Search results for ""Author Guy Brett""

Celebrated art critic and curator Guy Brett made a unique contribution to art criticism and exhibition making through his championing of experimental artists from across the world, writing seminal monographic essays on artists such as Susan Hiller, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, David Medalla, Rose English, Mona Hatoum, Takis and others. The 14 essays in this book bring together a unique gathering of artists, tracing their diversity and singularity. Many of these artists make works which arise out of their responses to the situation or the environment in which they find themselves, a process that draws on the countless interactions people have and the many ways that they connect. Brett’s writing has a unique tone – lucid and widely researched, free of a narrow academicism. He has published widely in the art press, addressing topics such as the relationship between art and life, ideas about the participation of the spectator, and the importance of a kind of visual wit to both artists and writers.

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Mona Hatoum creates events, videos, sculptures and installations that relate to the body, to language and to the condition of exile. Her most famous work Corps Etranger, first shown at the Tate Gallery when she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995, takes the viewer on a journey through the inner passages of the artist's body.Her audience is thrown into a dimension in which anything is possible, as in The Light at the End, which lures viewers down a long tunnel towards a light that will literally burn them. While her video work is often visceral and emotive, her sculptures and environments are ultra cool and minimal in their aesthetic. They often mimic domestic or institutional furniture, yet their designs and materials have a threatening edge. Exquisitely beautiful, Hatoum's works are at the same time powerful evocations of statelessness, anxiety, denial and otherness.Since Hatoum was exiled to London, where she has lived and worked since the 1970s, she has exhibited her work around the world, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Venice Biennale. This book surveys all her work, ranging from early performances, through to her videos, objects and full-scale environments.The distinguished art critic Guy Brett, author of Through Our Own Eyes: Popular Art and Modern History (1986), explores key themes around a sense of place, the body and communication that emerge from Hatoum's range of work. The artist describes a chronology of practice in conversation with Michael Archer, writer, curator and co-founder of London's Audio Arts sound archive. Director of the Kanaal Art Foundation Catherine de Zegher makes a complex and provocative analysis of Recollection, a work she commissioned for a sixteenth-century beguinage. Hatoum has chosen a text by the influential Palestinian author Edward Said as well as a statement from the noted Italian post-war sculptor and performance artist Piero Manzoni. The book also includes Hatoum's own notes, statements and interviews.

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The aim of this book is to reinstate the Benedictine monk and artist Dom Sylvester Houédard as an important figure within the countercultural and transnational art movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, especially as regards kinetic and concrete poetry. Widely recognised by his contemporaries as one of the leading theorists and outstanding practitioners of concrete poetry, Guernsey-born Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924–1992) is an unsung intellect of the twentieth century. Houédard is deeply relevant to our digital age. We may no longer use an Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter, as he did, but we all increasingly type rather than hand-write our lives. He would have been delighted by the permutational possibilities offered by the 280 characters in a tweet, or the visual shorthand of emojis and hashtags. For this monk, everything connected and was interconnected. The opportunity for the individual to compose ‘machinepoems’ or text works that ‘move thru the air’ in a ‘global kinkon’ is now greater than ever.

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A revised and expanded edition of one the most popular titles in the Contemporary Artists Series Born in Lebanon, Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum was exiled to London, where she has lived and worked since the mid-1970s. Through performance, video, sculpture, and installation, she creates architectonic spaces that relate to the body, language, and the condition of exile as well as transforming everyday, domestic objects into things foreign, threatening, and dangerous. Often exquisitely beautiful, Hatoum’s works combine states of emotion and longing with the formal simplicity of Minimalism, creating powerful evocations of displacement, denial, and otherness.

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