Claire Bishop

The ways we encounter contemporary art and performance is changing. Installations brim with archival documents. Dances stretch for weeks. Performances last a minute. Exhibitions are spread out over thirty venues. There are endless artworks about mid-century architecture and design. How are we expected to engage with today's diverse practise? Is the old model of close-looking still the ideal, or has it given way to browsing, skimming, and sampling? Across four essays, art historian and critic Claire Bishop identifies trends in contemporary practice - research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture - and their challenges to traditional modes of attention. Charting a critical path through the last three decades, Bishop pinpoints how spectatorship and visual literacy are evolving under the pressures of digital technology.

The ways we encounter contemporary art and performance is changing. Installations brim with archival documents. Dances stretch for weeks. Performances last a minute. Exhibitions are spread out over thirty venues. There are endless artworks about mid-century architecture and design. How are we expected to engage with today's diverse practise? Is the old model of close-looking still the ideal, or has it given way to browsing, skimming, and sampling? Across four essays, art historian and critic Claire Bishop identifies trends in contemporary practice - research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture - and their challenges to traditional modes of attention. Charting a critical path through the last three decades, Bishop pinpoints how spectatorship and visual literacy are evolving under the pressures of digital technology.

V iskusstve poslednikh desjatiletij installjatsija priobrela znachenie veduschej khudozhestvennoj formy. Odnako, kak otmechaet Kler Bishop, "shirochajshij spektr razlichij vo vneshnem vide, soderzhanii i masshtabe proizvedenij, sozdavaemykh segodnja pod etim nazvaniem, a takzhe svoboda v ispolzovanii etogo termina delajut ego pochti lishennym skolko-nibud opredelennogo znachenija". Zadacha nastojaschej knigi - uporjadochit etot, kazalos by, neobozrimyj v svoej raznorodnosti material. Opirajas na analiz konkretnykh rabot, avtor pokazyvaet, chto, poskolku vosprijatie takogo iskusstva trebuet fizicheskogo prisutstvija publiki vnutri proizvedenija, ego mozhno klassifitsirovat po tipu opyta, kotoryj ono predlagaet zritelju. Bishop proslezhivaet istoki installjatsii v khudozhestvennom avangarde 1920-kh godov, udeljaet pristalnoe vnimanie neoavangardu 1960-1970-kh i rassmatrivaet khudozhestvennuju praktiku kontsa XX - nachala XXI veka, projasnjaja pri etom kontseptualnye osnovanija iskusstva installjatsii.

The award-winning, highly acclaimed Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as "social practice." In recent decades, the art gallery and the museum have become a place for participatory art, where an audience is encouraged to take part in the artwork. This has been heralded as a revolutionary practise that can promote new emancipatory social relations. What was it is really? In this fully updated edition, Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawel Althamer and Paul Chan. Bishop challenges the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art this practise. She not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. In response Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.

An Associative Art History searches for the place of Czech, Slovak and Eastern European postwar art in global history. Resisting the mere repetition of Western canonization, the publication aims not to fruitlessly compare East and West, but rather to decipher the circumstances under which artworks are created, theorized and compared to each other. How do Kn z k, Kolar, Koller and Kovanda relate to Situationism, Minimalism and Fluxus? What does Jindrich Chalupeck have to do with Clement Greenberg? Czech art historian and curator Tom s Pospiszyl recounts a history of contemporary Eastern European art by highlighting emblematic stories of the art scene's protagonists, mixing personal anecdotes with artistic agendas. This collection of nine essays, on topics spanning from 1939 to 2013, proposes a new reading of the visual arts during the Iron Curtain era and after.

With austerity cuts to public funding, many contemporary art museums have been forced to scale down their budgets, staff and acquisitions. In Radical Museology, New York-based art historian Claire Bishop argues that the incommensurability of fiscal and cultural temporality--one fast, the other slower--points to an alternative world of values in which museums (and by extension, culture, education and democracy in general) are not subject to the banalities of a spreadsheet, but enable us to access a rich and diverse history, to question the present and to realize a different future. She discusses creative solutions implemented at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Museo Nacional de Reina Sof a in Madrid and MSUM in Ljubljana. This book is a manifesto for the importance of a politicized representation of the contemporary in today's art.

This volume comprises of a selection of texts and presentations from a seminar organized in Warsaw in 2008 by the Museum of Modern Art with art historian Claire Bishop that presented a comparative reflection of Western and Eastern European evaluations of the artistic significance of 1968 and the transformations of 1989, which saw the end of the Soviet empire. The essays presented here explore the extent to which political change affects the form, medium, and distribution of visual art; explain the differences among artistic practices that appear similar but arose in diverse political and ideological contexts; and, consider the possibility and desirability of writing a European art history that brings together East and West.

What has been loosely termed installation Art dominates the exhibition programmes of galleries worldwide. However, while it is much discussed it has rarely been clearly defined. In this book author Claire Bishop provides both a history and a full critical examination of installation art, in a survey of the form that is both thorough and accessible. Installation Art will provide, for the first time, a clear account of the rise of this now prevalent strand of contemporary art. While revising and, in some cases, re-assessing many well-known names in post-1960 art, it will also introduce the audience to a wider spectrum of younger artists yet to receive serious critical attention.