In the early 1950s, Willem de Kooning’s Woman I and subsequent paintings established him as a leading member of the abstract expressionist movement. His wildly impacted brushstrokes and heavily encrusted surfaces baffled most critics, who saw de Kooning’s monstrous female image as violent, aggressive, and ultimately the product of a misogynistic mind. In the image-rich Willem de Kooning Nonstop, Rosalind E. Krauss counters this view with a radical rethinking of de Kooning’s bold canvases and reveals his true artistic practices. Krauss demonstrates that contrary to popular conceptions of de Kooning as an artist who painted chaotically only to finish abruptly, he was in fact constantly reworking the same subject based on a compositional template. This template informed all of his art and included a three-part vertical structure; the projection of his male point of view into the painting or sculpture; and the near-universal inclusion of the female form, which was paired with her redoubled projection onto his work. Krauss identifies these elements throughout de Kooning’s oeuvre, even in his paintings of highways, boats, and landscapes: Woman is always there. A thought-provoking study by one of America’s greatest art critics, Willem de Kooning Nonstop revolutionizes our understanding of de Kooning and shows us what has always been hiding in plain sight in his work.

Erased de Kooning Drawing ist ein Kunstwerk, das auf radikale Weise die Definition von Kunst und das Verständnis von Autorschaft herausfordert. Drei amerikanische Künstler waren 1953 an seiner Erschaffung beteiligt: Robert Rauschenberg radierte eine Zeichnung Willem de Koonings aus, der mit einem gewissen Widerwillen sein Einverständnis gegeben hatte. Jasper Johns versah es anlässlich seiner ersten Präsentation mit einem Label, das maßgeblich zu seiner Wahrnehmung als eigenständigem Werk beitrug. Das zu etwas Neuem transformierte Blatt wurde in den 1950er-Jahren als Neo-Dada aufgefasst, in den 1960ern als Beginn der Konzeptkunst und in den 1980er-Jahren als Aufbruch in die Postmoderne. Zahlreiche Künstler*innen bezogen sich auf das Werk und Rauschenberg selbst griff es immer wieder auf. Es erwies sich als Testfall für Bestimmungen von Modernismus, Literalismus und Postmodernismus. Gregor Stemmrichs kenntnisreiche kunsttheoretische Betrachtung arbeitet die anhaltende Relevanz des Werks für die Theorie des Bildes, des Index, der Spur, des Allegorischen und der Frage nach Appropriation heraus.

Tracey Warr’s art texts have been developed as an ‘embedded’ writer, writing with rather than about artists. Throughout her various modes of art writing, she argues against binaries and focuses on the stream of consciousness, the more than human, and remoteness. Her essays tangle with punk art, art and ecology, endurance art, performance art, site-specific art, and women’s art. Warr’s writing engages with the making processes of contemporary artists, including Marina Abramovic, Ackroyd and Harvey, Tine Bech, Brook and Black, Bruce Gilchrist, Marcus Coates, Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva, London Fieldworks, Hayley Newman, Optik, Alan Smith, Emily Speed, Christian Thompson, James Turrell, Urbonas Studio, and more.

Saving Abstraction: Morton Feldman, the de Menils, and the Rothko Chapel tells the story of the 1972 premier of Morton Feldman's music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Built in 1971 for "people of all faiths or none," the chapel houses 14 monumental paintings by famed abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, who had committed suicide only one year earlier. Upon its opening, visitors' responses to the chapel ranged from spiritual succor to abject tragedy--the latter being closest to Rothko's intentions. However the chapel's founders--art collectors and philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil--opened the space to provide an ecumenically and spiritually affirming environment that spoke to their avant-garde approach to Catholicism. A year after the chapel opened, Morton Feldman's musical work Rothko Chapel proved essential to correcting the unintentionally grave atmosphere of the de Menil's chapel, translating Rothko's existential dread into sacred ecumenism for visitors. Author Ryan Dohoney reconstructs the network of artists, musicians, and patrons who collaborated on the premier of Feldman's music for the space, and documents the ways collaborators struggled over fundamental questions about the emotional efficacy of art and its potential translation into religious feeling. Rather than frame the debate as a conflict of art versus religion, Dohoney argues that the popular claim of modernism's autonomy from religion has been overstated and that the two have been continually intertwined in an agonistic tension that animates many 20th-century artistic collaborations.

This is the first monograph to analyse Beckett’s use of the visual arts, music, and broadcasting media through a transdisciplinary approach. It considers how Beckett’s complex and varied use of art, music, and media in a selection of his novels, radio plays, teleplays, and later short prose informs his creative process. Investigating specific instances where Beckett’s writing adopts musical or visual structures, Lucy Jeffery identifies instances of Beckett’s transdisciplinarity and considers how this approach to writing facilitates ways of expressing familiar Beckettian themes of abstraction, ambiguity, longing, and endlessness. With case studies spanning forty years, she evaluates Beckett’s stylistic shifts in relation to the cultural context, particularly the technological advancements and artistic movements, during which they were written. With new examples from Beckett’s notebooks, critical essays, and letters, Transdisciplinary Beckett evidences how the drastic changes that took place in the visual arts and in musical composition influenced Beckett and, in turn, were influenced by him. Transdisciplinary Beckett situates Beckett as a key figure not just in the literary marketplace but also in the fields of music, art, and broadcasting.

This book is about the way artists generate an endless chain of substitute objects for something they can never quite find. It explores the work involved in art with a focus upon finding, gathering, and assembling charged and auratic objects on the wall beside the work. The author employs the term Das Gegenwerk or the work towards the work. This concept avoids definitive closure and expands the notion of drafting and related practices to include qualitative research methods. The multi-mode transitional practices of Das Gegenwerk are devoid of any demand for a preconceived goal but instead hinge upon the provisional and indeterminate. As such, it is a far cry from the binary logic of the computer and the design cycle but is of interest to an audience engaged with both. Das Gegenwerk hinges on our capacity to respond to the outside rather than the inwardness often attributed to creative agency. A fundamental belief of the book is that by investigating and adapting the practices of expert practitioners, we can gain an understanding of high-level creativity. It is neither a recipe nor a linear or cyclic approach. Rather, artistic creation is an interweave of transitional multi-mode practices where the overriding emphasis is on the handling or habituation of transitional materials in physical place. The author addresses the urgent need to provide a balance between the promise of new technology and our capacity to both respond to and work with what the world bestows.

Described in the New York Times as the greatest art historian America ever produced, Meyer Schapiro was both a close friend to many of the famous artists of his generation and a scholar who engaged in public debate with some of the major intellectuals of his time. This volume synthesizes his prolific career for the first time, demonstrating how Schapiro worked from the nexus of artistic and intellectual practice to confront some of the twentieth century’s most abiding questions. Schapiro was renowned for pioneering interdisciplinary approaches to interpreting visual art. His lengthy formal analyses in the 1920s, Marxist interpretations in the 1930s, psychoanalytic critiques in the 1950s and 1960s, and semiotic explorations in the 1970s all helped open new avenues for inquiry. Based on archival research, C. Oliver O’Donnell’s study is structured chronologically around eight defining debates in which Schapiro participated, including his dispute with Isaiah Berlin over the life and writing of Bernard Berenson, Schapiro’s critique of Martin Heidegger’s ekphrastic commentary on Van Gogh, and his confrontation with Claude Lévi-Strauss over the applicability of mathematics to the interpretation of visual art. O’Donnell’s thoughtful analysis of these intellectual exchanges not only traces Schapiro’s philosophical evolution but also relates them to the development of art history as a discipline, to central tensions of artistic modernism, and to modern intellectual history as a whole. Comprehensive and thought-provoking, this study of Schapiro’s career pieces together the separate strands of his work into one cohesive picture. In doing so, it reveals Schapiro’s substantial impact on the field of art history and on twentieth-century modernism.