« Art Critics' Reading List
ANNE BARLOW
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Anne Barlow is executive director of Art in General, New York, a non-profit organization that supports artists through the commissioning of new work and a residency exchange program. At Art in General, Barlow has curated projects with many artists, including Kianga Ford, Surasi Kusolwong, Ohad Meromi and Ana Prvacki, and recently co-organized What Now? a symposium on future models for international residencies, exchanges and collaborations. Barlow is curator of the fifth Bucharest Biennale, Tactics for the Here and Now, 2012, which features the work of artists Abbas Akhavan, Iman Issa, Jill Magid, Wael Shawky, Alexandre Singh, and Rinus Van de Velde, among others.
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Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art. ed. by J.L. Martin, Ben Nicholson, N. Gabo. London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 1937. This beautifully designed book was a vital resource when I was researching the work of Russian artist Naum Gabo, who became part of a community of British and (often exiled) European artists living and working in London and St Ives in the 1930s and 1940s. A key publication about international abstract art at the time, Circle contains contributions by Gabo, J. D. Bernal, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Leslie Martin, Piet Mondrian, Ben Nicholson and Herbert Read, among others, offering a cross-disciplinary perspective on “constructive” tendencies present in painting, sculpture, architecture, design, scientific thought, typography, and other parts of “life.” While collectively these essays and statements may now seem to represent an almost utopian vision, overtaken just two years later by the advent of the Second World War, they nonetheless remain inspirational reading today.
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On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, (BAK Critical Reader Series). Edited by Maria Hlavajova, Jill Winder and Binna Choi. Utretch: BAK, Basis voor Actuele Kunst, and Frankfurt: Revolver, 2008. This critical reader presents diverse, and sometimes opposing, thoughts about art as a vehicle for the production of knowledge—a subject that has come to the fore in contemporary art discussions in recent years. This book is important for anyone interested in contested topics such as the practice (and relative merits) of artistic research as a way of working, notions of what knowledge actually is and how it relates to art, the cultural and political implications of “knowledge-based economies,” and ideas relating to processes of learning and unlearning. These issues are tackled through a range of contributions by artists, art historians, philosophers and theorists, including Matthew Buckingham, Sarat Maharaj, Irit Rogoff, Simon Sheikh, and Eva Meyer and Eran Schaerf, whose text is aptly titled “What does art know?”
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The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large-Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art. Edited by Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hall, and Solveig Østebø. Bergen: Bergen Kunsthall, and Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010. Whether you love them or hate them, biennials have become an ever more present and global phenomenon in the contemporary art world.
This book is one of the first anthologies to critically examine the history, definitions and formats of biennials—as well as other “perennial” exhibitions—through republished and newly commissioned contributions by scholars, critics and curators from around the world. Contributors offer diverse views on how biennials are defined, the political, theoretical and artistic contexts that drive and support them, their relationship to their own locality and the global art “stage,” and their role as vehicles for curatorial experimentation. As a result of the 2009 Bergen Biennial Conference (organized as an alternative to launching a new Bergen biennial without pause for reflection), this reader provides a fascinating insight into the key questions surrounding the biennial phenomenon today, as well as its future evolution.
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