Claire Bishop

A controversial figure working in installation and performance, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (born 1968) has consistently blurred the lines between art and activism. Defining herself as an initiator rather than an author, she often invites spectator participation and works in a collaborative mode, working with various organizations, institutions and individuals to challenge political and economic power structures and the control they hold over society. She researches and executes the ways in which art can be applied to everyday life, and how its effects can translate into political action. From offering Cubans one minute of uncensored time in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución (#YoTambienExijo, 2014) to operating a flexible community center in Corona, Queens (Immigrant Movement International, 2011), Bruguera strives to make Arte Útil (Useful Art), an art that imagines and provides tools to bring about social change.

This volume is the eleventh title in the Fundación Cisneros' Conversaciones/Conversations series, and features an in-depth conversation between the artist and the renowned art historian Claire Bishop. In this interview, Bruguera tells her own story, recounting the development of her early work in 1980s Cuba, motivated by her political activism, and her shift from intimate performances to the orchestration of the large-scale interactive situations and events that characterize her work today.

Matthew K. Gold (Editor) and Lauren F. Klein, Editors

Contending with recent developments like the shocking 2016 U.S. Presidential election, the radical transformation of the social web, and passionate debates about the future of data in higher education, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 brings together a broad array of important, thought-provoking perspectives on the field’s many sides. With a wide range of subjects including gender-based assumptions made by algorithms, the place of the digital humanities within art history, data-based methods for exhuming forgotten histories, video games, three-dimensional printing, and decolonial work, this book assembles a who’s who of the field in more than 30 impactful essays.

Among the book's many contributors is Graduate Center Professor Claire Bishop (Art History). 

Klein is graduated in 2011 with a Ph.D. in English from The Graduate Center. She is a currently an associate professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

In the face of austerity cuts to public funding, a handful of museums of contemporary art have devised compelling alternatives to the mantra of ‘bigger is better and richer’.

In Radical Museology, art historian and critic, Claire Bishop presents the collection displays of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Museo Nacional de Reina Sofía in Madrid and MSUM in Ljubljana as outlines of a new understanding of the contemporary in contemporary art.

Rather than denoting presentism, the contemporary comes to signal a dialectical method: scouring the past for the origins of our present historical moment, which in turn is the determining motivation for our interest in the past. It is an anachronic action that seeks to reboot the future through the unexpected appearance of a relevant past.

Accompanying and complimenting Claire Bishop’s text are illustrations by artist Dan Perjovschi.

A searing critique of participatory art by an iconoclastic historian.

Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson.

Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as “social practice.” Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Paweł Althamer and Paul Chan.

Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to challenge the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art. In Artificial Hells, she not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims made for these projects, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.

What has been loosely termed Installation Art, dominates the exhibition programmes of galleries worldwide. However, while it is much discussed it has rarely been clearly defined. Installation Art provides, for the first time, a clear account of the rise of this now prevalent strand of contemporary art. Author Claire Bishop provides both a history and a full critical examination of installation art, in a survey of the form that is both thorough and accessible. While revising and, in some cases, re-assessing many well-known names in post-1960 art, it will also introduce the audience to a wider spectrum of younger artists yet to receive serious critical attention.

Artists featured include Vito Acconci, Michael Asher, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Marcel Broodthaers, Judy Chicago, Olafur Eliasson, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Dan Graham, Group Material, Ann Hamilton, Thomas Hirschhorn, Carsten Holler,, Robert Irwin, Isaac Julien, Ilya Kabakov, Yayoi Kusama, Cildo Meireles, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Mike Nelson, Helio Oiticica, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Smithson, Paul Thek, Rirkrit Tiravanija James Turrell, Bill Viola and Richard Wilson.

Double Agent is the exhibition catalogue for London's Institute of Contemporary Arts exhibition which ran from February 14 to April 6, 2008, featuring international artists Pawel Althamer, Phil Collins, Dora Garcia, Joe Scanlan, Christoph Schlingensief, Barbara Visser, Donelle Woolford, and Artur Zmijewski. The works of these artists raise questions of performance and authorship, and particularly the issues that arise when the artist is no longer the central agent in his or her own work, but instead operates through a range of individuals, communities, and surrogates. Double Agent explores the ethics of performance and representation, including the power relations involved in the use of non-professional subjects. 

Art that seeks to produce situations in which relations are formed among viewers is placed in historical and theoretical context in key writings by critics and artists.

The desire to move viewers out of the role of passive observers and into the role of producers is one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century art. This tendency can be found in practices and projects ranging from El Lissitzky's exhibition designs to Allan Kaprow's happenings, from minimalist objects to installation art. More recently, this kind of participatory art has gone so far as to encourage and produce new social relationships. Guy Debord's celebrated argument that capitalism fragments the social bond has become the premise for much relational art seeking to challenge and provide alternatives to the discontents of contemporary life. This publication collects texts that place this artistic development in historical and theoretical context.

Participation begins with writings that provide a theoretical framework for relational art, with essays by Umberto Eco, Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, Peter Bürger, Jen-Luc Nancy, Edoaurd Glissant, and Félix Guattari, as well as the first translation into English of Jacques Rancière's influential "Problems and Transformations in Critical Art." The book also includes central writings by such artists as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Joseph Beuys, Augusto Boal, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. And it features recent critical and curatorial debates, with discussions by Lars Bang Larsen, Nicolas Bourriaud, Hal Foster, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.