Three new publications by AICA members

April 03, 2021

AICA-USA congratulates three members on their recent publications.

Paul Maziar's One Foot in the Other World was released in January of this year by AC Books. Fellow AICA member Jarrett Earnest says of the essay collection, "One Foot is a chatty carousel, covering the last ten years of art in and around Portland, Oregon. Tumbling between observation, reflection, and digression, he tells the stories of what it's like to be there, in front of that painting, in that art scene, in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This has the great advantage of being a critic's 'first' book, where the reader shares in working out foundational concepts of whatever 'art' or 'painting' or 'writing' is or might be. As Maziar says of Marcel Duchamp's 'shaved' Mona Lisa—'I like that he did this.'"

In her new book The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice: Between Work and World, Sue Spaid places the artworld under a microscope to demonstrate how curators collaborate with artists to structure ‘experiences’ that birth ‘artworld theories’. Building on Marcel Duchamp’s notion that ‘the spectator completes the work of art’, she credits spectators with weaving the narratives that lend artworks their meaning, a view ordinarily attributed to the artist and/or curator prior to the exhibition. In treating artworks as ongoing events whose presentational histories begin with their first public appearance, she shows how artworks are hardly static objects bound to particular eras.

Gregory Volk, in the most comprehensive monograph to date on the innovative abstract site related installations of German artist Katharina Grosse, details how her work radically extends the possibilities for abstract painting.