg, Sharmila Samant, Joe Scanlan, David Shrigley, Daniel Spoerri, Haim Steinbach, Superflex, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Ben Vautier, Lawrence Weiner, Franz West, Cerith Wyn Evans, Carey Young, Andrea Zittel, Heimo Zobernig.

Institutional critique is an artistic practice that reflects critically on its own place within galleries and museums and on the concept and social function of art itself. Such concerns have always been a part of modern art but took on new urgency at the end of the 1960s, when—driven by the social upheaval of the time and enabled by the tools and techniques of conceptual art—institutional critique emerged as a genre. This anthology traces the development of institutional critique as an artistic concern from the 1960s to the present, gathering writings and representative art projects of artists who developed and extended the genre. The artists come from across Europe and throughout North America. The texts and artworks included are notable for the range of perspectives and positions they reflect, and for their influence in pushing the boundaries of what is meant by institutional critique. Like Alberro and Stimson’s Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, this volume will shed new light on its subject through its critical and historical framing. Even readers already familiar with institutional critique will come away from this book with a greater and often redirected understanding of its significance. Artists represented include: Wieslaw Borowski, Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, Hans Haacke, Robert Smithson, John Knight, Graciela Carnevale, Osvaldo Mateo Boglione, Guerilla Art Action Group, Art Workers’ Coalition, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Mel Ramsden, Adrian Piper, The Guerrilla Girls, Laibach, Silvia Kolbowski, Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson, Mark Dion, Maria Eichhorn, Critical Art Ensemble, Bureau d’Études, WochenKlausur, The Yes Men, Hito Steyerl, Andreas Siekmann

Institutional Critique and After explores the history and contemporary reassessment of the Institutional Critique movement launched in the late 1960s by artists including Michael Asher and Hans Haacke. One of the movement’s key aims was the exposure and ironization of the structures and logic of museums and art galleries. The movement was redeveloped in the 1980s and after by Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Fred Wilson, and others who engaged in more interactive and performative interventions; and has been vigorously reoriented in recent years to address issues such as globalization. The publication will explore histories, theories, diverse locations and different kinds of institutional and alternative space. It will touch on traditional forms of art, but also on installations, performance, new media practices, and cultural activism. Its central questions will turn on the critical potential of art (and institutions) and whether—and if so how—they can stimulate social or political change. With texts by art historians, critics, curators, and artists such as John Searle, Hans Haacke, Alexander Alberro, Maria Eichhorn, Andrea Fraser, Isabelle Graw, Martin Sastre, Renée Green, Lynn Zelevansky, Monica Bonvicini, Christiane Paul, The Guerilla Girls, Juli Carson, Javier Téllez, Astrid Mania, Amy Pederson, The Yes Men, Lauri Firstenberg, Jens Hoffmann, Mike Kelley, and Ricardo Dominguez. Published with The Southern California Consortium of Art Schools (SoCCAS), as the second volume of a series of anthologies dedicated to contemporary art issues.

These days, the term “reenactment” usually refers to live reconstructions of historic events, often of a military nature, performed by hobbyists. Civil War reenactments are the most popular in the United States, while European enthusiasts most often engage in recreations from the Napoleonic era. Visual art has its own versions. Recent years have brought many reenactments of historic performances from the 1960s and 1970s, works which otherwise would exist only in photos, videos, and text descriptions. But what exactly is being reenacted, and what is the effect of the representation? What meaning is resurrected out of this “doubling”? In the exhibition Life, Once More, contemporary works and texts by Mike Bidlo, Bik Van der Pol, Rod Dickinson, Omer Fast, Andrea Fraser, Robert Longo, Eran Schaerf, Catherine Sullivan, and Barbara Visser reflect on these timely (and timeless) questions. Edited by Sven Lütticken. Essays by Sven Lütticken, Jennifer Allen and Peggy Phelan.

Writing by Mike Sperlinger, Stuart Comer, Andrea Fraser, Bettina Carl, Ian White. afterthought represents an engagement on the part of a younger generation of writers, curators and artists with some of the conceptual strategies of the 1960s and 1970s which continue to influence contemporary art. The subjects covered include instruction pieces, conceptualism and curatorship, television and the museum, the politics of institutional critique; artists discussed include Yoko Ono, ‘Orders & Co.’, Gerry Schum, Hanne Darboven, and many others.

Everything is made in Mexico, from decorative mirrors to silver jewelry to plastic dolls and ceramic dishware–and contemporary art. Made in Mexico examines recent art produced within and about Mexico. Historically, Mexico has always welcomed artists and writers from abroad as a way of enriching and diversifying the national character. This publication examines the phenomenon from a contemporary perspective for the first time. Made in Mexico highlights the current generation of cultural production within the context of prevailing global and conceptual art vocabularies. Speaking within a larger dialogue, Made in Mexico includes international artists whose work does not necessarily come out of a local experience, yet draws upon a distinctly Mexican vernacular–whether iconographic, architectural, or environmental. Three themes structure the book’s organization: “Local Identities” addresses how contemporary artists approach the essential characteristics of Mexican identity as projected through popular imagery, cultural iconography, and traditional art forms. “Mexican Modernisms” addresses the problems of modernist aesthetic ideologies within the context of Mexican architecture, design, and sculpture. And “Social Spaces” addresses artistic inspirations found within the environmental landscape. Included are works by artists such Francis Als, Daniel Buren, Andrea Fraser, Thomas Glassford, Erik G ngrich, Terrence Gower, Andreas Gursky, Mona Hatoum, Sharon Lockhart, Teresa Margolles, Yasumasa Morimura, Gabriel Orozco, Damin Ortega, Pedro Reyes, Sebastin Romo, Daniela Rossell, Santiago Sierra, Melanie Smith.

Image Stream brings together eight gallery-based film and video works, each of which explore the limits of this new medium, returning to narrative and changing conventional modes of viewing. Curator Helen Molesworth in this her first exhibition for the Wexner Art Center has selected works by Kutlug Ataman, Matthew Barney, Tacita Dean, Andrea Fraser, Pierre Huyghe, Neil Jordan, Donald Moffett, and Lorna Simpson, each of which is accompanied by an individual short analytical essay. As Molesworth writes in her introduction, “The hygenic isolation of the white cube has slowly, but steadily, been overtaken by an increasingly promiscuous black box. As any turn-of-the-century member of the art public knows, darkened rooms and heavy black curtains signal the omnipresent film and/or video installation.” If an earlier generation of film and video artists were concerned with the formal properties of film, she argues, today’s contemporary artists “willingly explore visual forms borrowed from both Hollywood and auteur film, as well as television, MTV, CNN, and the theater. This profligate borrowing of mass-media forms has been accompanied by a strong impulse towards narrative.” It is what Molesworth calls this “reciprocity” between art wold and mass culture that is a “defining characteristic of contemporary projected images.” Essays by George Baker, Gregg Bordowitz, Aruna D’Souza, Bill Horrigan, Bruce Jenkins, Helen Molesworth and Hamza Walker. ~Introduction by Sherri Geldin.

Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art’s autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra’s famous dictum “to remove the work is to destroy the work” is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces. One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, René¥ Green, Suzanne Lacy, Iñ©§¯ Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.

Commerce by Artists documents a fascinating and sweeping range of artists’ projects produced since the 1950s by Canadian and international artists who have sought to engage, rather than merely represent, the commercial world of which they are a part. Encompassing canonical works such as Yves Klein’s Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1958), Seth Siegelaub’s Artist’s Contract (1971), and Lee Lozano’s Strike Piece (1969) — as well as innovative and rarely-documented works like Keith Obadike’s Blackness for Sale (2001), Kelly Mark’s In & Out (1997-ongoing until 2032), and Ben Kinmont’s Sometimes a Nicer Sculpture Is to Be Able to Provide a Living for Your Family (1998-ongoing) — Commerce by Artists is a comprehensive document of artworks that take the form of transactions and exchanges of value. Edited by Luis Jacob Includes contributions by: agent.NASDAQ aka Reinhold Grether, Zeigam Azizov, Clegg & Guttmann, Carole Condé & Karl Beveridge, Isabelle De Baets and Hendrik Tratsaert, Jorge di Paola, Hu Fang, Elizabeth Ferrell, Gerald Ferguson, Andrea Fraser, Coco Fusco, Hans Haacke, Jens Hoffmann, Luis Jacob, Mary Kelly, Yves Klein, Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi, Jane Crawford, Frances Richard, Richard Manning, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Helen Molesworth, Keith Obadike, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Beatrix Ruf, Andrea Rosen, Martha Rosler, Reid Shier, Julian Stallabrass, Julia Steinmetz, Heather Cassils, Clover Leary, Neil Thomas, Calvin Tomkins, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Cédric Villate