« Art Critics' Reading List
BONNIE CLEARWATER
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Bonnie Clearwater is the executive director and chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), in North Miami since 1997. She has organized over 100 exhibitions ranging from solo shows for emerging artists, to historical surveys of modern and contemporary artists, and thematic exhibitions exploring current trends and influences. She has written extensively on modern and contemporary art, and is the author of The Rothko Book (2007); Edward Ruscha: Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go (1988); Roy Lichtenstein: Inside/Outside (2001); and Frank Stella at 2000: Changing the Rules (2000), and is a contributing author of the new monograph on Rita Ackermann, among others. |
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Gerhard Richter. The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995. In 1996, I organized the exhibition “Painting into Photography/Photography into Painting” for MOCA, that focused on how contemporary artists were using photography to expand the field of painting conceptually and to bring new relevance to the act of painting. I included Gerhard Richter in the exhibition for his precedent-setting paintings of the 1960s based on photographs. Richter’s collected writings were published in English during the period I conducted my research for the exhibition. His observation about how painting from a photograph changes both its meaning and information content was instrumental to the framing of my thesis. I also found in his writings one of the most compelling definitions of contemporary art. For Richter “art is not a thing that is periodically over and done with. It has nothing to do with time…traditional, supposedly old works of art are not old but contemporary…”
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Denis Diderot. Jacques the Fatalist. London: Penguin Books, 1986. The Eighteenth-century philosopher Denis Diderot has always intrigued me and I frequently consult his writings, as he formulated so many of the concepts that have shaped modern thought and expression. I first read his novel Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, in tandem with Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy in the late 1980s. I was struck by how these publications embodied the experimental possibilities for the novel, long before the modern period. The underlying theme of the autonomy of an artwork from its author/artist/creator is essential to understanding most modern and contemporary art. When I researched my exhibition of Frank Stella’s work of the 1990s for MOCA’s “Frank Stella at 2000: Changing the Rules” (1999), I realized that his references to Diderot, and specifically Jacques the Fatalist, in some of his paintings’ titles provided insight into Stella’s philosophy regarding free will and working within the predetermined parameters of art history.
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Arthur C. Danto. Andy Warhol. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2010. I had the good fortune to spend time with American philosopher, Arthur Danto, at Arcadia Summer Arts Program in Maine the summer of 2009, and to hear him talk about his new book on Andy Warhol. I was intrigued by his highly original interpretation of Warhol’s work as the expression of his Catholic faith (emphasized more in his talk than in the book). Danto took Warhol’s miraculous transformation of everyday objects into art works beyond the Duchampian gesture, by demonstrating how it was rooted in the transubstantiation of wine and wafer to the blood and body of Christ in the Eucharist. Moreover, believing Warhol’s “Brillo Box” is art, or a relic is a bone of a saint, demands a leap of faith. According to Danto, Warhol “ … changed not so much the way we look at art but the way art was understood.”
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