1.
Museum of Modern Art
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The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is identified as one of the largest and most influential museums of modern art in the world. The MoMA Library includes approximately 300,000 books and exhibition catalogs, over 1,000 periodical titles, the archives holds primary source material related to the history of modern and contemporary art. The idea for The Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1929 primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and they became known variously as the Ladies, the daring ladies and the adamantine ladies. They rented modest quarters for the new museum in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and it opened to the public on November 7,1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash. Abby had invited A. Conger Goodyear, the president of the board of trustees of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. At the time, it was Americas premier museum devoted exclusively to art. One of Abbys early recruits for the staff was the noted Japanese-American photographer Soichi Sunami. Goodyear enlisted Paul J. Sachs and Frank Crowninshield to join him as founding trustees, Sachs, the associate director and curator of prints and drawings at the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, was referred to in those days as a collector of curators. Goodyear asked him to recommend a director and Sachs suggested Alfred H. Barr, under Barrs guidance, the museums holdings quickly expanded from an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing. Its first successful exhibition was in November 1929, displaying paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne. Abbys husband was opposed to the museum and refused to release funds for the venture. Nevertheless, he donated the land for the current site of the museum, plus other gifts over time. During that time it initiated many more exhibitions of noted artists, the museum also gained international prominence with the hugely successful and now famous Picasso retrospective of 1939–40, held in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago. In its range of presented works, it represented a significant reinterpretation of Picasso for future art scholars, Boy Leading a Horse was briefly contested over ownership with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 1941, MoMA hosted the exhibition, Indian Art of the United States. His brother, David Rockefeller, also joined the board of trustees in 1948. David subsequently employed the noted architect Philip Johnson to redesign the garden and name it in honor of his mother
2.
Vito Acconci
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Vito Hannibal Acconci is an American designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist. Acconci was married to the artist Rosemary Mayer, Acconci went to a Roman Catholic elementary school, high school, and college. He attended Regis High School in New York City and he received a BA in literature from the College of the Holy Cross in 1962 and an MFA in literature and poetry from the University of Iowa. He noted, There wasnt a woman in my classroom between kindergarten and graduate school, Acconci began his career as a poet, editing 0 TO9 with Bernadette Mayer in the late 1960s. In the late 1960s, Acconci transformed himself into a performance and video artist using his own body as a subject for photography, film, video, most of his early work incorporated subversive social comment. His performance and video work was marked heavily by confrontation and Situationism, in the mid-1970s, Acconci expanded his métier into the world of audio/visual installations. One installation/performance piece from this period is Seedbed, one motivation behind Seedbed was to involve the public in the works production by creating a situation of reciprocal interchange between artist and viewer. Cindy Nemser was the first art critic to write about Vito Acconci for Arts Magazine in 1971, Nemser also later did an interview with Vito Acconci which became the cover piece for Arts Magazine. In the article Video, the Aesthetics of Narcissism, Rosalind Krauss refers to aspects of Narcissism apparent in the work of Acconci. “A line of sight begin Acconci’s plane of vision ends on the eyes of his projected double”, Krauss uses this description to underline aspects of narcissism in the Vito Acconci work Centers. Krauss also goes on to explain the basis behind the actions of video in comparison to discussions of object art. In the 1980s, Acconci turned to permanent sculptures and installations, during this time he invited viewers to create artwork by activating machinery that erected shelters and signs. Later, in January 1983, Acconci was a visiting artist at Middlebury College, during that time, he completed Way Station I, which was his first permanent installation. The work sparked immense controversy on the campus, and was eventually set on fire. Acconci Studio is located on Jay Street in Brooklyn, the artist has focused on architecture and landscape design that integrates public and private space. One example of this is Walkways Through the Wall, which flow through structural boundaries of the Midwest Airlines Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and provide seating at both ends. The project replaced the existing facade with a series of panels that pivot vertically or horizontally to open the entire length of the gallery directly onto the street. Another example of his work is Dirt Wall at the Arvada Center for the Arts, the wall begins outside the Arvada Center and extends inside, rising from ground level to a height of 24 feet
3.
David Blaine
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David Blaine is an American magician, illusionist and endurance artist. He is best known for his feats of endurance, and has set. Blaine revolutionized the way magic is shown on television by focusing on spectator reactions and his idea was to turn the camera around on the people watching instead of the performer, to make the audience watch the audience. The New York Times noted that hes taken a craft thats been around for hundreds of years and done something unique, according to the New York Daily News, Blaine can lay claim to his own brand of wizardry. The magic he offers operates on a personal level. Blaine was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Patrice Maureen White, a teacher, and William Perez. His father was of half Puerto Rican and half Italian descent, when Blaine was four years old, he saw a magician performing magic in the subway. This triggered a lifelong interest for him and he was raised by his single mother and attended many schools in Brooklyn. When he was 10 years old, his mother married John Bukalo and they moved to Little Falls, New Jersey, when Blaine was 17 years old, he moved to Manhattan, New York. On May 19,1997, Blaines first television special, David Blaine and it really, really does break new ground, said Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller. When asked about his style, Blaine explained, “Id like to bring magic back to the place it used to be 100 years ago. ”Time commented, His deceptively low-key. Jon Racherbaumer commented, Make no mistake about it, the focus of show, boys. It is really about theatrical proxemics, about the show-within-a-show and the spontaneous, USA Today called Blaine the hottest name in magic right now. According to CNN, Blaines only communication to the world was by a hand buzzer. BBC News reported that the coffin had six inches of headroom. During the endurance stunt Blaine did not eat and drank only two to three US tablespoons of water a day. An estimated 75,000 people visited the site, including Marie Blood, Harry Houdinis niece, who said, My uncle did some amazing things, on the final day of the stunt, April 12, hundreds of news teams were stationed at the site for the coffin-opening. A team of construction workers removed a portion of the 75 cubic feet of gravel surrounding the 6-foot deep coffin before a crane lifted the water tank, Blaine emerged and told the crowd, I saw something very prophetic
4.
Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)
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Mattress Performance was a work of endurance performance art by Emma Sulkowicz, conducted as her senior thesis during the final year of her visual arts degree at Columbia University in New York City. Begun in September 2014, the piece involved her carrying a 50-lb mattress—of the kind Columbia uses in its dorms—wherever she went on campus. She said the piece would end when a student she alleges raped her in her room in 2012 was expelled from or otherwise left the university. Sulkowicz carried the mattress until the end of the Spring semester as well as to her graduating ceremony in May 2015, the student Sulkowicz accused was found not responsible in 2013 by a university inquiry into the allegations. He called Sulkowiczs accusation untrue and unfounded and Mattress Performance an act of bullying, Sulkowicz filed a police complaint in May 2014, the district attorneys office did not pursue criminal charges, citing a lack of reasonable suspicion. The suit was dismissed in March 2016, the student filed an amended complaint on April 25,2016. The piece has been subject to controversy with praise from art critics, Art critic Jerry Saltz called Mattress Performance pure radical vulnerability and one of the best art shows of 2014. Social critic Camille Paglia criticized Mattress Performance stating that feminist works should empower women, Emma Sulkowicz is the daughter of Sandra Leong and Kerry Sulkowicz, psychiatrists from Manhattan. She attended Dalton School on the Upper East Side, and in 2011 began her visual arts degree at Columbia University, the student Sulkowicz accused denies the allegation, insisting that the encounter was entirely consensual. In April 2013,8 months after the encounter, Sulkowicz filed a complaint with the university, Sulkowicz says she filed her complaint after she encountered two other female students who said they had been victimized by the same individual. One was a girlfriend who said she was emotionally abused during their long-term relationship. The other said that on one occasion the accused student had moved toward her aggressively, grabbed her arms, shortly after Sulkowicz filed her complaint, the two other students with whom she was acquainted also filed complaints with the university against the same student. Columbia ultimately cleared him of responsibility in all three cases, the case attracted wider attention when the three female students who filed complaints gave interviews to the New York Post, which broke the story on December 11,2013, without naming those involved. In April 2014 Sulkowicz appeared with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand at a conference about campus sexual assault. The Department of Educations Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation in January 2015, on May 14,2014, Sulcowicz filed a complaint with the NYPD. The district attorneys office interviewed Sulkowicz and the student she accused in August, Sulkowicz created Mattress Performance in the summer of 2014 for her senior thesis while at Yale University Summer School of Art and Music. Her first effort was a video of herself moving a bed out of a room, accompanied by the audio of her filing the police report, the mattress later became the focus of the piece. Sulkowiczs thesis was supervised by artist Jon Kessler, a professor at Columbia, as the idea for Mattress Performance developed, Kessler and Sulkowicz discussed the nature of endurance art and the work of Tehching Hsieh, Marina Abramović, Ulay and Chris Burden
5.
Franz Kafka
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Franz Kafka was a Prague German-language novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His best known works include Die Verwandlung, Der Process, the term Kafkaesque has entered the English language to describe situations like those in his writing. Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague and he trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education he was employed with an insurance company, forcing him to relegate writing to his spare time. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and he became engaged to several women but never married. He died in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis and his work went on to influence a vast range of writers, critics, artists, and philosophers during the 20th century. Kafka was born near the Old Town Square in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his family were middle-class Ashkenazi Jews. His father, Hermann Kafka, was the child of Jakob Kafka, a shochet or ritual slaughterer in Osek. Hermann brought the Kafka family to Prague, after working as a travelling sales representative, he eventually became a fancy goods and clothing retailer who employed up to 15 people and used the image of a jackdaw as his business logo. Kafkas mother, Julie, was the daughter of Jakob Löwy, a retail merchant in Poděbrady. Hermann and Julie had six children, of whom Franz was the eldest, franzs two brothers, Georg and Heinrich, died in infancy before Franz was seven, his three sisters were Gabriele, Valerie and Ottilie. They all died during the Holocaust of World War II, Valli was deported to the Łódź Ghetto in Poland in 1942, but that is the last documentation of her. On business days, both parents were absent from the home, with Julie Kafka working as many as 12 hours each day helping to manage the family business, consequently, Kafkas childhood was somewhat lonely, and the children were reared largely by a series of governesses and servants. The dominating figure of Kafkas father had a significant influence on Kafkas writing, the Kafka family had a servant girl living with them in a cramped apartment. In November 1913 the family moved into an apartment, although Ellie. In early August 1914, just after World War I began, both Ellie and Valli also had children. Franz at age 31 moved into Vallis former apartment, quiet by contrast, from 1889 to 1893, Kafka attended the Deutsche Knabenschule German boys elementary school at the Masný trh/Fleischmarkt, now known as Masná Street. His Jewish education ended with his Bar Mitzvah celebration at the age of 13, Kafka never enjoyed attending the synagogue and went with his father only on four high holidays a year. German was the language of instruction, but Kafka also spoke and he studied the latter at the gymnasium for eight years, achieving good grades
6.
Yoko Ono
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Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist who is also known for her work in performance art and filmmaking. She is the wife and widow of singer-songwriter John Lennon of the Beatles. Ono grew up in Tokyo, and studied at Gakushuin and she withdrew from her course after two years and rejoined her family in New York in 1953. She spent some time at Sarah Lawrence College, and then involved in New York Citys downtown artists scene. She first met Lennon in 1966 at her own art exhibition in London and she brought feminism to the forefront in her music, influencing artists as diverse as the B-52s and Meredith Monk. Ono achieved commercial and critical acclaim in 1980 with the chart-topping album Double Fantasy, public appreciation of Onos work has shifted over time, helped by a retrospective at a Whitney Museum branch in 1989 and the 1992 release of the six-disc box set Onobox. She received a Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement from the Venice Biennale in 2009, as Lennons widow, Ono works to preserve his legacy. She funded Strawberry Fields in New York City, the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland, and she has made significant philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace, Philippine and Japan disaster relief, and other causes. In 2012 Yoko Ono received the Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt Human Rights Award endowed by Alexandra Hildebrandt, the award is given annually in recognition of extraordinary, non-violent commitment to human rights. Ono continues her activism, inaugurating a biennial $50,000 LennonOno Grant for Peace in 2002. She has a daughter, Kyoko Chan Cox, from her marriage to Anthony Cox, Ono was born on February 18,1933, in Tokyo, to Isoko Ono and Eisuke Ono, a banker and former classical pianist. Isokos father was ennobled in 1915, isokos maternal grandfather Zenjiro Yasuda was an affiliate of the Yasuda clan and zaibatsu. Eisuke came from a line of samurai warrior-scholars. The kanji translation of Yokos first name Yoko means ocean child, Two weeks before Yokos birth, Eisuke was transferred to San Francisco by his employer, the Yokohama Specie Bank. The rest of the family followed soon after, with Yoko meeting Eisuke when she was two and her younger brother Keisuke was born in December 1936. Yoko was enrolled in piano lessons from the age of 4, in 1937, the family was transferred back to Japan and Ono enrolled at Tokyos Gakushuin, one of the most exclusive schools in Japan. In 1940, the moved to New York City. The next year, Eisuke was transferred from New York City to Hanoi, Ono was enrolled in Keimei Gakuen, an exclusive Christian primary school run by the Mitsui family
7.
Bruce Nauman
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Bruce Nauman is an American artist. His practice spans a range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico, Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but his fathers work as an engineer for General Electric meant that the family moved often. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and art with William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson at the University of California, in 1964 he gave up painting to dedicate himself to sculpture, performance and cinema collaborations with William Allan and Robert Nelson. He worked as an assistant to Wayne Thiebaud, upon graduation, he taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1966 to 1968, and at the University of California at Irvine in 1970. In 1968 he met the singer and performance artist Meredith Monk, Nauman moved from Northern California to Pasadena in 1969. In 1979, Nauman further moved to Pecos, New Mexico, in 1989, he established a home and studio in Galisteo, New Mexico, where he continues to work and live along with his wife, the painter Susan Rothenberg. In his studio soon after graduating, Nauman had the simple but profound realization that “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product. ”Nauman set up a studio in a grocery shop in the Mission district of San Francisco. These two locations provided the setting for a series of performed actions which he captured in time, on a fixed camera. Between 1966 and 1970 he made several videos, in which he used his body to explore the potentials of art and the role of the artist, much of his work is characterized by an interest in language, often manifesting itself in a playful, mischievous manner. He has a strong interest in setting the metaphoric and descriptive functions of language against each other. For example, the neon Run From Fear – Fun From Rear, or the photograph Bound To Fail and he seems to be fascinated by the nature of communication and languages inherent problems, as well as the role of the artist as supposed communicator and manipulator of visual symbols. Naumans use of neon as a medium was very recurrent in his works and he uses neon in irony by making illusions to the numinous connotations of light, similarly to Mario Merz, who used neon new life to assemblages of mundane objects. Neon also connotes the public atmosphere by the means of advertising and his Self Portrait as a Fountain shows the artist spouting a stream of water from his mouth. A series of inspired by one of the artists dreams was brought together under the title of Dream Passage and created in 1983,1984. In his installation Changing Light Corridor with Rooms, a corridor is shrouded in darkness. In 1988, after a hiatus of two decades focused on time-based media, he resumed his work with cast objects
8.
One & Other
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One & Other was a public art project by Antony Gormley, in which 2,400 members of the public occupied the usually vacant fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, for an hour each for 100 days. The project began at 9 am on Monday 6 July 2009, the first person to officially occupy the plinth was Rachel Wardell from Lincolnshire. A documentary art book by Gormley, entitled One and Other, was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on 14 October 2010, the Wellcome Trust has posted online at its website its series of oral-history interviews of the 2400 plinthers. The project was opened by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, minutes before the official launch Stuart Holmes, an anti-smoking protester, managed to clamber onto the plinth and displayed a banner calling for a ban on tobacco. Gormley urged him to do the thing and give up his place to the first official plinther. He did so and descended in the cherry picker used to carry participants to, members of the public could apply for an hour on the plinth via the projects website. Gormley himself applied but didnt get a place, on 14 July at 8.00 pm, poet R. N. Taber read a selection of his poems, while photographer Alex Boyd collaborated with Scottish Makar Edwin Morgan for his time on the plinth. On 12 August at 1 am, a naked plinther was asked to cover up by the police, streamed live online by SkyArts, the exhibit quickly developed a cadre of regular Twitter followers who provided a running commentary of events on the plinth. Archive of official website Review by Adrian Searle Review by Jonathan Jones in September. And in October Why I made an exhibition of myself on the plinth Resistance on the Plinth
9.
Performance art
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Performance art is a performance presented to an audience within a fine art context, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated. The performance can be live or via media, the performer can be present or absent and it can be any situation that involves four basic elements, time, space, the performers body, or presence in a medium, and a relationship between performer and audience. Performance art can happen anywhere, in any type of venue or setting, the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work. Performance art is a contested concept, any single definition of it implies the recognition of rival uses. As concepts like democracy or art, it implies productive disagreement with itself, the meaning of the term in the narrower sense is related to postmodernist traditions in Western culture. The ideal had been an ephemeral and authentic experience for performer, the widely discussed difference, how concepts of visual arts and concepts of performing arts are utilized, can determine the meanings of a performance art presentation. It therefore can include action or spoken word as a communication between the artist and audience, or even ignore expectations of an audience, rather than following a script written beforehand, some kinds of performance art nevertheless can be close to performing arts. Performance artists often challenge the audience to think in new and unconventional ways, break conventions of traditional arts, and break down conventional ideas about what art is. Some artists, e. g. the Viennese Actionists and neo-Dadaists, prefer to use the terms live art, action art, actions, as genres of performance art appear body art, fluxus-performance, happening, action poetry, and intermedia. Performance art activity is not confined to European or American art traditions, notable practitioners can be found in Asia, Performance artists and theorists point to different traditions and histories, ranging from tribal to sporting and ritual or religious events. There are also accounts of Renaissance artists such as itinerant poets putting on performances that could be said to be ancestors of performance art. Western cultural theorists often trace performance art activity back to the beginning of the 20th century, to the Russian constructivists, Futurists, Dada provided a significant progenitor with the unconventional performances of poetry, often at the Cabaret Voltaire, by the likes of Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara. Russian Futurist artists could be identified as precursors of performance, such as David Burliuk, abstract expressionism and Action painting preceded the Fluxus movement, Happenings and the emergence of Performance Art. Performance art was anticipated, if not explicitly formulated, by Japans Gutai group of the 1950s, in the late 1960s Earth artists as diverse as Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer and Carl Andre created environmental pieces that predict the performance art of the 1970s. Works of conceptual artists in the early 1980s, like Sol LeWitt, who converted mural-style drawing into an act of performance by others, were influenced by Yves Klein and the Earth artists as well. In the 1960s a variety of new works, concepts and the number of artists led to new kinds of performance art. Kaprow had coined the term Happening describing a new artform, at the beginning of the 1960s, a Happening allows the artist to experiment with body motion, recorded sounds, written and spoken texts, and even smells
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