C21st RECENT HISTORY, 2016

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Jones, Alison and Thompson, Milly. 2016. C21st RECENT HISTORY, 2016. [Artist's Book]

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Image ('Alison Jones & Milly Thompson C21ST RECENT HISTORY', 2016)
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Image ('Alison Jones & Milly Thompson C21ST RECENT HISTORY', 2016, contents page)
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Image ('Alison Jones & Milly Thompson C21ST RECENT HISTORY', 2016, 'Martha Rosler reads Vogue')
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Image ('Alison Jones & Milly Thompson C21ST RECENT HISTORY', 2016, ‘ÉVASION’)
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Image ('Alison Jones & Milly Thompson C21ST RECENT HISTORY', 2016, ‘VUOTO’)
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Image ('Alison Jones & Milly Thompson C21ST RECENT HISTORY', 2016, ‘ÉVASIONISTA’)
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Image ('Alison Jones & Milly Thompson C21ST RECENT HISTORY', 2016, ‘C21ST Art-Worker’)
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Text ('Alison Jones and Milly Thompson C21st RECENT HISTORY' 2016, press release)
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Text ('Alison Jones & Milly Thompson C21ST RECENT HISTORY', 2016, PDF)
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Official URL: http://lanchestergalleryprojects.org.uk/project/al...

Abstract or Description

An artist’s book comprising the artwork, documentation and conference papers of 5 collaborative projects and exhibitions by Milly Thompson and Alison Jones between 2012-16. The project rethinks the conditions of art through feminism, showing off, distinction*, luxury, glamour and ‘being hot’. It is a hand-assembled, riso and digital print book with fold-out inserts, posters ephemera etc.
C21st Recent History makes an original contribution to current understanding of gender and power in the field of art through its exploration of dialogical and opposing positions of the woman artist. It identifies and occupies a series of interrelated positions available to female artists at the start of the C21st, juggling feminism, neo-liberalism, individualism, gender power, hypocrisy, ambition, fashion and embodiment. The project acknowledges that there are many feminisms which range the political spectrum, and builds on current knowledge by opening up the terrain of feminist practice across
• A Marxist critique of commodity culture
• Institutional critique
• Individual desire
• critique of the neoliberal subject
• within the context of affective labour in the artworld
The research matters to art theorists and practitioners in the field of non-cis male art because it connects a number of previously distinct positions in relation to the creation, distribution and dissemination of art and ideas within the artworld.
The research collaborates with canonical feminist artists Rosler, Meckseper, Wermers whose works focus on a critique of commodity aesthetics. The artist book form is integral to the research being a desirable highly tactile and sexualised limited edition comprising all the documentation, polemical texts, posters, press releases as well as advertisements for the artists.
Through precise juxtapositions of artistic subjectivity with self promotion, affective labour and the art market, and the politics of feminism and the politics of post feminism, C21st Recent History interrogates the ideologies of the contemporary art world and its markets.
The various strands of the research/exhibition/projects included are:
• The exhibition Martha Rosler Reads Vogue (2010), setting feminism against post-feminism, worthiness intermingled with the guilty fandom of glamour in culture and the art world. Artists: Alison Jones, Martha Rosler, Milly Thompson
• The exhibition Evasion (2012) perfomed opposition nestling in co-dependency as a trope. Artists: Alison Jones, Josephine Meckseper, Martha Rosler, Milly Thompson, Nicole Wermers
• Thompson and Jones’ gallery performance Evasionista (2012) and public billboard C21st Art Worker (2013/16) enacted the feminine labour of the gallery assistant through which she activates the cultural context for the objects on display.
• The magazine Vuoto elides artisic integrity and self-promotion with an editorial by Nina Power. Artists: Alison Jones, Josephine Meckseper, Martha Rosler, Milly Thompson, Nicole Wermers
• An invited panel of academics addressed the ideas proposed in Evasion; the papers are reproduced in C21st RECENT HISTORY. Papers from Nicholas Cullinan, Mark Harris, Ian Hunt, Angela McRobbie and Monika Szewczyk
• Michael Archer did an introductory talk at the book launch.

C21st Recent History is held in many libraries, including the Feminist Art Library in Goldsmiths. It was included alongside 'VUOTO in the exhibition 'THE GEO POLITICS OF MONETIZED AIRSPACE — Come Fly with Me, I Meet You by the Airside Gucci Concession at 4, Fox Fur Hat', at Midway Contemporary, Minnesota, in 2017.

Item Type:

Artist's Book

Keywords:

masquerade, post-feminism, feminism, affective labour, precarity, immaterial labour, humour, anti-feminism, neo-liberalism, art-world, gender, Martha Rosler, glamour, being hot, consumerism, alienation, false consciousness, performativity, performance, desire

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