Molly Nesbit

From 1992 to 2004, Dia Art Foundation presented the Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art, in which a distinguished array of scholars, critics and cultural historians engaged in cross-disciplinary critical discourse around Dia's exhibition program. The lectures were subsequently collected into a related series of publications, providing a valuable record and extending the debate on contemporary artistic practice and theory. This fifth and final volume focuses on analyses of the work of internationally recognized artists Jo Baer, Pierre Huyghe, Vera Lutter, Gerhard Richter, Rosemarie Trockel and Robert Whitman.

Molly Nesbit shows how American pragmatism has informed art theory from Meyer Schapiro to T. J. Clark and Linda Nochlin First published in 2013 and quickly going out of print, Molly Nesbit’s The Pragmatism in the History of Art traces the questions that modern art history and theory has used to make sense of the changes overtaking both art and life. Opening with a consideration of pragmatism’s origins in the thought of Charles Sanders Pierce, William James and John Dewey, the book examines the overlaps and disparities between art and philosophy across several generations of art historians, crossing back and forth over the Atlantic. A genealogy emerges through case studies on the work of Schapiro, Henri Focillon, Alexander Dorner, George Kubler, Robert Herbert, T. J. Clark and Linda Nochlin. The philosophy of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and the films of Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard also show distinctly pragmatic effects. Artists discussed include Vincent van Gogh, Isamu Noguchi, Lawrence Weiner and Gordon Matta-Clark. The Pragmatism in the History of Art precedes Midnight: The Tempest Essays in Nesbit’s Pre-Occupations series. Molly Nesbit is Professor in the Department of Art at Vassar College and a contributing editor of Artforum. Her other books include Atget's Seven Albums (1992) and Their Common Sense (2000).

Midnight: The Tempest Essays, the second book in Molly Nesbit’s Pre-Occupations series, returns the question of pragmatism to the everyday critical practice of the art historian working in the late 20th century. These essays take their cues from the work of specific artists and writers, beginning in the late 1960s, a time when critical commentary found itself in a political and philosophical crisis. Illustrated case studies on Eugène Atget, Marcel Duchamp, Jean-Luc Godard, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Rachel Whiteread, Gabriel Orozco, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lawrence Weiner, Nancy Spero, Rem Koolhaas, Martha Rosler, Gerhard Richter, Matthew Barney and Richard Serra, among others, continue the legacy of a pragmatism that has endured while debates over postmodernism and French philosophy raged.