Table of Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Copyright Credits Introduction Figures 1. “Real Dead” 2. “Al Held” 3. “In Another Light” 4. “The Reality of Abstraction” 5. “The Uncomfortable Armchair: Abstraction and Decoration” 6. “Wandering Color: Arbitrariness, Disjunction, and Decoration in American Art of the Sixties” 7. “The Rutgers Group: Garden State Avant-Garde” 8. “Expressing the Abstract” 9. “Gees Bend Modern” 10. Excerpts from Imagining the Present: Context, Content and the Role of the Critic 11. “Ab-Ex Confidential: The Way They Were” 12. “Martín Ramírez: Narratives of Displacement and Memory” 13. “The Dream of Aboriginal Art” 14. “The Guardians of the Avant-Garde” 15. “Robert Morris: The Order of Disorder” 16. “West of Eden” 17. “Harmony & Discord” 18. “The Four Corners of Painting” 19. “Talk/Show: Language and the Resistant Artwork” 20. “Stop, Look and Listen! Mel Bochner Strong Language” 21. “Through Color” 22. “Hold Still: Looking at Photo-Realism” 23. “The Here and Then” 24. “Art Between Form and Anti-Form” 25. “Frames and Personas” 26. “Inside Outsider” 27. “The Unusual Suspects: A View of Abstraction” Index

Promotional Information

The critic and scholar Richard Kalina examines the aesthetic, social and political conditions of contemporary art, addressing questions about how works are made, how they appear, and what they tell us about the changing definition of art.

About the Author

Richard Kalina is Professor of Art at Fordham University, USA. He is the Editor of Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic (2006) and a Contributing Editor to the monthly magazine Art in America.

Reviews

For over 30 years, artist and critic Richard Kalina has asked his readers to look beyond artworld rhetoric for authenticity and value in our ever-changing visual landscape. This selection of essays traces key developments and A-list artists, while foregrounding influences and individuals on the margins of accepted artworld practices.
*René Paul Barilleaux, Head of Curatorial Affairs, McNay Art Museum, USA*

In this series of essays, Richard Kalina takes us on an expansive and insightful expedition through some of the most salient art and art criticism of the post-war years. In doing so, he articulates coherent and meaningful analyses of some of Modernism’s (and post-Modernism’s) most persistently elusive concepts.
*Marshall N. Price, Chief Curator and Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, USA*