Pamela M. Lee Knihy

In this first critical account of Matta-Clark's work, Pamela M. Lee considers it in the context of the art of the 1970s--particularly site-specific, conceptual, and minimalist practices--and its confrontation with issues of community, property, the alienation of urban space, the "right to the city," and the ideologies of progress that have defined modern building programs. Although highly regarded during his short life--and honored by artists and architects today--the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78) has been largely ignored within the history of art. Matta-Clark is best remembered for site-specific projects known as "building cuts." Sculptural transformations of architecture produced through direct cuts into buildings scheduled for demolition, these works now exist only as sculptural fragments, photographs, and film and video documentations. Matta-Clark is also remembered as a catalytic force in the creation of SoHo in the early 1970s. Through loft activities, site projects at the exhibition space 112 Greene Street, and his work at the restaurant Food, he participated in the production of a new social and artistic space. -- publisher's website

It may be time to forget the art world - or at least to recognize that a certain historical notion of the art world is in eclipse. Today, the art world spins on its axis so quickly that its maps can no longer be read; its borders blur. In Forgetting the Art World, Pamela Lee connects the current state of this world to globalization and its attendant controversies. Contemporary art has responded to globalization with images of movement and migration, borders and multitudes, but Lee looks beyond iconography to view globalization as a world process. Rather than think about the "global art world" as a socioeconomic phenomenon, or in terms of the imagery it stages and sponsors, Lee considers "the work of art's world" as a medium through which globalization takes place. She argues that the work of art is itself both object and agent of globalization. Lee explores the ways that art actualizes, iterates, or enables the processes of globalization, offering close readings of works by artists who have come to prominence in the last two decades. She examines the "just in time" managerial ethos of Takahashi Murakami; the production of ethereal spaces in Andreas Gursky's images of contemporary markets and manufacture; the logic of immanent cause dramatized in Thomas Hirschhorn's mixed-media displays; and the "pseudo-collectivism" in the contemporary practice of the Atlas Group, the Raqs Media Collective, and others. To speak of "the work of art's world," Lee says, is to point to both the work of art's mattering and its materialization, to understand the activity performed by the object as utterly continuous with the world it at once inhabits and creates

How Silicon Valley, the dark net, and digital culture have affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth.

How the approaches and methods of think tanks-including systems theory, operational research, and cybernetics-paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism.

Lee addresses illegibility in notetaking, with reference to the archive of art historian Meyer Shapiro.