Isabelle Graw

Texte zur Kunst
Essays, Rezensionen, Gespräche (Essays, Reviews, Conversations)
VOLUME 195

How Do Social Conditions Manifest in Artistic Practice?

This volume brings together extended theoretical essays, lectures, exhibition reviews, conversations, and blog entries by the art historian and critic Isabelle Graw. What they all share is a rejection of the still-popular notion that “art” is something clearly definable or even unified. Graw devotes her attention to individual artistic practices, including those of Cosima von Bonin, Jutta Koether, Sarah Lucas, Richard Prince, and Martin Kippenberger, among others, and to theoretical reflections by Theodor W. Adorno, Eva Illouz, Paolo Virno, and many more. In the process, Graw consistently stakes out the unstable boundary between art and society: In this collection, artistic works fundamentally present themselves as a problem—a problem that they not only pose to the viewer, but one that the works also address themselves, and in a thoroughly discursive way.

The aim of this collection is to outline a specific discourse of art and position artistic practice within a socio-critical perspective. The selection of texts follows a principle that is as simple as it is difficult: The author can still live with them, so to speak, which isn’t something one can take for granted with “old” writings.

Isabelle Graw (b. 1962 in Hamburg; lives and works in Berlin) is an art critic, publisher of the journal Texte zur Kunst, and a professor of art theory and art history at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main.