Art at the Turn of the Millennium - Softcover

Riemschneider, Burkhard; Grosenick, Uta

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3822873934 ISBN 13: 9783822873939

Publisher: Taschen America Llc, 1999

Synopsis

Comment comprendre l'art des années 1980 et 1990 ? Cet ouvrage bilingue anglais/français offre une vaste vue d'ensemble de la scène artistique internationale (principalement occidentale) en cette fin de siècle. L'objectif des auteurs est de souligner les dernières tendances de l'art à l'aube du troisième millénaire et de donner une idée de ce que sera l'art du XXIe siècle. L'oeuvre de chacun des 137 artistes retenus couvre ainsi une période inférieure à vingt ans et se trouve donc encore en pleine évolution.

About this title

Review:

Art at the Turn of the Millennium is a mega-exhibition--a Documenta or Venice Biennale in book form. There are 137 artists on view here in 1,200 illustrations, a nearly dizzying array of work chosen by a team of seven experts on contemporary art. Each artist gets four pages within which readers will find high-quality color illustrations, a concise commentary about the art maker, and a one- or two-sentence artist's statement. An amusing and helpful glossary, full of tricky terms from the contemporary art world like "body art," "gender surfing," and "structuralism," is thoughtfully placed at the end of the book. Arranged alphabetically, the book functions as an artifact of this particular moment in time--the very late 20th century. In its scope it identifies the transcontinental nature of the art world today. And by selecting artists who are still hard at work, Art at the Turn of the Millennium hopes to indicate some of the discipline's future directions.

Since the book functions like a dictionary of contemporary art, it is impossible to give a representative list of the artists in it. However, a ruffle of the pages turns up Tony Oursler, an L.A. artist whose video installations feature passionately articulate faces projected onto various head-shaped objects. Italian artist Pipilotti Rist makes hilarious and charming video work that is something like metamusic video. Two German photographers are included, Andreas Gursky, eminently capable of capturing the bigness of the world today, and Thomas Demand, who subjects photography to a rigorous reality check by constructing alarmingly realistic miniature sets, often architectural, which he then photographs. This is a smart and fun book that will endure on the shelves and in the hands of art enthusiasts for years to come. --Loren E. Baldwin

Language Notes:

Text: English, French

About this edition

• Publisher: Taschen America Llc
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 3822873934
• ISBN 13: 9783822873939
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 575
• Editor: Grosenick Uta, Riemschneider Burkhard, Larsen Lars Bang