by Jon Lackman | 25 October 2010 | Books, Contemporary
We noted in 2007 the debut of “Documents of Contemporary Art,” a series of books that collect writings on individual themes. The latest volume to appear is Failure, edited by Lisa Le Feuvre, which announces, “Amidst current global uncertainty failure has become a central subject of investigation in recent art … Here success is deemed overrated, doubt embraced, experimentation encouraged and risk considered a viable position.” Thus far, a variety of notable authors have tackled fourteen topics including appropriation, the archive, the artist’s joke, beauty, chance, the cinematic, colour, design and art, the everyday, the gothic, participation, situation, the sublime, and utopias. Collectively, the books update and extend the 1996 Stiles and Selz volume Theories and documents of contemporary art : a sourcebook of artists’ writings. The themes chosen seem specific enough to focus discussion and lend some clarity to the messy picture of contemporary art, yet broad and flexible enough to permit of debate and contradiction. In caa.reviews, Jennifer Geigel Mikulay deemed Situation, edited by Claire Doherty, “laudable,” “adventurously dipping in and out of a fascinating array of recent art projects,” despite “the unevenness of the content of the individual texts, especially in the excerpted form that prevails throughout the volume (and larger series in which it appears).” Success may be overrated, but it seems like the right word for Documents of Contemporary Art.
