Books by Martha Buskirk
Forthcoming book that explores multiple points of intersection between artistic authorship and in... more Forthcoming book that explores multiple points of intersection between artistic authorship and intellectual property.
In the face of unparalleled growth and a truly global audience, the popularity of contemporary ar... more In the face of unparalleled growth and a truly global audience, the popularity of contemporary art has clearly become a double-edged affair. Today, an unprecedented number of museums, galleries, biennial-style exhibitions, and art fairs display new work in all its variety, while art schools continue to inject fresh talent onto the scene at an accelerated rate. In the process, however, contemporary art has become deeply embedded not only in an expanding art industry, but also the larger cultures of fashion and entertainment.
Buskirk argues that understanding the dynamics of art itself cannot be separated from the business of presenting art to the public. As strategies of institutional critique have given way to various forms of collaboration or accommodation, both art and museum conventions have been profoundly altered by their ongoing relationship. The escalating market for contemporary art is another driving force. Even as art remains an idealized activity, it is also understood as a profession, and in increasingly obvious ways a business, particularly as practiced by star artists who preside over branded art product lines.
MIT Press, 2003
In this book, Martha Buskirk addresses the interesting fact that since the early 1960s, almost an... more In this book, Martha Buskirk addresses the interesting fact that since the early 1960s, almost anything can and has been called art. Among other practices, contemporary artists have employed mass-produced elements, impermanent materials, and appropriated imagery, have incorporated performance and video, and have created works through instructions carried out by others. Furthermore, works of art that lack traditional signs of authenticity or permanence have been embraced by institutions long devoted to the original and the permanent. Buskirk begins with questions of authorship raised by minimalists' use of industrial materials and methods, including competing claims of ownership and artistic authorship evident in conflicts over the right to fabricate artists' works. Examining recent examples of appropriation, she finds precedents in pop art and the early twentieth-century readymade and explores the intersection of contemporary artistic copying and the system of copyrights, trademarks, and brand names characteristic of other forms of commodity production. She also investigates the ways that connections between work and context have transformed art and institutional conventions, the impact of new materials on definitions of medium, the role of the document as both primary and secondary object, and the significance of conceptually oriented performance work for the intersection of photography and the human body in contemporary art. Buskirk explores how artists active in the 1980s and 1990s have recombined strategies of the art of the 1960s and 1970s. She also shows how the mechanisms through which art is presented shape not only readings of the work but the work itself. She uses her discussion of the readymade and conceptual art to explore broader issues of authorship, reproduction, context, and temporality.
MIT Press, 1998
This expanded edition of the fall 1994 special issue of October includes new essays by Sarat Maha... more This expanded edition of the fall 1994 special issue of October includes new essays by Sarat Maharaj and by Molly Nesbit and Naomi Sawelson-Gorse. It also includes the transcript of an exchange between T. J. Clark and Benjamin Buchloh which presents new responses to the problems raised by this immediately popular (and now out of print) issue of the journal. The Duchamp Effect is an investigation of the historical reception of the work of Marcel Duchamp from the 1950s to the present, including interviews by Benjamin Buchloh (with Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Robert Morris), Elizabeth Armstrong (with Ed Ruscha and Bruce Conner), and Martha Buskirk (with Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Fred Wilson) and a round-table discussion of the Duchamp effect on conceptual art.
Articles and reviews by Martha Buskirk
Burlington Magazine, 2018
With more than a thousand objects, the colossal undertaking " Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual A... more With more than a thousand objects, the colossal undertaking " Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art " fulfilled its title's promise in an exhibition that traced not only Siegelaub's early promotion and curatorial forays into one of the most prominent postwar art movements but also his later identities as publisher and textile researcher. A small forest of colorful, textile-based headdresses mounted on poles, followed by a reading table with radical classics, announced the eclectic purview, which continued with a vast array of display cases filled with fabric samples and associated rare books, more cases with exhibition catalogues and documents, facsimile pages pinned to low dividing walls, and even a few paintings by the likes of Lawrence Weiner and Robert Barry. The multifaceted overload at the Stedelijk evoked many recent projects by artists operating in the guise of archivist, researcher, or anthropologist (and there were works by Maria Eichhorn and Mario García Torres included in the mix). Curators Leontine Coelewij and Sara Martinetti, however, cut to the chase by focusing on the work of another curator as their exhibition's subject.
TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY lives are inescapably defined by the data generated through an endless accum... more TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY lives are inescapably defined by the data generated through an endless accumulation of transactions and actions, no matter how minor. Indeed, many denizens of the developed world find themselves enmeshed in a net of information gathering that they have willingly extended to every footstep and heartbeat. Access to data is a basic prerequisite for exploiting this ever-growing electronic treasure trove, but so, too, are techniques for sifting through and merging available information, including strategies for giving it visual form. This is the scenario addressed by the recent exhibition " Data Drift, " whose curators, Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits, and Lev Manovich, boldly proclaim: " If painting was the art of the classical era, and photography that of the modern era, data visualization is the medium of our own time. " Smite and Smits are cofounders of RIXC, the Center for New Media Culture in Riga, Latvia, and Manovich is a City University of New York professor and director of the Software Studies Initiative; the three are themselves representative of emerging data-driven models of scholarship and creative practice, and their group show convened a wide range of responses to our changing information landscape, from political activism to poetic abstraction. Their selections evoked the information aesthetic of earlier Conceptual art practices, while also highlighting the shifting tactics required to engage with or subvert the metrics of contemporary life.
How is it that certain examples come to stand as shorthand markers for an artist's work, or even ... more How is it that certain examples come to stand as shorthand markers for an artist's work, or even an entire movement? The first gambit in any such reassessment is likely to involve proffering an alternate slate on which to build the analysis. For event-based work there is the further challenge of sifting through the traces, documents, and residue relating to manifestations that remain tantalizingly beyond any opportunity for direct experience.
SOMERVILLE, Mass. -Ending not with a bang but a whimper, the last bit of legal wrangling in the c... more SOMERVILLE, Mass. -Ending not with a bang but a whimper, the last bit of legal wrangling in the case that pitted collector Marc Jancou against Cady Noland and Sotheby's was quietly settled on November 11. At issue was damage to Noland's 1990 "Cowboys Milking," made with a combination of image and text screen printed onto an inherently fragile aluminum surface. Although the condition of the work was described as good overall, damage to the corners of the once pristine surface prompted Noland to renounce authorship of the work in its entirety. Marc Jancou, Cady Noland, and the Case of th... es (x86) ...
October, 1994
... 1. Rosalind Krauss discusses Picasso's anxiety around Duchamp's rising reputation i... more ... 1. Rosalind Krauss discusses Picasso's anxiety around Duchamp's rising reputation in chapter 5 of The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). Duchamp's inclusion in Robert Motherwell's anthology The Dada Painters ...
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Books by Martha Buskirk
Buskirk argues that understanding the dynamics of art itself cannot be separated from the business of presenting art to the public. As strategies of institutional critique have given way to various forms of collaboration or accommodation, both art and museum conventions have been profoundly altered by their ongoing relationship. The escalating market for contemporary art is another driving force. Even as art remains an idealized activity, it is also understood as a profession, and in increasingly obvious ways a business, particularly as practiced by star artists who preside over branded art product lines.
Articles and reviews by Martha Buskirk
Buskirk argues that understanding the dynamics of art itself cannot be separated from the business of presenting art to the public. As strategies of institutional critique have given way to various forms of collaboration or accommodation, both art and museum conventions have been profoundly altered by their ongoing relationship. The escalating market for contemporary art is another driving force. Even as art remains an idealized activity, it is also understood as a profession, and in increasingly obvious ways a business, particularly as practiced by star artists who preside over branded art product lines.