Studio International Research Articles

Our Cherished Moments of Involuntary Realism: Charles Harrison, Modernism, and Art Writing

In May 1969, Charles Harrison reviewed Morris Louis’ exhibition at the Waddington Galleries in London. Months later, he helped to install the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Harrison also wrote the catalogue text, published in Studio International. Those two texts marked a significant point in Harrison’s career. They were indicative of his disillusionment with modernist criticism, and of his burgeoning interest in the work of post-minimal and conceptual art. In this respect, the two essays mark a transition from modernism to post-modernism in the space between a formalist analysis of the art object and a more dispersed field of artistic practice, where a changed relationship between art practice, criticism, and curating was taking place. However, in the 2000s, Harrison came to reflect upon this cardinal moment. Harrison referred to his recollected experiences of the late 1960s as a ‘cherished moment of involuntary realism’, opening up issues around art writing which remain pertinent to the practice of art history.

The Senses Pointing Toward a New Transformation

Abstract Hélio Oiticica's “The Senses Pointing Towards a New Transformation” was written between June 18 and June 25, 1969, in London and submitted to the British art magazine Studio International, but never appeared in print. The essay negotiates art after objecthood and contextualises Oiticica's project to effect a definitive radicalization of anti-art, one that the artist held to be necessary in light of the impasse reached by the longstanding conflict between formalist art and its various neo-avant-garde negations (both within the Brazilian and the international neo-avant-gardes). For Oiticica, after both Neoconcretism and Minimalism, it was now the process of art making itself that had to be rethought. Oiticica did so by developing what he called “crebehavior,” a practice that revealed the routinized character of everyday life and proposed an immanent transformation of the same via a change in everyday behavioral patterns. Such a transformation opened up the possibility of bringing about “creleisure,” a condition that Oiticica understood to involve both the realization and the dissolution of art.

Introduction to Hélio Oiticica's “The Senses Pointing Toward a New Transformation” (1969)

Abstract Hélio Oiticica's “The Senses Pointing Towards a New Transformation” was written between June 18 and June 25, 1969, in London and submitted to the British art magazine Studio International, but never appeared in print. The essay negotiates art after objecthood and contextualises Oiticica's project to effect a definitive radicalization of anti-art, one that the artist held to be necessary in light of the impasse reached by the longstanding conflict between formalist art and its various neo-avant-garde negations (both within the Brazilian and the international neo-avant-gardes). For Oiticica, after both Neoconcretism and Minimalism, it was now the process of art making itself that had to be rethought. Oiticica did so by developing what he called “crebehavior,” a practice that revealed the routinized character of everyday life and proposed an immanent transformation of the same via a change in everyday behavioral patterns. Such a transformation opened up the possibility of bringing about “creleisure,” a condition that Oiticica understood to involve both the realization and the dissolution of art.

The Original “Cybernetic Serendipity” Special Issue of Studio International to Be Reprinted

Studio International (Studio International 2018), the now on-line successor to print art magazine The Studio, is planning a late April 2018 50th anniversary reprinting of its Special Issue dedicated to the historic 1968 “Cybernetic Serendipity” techno-art exhibition (Benavides 2018a)[...]

Technological art and Studio International’s eclectic vanguardism

ABSTRACTThis article takes the editorship by Peter Townsend of Studio International, to which the author contributed regularly between 1969 and 1972, as a starting-point to recall decisive personal encounters with Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings, Wen-Ying Tsai’s sculptures, Jasia Reichardt’s exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity and the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science. It goes on to re-endorse the earlier argument that a long historical time-scale was required for the aesthetic implications of photography to become clear, and that, like photography, the computer and holography are technological media whose immediate interactions with aesthetics and the culture at large will take many decades to pan out. Earlier claims about the relationship between art and ecology are then reviewed. Finally the article suggests that though world politics have changed considerably since the 1960s and 1970s, artists have undiminished opportunities to grapple with the challenges of new technologies directly, rather than retreating into a closed system.

The British Avant Garde:A Joint Venture Between the New York Cultural Center andStudio InternationalMagazine

This essay considers the relevance of The British Avant Garde exhibition at the New York Cultural Center in 1971 to the reputation and discussion of British artists in the US, and its subsequent impact in Britain. It situates the exhibition with reference to Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects at the NYCC and Information at the Museum of Modern Art, both held in 1970, and within the background milieu of a lively transatlantic and multi-directional network of artists such as Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin, Ian Burn, Barry Flanagan, Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, Richard Long, Mel Ramsden, Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner, who were developing alternative ways to make and to distribute work by using text, photocopies, and self-publication as forms of production as well as becoming the site of exhibition. Devised by Charles Harrison, assistant editor of Studio International magazine, the exhibition was a collaboration between the magazine and the NYCC, directed by Donald Karshan. Despite the mixed press reviews in New York, the exhibition paved the way for establishing institutional support for the artists in the UK.

Reviews

Abstract ‘Iteration: Again’, Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania, Hobart, Australia, 18 September–15 October 2011 Smadar Dreyfus’ School, Folkestone Triennial 2011, Folkestone, UK, 25 June–25 September 2011 Chance, flow and measurement: Reviewing the Conference ‘TIMING – on the Temporal Dimension of Exhibiting’, Cultures of the Curatorial and Studio International, Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig, 19–21 JANUARY 2012 The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), Paul O’Neill (2012) Cambridge, MA and London, England: The MIT Press, 192 pp. ISBN: 9780262017725, h/bk, £19.95 (black and white illustrations)

The Bed and Breakfast Notebooks

Alexandra Handal is a London based Palestinian visual artist, filmmaker and essayist. She works at the intersection of different disciplines, breaking the boundaries between them in search of new creative expressions and narrative possibilities to explore the human condition in lingering times of war and other man-made disasters. Through her creative practice she attempts to make palpable what is disappearing or has been destroyed, engaging with modern day ruins from conflict zones to areas of urban decay. Handal uses performance-based strategies to experiment with modes of storytelling that are multilayered and mixed-genre. She combines experience, research and imagination to redress absence - blurring the line between written and oral history, fact and fiction, subjectivity and objectivity, past and present. Handal's work includes an eclectic range of media such as digital storytelling, creative interventions, photography, drawing, experimental texts and films that expand the documentary form and propose a new kind of fiction. Handal holds a PhD (practice/theory) from the University of the Arts London, UK (2011), for which she was the recipient of the UAL Research Studentship Award, UK (2004) and the Chelsea College of Art and Design Graduate Fund (2007 & 2009). Her short film From the Bed & Breakfast Notebooks (2009) was selected for New Contemporaries 2009 - an internationally juried exhibition, which showcases emerging artists in the United Kingdom. Studio International magazine (2009) described her short as a 'quietly powerful political engagement' and she was listed among the 'few names to watch' in the Guardian (2009). Recent exhibitions and festivals include: 'Video Lounge', India Art Summit, New Delhi, India (2011), ‘Future Movements – Jerusalem’, Liverpool Biennial, Contemporary Urban Centre, Liverpool, UK (2010), ‘Whose Map is it?' INIVA, London, UK (2010), 'Documentary Program', Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid (2009 & 2010), 'New Contemporaries 2009' A Foundation, London, UK (2009), and Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK (2009) and 'The Other Shadow of the City', Al-Hoash Gallery, East Jerusalem (2009).

21st-Century Brecht

Research Article| May 01 2011 21st-Century Brecht Philip Glahn Philip Glahn PHILIP GLAHN is an assistant professor of critical studies and aesthetics at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2011) 38 (6): 12–15. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2011.38.6.12 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Philip Glahn; 21st-Century Brecht. Afterimage 1 May 2011; 38 (6): 12–15. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2011.38.6.12 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2011 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Framing the outdoors: landscape and land art in Britain, 1973–1977

With the formation of the first sculpture parks in Britain in the 1970s, the gallery roof was lifted off — in both the literal and figurative sense — so that works of art could be displayed and exp...

There's a sculpture on my shoulder: Bruce McLean and the anxiety of influence

peopl e Who M A k e A rT i n gl A s s hou s e s is the title of a photographic work made by Bruce McLean in 1969, in which the young artist stands in the proverbial glasshouse (fig. 1). The panes are broken not by stones, but by the protruding remnants of one of McLean’s early abstract sculptures made in 1964 while he was a student at St. Martin’s School of Art in London. There McLean was taught by a number of “New Generation” sculptors including Anthony Caro, William Tucker, and Phillip King. This photograph spells out the terms in which McLean’s generation perceived their relationship to their modernist predecessors. The photograph was published in Studio International alongside a review McLean wrote in 1970 of the exhibition British Sculpture Out of the Sixties, in which he lambasted the contemporary scene for remaining subservient to a modernist vocabulary that had become tired and out of date.1 In his polemical attack on the current state of sculpture McLean declared that the legacy offered by the New Generation sculptors would no longer do. What had seemed a “major breakthrough” in 1960, he wrote, now seemed anything but. “Why don’t they take a few chances,” McLean suggested, “smash up the little scenes they’ve carefully built up like a military operation for themselves over the last five years and have a go at setting towards making or doing something worthwhile?”2 Retreading old ground, for McLean, was no longer an option. Anthony Caro, he grudgingly admitted, was the only person making anything that was remotely interesting—the rest, he claimed, should be “slung out.”3 In a similarly provocative performance work There’s a Sculpture on My Shoulder, which took place in 1971 at Situations in London, a series of well-known large-scale New Generation works were projected onto the wall behind McLean, as he knelt on his hands and knees. With each change of image, McLean crumpled and staggered, as if under the weight of the sculpture, wittily illustrating the extent to which his predecessors’ works were an oppressive weight to bear. The antimonumental impulse of the current generaThere’s a Sculpture on My Shoulder: Bruce McLean and the Anxiety of Influence

Convergence: The Furnace and MoMA

My first memory of Franklin Furnace is of a set of teeth. These glistening fangs belonged not to Martha Wilson but to her dog, possibly a German shepherd, who greeted me somewhat ahead of Martha when I dropped by Franklin Street in April 1977. I was in New York for a week-long interview for the position of Director of the Library at The Museum of Modern Art. I must have arrived at the Furnace at a quiet time, or before the scheduled opening hours, hence the fierce greeting. But Martha restrained the beast and invited me in. Back in London, England, I had already been involved with artist books increasingly since 1972-buying them for the Chelsea School of Art Library, writing about them for Studio International and other magazines, and being involved in exhibitions for the British Council and the Arts Council of Great Britain. Thus my antennae were sensitive to any mention of artist books in the media. In 1976 or 1977 I read somewhere about the establishment of Franklin Furnace in New York and wrote for information. By the time I got to New York, Franklin Furnace and Printed Matter, the other new artist books organization, were on my list of places to visit. I eventually settled in Manhattan in November of 1977, and within a few weeks had set up the beginnings of the Artist Book Collection at the MoMA Library and ordered my first titles from Printed Matter bookstore. There seemed to be no reason to defer to the existence of the Franklin Furnace Archive at that

Jean Lionnet, 1935–98

When Tess Knighton decided in 1995 to enlarge the international advisory team of Early music one of her appointments was Jean Lionnet, who became the first French consultant editor. It was a natural choice. Not only did Lionnet occupy a central position in one of France's most lively and active musicological organizations-the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles (CMBV)-but he felt himself particularly close to the aims and aspirations of Early music. Readers will thus be saddened by news of his premature death in October, at the age of 63. Few musicologists can have lived quite such a diverse or colourful life as Jean Lionnet. Indeed, there is scarcely a hint in his early biography of the scholarly achievements to come. Born in Versailles in 1935, he would have pursued a naval career had it not been for imperfect eyesight. He subsequently trained as a sound engineer and, after a period of military service in Algeria, joined the French film industry. By the late 1960s he had established himself in Rome as sound engineer at Cinefonico (1966-70) and Studio International Recording (1971-7). There he collaborated with such distinguished directors as Federico Fellini (Amacord), Michelangelo Antonioni (The passenger), Joseph Losey (L'assassinat de Trotsky) and with Luchino Visconti on his last four films.

The Turn of the Screw: Daniel Buren, Dan Flavin, and the Sixth Guggenheim International Exhibition

* This article derives from a project begun at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. I wish to thank Serge Guilbaut and John O'Brian for the helpful and provocative comments they provided on the first version of this paper. Later drafts benefitted greatly from the suggestions made by Nora M. Alter, Whitney Davis, Rosalind Krauss, Lora Rempel, and especially Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. 1. Thomas M. Messer, 'Which is in fact what happened': Thomas M. Messer in an Interview with Barbara Reise 25 April, 1971, Studio International 182, no. 935 (July/August 1971), p. 37. 2. Dan Flavin, Letter to the Editor, Studio International 182, no. 935 (July/August 1971), p. 6. 3. Daniel Buren, Mise en garde no. 3, VH 101 (December 1969), reprinted in Daniel Buren: Les Ecrits (1965-1990), Tome 1: 1965-1976 (Bordeaux: Mus6e d'art contemporain, 1991), p. 119.

Viewpoint

It has seemed to me for some time that one of my preoccupations was really only a hobby-horse, in the sense that Laurence Sterne describes that of Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy, for it has seemed to be of ‘great singularity’ as if I ‘might have travelled from York to Dover, — from Dover to Penzance in Cornwall, and from Penzance to York back again, and not have seen such another upon the road’. I am thinking of my preoccupation with what I identified as the need for a library, or libraries, in Britain, devoted to contemporary art, and open to the public. I aired the idea in Studio International in May 1973, but received no feedback.

Studio International volume 192 no. 983, September/October 1976. £1.75/$5. (Special issue on Art Magazines).

Studio International volume 192 no. 983, September/October 1976. £1.75/$5. (Special issue on <i>Art Magazines</i>).

The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein. By Bernhard Leitner. A Documentation. With excerpts from the Family Recollections by Hermine Wittgenstein. Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; London:Studio International Publications, Ltd., 1973. 128 pages, 88 reproductions. $9.95.

The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein. By Bernhard Leitner. A Documentation. With excerpts from the Family Recollections by Hermine Wittgenstein. Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; London:Studio International Publications, Ltd., 1973. 128 pages, 88 reproductions. $9.95. - Volume 13 Issue 2