Martha Buskirk (Twitter: @martha_buskirk) is Professor of art history and criticism at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts. Her current research is focused on art and law, including artists’ rights advocacy, intellectual property, and potential conflicts between proprietary control and public interest. She is author of Creative Enterprise: Contemporary Art between Museum and Marketplace (Continuum, 2012) and The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (MIT Press, 2003), and she is co-editor of The Duchamp Effect (with Mignon Nixon, MIT Press, 1996) and The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents (with Clara Weyergraf-Serra, MIT Press, 1990).
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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 ...
... of brand recognition rather than as generic substances, corporations began to depend more and... more ... of brand recognition rather than as generic substances, corporations began to depend more and more on laws that would enable them to protect the public perception or image that they had developed around their products from appropriation ... Mass Production and Originality ...
First there was the sheer multitude of it all. Tables full of identical objects were surrounded b... more First there was the sheer multitude of it all. Tables full of identical objects were surrounded by walls hung with varied responses to what was clearly the same environment. Depending on which of the multiple exhibition sites they experienced, viewers encountered miniature mountains, assorted concretions, multiple identical copies of one of the mineral forms known as a sand spike, or a single enlarged version of that form. And based on how much background information they brought to the experience, they may have understood the display to be the work of an artist with a longstanding interest in evocative found objects, both natural and cultural. With its many and varied components, Signs of the Imperial Valley: Sand Spikes from Mount Signal (2000-01) is an inherently hybrid project, juxtaposing objects produced by Allan McCollum with others ranging from natural specimens to landscape painting in an assembly by an artist also functioning as curator and collector.
" Adrian Piper has consistently produced groundbreaking work that has profoundly shaped the ... more " Adrian Piper has consistently produced groundbreaking work that has profoundly shaped the form and content of conceptual art since the 1960s. Strongly inflected by her longstanding involvement with philosophy and yoga, her pioneering investigations into the political, social, psychological, and spiritual potential of Conceptual art have had an incalculable influence on artists working today. Published in conjunction with the most comprehensive exhibition of her work to date, this catalogue presents more than 290 artworks that encompass the full range of Piper’s mediums: works on paper, video, multimedia installation, performance, painting, sound, and photo-texts. Essays by curators and scholars examine her extensive research into altered states of consciousness; the introduction of the Mythic Being—her subversive masculine alter-ego; her media and installation works from after 1980, which reveal and challenge stereotypes of race and gender; and the global conditions that illuminate the significance of her art. " -- Publisher's website
"A beam on its end is not the same thing as the same beam on its side," wrote Robert Mo... more "A beam on its end is not the same thing as the same beam on its side," wrote Robert Morris in his 1966 Notes on Sculpture, Part II, succinctly articulating the degree to which, in the context of minimalism, the identity of a work does not reside in a self-contained physical form, and is instead deflected outward to the relationship established between object and surrounding space. It also happens that Morris was not necessarily concerned about whether the simple geometric shapes he created during the mid-1960s as part of his exploration of the viewer's spatial and temporal experience maintained a continuous physical existence. To the extent that the work could be disassembled and built again as needed (the same configuration, but different plywood and gray paint), this alternate way in which the same work might not be the same links his profoundly physical expression with a form of dematerialization more often associated with conceptual art.
Introduction, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh what's neo about the neo-avant-garde?, Hal Foster typotra... more Introduction, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh what's neo about the neo-avant-garde?, Hal Foster typotranslating the green box, Sarat Maharaj three conversations in 1985 - Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh interviews with Ed Ruscha and Bruce Conner, Elizabeth Armstrong echoes of the readymade - critique of pure modernism, Thierry de Duve concept of nothing - new notes by Marcel Duchamp and Walter Arensberg, Molly Nesbit and Naomi Sawelson-Gorse interviews with Sherrie Levine, Louis Lawler and Fred Wilson, Martha Buskirk thoroughly modern Marcel, Martha Buskirk conceptual art and the reception of Duchamp, "October" Round Table all the things I said about Duchamp - a response to Benjamin Buchloh, T.J. Clark response to T.J. Clark, Benjamin Buchloh.
Mexico City-based artist Francis Alys (b. 1959) has assembled a group of paintings depicting Sain... more Mexico City-based artist Francis Alys (b. 1959) has assembled a group of paintings depicting Saint Fabiola, a 4th-century saint who gave up all earthly possessions and devoted herself to the practice of Christian asceticism. All of the pictures in the collection are based on an original work, now lost, by the nineteenth-century French artist Jean-Jacques Henner. This collection of Fabiola portraits, numbering in the hundreds and painted by amateurs and professionals alike, is the focus of this intriguing book. Not only does it explore the artist's exploration of collecting practices, but the publication also offers an unusual window into aesthetic, sociological, and anthropological values of the past century.In addition to cataloguing each of the Fabiola works, the book includes Saint Jerome's eulogy for Fabiola (the primary source for Fabiola's biography), followed by an interpretive text on evolving hagiographies and saint's vitae, an analysis of the role of iconog...
Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc," a 120-foot curved Cor-Ten steel structure in New York... more Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc," a 120-foot curved Cor-Ten steel structure in New York City's Federal Plaza, was destroyed in the spring of 1989 by the General Services Administration, the federal agency that had commissioned and installed what was Serra's most ambitious and probably most important public sculpture. These documents from the public hearing and the court proceedings are an essential primary source for scholars of art and law, providing a complete and moving record of censorship in the arts.The impassioned speeches by important artists, political figures, and by federal employees for and against the sculpture's removal also make fascinating reading. Among those testifying at the hearing were Marion Javits, reading a letter from her husband, the dying Senator Jacob Javits; Congressman Theodore Weiss; artists Claes Oldenburg and Frank Stella; filmmaker Emile de Antonio; and Museum of Modem Art director William Rubin. Richard Serra's introduction presents his own acerbic view of the government's case.
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.
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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.