Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture (Documentary Sources in Contemporary Art) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262633469 ISBN 13: 9780262633468

Publisher: Mit Pr, 2007

Synopsis

The new realities of economic globalization have created new conditions for cultural practice. At the same time, the information circuits, designed to promote the generalization of Western culture, have also become increasingly available to other, more marginalized art and cultures, enabling the local (or traditional) to circulate on the global stage. News (and culture) travels fast with the help of technology, displacing Western centers of legitimation and meaning. Over Here collects writings by curators, critics, and artists living and working outside mainstream cultural circuits in Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. Witnessing the variety and multiplicity of cultural viewpoints and voices, this book calls for a new critical approach to address new cultural complexities.

The phrase "over here" implies both distance and proximity, indeterminacy and stability. The writers—all of whom are well respected regionally and many of whom are becoming known internationally—address the cultural entanglements arising from such simultaneous displacement and placement: the effects of diaspora, transnational communities, translation (and the untranslatable). Essay titles range from "Just What Is It That Makes the Term Global-Local So Widely Cited, yet So Annoying?" and "When Was Modernism in Indian Art?" to "Forms of Resistance, Corridors of Power: Public Art on the Mexico-U.S. Border" and "Desperately Diasporic" to "Modernity as a Mad Dog: On Art and Trauma" and "Transit Visa to Postwar Lebanon" to "The Limits of Cultural Translation" and "Der Glauber Have Sept Cabecas." Also included is a 70-piece artist's project by Francis Alys, who addresses the book's themes in his own way with a work based on photographs of "walk" signs from around the world.

About this title

About the Author

Gerardo Mosquera is Adjunct Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the editor of Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America (MIT Press/inIVA, 1996).

From Publishers Weekly

New Museum of Contemporary Art curator Mosquera and Royal College of Art lecturer Fisher bring together more than 20 polemical reflections on art’s place within the global exchange of ideas, goods and works in this follow up to the seminal Out There (MIT, 1990). Among the pieces included here are Apinan Poshyananda’s "Desperately Diasporic," which critiques the West’s rush to market "global" art, and Carolina Ponce de Léon’s "Encounters and Disencounters," which draws out the meanings of the term "displacement" by detailing the author’s childhood as "an imaginary Colombian," her return to her family’s country after a childhood in New York and Paris, and her most recent stint in the Big Apple. Some of the contributions are abstrusely theoretical. Others are playfully serious, such as Jalal Toufic’s "Transit Visa to Postwar Lebanon!" In addressing "Transcultural Circuits" and "Unbounded Totalities," the editors go far in penetrating "The Museological Unconscious" that underlies everything from art making, collecting and displaying to the ways people can and can’t reach "Over Here."
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Edition details

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262633469
• ISBN 13: 9780262633468
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 431
• Editor: Mosquera Gerardo, Fisher Jean