The Play of the Unmentionable: An Installation by Joseph Kosuth at the Brooklyn Museum

The Play of the Unmentionable: An Installation by Joseph Kosuth at the Brooklyn Museum
ISBN-10
1565840046
ISBN-13
9781565840041
Category
Art / History / General
Pages
148
Language
English
Published
1992
Publisher
New Press
Authors
David Freedberg, Joseph Kosuth

Description

At the height of the controversy over government funding for "obscene" works of art, internationally renowned conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth created "The Brooklyn Museum Collection: The Play of the Unmentionable," an exhibit about censorship at The Brooklyn Museum. His installation, one of the best-attended, most widely reviewed (and most controversial) of the year, juxtaposed works of art from throughout history that had been deemed politically, religiously, or sexually objectionable, with statements about the role of art in society by writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, Adolf Hitler, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Using artworks drawn from the permanent collection of The Brooklyn Museum, "The Play of the Unmentionable" showed graphically how public and institutional ideas of obscenity and artistic value have changed throughout history - and continue to change today. This handsome book documents the exhibit with twenty-one pages of color and more than a hundred duotone photographs, and is designed to recapture the installation's juxtapositions of artworks and texts. In a major essay, art historian David Freedburg offers a detailed analysis of the installation, setting it in both the context of America's "culture wars" of the late 1980s, and of Kosuth's career. The Brooklyn Museum's director, Robert Buck, and its creator of contemporary art, Charlotta Kotik, also add critical perspectives; and Kosuth himself articulately describes his objectives in an interview. The result is a book that both represents the work of a major contemporary artist and boldly steps into the middle of the most controversial arguments about art and culture in America today. -- from dust jacket.

Other editions

Similar books

  • Modern Art: A Critical Introduction
    By Pam Meecham, Julie Sheldon

    ... Cabaret Voltaire , an extension of Umberto Boccioni's legendary Italian futurist evenings , was founded and directed ... Cabaret became the focus of Zurich Dada's anti - war , anti - nationalist writers and artists , like Tristan Tzara ...

  • Unmentionables: A Novel
    By David Greene

    Unmentionables is the epic story of two couples in the Civil War south.

  • Iconoclasm
    By David Freedberg

    This volume collects the most significant of Freedberg’s texts on iconoclasm and censorship, bringing five key works back into print alongside new assessments of contemporary iconoclasm in places ranging from the Near and Middle East to ...

  • The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies
    By Krešimir Purgar

    5 Jeffrey Strayer, Haecceity 12.0.0, 2002; photo courtesy of the author. Each instance of the repeated circular text reads: that ... Haecceities: Essentialism, Identity, and Abstraction. Leiden: Brill. The Postmodern Image Luca Malavasi ...

  • The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere
    By Richard Burt

    ... The Play of the Unmentionable : An Installation by Joseph Kosuth at the Brooklyn Museum ( New York : New Press in association with the Brooklyn Muse- um , 1992 ) . See also Grace Glueck , “ At Brooklyn Museum , Artist Surveys the ...

  • Unmentionables: Poems
    By Beth Ann Fennelly

    With elegant word play and her usual subversive wit, Beth Ann Fennelly questions our everyday human foibles.

  • On the Subject of Unmentionable Things
    By Julia Walton

    In this Amazon Best Book of the Month--with a very timely theme around girls and their bodies--a teen rewrites sex education, one viral post at a time.

  • Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners
    By Therese Oneill

    A lady doesn't question.) UNMENTIONABLE is your hilarious, illustrated, scandalously honest (yet never crass) guide to the secrets of Victorian womanhood, giving you detailed advice on: ~ What to wear ~ Where to relieve yourself ~ How to ...

  • Abstraction Matters: Contemporary Sculptors in Their Own Words
    By Cristina Baldacci, Michele Bertolini, Stefano Esengrini

    ISculpture in the Expanded Field." October, 8: 30-44. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. ... ISculpture in Space: Flotation and Levitation in Postwar Art." Leonardo, 5: 498-502. Porterfield, Todd. 1998. ... A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

  • The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
    By Rose George

    Examines the dangers, rising costs, and environmental concerns related to human waste, citing a high percentage of people in both developed and underprivileged nations who do not have access to properly maintained sewage systems.