Description
Book SynopsisThe contributors to
Nervous Systems reassess contemporary artists' and critics' engagement with social, political, biological, and other systems as a set of complex and relational parts: an approach commonly known as systems thinking.
Trade Review“A vital and much-needed contribution to the literature on art and systems discourse. If the history of art has largely treated systems theory in terms of its technocratic implications in the 1960s,
Nervous Systems expands the field to postwar and contemporary art, addressing race, gender, ecology, and global networks as among its most urgent questions.” -- Pamela M. Lee, author of * Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present *
“
Nervous Systems is one of the most impressive and conceptually nuanced collections of art historical essays that I have ever had the pleasure of reading. A model of what contemporary arts scholarship can look like, this volume is eminently readable and, most of all, teachable.” -- Jonathan Eburne, author of * Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas *
Table of ContentsForeword / Judith Rodenbeck vii
Acknowledgments ix
After the Breakdown: Sixty Years of Systems Art / Johanna Gosse and Timothy Stott 1
Section I: Systems Aesthetics to Systems Politics
1. Jack Burnham Redux: Reappraising System Aesthetics / Luke Skrebowski 31
2. The Artist as "Weatherman": Hans Haacke's Critical Meteorology / John Tyson 55
3. Desalineación: Open Systems as Social Transformation in Tucumán Arde / Christine Filippone 78
Section II: Nervous Interfaces
4. The Irresolutions of Charles Gaines / Kris Cohen 103
5. Light and Space as Institutional Critique / Dawna Schuld 125
6. One among Many: Experiencing Complexity in Participatory Art Systems / Cristina Albu 148
Section III: The Contemporary Art World Described as a System
7. Abstraction, Dispersion, Deflation, and Noise: Liam Gillick's Disappointing Systems / Francis Halsall 173
8. Aesthetic Action as Planetary Praxis: Mel Chin's The Arctic Is . . . / Amanda Boetzkes 192
9. Mapping,
SEA STATE, and State Violence on the Shores of Singapore / Brianne Cohen 213
10. Toward Infrastructure Art: Containerization, Black Box Logistics, and New Distribution Complexes / Jaimey Hamilton Faris 235
Selected Bibliography 261
Contributors 277
Index 281
