Environmental Art, Postmodern Art, Hélio Oiticica

This 1966 essay is renowned for its early use of the term “postmodern.” Unlike later theorizations, the Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa deploys the concept to discuss how immersive environments replace distanced visual perception in the artworks of Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. New attention to the essay—where the text is interpreted as an alternate theoretical…

Photography and Modern Indian Architecture (1949-1990s)

Ram Rahman (photographer, designer, curator and activist) discusses key examples of modernist architecture in post-colonial India. Using photographic documentation and archival materials, he surveys the landscape of architects, designers, photographers, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals working (primarily in New Delhi) between the 1950s and 1990s. This presentation is excerpted from a closed-door session with MoMA’s C-MAP Asia…

Tehching Hsieh’s “One Year Performance”

MoMA PS1 Associate Curator Jenny Schlenzka on the Taiwanese artist’s innovative posters documenting some of his extreme performances in New York City in the 1980s. The four posters in the collection of MoMA’s Library are part of One Year Performance 1981–1982 by Tehching Hsieh (Taiwanese, born 1950). To complete this work, which is often referred to as Outdoor…

A Flâneur in Montevideo: Joaquín Torres-Garcías “La ciudad sin nombre”

Jorge Schwartz discusses the prominence of the urban in Joaquín Torres-García’s visual and literary works. A major retrospective at MoMA, The Arcadian Modern, reveals a totalizing and structural vision of Joaquín Torres-García’s thinking, mainly through his painting, sculpture, objects, and, of particular interest to me, bibliographic production: his theoretical texts about Constructivism, autobiographical texts, manifestos,…