In 1959, the year he founded Gorgona with his friends and colleagues, Josip Vaništa staged a solo exhibition in Zagreb of his drawings from the 1950s. A black-and-white photograph commemorates the occasion; it shows three framed works on the wall, studied by three female visitors. The drawing on the left suggests the moody, delicate, somewhat…
post asked the artist and critic Luis Camnitzer, one of the project directors of Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, to respond to some basic questions about the exhibition. In this interview he talks about how the show evolved. He also addresses how the organizers dealt with critical issues such as the differences between “Conceptual…
Rachel Weiss, curator, writer, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was invited to MoMA to speak about the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, which she co-organized in 1999 with Jane Farver (who also came to talk on the subject), Luis Camnitzer, and an international team of curators: Okwei Enwezor,…
Jane Farver, curator and former Director of Exhibitions at the Queens Museum, was invited to MoMA to speak about the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, which she co-organized in 1999 with Rachel Weiss (who also came to present on the subject), Luis Camnitzer, and an international team of curators: Okwei Enwezor, Reiko Tomii &…
John Cage and David Tudor visited Japan in October 1962 at the invitation of the Sogetsu Art Center (SAC). Over the course of the month they gave seven concerts in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Sapporo, causing a sensation that would become known as “the John Cage shock.”
At what moment did artists in Korea show work that was considered experimental, underground, and contemporary? How are the first Korean Happenings, from the late 1960s, seen from today’s perspective? These questions were addressed by Kim Mikyung at a C-MAP presentation at The Museum of Modern Art in April 2014. Her talk, published below, surveys…
Although postwar Japanese avant-garde art is considered to have ended in the year 1970, Julian Ross contends that projection installations in the 1970s took on many of its characteristics, namely, an engagement with the concepts of “environment,” “intermedia,” and “display.”
A close examination of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC)’s 1964 stop in Tokyo allows for a better understanding of how mutually significant this encounter was for the Japanese avant-garde and Cunningham and his close collaborators Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. John now feels that the time is propitious for Merce to undertake not only…
In this interview, the artist Anna Bella Geiger explores the development of her production from early neo-figuration and her “visceral” works, to more experimental tendencies from the late 1960s onward. She talks about photographs taken on the subway during her time in New York City, works that engage unusual mediums such as bread bags and…
In addition to autonomous pieces of music, the Experimental Studio at the Polish Radio in Warsaw produced incidental music for radio broadcasts and soundtracks for movies and TV.
These two texts, one by a well-known artist, the other by an eminent critic—both Tokyoites—, first appeared in Japanese in 1963 and 1968, respectively. Each provides a colorful account of interactions between artists from Tokyo and New York in the ’60s, and both present Japanese reflections on American art at that time. Here the texts…
Listen to 23 music compositions created at Polish Radio Experimental Studio by both the foreign and local composers. Starting with Kotoński’s Study, the first autonomous piece of music for tape produced at PRES in 1959, the presented selection leads through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
