Contents

• I. Modernism and the Crisis of Modernism
• 1. Selection of statements on early modernism
• ‘Simplification and Design’, 1913 / Clive Bell
• ‘Negro Sculpture’, 1920 / Roger Fry
• from Modern Plastic Art, 1937 / Carola Giedion-Welcker
• ‘A Definition of Primitivism’, 1938 / Robert Goldwater
• from The Story of Modern Art, 1941 / Sheldon Cheney
• ‘Statement’, 1959 / Elaine de Kooning
• 2. ‘The Nature of Abstract Art’, 1937 / Meyer Schapiro
• 3. ‘Modernism in Comparative Perspective’, 1982 / Eugene Lunn
• 4. from Farewell to an Idea, 1999 / T. J. Clark
• II. Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde
• 1. from Theory of the Avant-Garde, 1974 / Peter Burger
• 2. ‘How a Cubist Painting Holds Together’, 2002 / Paul Smith
• 3. ‘The Pasted-Paper Revolution’, 1958 / Clement Greenberg
• 4. from The Critique of Everyday Life, 1947 / Henri Lefebvre
• 5. ‘The Primary Colours for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde’, 1986 / Benjamin Buchloh
• III. Modernity and Photography
• 1. ‘News about Flowers’, 1928 / Walter Benjamin
• 2. ‘A Few Words on Photomontage’, 1934 / Hannah Hoch
• 3. ‘Photography in the Service of Surrealism’, 1986 / Rosalind Krauss
• 4. from The Photographer’s Eye, 1969 / John Szarkowski
• 5. ‘Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation)’, 1976-8 / Allan Sekula
• 6. ‘"Marks of Indifference": Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art’, 1995 / Jeff Wall
• IV. Subjects and Objects
• 1. ‘Literalism and Abstraction’, 1970 / Philip Leider
• 2. ‘Space, Time and Situation’, 2000 / Alex Potts
• 3. ‘Escape Attempts’, 1995 / Lucy Lippard
• 4. ‘Convention and Innovation’, 1976 / Clement Greenberg
• 5. ‘Art Object and Art Work’, 1989 / Charles Harrison
• 6. ‘One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity’, 1997 / Miwon Kwon
• V. The Performance of Identity
• 1. ‘Personism: A Manifesto’, 1960 / Frank O’Hara
• 2. ‘Painting, Feminism, History’, 2001 / Griselda Pollock
• 3. ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism’, 1985 / Craig Owens
• 4. from Body Art: Performing the Subject, 1998 / Amelia Jones
• 5. ‘Objects Beyond Objecthood’, 1999 / Briony Fer
• VI. Globalisation
• 1. ‘What is this "black" in black popular culture?’, 1992 / Stuart Hall
• 2. ‘Perfidious Fidelity: the Untranslatability of the Other’, 1994 / Sarat Maharaj
• 3. ‘Emily Kame Kngwarreye and the Undeconstructible Space of Justice’, 1998 / Rex Butler
• 4. ‘The Black Box’, 2002 / Okwui Enwezor