Writing Art

Imaging Desire, Mary Kelly's long-awaited collection of writings from 1976 to 1995, asks fundamental questions about the analysis of current practices in art and makes rigorous arguments for a criticism informed by semiotics, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Few artists have made such a strong contribution to critical discourse and art as Mary Kelly, who for more than twenty years has pushed the boundaries of the visual, the textual, the sexual, and the political in her writing and her art. In the 1970s, Kelly's transgressive projects helped to instigate conceptual art's second phase; her daring critiques of the female body as a fetishized, allegorized, commodified site were debated long after they were first seen in galleries and discussed in catalogues, and long before the debut of the "bad girls" in the 1990s. In fact, the debates currently surrounding Kelly's work are a necessary and defining element of theoretical discourse about art today. Imaging Desire is essential to that debate, for it contains all the seminal texts and reveals crucial points of intersection between written and visual expression in a career known for its intertextual, interdiscursive features. Here the visible, the oral, the gestural, and the readable continually converge to frame questions about the body in ways that redefine its cultural and visual status, and to explore the relation between images and desire. Imaging Desire is also a kind of conceptual autobiography in which the author's early interrogations of maternal fetishism and feminine masquerade are seen as foundations of her later investigations of masculine display. The essays demonstrate that much of feminism's transformative impact on contemporary art is grounded in Kelly's pioneering work.

Since the age of twelve, the internationally renowned sculptor Louise Bourgeois has been writing - writing and drawing. First a diary precisely recounting the everyday events of her family life, then notes and reflections. Destruction of the Father - the title comes from the name of a sculpture she made following the death of her husband in 1973 - contains both formal texts and what the artist calls "pen-thoughts": drawing-texts often connected to her drawings and sculptures, with stories or poems inscribed alongside the images. This book collects both her writings and her spoken remarks on art, confirming the deep links between her work and her biography and offering new insights into her creative thinking and process.

For three years Weiwei, the most celebrated artist in China & an outspoken social critic, compiled a blog in which he ranged widely over issues of the day as well as art matters. This translation offers a complete documentation of his blog, which was closed down by the government of China on 1st June 2009.

"Carolee Schneemann is one of the pioneers of performance, installation, and video art. Although other visual artists, such as Salvador Dali and Yves Klein, have used live self-portraiture and performance as a vehicle for public provocation, Schneemann was among the first to use her body to animate the relationship between the world of lived experience and the imagination, as well as issues of the erotic, the sacred, and the taboo. In the 1960s, her work prefigured the feminist movement's sexual self-assertion for women, and by the mid-1970s, her work anticipated the field of women's studies and its critique of patriarchal institutions. In the 1980s, she was one of the first to experiment with virtual environments.". "Imaging Her Erotics integrates images from Schneemann's works in painting, collage, drawing, and video sculptures with written material drawn from the artist's journals, dream diaries, essays, and lectures. Encompassing four decades of her work, it demonstrates her profound influence on artists in all media. An opening essay by Kristine Stiles presents Schneemann's major themes and places her work in a historical context. Among other topics, the book covers Schneemann's response to the widespread use by artists of the ideas of theoreticians such as Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan; her relationship to male artists such as Joseph Cornell, Robert Morris, and Claes Oldenburg; and reminiscences about her friends Ana Mendieta, Charlotte Moorman, and Hannah Wilke. The book also contains essays by Jay Murphy and David Levi-Strauss and interviews with the artist by Kate Haug, Linda Montano, and Aviva Rahmani."--BOOK JACKET.