In the late 1960s, New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission rejected a scandalous proposal submitted by Marcel Breuer and Associates to float a fifty-five-story office tower in the air rights above Grand Central Terminal. The tendency among historians has been to treat Breuer's tower as an act of vandalism, but this article argues that such an interpretation obscures the real political and economic stakes of the controversy. In fact, Breuer's design uncovered the single-minded profit orientation of development interests and the preservationists who opposed the scheme operated less on behalf of a landmark threatened with defacement than against an economy of development operating without meaningful public oversight. Contemporary accounts repress this antagonism between preservationists and a growth machinery operated by corporate capitalists; they repress exactly what the proposal made visible to its critics. And the scandal of Breuer's proposal was not in the threat it posed to the terminal but precisely in the irreconcilability, in the 1960s, of development and preservation.

This essay focuses on Brazilian–American artist Vik Muniz's 2008 Pictures of Garbage and the pendant 2010 documentary on their making, Waste Land , directed by Lucy Walker. Muniz enlists a group of Brazilian garbage pickers as subjects and participants in the construction of their own portraits, using garbage picked from a landfill outside of Rio de Janeiro. The use of garbage as a material draws attention to global patterns of exploitation that produce both the waste itself and the poverty of the garbage pickers. However, this essay argues that Muniz's social aims are undermined by formal incoherences within the portraits and their subsequent recommodification on the global art market. Using Michael Fried's theories, the essay identifies a tension in Pictures of Garbage between the theatricality of the subjects' poses, drawn from canonical European paintings, and the absorptive qualities of the garbage itself. This dissonance reflects Muniz's own split position as a cosmopolitan global artist compelled to represent Brazilian identity through associations with base materiality.

American painter Frederic Edwin Church's monumental oil painting Aurora Borealis (1865) presents a stark contrast to the dominant Western tradition of representing the Arctic as monochrome and static. This article discusses how the impressive palette of Aurora Borealis and its black semi-circle in the center allow for a revisionist understanding of Church's contributions to a rich history of Arctic representation, including in an age of climate change and rapidly melting ice. The article connects Aurora Borealis to emerging lens technologies—especially photography and astronomy, and later the cinema and composite satellite imagery, to argue for circumpolar north as globally connected—then, and now. The article furthermore draws connections to the nineteenth-century trade in pigments, the interconnected routes of slavery, and cultural modes of urban modernity.

Published in the September 1974 issue of Artforum , my article “The Provincialism Problem” argued that a world art system, centered on the New York artworld, condemned artists elsewhere to misleadingly perceive their situation as necessarily subservient, and their art as lesser, secondary, and dependent. In fact, this system condemned all involved, including New York based artists, to a vicious cycle of mutual inequity. The article called for artists, critics, and curators to radically reimagine these relationships. Often cited in the decades since then, in recent years it is frequently used as a foil to demonstrate how, within the international artworld, the situation has improved significantly. In this essay, I review the acute awareness of these issues in the Australian artworld during the 1960s and 1970s, and the situation in New York in the early and mid-1970s that lead me to write the article in concert with other members of the Art & Language group. I note some of the critical responses to the article since its publication, explore key aspects of center-periphery theory, and conclude by arguing that the provincialism problem has not been solved—it has, rather, been globalized then neoliberalized, and thus remains problematic.

This essay explores the role of art periodicals in art worlds past and present. It examines the histories of Artforum and October within the context of the North American art world of the 1960s and 1970, and contextualizes these publications within a larger field of publishing practices, including self-published Salon pamphlets, little magazines, and artists' periodicals. It explores how the distribution form of the periodical affects the politics of art criticism, and considers how art magazines have served as sites of critical publicity, mediating publics and counterpublics within the art world. It also reflects on the role of magazines and newer online media in the contemporary, globalized art world.

This text examines the first official exhibition of the Yugoslav Association of Fine Artists, and the theoretical, socio-political, and institutional contexts of the Socialist Realist period in Yugoslav art (spanning roughly the years between1945 and 1954). Post-war artistic and cultural environment, the first exhibition, and critical aesthetic debates around Socialist Realism exemplify Yugoslavia's struggle to make sense of, and implement, Socialist Realism as an official artistic, cultural, and political category. Its development paralleled the state's own wrestling with notions of socialist governance and its proper implementation. Difficulties with Socialist Realist aesthetic and the ensuing paradoxes in its adaptation in Yugoslav art are at the core of the dialogs, theoretical discourses, and critical responses to the first exhibition. My analysis uses accounts and reviews of the exhibition, as well as official writings and arguments presented by the state and cultural officials to argue that Yugoslav art of the time was in fact transgressive, a hybrid of modernism and Socialist Realism. Rather than reading its hybridity as a failure, as some have argued, I read the hybridity of Yugoslav art as a space of possibilities that would have opened a new art praxis in Yugoslavia of the time.

This article raises two concerns underpinning the need for a critical history of fiber art in the 20 th century. The first is a critique of aesthetic formalism predominant in the Lausanne Biennale during the 1960s and 70s, which overlooks artistic, ideological, and political milieus that drew together textile artists from localities formerly treated as peripheral in art history. The second holds to account Euro-American institutions and related historiographies for their curatorial exclusion of Arab and African fiber artists. Such inclusion, I argue, would have conjured tapestry's deeper incongruities, which emanated from unresolved questions at the core of modernism: the assigning and appropriating of artistic identities, the evaded issue of state patronage, and the persistent ideological and aesthetic problem of craft and its framing within economies. By comparing three artists: Magdalena Abakanowicz, Jagoda Buic, and Safia Farhat, I reassess New Tapestry networks, myths, and systems of state and institutional support. The circulation of Abakanowicz, Buic, and Farhat around a conflux of dimensions signals a new pathway for recovering and writing a history of fiber art, and perhaps a reflection on modernism at large.

The article analyzes Öyvind Fahlström's (1928–1976) performance Kisses Sweeter Than Wine , which took place as part of the festival 9 Evenings: art&engineering in New York (1966). It situates the performance's use of multimedia material as continuations of earlier investigations into manipulating language that played a central part in the artist's practice of both visual art and concrete poetry. It further argues that in Kisses Sweeter Than Wine such manipulations form a series of ruptures into the wider circulation of mass-media images, ruptures that locate Fahlström's use of media images in relation to both Pop Art and the beginning media activism under the Vietnam War.

This article discusses the ongoing pertinence to the present of Fredric Jameson's work on postmodernism in the context of recent elaborations of “the contemporary” and “contemporaneity” in art history, theory and criticism. It is argued that, while postmodernism is fraught with contradiction and in any case irretrievable by now as a periodization of the present, it nonetheless remains crucially instructive for a fuller understanding and politicization of contemporaneity. In particular, both the nature of the relationship between culture and capital, as well as the theoretical imperative to totalize remain central to Jameson's problematic in ways that the discourse on the contemporary threatens to undo, in its resistance to historicism, and in its tendency to insist, not merely upon the heterogeneity, but upon the incommensurability of global cultures and space-times.

This article examines conflicting racial, archaeological and art historical interpretations of Olmec art produced in the United States in the early 1960s. It inscribes shifting approaches to the study of monumental Olmec art by figures like George Kubler within the contexts of violent modernization of the Olmec ‘heartland’ of Veracruz and Tabasco, the politicized display of this artistic tradition in museums and traveling exhibitions, and the unstable horizons of U.S.-Mexico diplomatic relations during that period.

This roundtable article investigates the “critical archive” as a material concept in the fields of artistic production, art historiography, curatorial practice, and criticism. We invited twelve critics, artists, art historians, and curators to respond to a series of questions related to the idea of the archive as a critical agent in the field of art. The roundtable examines different historical and institutional permutations of conceptions of a (self-) critical archive and its possible impact on our understanding of the relationship between art and historical evidence.

In the 1990s, contemporary art's “global turn” was vividly demonstrated by artists whose works directly reflected upon their experiences of moving across vast geographical distances. Coinciding with a multidisciplinary crisis over globalization as expressed through different approaches to the question of scale, the ambivalence towards the global turn's expansionism was vividly taken up by the large number of Asian artists whose rise to international prominence was enabled by this “turn.” Artists like Suh Do-Ho, Naoya Hatakeyama, and Danh Vo engaged with scale not simply as metonymical reflections of the world, but as a means of responding to those systems, standards, and hierarchies whose own assumptions about scale were mobilized to put things in their proper, but not always rightful, place.

The article considers two art works made in recent years in Angola: the exhibition Lion & Ox, which featured art works by António Ole and Art Orienté objet, and the installation Icarus 13 by Kiluanji Kia Henda. Both draw on twentieth century utopias still present in Angola and refer to Agostinho Neto, the poet who became Angola's first Marxist-Leninist president. While Lion & Ox explores Angolan nature structured through colonial taxonomies, Icarus 13 tells sci-fi narrative of an Angolan space mission to the Sun, suggesting a shift to a planetary imaginary. What does it mean, in the present conjuncture, to think the planetary from Angola?

This research is part of a core of broader interests which seek to study the diverse cultural positions in South America and to analyze the tensions between traditional hegemonies and the appearance of new centers of cultural diffusion and management within the region. In this text I develop two lines of investigation: firstly, to pursue existing research into the disputes between Argentina and Brazil over hegemony in the region and, second, to propose an approach to Brazilian cultural intervention in Paraguay. The hypothesis of this work states that Brazilian cultural management in Paraguay during the 1950s sought to catalyze the process of artistic modernization within this country and to enroll it in an internationalist promotional framework.

This article discusses the plastic arts' non-dialectical engagement with materiality, by focusing on figures of depth in three recent artworks in mixed media by artists from the Americas: Artur Barrio's coffee-grounds installations (2000–08), Jacques Coursil's avant-garde jazz album Clameurs (2007), and Damián Ortega's action Moby Dick (2004). All three offer aesthetic experiences of depth that propose an approach to the questions of relation and chaos-monde addressed by Édouard Glissant in terms of plasticity and assemblages—unhinged from anthropocentrism and signification.

In 1932, Paul Strand travelled to Mexico. The work he completed during his two-year stay has framed our histories of Strand's practice in the 1930s and 1940s as a history of his turning away from his commitment to formalism in the 1920s. Paul Strand's Living Labor challenges this history through an examination of The Wave , a documentary film Strand shot in 1934. A study of labor struggles in post-revolutionary Mexico, The Wave , this essay argues, reanimates Strand's investigation of the relationship between man and machine evident in his first film, Manhatta (1921). Focusing on Strand's obsession with the close-up and the portrait, Paul Strand's Living Labor organizes a history of Strand's work that rejects the binaries framing our studies of Strand: between New York and Mexico, film and photography, modernism and documentary.

The first biennial founded outside Venice opened in São Paulo Brazil in 1951, providing a fulcrum between “dependency” and “developmentalism” (to use economic terms). In terms of art history, it presents a useful anomaly in which an international style (“concrete abstraction,” a European import) was used simultaneously to eradicate local difference and to declare a cosmopolitan, up-to-date Brasilidade (Brazilianness). More crucially, I argue that the São Paulo Bienal was the precondition for the newly rigorous conceptualism that followed, as Brazilian artists in the late ′60s rejected “Concretismo” to craft a new world picture, radically transforming margin and center through the profoundly theoretical practice of antropofagia — cultural cannibalism.

This article contributes to a recent debate around the question “What Is Contemporary Art?” It brings into discussion certain key aspects of the activities of the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA)—a network of contemporary art centers established by the Open Society Institute in Eastern Europe during the 1990s. The author draws upon distinctions between this new type of art institution and the Union of Artists (the organizations which represented the interests of artists under socialism), highlighting distinct artistic, aesthetic and economic characteristics of each institutional model.