California Video: Artists and Histories (N6512.5.V53 C35 2008)
Published to accompany a landmark exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from March 15 through June 18, 2008, California Video presents the first comprehensive survey of the history of video art in California. Since the late 1960s, California artists have been at the forefront of an international movement that has expanded video into the realm of fine art. Whether designing complex video installations, devising lush projections, experimenting with electronic psychedelia, creating conceptual and performance art, generating guerilla video, or producing works that promote feminism and other social issues, these artists have utilized video technology to express revolutionary ideas.
This illustrated volume focuses on fifty-eight artists, from early video pioneers such as John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, and William Wegman, to Martha Rosler, Diana Thater, Bill Viola, and other established and emerging talents. Thirty-seven recent interviews shed new light on these artists-their influences, creative processes, and impact. Together with commissioned essays, rare reprints, and previously unpublished video transcripts, California Video chronicles a distinctly West Coast aesthetic located within the broader history of video art.
exhibition website here. New York Times article here.
the first to focus on Antin’s recent series of large-scale tableaux photographs based on Greek and Roman history and mythology.
artists who expand the boundaries of traditional landscape painting. They embrace the decorative and blur distinctions between art and craft, using materials and techniques—including silicone, wax, collage, and embroidery—that range far beyond paint on canvas. Artists in the exhibition are Rowena Dring, Pia Fries, Jason Gubbiotti, Jim Hodges, David Korty, Kori Newkirk, Katie Pratt, Michael Raedecker, Neal Rock, Lisa Sanditz, Ranjani Shettar, Amy Sillman, and Janaina Tschäpe. This extensively illustrated catalogue features an overview essay, “The Loneliness of the Decorative,” by Wexner Center Chief Curator Helen Molesworth, plus entries on each of the artists by associate curator Claudine Isé.
reevaluation of one of art history’s most popular and important art movements. In Impressionism and the Modern Landscape, James Rubin shifts the focus from familiar scenes of pleasure—the beautiful countryside, people at leisure—to a landscape changing as the result of productivity, technology, and urbanization. He demonstrates not only that the industrial and demographic revolutions of the nineteenth century had a profound impact on art, but also that impressionism was the first art historical movement to embrace such changes. Looking principally at Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Armand Guillaumin, and Gustave Caillebotte, Rubin has selected works in four categories: industrial waterways, trains, factories, and photographic viewpoints in the modern city. The examples convey not only these major themes but also the painters’ belief in the progress of civilization through science and industry. 
of the most influential landscapes in Western art. In them, nature is viewed “through the glass of time” and endowed with a poetic quality that has been admired by painters as different as Constable, Turner, and Cézanne. 
than 100 works by artists such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875), Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867), Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), Claude Monet (1840–1926), Gustave Le Gray (1820–1884), and Eugène Cuvelier (1837–1900) explore the French phenomenon of plein-air (open-air) painting and photography in the region of Fontainebleau, a pilgrimage site for aspiring landscape artists. Some 35 miles southeast of Paris, the Forest of Fontainebleau became a magnet for artists and tourists in the 19th century. It was accessible, beautiful, and visually compelling, with a rare mix of traditional rural French villages and natural landscape features, including magnificent old-growth trees, stark plateaus, dramatic rock formations, and stone quarries. Best known for the informal artists’ colony centered in the village of Barbizon, the Forest of Fontainebleau became a nearly obligatory stop for both French and foreign artists, and served as subject and sanctuary, “natural studio” and open-air laboratory for investigating nature. Spanning half a century, from the mid-1820s through the 1870s, this artistic movement gave rise to the Barbizon School of painting and laid the groundwork for impressionism. The forest also inspired a new school of landscape photography, as figures such as Gustave Le Gray and Eugène Cuvelier, working side by side with painters, explored the camera’s potential to reveal nature in a fresh and unadorned manner.
