Tre libri che raccontano i primi lavori di tre artisti straordinari

segnalati da Microcities (Socks-studio), che in un certo senso hanno reinventato un modo di fare arte, fuori dagli schemi consueti.

Il loro campo di intervento non è più lo spazio chiuso dello studio, ma il mondo fuori.

L'esperienza dello spazio è prima una necessità poi una prova da superare. Il lavoro dell'artista non si ferma quindi alla concezione dell'opera e alla sua realizzazione, ogni volta l'opera è l' esperienza, un modo di vedere il mondo di interpretarlo di viverlo.

Se avete apprezzato il libro di Careri walkscapes, allora non potrete non riconoscere in Richard Long un camminatore prima che un artista.

Se il saggio sulla fotografia di Dyer, vi ha colpito allora è inevitabile che Jeff Wall vi mostri come la fotografia abbia assunto con il suo lavoro, un valore concettuale che non si ferma alla rappresentazione di un soggetto, ma di un'idea di spazio.

E se poi siete interessati all'architettura, allora, la vostra idea di spazio non sará più la stessa dopo aver studiato il lavoro di Gordon Matta Clark.

Richard Long: A Line Made by Walking

Dieter Roelstraete

One Work

In 1967, Richard Long, then a student at St. Martin's School of Art in London, walked back and forth along a straight line in the grass in the English countryside, leaving a track that he then photographed in black and white. This work, A Line Made by Walking, was not only the starting point for Long's career as an artist, but also a landmark for a new kind of art emerging in Europe and the Americas.

In this critical study, Dieter Roelstraete explores how the work's location outside the gallery context and its suggestion of bodily action makes it characteristic of the work made by a new generation of artists who combined the organic, the temporary, the non-material and the performative to offer a critique of the art system and its language, forms and values.

Jeff Wall: Picture for Women

David Campany

One works

Jeff Wall's Picture for Women (1979) marks the transition of photography as an art form from the printed page to the gallery wall. In the photograph a woman looks outward, as if at the viewer; a camera occupies the centre of the image; the photographer stands on the right. Modelled on Édouard Manet's painting Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère, Picture for Women is an ambitious attempt to relate the artistic and spectatorial demands of the late 1970s to modernist pictorial art.

In this book, David Campany offers an account of Wall's move from a Conceptual approach to a reengagement with the idea of a singular (rather than serial) picture. Contrasting Wall's idea of the photograph as a tableau or a 'picture' with the works of the Pictures Generation - including Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Jack Goldstein - this book argues that Picture for Women is inseparable from the modern fate of the picture in general.

Gordon Matta-Clark: Conical Intersect

Bruce Jenkins

One work

Gordon Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect (1975) was a torqued, spiralling 'cut' into two derelict seventeenth-century Paris buildings adjacent to the construction site of the Centre Pompidou. With this landmark work of 'anarchitecture', Matta-Clark opened up these venerable residences to light and air, and began a dialogue about the nature of urban development and the public role of art. Considered today, Conical Intersect reveals the multivalent nature of the artist's practice and his prescient focus on sustainability and creative reuse of the built environment.

In this book, Bruce Jenkins examines Matta-Clark's 'non-u-ment', looking closely at the artist's proposals, working process, various forms of documentation, and the dialogue begun by Matta-Clark's decision to transform two abandoned buildings into an 'act of communication'. The text is accompanied by rarely seen photographs of the construction process taken by French artist Marc Petitjean.