Tom Holert

Übergriffe
Zustände und Zuständigkeiten der Gegenwartskunst
VOLUME 217

The Unruliness of the Contemporary Art Label

Who is authorized and competent? And why? The art of the present is an undertaking defined by the perpetual reorganization of responsibilities. Reflecting on his own roles in the contemporary art system, the art historian, cultural scholar, and artist Tom Holert investigates these displacements.

Born of the conviction that reflectivity and materiality are inextricably interwoven in the art since the 1950s, as are aesthetics and politics, Holert’s essays examine how art changes its operating range and lays claim to and transforms modes of knowledge and action that were long seen as being beyond its purview. The so-called “deskilling” of contemporary art, the decline of expertise and the loss of a binding canon of media, questions, and procedures, has resulted in an expansion of thematic concerns and methodologies. The art-critical debate has responded by shifting from an interrogation of the ideas specific to art to an ongoing effort to take stock of its encroachments.

This volume gathers selected essays originally published in international magazines, catalogues, and anthologies, some of which have been translated into German for the first time, as well as previously unpublished writings from fifteen years of art-critical and art-historical production. Each grapples with specific works of art and practices, and many were conceived in close collaboration with the artists. Monographic studies on Candice Breitz, Bernadette Corporation, Danica Dakić, Omer Fast, Sanja Iveković, Mark Lewis, Sarah Pierce, Stephen Prina, Josephine Pryde, Jeroen de Rijke, Willem de Rooij, and Jeff Wall form the book’s backbone.

Tom Holert (b. Hamburg, 1962) is an art historian, cultural scholar, and artist. In the 1990s, he was an editor at Texte zur Kunst and co-editor-in-chief of Spex. Holert has held a series of professorships at schools including the Merz-Akademie, Stuttgart, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He is a founding member of the Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne, and has written numerous books.