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NEW MUSEUM
Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld
Introduction by Lisa Phillips. Text by Johanna Burton, Hal Foster, Kate Linker, Margot Norton, Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, Laurie Simmons, Sara VanDerBeek, Cindy Sherman. Interview by David Clarkson.
Over the course of a 40-year career, Conceptual artist and photographer Sarah Charlesworth deconstructed the conventions of photography and gave emphasis to the medium's importance in mediating our perception of the world. Part of a group of artists working in New York in the 1980s that included Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons, Charlesworth straddled 1970s Conceptual art and the Pictures Generation, creating work that probed the visual language of mass media and illuminated the impact of ubiquitous imagery on our everyday lives.
This fully illustrated catalogue accompanying Charlesworth's first major survey in New York features series such as Stills (1980), a group of 14 large-scale works rephotographed from press images that depict people falling or jumping off buildings; Modern History (1977-79), which pioneered photographic appropriation; the alluring Objects of Desire (1983-88) and Renaissance Paintings (1991), which continued Charlesworth's trenchant approach to mining the language of photography; Doubleworld (1995), which probes the fetishism of vision in pre-modernist art and marks Charlesworth's transition to a more active role behind the camera; and her final series, Available Light (2012).
Sarah Charlesworth was born in 1947 in East Orange, New Jersey, and received a BA from Barnard College in 1969. She was the subject of a 1997 retrospective organized by SITE Santa Fe. Charlesworth taught photography for many years at the School of the Visual Arts, New York; the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; and Princeton University, New Jersey. She died in 2013 in Falls Village, Connecticut.
Sarah Charlesworth, "Crystal Ball", 2012, is reproduced from Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
New York Times
Roberta Smith
Of all the Pictures artists, many of whom were women, few remained as stauncly loyal to photography as she. No one explored its history, formal possibilities and very mechanisms with such a determined, even obsessive, drive, nor did anyone make color so abstract and implacable.
Brooklyn Rail
Simone Krug
The world Sarah Charlesworth depicts is not simply a duplication of the world we know, but a separate world that insists upon the infinite complexity—and power—of pictures.
Hyperallergic
Cynthia Cruz
By removing images from their original context and placing them in an alternative space, Charlesworth is in essence creating a new language….we might call Charlesworth not a “Writer” but instead an “un-writer” who un-wrote: removing, redacting, and then showing us our world anew, through her eyes, in her Doubleworld.
For a 1983 Postmodernism and Photography panel with Douglas Crimp, Richard Prince and Laurie Simmons, Sarah Charlesworth wrote, "Pop art pointed out that popular culture existed and was not in itself lethal to Art. Postmodernism is increasingly a part of that culture. But it is a critical part. The artificial, the posed, the stylized, the familiar are not so much a threat to this art, but a rich and rigorous syntax of social exchange and personal experience. To reveal through exploration and expression of convention its structures and meaning, its language of form, is a step toward consciousness within." Red Mask (1983) is reproduced from Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld, published to accompany the late artist's retrospective at the New Museum. continue to blog
In Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld—published to accompany the late artist's retrospective on view now at the New Museum—Hal Foster writes, "Ambiguity is everything in postmodernist art, and so it is with the work of Sarah Charlesworth: she liked to turn the received ideas of visual culture into productive paradoxes, questioning other clichés in the process, such as the notion that critical art is always didactic or obviously political." He goes on to list seven of the categories of paradox that Charlesworth put into play, including photography as a problem; subtraction as addition; aura lost and regained; the sex appeal of the inorganic; the question of whether alienation can be desired; critique through complicity; and paradox in art that "looks great and hurts a little." Featured image is "Carnival Ball" (2012). continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 8.75 x 11.75 in. / 164 pages / 100 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $55.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $72.5 GBP £50.00 ISBN: 9780915557080 PUBLISHER: New Museum AVAILABLE: 6/23/2015 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by New Museum. Introduction by Lisa Phillips. Text by Johanna Burton, Hal Foster, Kate Linker, Margot Norton, Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, Laurie Simmons, Sara VanDerBeek, Cindy Sherman. Interview by David Clarkson.
Over the course of a 40-year career, Conceptual artist and photographer Sarah Charlesworth deconstructed the conventions of photography and gave emphasis to the medium's importance in mediating our perception of the world. Part of a group of artists working in New York in the 1980s that included Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons, Charlesworth straddled 1970s Conceptual art and the Pictures Generation, creating work that probed the visual language of mass media and illuminated the impact of ubiquitous imagery on our everyday lives.
This fully illustrated catalogue accompanying Charlesworth's first major survey in New York features series such as Stills (1980), a group of 14 large-scale works rephotographed from press images that depict people falling or jumping off buildings; Modern History (1977-79), which pioneered photographic appropriation; the alluring Objects of Desire (1983-88) and Renaissance Paintings (1991), which continued Charlesworth's trenchant approach to mining the language of photography; Doubleworld (1995), which probes the fetishism of vision in pre-modernist art and marks Charlesworth's transition to a more active role behind the camera; and her final series, Available Light (2012).
Sarah Charlesworth was born in 1947 in East Orange, New Jersey, and received a BA from Barnard College in 1969. She was the subject of a 1997 retrospective organized by SITE Santa Fe. Charlesworth taught photography for many years at the School of the Visual Arts, New York; the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; and Princeton University, New Jersey. She died in 2013 in Falls Village, Connecticut.
