ART TODAY
by Eleanor Heartney
Phaidon, £45.00
448 pages, 460 colour illustrations
In this visually rich and stimulating work, critic and scholar Eleanor Heartney discusses the work of over 400 artists as she grapples with the huge diversity in art-making over the last three decades. How can we begin to make sense, she asks, of an artistic landscape which includes works such as Damien Hirst's formaldehyde cows, Orlan's ongoing project involving numerous surgical operations primarily on her own face, Maurizio Cattelan's sculpture of the Pope knocked down by a meteorite - just three examples that she cites in her introduction to the book. Rather than tackling the period chronologically Heartney breaks her chapters into 16 themes which have united the work of particular artists or which seem to represent particular concerns in the work that has been made over the last few decades. So in Art and Popular Culture, she looks at Andy Warhol's far-reaching legacy and the cult of celebrity; Art and Globalisation considers work which deliberately goes beyond national boundaries; and Art and Audience explores artworks that function as a set of social relationships. By adopting this approach Heartney, who writes in a refreshingly non-art speak way, finds order in what she calls an 'amorphous state of contemporary art' - though whether any consensus is arrived at in terms of questions of value, quality and meaning remains uncertain.
COLLAGE: THE UNMONUMENTAL PICTURE
Merrell, £17.95
144 pages, 130 colour illustrations
The New Museum in the Bowery continues its four-part opening show 'Unmonumental' with an exhibition of contemporary collage, to which this is the accompanying catalogue. The artists in the exhibition are Mark Bradford, Jonathan Hernandez, Thomas Hirschhorn, Christian Holstad, Kim Jones, Wangechi Mutu, Henrik Olsen, Martha Rosler, Nancy Spero, John Stezaker and Kelley Walker. All scavengers in their own way, they are united by their use of trash, discarded fragments, and found objects to explore and comment on the cultural, social and political landscape of the 21st century. In one of the essays in this book New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni argues that collage is a form that emerges during times of rupture and panic, with artists using it not only as an art form but as 'an act of ethical responsibility' - as in the work of Hirschhorn and Rosler. Others take on the media, the plethora of magazines pandering to our every desire (Wangechi Mutu); while artists such as Kim Jones and Nancy Spero use collage to make sense of our complicated, conflicted times with particular reference to war. If you aren't able to see the show, this concise book provides an excellent guide to an important trend within contemporary sculpture.
PHOTO ART
Thames & Hudson, 520pp
718 illustrations, 596 in colour, £24.95
112 artists have made their way into this book which presents a survey of where the medium of photography currently stands. The selection, which the editors Uta Grosenick and Thomas Seelig admit is subjective (for example, there is no Idris Khan, no Ryan McGinley, no Shannon Abner, no Esko Mannikko),
presents what they consider to be the most striking trends in photography with big names such as Tacita Dean, The Atlas Group, JH Engstrom, Simon Norfolk and Florian Maier-Aichen among the artists featured. As a reference book it's perfect - each photographer is given a page of text introducing their work plus four pages of images, and very helpfully, the website addresses for each artist and/or their gallery.
STEPHEN SHORE
Phaidon, £24.95
160 pages
The latest volume in Phaidon's Contemporary Artists series offers the most thorough survey to date of the work of American photographer Stephen Shore. Shore's two best-known series, 'American Surfaces' and 'Uncommon Places' were born out of various road trips he made in the 1970s across America. ON one such trip to Amarillo in Texas Shore started taking colour photographs, at the time a taboo among the puritanical elite of the photography world. These pictures would eventually be published in 1972 as 'American Surfaces'. Shore's subject for the series was the mundane, the everyday - motel rooms, parking lots, filling stations, plates of food in diners - even toilets got documented. Shore was the only photographer working in colour to be included in the now legendary exhibition in 1975 called 'New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape' which took place at George Eastman House. Shore discusses this particular body of work with Michael Fried in an interview included in the book. In a survey of Shore's work Christy Lange, one of Frieze magazine's editors, charts his career as a photographer from the age of 6 when he was given his first camera, to succeeding in getting Edward Steichen, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to look at his work and acquire several pieces for the museum's permanent collection - Shore was just 14 -, through to his time hanging out with Andy Warhol at the Factory in the 1960s when he was 17, and inviting friends such as Nico back to his parents' place where he was still living. 'My whole understanding of what contemporary art was opened up', he says of his first meeting with Warhol. Shore also discusses in the book the images and writing that have most influenced his work, such as Ed Ruscha's and John Coplans' conceptual projects which, Shore says, took him out of the geeky photography world of camera clubs and started him off down the path of documenting vernacular imagery.
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