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The article reviews the art exhibition documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany from June 10 to September 17, 2017, featuring the works of artist Marta Minujín.

The article reviews the exhibition documenta 14: learning from Athens in Athens from April 8 to July 16, 2017, featuring marble carving by artist Rebecca Belmore, and Maria Eichhorn.

This article explores the political implications of the work of German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–86). Focusing on a selection of the artist’s political projects between 1967 and 1983, this article considers his work in the context of contemporaneous art movements that sought to merge art and life. It argues that what set Beuys apart from his peers was his use of politics as a medium by which to communicate a message about the revolutionary potential of art. It further argues that while Beuys’s political efficacy was limited in his lifetime, his approach, termed “social sculpture,” has been influential for successive generations of artists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the concept of authenticity of experience as it arises in the recent criticism of Marina Abramović, and in Sanja Iveković's art since 2000. The controversy around Abramović's participation in the 2011 Los Angeles MOCA gala demonstrates the limitations of a concept of ethics within contemporary art that is based on authenticity, in particular because of the commodity status of experience within high-profile performance and participatory art. Iveković's artworks Looking for Mama's Number (2002) and The Disobedient (2012) are useful in this context because they materialize an ethics not based on authenticity. They do so by problematizing the recovery of experience, particularly as it pertains to political commitment, in a way that is consistent with reflections on the ideological status of historical narrative from within critical left-wing histories of the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Iveković's recent emphasis on the unknowability of experience can be seen as a tactical response to the conditions of global art reception that shape the interpretation of her work, as well as that of Abramović. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article's central claim is that a paradigm shift occurred in the intertwining of aesthetic practices, the discursive, and the institutional mechanisms of legitimization and display in the European public sphere from the postwar to the present. More specifically, it foregrounds ‘the problem of Europe’ as it materialized within the modernist rubric of the nation state with Documenta (established 1955) in Germany and the Biennale de Paris (established 1959) in France and in relation to processes of globalization with the peripatetic exhibition Manifesta: The European Biennial of Contemporary Art (established 1996). If postwar cultural initiatives elaborated and exhibited ‘Europe’ as a collection of nation states, the nomadic imperative of Manifesta crystallizes and contributes to the collective imagination of ‘Europe’ and itsdemosas a permanent experience of the border. Moving from nation state to border state is thus not so much a fully concretized or accomplished political or economic reality as an exhibited cultural proposal for novel iterations of Europe and its publics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Beginning with a critique of Thierry de Duve's return to Kantian aesthetics in order to rescue art from a commodified culture exemplified by the art biennial, this article argues that the globalised proliferation of biennials is a symptom of a broader problem: the hegemony of the exhibition form in the public's encounter with art. The analysis focuses on the concept of globalisation and what it hides from view; participatory art and the post-documentary artwork, with video essay as an example, as two radical tendencies associated with experiential, co-operative knowledge generated in the social field; and the rhetoric of specific exhibitions – ‘Documenta XI’ (2002) and ‘Altermodern’ (2009) – addressing globalisation. The continual reproduction of the exhibition form performs an important role in post-Fordism and ensures a transcription of art as immaterial, affective labour, marginalising the more complex forms of labour that produce the artwork when globalisation becomes the latter's production site. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses several topics including the 13th edition of the Documenta art exhibit in Kassel, Germany curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the 33rd edition of the Comité international d'histoire de l'art (CIHA) conference held in Nuremberg, Germany in July 2012, and the NORDIK 2012 art history conference in Stockholm, Sweden.