Hardcover
2003
by Molesworth, Helen et al.
Baltimore Museum of Art, 2003. Hardcover. New. Pale tan boards, yellow cloth spine. 245 pp. Profuse bw plates. During the 1960s, artists from Alan Kaprow and Yoko Ono to Andy Warhol and Richard Serra stopped making "art" as it has been thought of since the Renaissance. They staged performances that mixed everyday life with theater and in yet other, often ironic, ways challenged the system of marketing, display, and aesthetic discourse that ascribes exceptional monetary as well as cultural value to paintings and sculpture. Work Ethic, published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art, brings together a cross section of such radical endeavors and opens a fresh perspective on their genesis and meaning. Most of the avant-garde interventions considered in Work Ethic entailed performances and other procedures generally interpreted as linking a "dematerialization" of the object with the free play of concepts. Four essays introduce topics, like utopian fantasies of pleasurable work, that are of general relevance to setting the material into a postindustrial context. Throughout this catalogue, there is as well a lively dialogue on the museum's relationship to art that questions the rules of both the workplace and the art world. The exhibition, "Work Ethic," was held at The Baltimore Museum of Art from October 12, 2003, to January 11, 2004, and at the Des Moines Center for the Arts from May 15 to August 1, 2004. Includes works by Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, Valie Export, Tom Friedman, Donald Judd, Alison Knowles, Lee Lozano, Tom Marioni, Yoko Ono, Babriel Orozco, Roxy Paine, Martha Rosler, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Mierle Ukeles, Andy Warhol, Erwin Wurm, and many others.
(Inventory #: 32348)