We cannot always quantify change; is Istanbul changing very fast? … too fast? To document and archive in a place that has a habit of describing itself as “in flux” is of immense importance; we rely on the stories we record and tell to create a collective memory. We thank the individuals and institutions that…
Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. —Peggy Phelan Figures 1–6 are scans of what remains of Circle & Square, performed at LUX in London on the October 13,…
When a stem breaks the water perpendicularly, its angle is measured to be 0 degree, and the degree gets closer to 90 as it is slanted more, and the level surface is 90 degrees.[from the Sogetsu ikebana handbook] Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around.[John Cage] Arranging flowers takes…
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…
Ethnomusicologist David Novak brings you to the noisy scenes of Japan’s 2012 antinuclear protest movement in Tokyo, Osaka, and Fukushima, mixing commentary with field recordings, musical examples, and interviews about the role of arts and culture in the ongoing political crisis.
Ana Longoni delivered these reflections as a response during the yearly C-MAP Seminar that took place at The Museum of Modern Art in April 2013. Entitled “Global Networks,” this two-day-long meeting of members of the three geographically oriented C-MAP research groups and guests focused on self-critically addressing C-MAP’s mission to build a more global program for MoMA’s…
The research project C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives) is built upon research that happens both within and outside MoMA. In November 2012, a group of curators, educators, and editorial staff from MoMA spent ten days in Brazil. All through the preceding year, the C-MAP Latin America group had attended lectures, roundtables, and seminars on twentieth-century art…
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…
What does it take to perform an object?
Mieko Shiomi conducted a series of nine events called Spatial Poems which often took the form of an intimate action poem that anyone could perform.
A talk and performance by Shiomi presented in conjunction with the exhibition MOT Collection Chronicle 1964–: Off Museum at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, on April 29, 2012.
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…
