UNIT

INFORMATION

Unit 5

Curating Subjects
Paul O'Neill
Open Editions, 2007
This sleek and serious anthology of new curatorial writing
features contributions from leading international curators, artists
and critics including Julie Ault, Soren Andreasen & Lars Bang
Larsen, Carlos Basualdo, Dave Beech & Mark Hutchinson, Irene
Calderoni, Anshuman Das Gupta & Grant Watson, Clementine
Deliss, Eva Diaz, Claire Doherty, Okwui Enwezor, Annie
Fletcher, Liam Gillick, Jens Hoffmann, Robert Nickas, Hans
Ulrich Obrist, Sarah Pierce, Simon Sheikh, Mary Anne
Staniszewski, Andrew Wilson and Mick Wilson. Put together by
the curator-critic Paul O'Neill, "Curating Subjects," documents
the inter-dependent relationships between the curatorial past,
present and speculative futures and, instead of following the
convention of curators writing about themselves, invites the
authors to provide a text about the curatorial work of others. The
result is an eclectic volume of accessible responses that
provides a pluralistic and dynamic curatorial discourse where
critical essays, theoretical explorations, propositions, historical
overviews, interviews, exhibition critiques and fictional accounts
sit side by side.

Unit 5

Installation Art: A Critical History

Claire Bishop
Routledge., 2004
Installation Art provides both a history and a full critical
examination of this challenging area of contemporary art, from
1960 to the present day. Using case studies of significant artists
and individual works, Claire Bishop argues that, as installation art
requires its audience to physically enter the artwork in order to
experience it, installation pieces can be categorised by the type
of experience they provide for the viewing subject. As well as
exploring the methodologies of the artists examined, Bishop also
explains the critical theory that informed their work. While
revising and, in some cases, re-assessing many well-known
names, this fully illustrated book will introduce the reader to a
wide spectrum of younger artists, some yet to receive critical
attention.

Page 1 of 3

Unit 5

Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation

Claire Doherty
Black Dog Pub., 2004
Contemporary Art from Studio to Situation collects together texts
and interviews with key artists, curators and writers involved in
the issue of context and site-specificity in the contemporary
international art scene. Included are artists such as Thomas
Hirschhorn and Kathrin Bohm, who have - in very different ways investigated the relationship between architecture and social
interaction; Nicolas Bourriaud, the author of the influential book
Relational Aesthetics; and curators from innovative art museums
including Catherine David (currently at Witte de With,
Rotterdam), whose extensive list of projects includes Documenta
X. This book continues and expands on the critical investigations
of writers such as Douglas Crimp, Rosalyn Deutsche, Brian
Wallis and Lucy Lippard into the shifting relations between artist,
institution, and practice/production.

Unit 5

Thinking about Exhibitions

Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, Sandy Nairne
Psychology Press, 1996
Presents a multidisciplinary anthology of writings on current
exhibition practice by curators, critics, artists, sociologists and
historians form North America, Europe and Australia. It marks
out the emergence of new discourses surrounding the exhibition
and illustrates the urgency of the debates centred in and fostered
by exhibitions today. Texts have been grouped ... in sections
which focus on the history of the exhibition, forms of staging and
spectacle, and questions of curatorship, spectatorship and
narrative. These writings ... investigate exhibitions in settings
outside of the traditional gallery as well as innovative work in
extending cultural debates within the museum ... fully ilustrated
with over ninety black-and-white photographs and includes a
bibliography on the subject of art exhibitions.

Page 2 of 3

Unit 5

Inside the White Cube: The ideology of the gallery space

Brian ODoherty
Lapis Press, 1986
A pivotal text in post-modern art theory. In these essays, Brian
O'Doherty framed an important and still unresolved theoretical
debate about the display and consumption of art in the modern
gallery space.
When these essays first appeared in Artforum in 1976, their
impact was immediate. They were discussed, annotated, cited,
collected, and translated--the three issues of Artforum in which
they appeared have become nearly impossible to obtain. Having
Brian O'Doherty's provocative essays available again is a signal
event for the art world. This edition also includes "The Gallery as
Gesture," a critically important piece published ten years after the
others.
O'Doherty was the first to explicitly confront a particular crisis in
postwar art as he sought to examine the assumptions on which
the modern commercial and museum gallery was based.
Concerned with the complex and sophisticated relationship
between economics, social context, and aesthetics as
represented in the contested space of the art gallery, he raises
the question of how artists must construe their work in relation to
the gallery space and system.

Page 3 of 3