"This book explores the return of handwork and process-driven practices in installation art by women during the 1990s. Guiding the reader through three key episodes, focussed on the work of Jessica Stockholder, Liza Lou, and Sarah Sze, each case study explores how their work has advanced the legacies of feminist art and upended our relationship with everyday objects. Positioning these artists alongside over 20 other contemporary artists, such as David Hammons, Karen Kilimnik, Rikrit Tiravanija, Do Ho Suh, and El Anatsui, the book draws on previously unpublished interviews and situates their work in relation to contemporary consumerisms and institutionalized frameworks of value. Written in accessible prose, the book explores how work of contemporary womensculptors has challenged our relationship with everyday routines and environments"--
Explores the function of everyday materials and processes in the work of contemporary installation artists during the 1990s using three major US artists as primary case studies, situated in relation to contemporary art making, aesthetics and modernist value systems.
What can art offer as it extends beyond aesthetic categories and their boundaries?
Examining the work of three major American contemporary artists, Jessica Stockholder, Liza Lou, and Sarah Sze, this book explores their installation-specific practice in rich detail, connecting it to wider issues surrounding feminist art, everyday objects, DIY spaces and practice in the 1990s and broader contemporary period.
Feminist art practice has long invested in the shape, routines, and materials of everyday life but the 1990s saw a significant return of handwork and process-driven practice within installation art. This book highlights the capacity for artwork to promote alternate categories of aesthetic experience through investigations of inventive and alternative materials and processes. By looking across these artists' contrasting practices and approaches to intermediality, the book shows how their work makes connections between the mundane and surprising, the banal and transformed, and the real and imaginary.
Richly illustrated and drawing on interviews with Stockholder, Lou and Sze, each chapter presents a case study for how these artists have questioned the aesthetics of the everyday through their provocative use of everyday objects, craft materials and making techniques. Each artwork is situated within broader issues surrounding materiality and contemporary art, and each artist examined in relation to their contemporaries, including Abraham Cruzvillegas, Haegue Yang, Rachel Harrison, Thomas Hirschhorn, Cady Noland, Gabriel Orozco, Rikrit Tiravanija and Do Ho Suh. What emerges is a new understanding of aesthetic and material value, and the legacy of experimental forms of artistic production.
