How did the infrastructure of the former Soviet Bloc’s socialist states support experiments in the art of sound? What possibilities were created and what were the drawbacks that resulted, for artists and their art, from the desire to create an entirely new, experimental society? This talk was delivered at “About Sound,” a C-MAP seminar on…
Here lies a bibliography to be stepped on. It is composed of forty primarily English-language publications that take the form of exhibition catalogues, anthologies, artists’ books, and scholarly treatises. Together, these volumes give voice to and reflect on a movement with many histories, a movement propelled by artists living in New York, Eastern Europe, and…
Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg ruminates on the life journeys of his archive, weaving a tale that takes in personal, cultural, socioeconomic, and institutional dimensions of building—and letting go of—an artist’s file, and considering whether an archive can itself be a work of art. To most people, a file is merely a collection of objects, mostly…
Reflecting on the problematic term “Latin American Conceptualism,” Harper Montgomery’s text stems from a workshop at MoMA in which she and the C-MAP Latin America research group debated some of the issues surrounding the historicization of experimental art in Latin America. The workshop raised a number of questions that are broached below. This text was part of…
Initiated in the late 1950s in Zagreb, in the former Yugoslavia, and dissolved less than a decade later, the Gorgona Group continues to fascinate. Since the group’s first exhibition in 1977, generations of artists and art historians from Eastern Europe have viewed its ephemeral, collective artistic practices as the foundation for the later development of…
Iako raspuštena vec desetljeće nakon svog osnivanja u kasnim 50-im godinama 20. stolječa u bivšoj Jugoslaviji, grupa Gorgona još uvijek fascinira. Od njihove prve izložbe 1977. godine, generacije umjetnika i povjesničara umjetnosti iz Istočne Europe smatrali su da je kratkotrajno umjetničko djelovanje ove grupe temelj kasnijeg razvoja konceptualizma koji je u šezdesetim godinama cvjetao u…
The following are selected works and related archival materials presented by Postwar Japan Moving Image Archive. The digitization of these materials was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 24720048. Matsumoto Toshio has made approximately eighty film and video works ranging from avant-garde documentaries, features, and experimental films to multimedia installations. He has collaborated with artists…
From Juilliard to Fluxus and traditional Japanese music, this essay, which traces the multifaceted music of Toshi Ichiyanagi, is based on a C-MAP workshop led by Yayoi Uno Everett in January 2012. [1] This presentation explores Ichiyanagi Toshi’s philosophy and aesthetics during the years 1961–64, when he was composing indeterminate music and graphic scores, and…
Geta Brătescu, whose career began in the 1960s and continues until today, is a pivotal figure in the history of post-war Romanian art. Working under the repressive political regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu for a large part of her career, Brătescu, developed a body of work that reflects the conditions of its production. Largely (though not…
The Sogetsu Art Center (SAC) in Tokyo was a major hub for avant-garde activities between 1958 and 1971, a period of concentrated energy for the experimental arts in Japan. Artists, musicians, designers, critics, writers, and performers gathered at the SAC to test out new experimental practices and to engage in dialogue about new directions in…
Speaking with Christophe Cherix, The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books, Geta Brătescu shares her understanding of drawing and speaks of the importance of personal space for her creative practice, offering an insight into her technique. She discusses her fascination with Charlie Chaplin, which led to the creation of her best-known…
As environmental and media ecologies changed drastically in 1960s urban Japan, how did artists respond to rapid growth and prosperity, and to their byproducts and side effects?
