Jörg Heiser Libri

Ein gängiger Vorwurf besonders gegen konzeptuelle Kunst lautet, sie sei zu didaktisch. 'Funky Lessons' versammelt Arbeiten, die das Problem der Didaktik direkt angehen: Sie brechen Autorität und krümmen erhobene Zeigefinger, verzichten aber dennoch nicht auf Wissen und Kritik. Humor ist die Waffe der Entwaffnung in Performance, Video, Installation, Text-Arbeiten und Skulptur. Es eröffnen sich Wege aus einer Sackgasse der Kunst: jenseits der falschen Wahl zwischen harmloser Hermetik und belehrender Bevormundung. 13 KünstlerInnen, 13 Interviews, plus zwei Gespräche zum Didaktischen in Kunstlehre und Popmusik.

Das Buch zeigt ausgewählte Werke von 23 internationalen Künstlerinnen und Künstlern verschiedener Generationen, die belegen, dass die Reflexion des Romantischen nicht nur ein vernachlässigbarer Seitenstrang, sondern ein zentraler Aspekt des Konzeptuellen ist. Die gezeigten Arbeiten – aus den frühen Sechzigern bis hin zu exklusiven Neuproduktionen – bringen auf teils emphatische, teils kritisch-humorvolle Weise romantische Motive (Sehnsucht, Melancholie) und Methoden (das Fragmentarische, Ephemere und Prozesshafte) ins Spiel. Sie durchkreuzen den üblichen Gegensatz von romantischer Innerlichkeit und konzeptueller Rationalität. Beteiligte Künstlerinnen und Künstler: Bas Jan Ader, Robert Barry, Ross Birrell, Lygia Clark, Didier Courbot, Tacita Dean, Cerith Wyn Evans, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Tomislav Gotovac, Rodney Graham, Henrik Håkansson, Mathilde ter Heijne, Susan Hiller, Douglas Huebler, Kollektive Aktionen, Louise Lawler, Yoko Ono, Kirsten Pieroth, Allen Ruppersberg, Frances Stark, Jan Timme, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner

Contemporary art is there are more artists, more collectors,more venues, more fairs, more museums and definitely more hype thenever before. What s missing are criteria that define quality. That's whatJörg Heiser explores in this wonderful critical book, in which he uses asharp summary of contemporary art since Marcel Duchamp to make hispoints. When it's good, Heiser claims, art hits where it hurts, strikingat the heart of an ossified status quo . . . Instead of just aiming to shockand outrage, it shows authority losing its grip. Instead of inflating itself,it deflates the pompous in the name of art. Praised by critics as-astonishingly enlightening.

Exploring the relationship between art and pop music over the last fifty years. Why did Andy Warhol decide to enter the music business by producing the Velvet Underground, and what did the band expect to gain in return? What made Yoko Ono use the skills she developed in the artistic avant-garde in pop music, and what drew John Lennon, in turn, to visual art? Why, in 1982, did Joseph Beuys record the pop single “Sonne statt Reagan,” and why, around the same time did, West German artists such as Michaela Melián move into pop music? In Double Lives in Art and Pop Music, Jörg Heiser argues that context shifting between art and pop music is an attempt to find solutions for contradictions faced in one field of cultural production. Heiser looks closely at the careers of artists and pop musicians who work in both fields professionally. The seeming acceptance and effortlessness today of current border crossings can be deceptive, since they might be serving vested economic or ideological interests. Exploring a pop and art history of more than fifty years, Heiser shows that those leading double lives in art and pop music may often be best able to detect these vested interests while he points toward radical alternatives.

This reader, based on a symposium at the Department of Sculpture, Transmedial Space, University of Art and Design, Linz, poses profound questions about contemporary sculpture

On the occasion of the exhibition 'Waitin' Around to Die', this publication presents a detailed exploration of the performance, video, and photographic works of Christoph Dettmeier (b. in Cologne, 1966). Dettmeier's photographs frequently depict unpopulated landscapes, including indutrial areas in Detroit, Berlin, and the Ruhr region of Germany. His videos and performances paired with slide projections display a closeness to the cinematic genre of the American Western; as a result, the landscapes these works depict are imbued with an additional emotional charge by filmic images in the mind's eye of the the beholder.-- Publisher

In his sculptures, installations and objects, Martin Gostner is critically engaged with history and memory. This is partly achieved through an ironic dissociation of familiar materials, like soft cotton wool, that reveals the historically imprecise subjectivity of so-called official history. Gostner's poetic works involving language are included as well.