Books published by Bard Graduate Center, Exhibitions Department

A volume considering questions of conservation that arise with new artistic mediums and practices. Much of the artwork that rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century took on novel forms‿such as installation, performance, event, video, film, earthwork, and intermedia works with interactive and networked components‿that pose a new set of questions about what art actually is, both physically and conceptually. For conservators, this raises an existential challenge when considering what elements of these artworks can and should be preserved.   This provocative volume revisits the traditional notions of conservation and museum collecting that developed over the centuries to suit a conception of art as static, fixed, and permanent objects. Conservators and museums increasingly struggle with issues of conservation for works created from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century that are unstable over time. The contributors ask what it means to conserve artworks that fundamentally address and embody the notion of change and, through this questioning, guide us to reevaluate the meaning of art, of objects, and of materiality itself. Object‿Event‿Performance considers a selection of post-1960s artworks that have all been chosen for their instability, changeability, performance elements, and processes that pose questions about their relationship to conservation practices. This volume will be a welcome resource on contemporary conservation for art historians, scholars of dance and theater studies, curators, and conservators. Â

In The Art of the Jewish Family, Laura Arnold Leibman examines five objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who all lived in New York in the years between 1750 and 1850: a letter from impoverished Hannah Louzada seeking assistance; a set of silver cups owned by Reyna Levy Moses; an ivory miniature owned by Sarah Brandon Moses, who was born enslaved and became one of the wealthiest Jewish women in New York; a book created by Sarah Ann Hays Mordecai; and a family silhouette owned by Rebbetzin Jane Symons Isaacs. These objects offer intimate and tangible views into the lives of Jewish American women from a range of statuses, beliefs, and lifestyles--both rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, slaves and slaveowners. Each chapter creates a biography of a single woman through an object, offering a new methodology that looks past texts alone to material culture in order to further understand early Jewish American women's lives and restore their agency as creators of Jewish identity. While much of the available history was written by men, the objects that Leibman studies were made for and by Jewish women. Speaking to American Jewish life, women's studies, and American history, The Art of the Jewish Family sheds new light on the lives and values of these women, while also revealing the social and religious structures that led to Jewish women being erased from historical archives.

"First published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2014"--Title page verso.

This volume collects a series of influential early twentieth-century essays on the role of museums

"The transition from roll to codex as the standard format of the book is one of the most culturally significant innovations of Late Antiquity. The Codex and Crafts in Late Antiquity examines surviving evidence in order to better understand how this transition took place. Placing the codex into the general cultural, religious, and technological context of Late Antiquity, the book examines the major types of codices--the wooden tablet codex, the single-quire codex and the multi-quire codex--in all their structural, technical, and decorative features. Georgios Boudalis argues that the codex was not an ingenious invention but rather an innovation that evolved using techniques already widely employed by artisans and craftspeople in the creation of everyday items such as socks, shoes, and baskets, revealing that the codex was a fascinating, yet practical, development"--

How do works of art endure over time despite their material and conceptual alteration? How do decay, technological obsolescence and remediation affect what the artwork is and what it may become? How might the observation of change in artworks teach us something about their nature and behavior? How do changeable artworks induce a rethinking of those museological paradigms that assume fixity and stasis? The intellectual aim of this project is to come up with answers to these questions. "Revisions Zen for Film" which is accompanied by an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center on display from September 18, 2015 January 10, 2016 focuses on "Zen for Film" (also known as Fluxfilm no.1), one of the most evocative film works created by the Korean-American artist, Nam June Paik in 1962-64. Rather than being a compilation of objects presented for inspection in support of a curatorial argument, this project zooms into the microcosm of a singular artwork in order to unfold some of the inspirations, transitions, remediations, and residues that have occurred in the course of that artwork s existence. It also seeks to examine how the firsthand awareness of materiality enhances visual knowledge. "Revisions Zen for Film" strives to revise standard notions about an artwork that has undergone a rich history of display. The project reveals what often remains undisclosed an artwork that is a complex sum of its transitions rather than a product of the visual analysis and interpretation of that thing as a static entity. The project undermines any assumption that the artwork is unchanging, and hence subject to a single interpretation. "Zen for Film Revisions" aims to explore the significance of the artwork in its constant transitions, proposing a new art historical narrative. By putting "Zen for Film" on display and inviting an interdisciplinary dialogue, it asks precisely what and when the artwork might be."

Surveys some of the landmark devices in the history of personal computing - including the Commodore 64, Apple Macintosh Plus, Palm Pilot Professional, and Microsoft Kinect - and helps you to understand the historical shifts that have occurred with the design and material experience of each machine.

Offers insights into the nature of expeditions and the human relationships that shaped them. This title examines, collected materials as well as museum and archive records, the contributors shed light on the complex social life and intimate work practices of the researchers involved in these expeditions.