Contemporary art explained

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Defining Contemporary Art - 25 Years in 200 Pivotal Artworks

By Daniel Birnbaum et al.

Contemporary art is at times difficult to comprehend. The plurality of its forms and its, sometimes, provocative nature can make for difficult viewing. Just think of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987), for example, provocative even by its title. Phaidon’s latest offering is, therefore, a welcome and accessible addition to the literature surrounding contemporary art practice. All too often writing on contemporary art is dense and theory laden, adding little to a general understanding of the work it represents.

Defining Contemporary Art – 25 Years in 200 Pivotal Artworks is different. Written by eight of the most highly respected international curators of today, this book brings a new understanding of contemporary art to a wider readership, offering critical and insightful readings of important artworks in an accessible way. These writers are serious about their subject and there is certainly no dumbing down here. Yet, the way in which they explain works as diverse as Mike Kelley’s More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987) and Gerhard Richter’s Cologne Cathedral Window (2007), not only opens up these works, but does so in a way that offers new perspectives and fresh readings to a diverse readership.

Each author has selected 25 artworks from across the last 25 years, as well as singling out one year as pivotal for development across the period. In this respect the book does simplify things considerably, but it needs to. As you might reasonably expect from curators, key exhibitions, such as ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ in Paris in 1989, are accounted for along the way and this is important in helping to provide a context for specific artworks and developments.

Some of these works are extremely well known while others are less so. For instance, I was previously unfamiliar with Jason Rhoades’ Black Pussy Soirée Cabaret Macramé of 2006, but Cornelia Butler’s account of this work and the high quality images that accompany that account made me want to know more. Artur Żmijewski’s Democracies (2009) caught my attention too. Democracies takes the form of 20 videos shown on 20 flat screens and runs for over two hours. Żmijewski’s films of demonstrations, protests and public gatherings from around the world have been installed in varying configurations. Butler, again, gives us a strong sense of the oppressive nature of experiencing this work and of its importance.

All 200 works are offered to the reader as somehow critical for the shifts and slides in art making over the last quarter of a century and how art looks now. A round-table discussion across the last few pages of the book gives the authors space to consider some of these broader questions. Interestingly, Okwui Enwezor suggests that the book offers, ‘an intellectual biography of each contributor: the kind of art they have responded to during the years in question’. Bob Nickas supports Enwezor’s suggestion wholeheartedly, reminding us of Oscar Wilde’s notion of criticism as a mode of autobiography. With that in mind, we have to wonder how different the book might look with a different group of authors. Yet, perhaps that doesn’t matter too much since, as Nikas says, the book is ‘a starting point rather than an end point, and in this respect we haven’t so much told art history as laid some groundwork for those who eventually will’. It’s a fair assessment of their contribution I think.

Defining Contemporary Art – 25 Years in 200 Pivotal Artworks  by Daniel Birnbaum, Cornelia Butler, Suzanne Cotter, Bice Curiger, Okwui Enzwezor, Massimiliano Gioni, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Bob Nickasis published by Phaidon, London and New York, 2011. 264 pp., 700 colour, 100 mono illus, £45.00. ISBN: 978-0-7148-6209-5