Litteraturliste:

The lure of the local – Senses of place in a multicentered society
The New Press, New York, 1997 by Lucy R. Lippard
In The Lure of the Local, Lucy R. Lippard, one of America's most influential art writers, weaves together cultural studies, history, geography, and contemporary art to provide a fascinating exploration of our multiple senses of place. Expanding her reach far beyond the confines of the art world, she discusses community, land use, perceptions of nature, how we produce the landscape, and how the landscape affects our lives. In this extensively illustrated, beautifully produced volume, she consistently makes unexpected connections between contemporary art and its political, social, and cultural contexts.

On the beaten track – tourism, art and place
The New Press, New York, 1999 by Lucy R. Lippard
In Lucy R. Lippard's On the Beaten Track, essays on cultural criticism, anthropology, and community activism are interwoven to examine how tourism sites are conceived and represented, and how they transform their surroundings. Called "stimulating" and "valuable" by Newsday, On the Beaten Track is now available in paperback for the first time.

With her characteristic breadth of insight and critical eye, Lippard explores the act of being a tourist in one's own home, the role of advertising and photography in defining place, antique shops as populist museums, and the commodification of indigenous cultures. She discusses the political economies of leisure spaces; the tourist's fascination with tragic destinations such as the sites of massacres, nuclear weapons tests, and Holocaust memorials; and our willingness to let national parks and heritage sites define nature and history.

Finally, the author that critic Andrew Ross calls "the most sure-footed tour guide you could hope for" surveys how artists are responding to the environmental, cultural, and political issues surrounding contemporary tourism.

-"One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity" by Miwon Kwon
Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art's autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's famous dictum "to remove the work is to destroy the work" is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces.

One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.

Miwon Kwon is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"The Archive without Museums"
by Hal Foster
October volume 77 (Summer 1996), pp. 96-119 (R), "(Post)Modern Polemics", Perspecta 21 (1984), pp. 144-153

"The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century" (October Books) by Hal Foster

In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today.

After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s; Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real -- to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites: If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-garde; it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation -- and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.

The original English edition of this book was published by Lukas & Sternberg in 2001.

Relational Aesthetics
by Nicolas Bourriaud, 1998

Where does our current obsession for interactivity stem from? After the consumer society and the communication era, does art still contribute to the emergence of a rational society?
Nicolas Bourriaud attempts to renew our approach towards contemporary art by getting as close as possible to the artists' works, and by revealing the principles that structure their thoughts: an aesthetic of the inter-human, of the encounter; of proximity, of resisting social formatting.
The aim of his essay is to produce the tools to enable us to understand the evolution of today's art. We meet Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Louis Althusser, Rirkrit Tiravanija or Félix Guattari, along with most of today's practising creative personalities.

-Formes de vie, Bourriaud Nicolas, Edition Denoël 2003

Jürgen Habermas, Borgerlig offentlighet.
— dens fremvekst og forfall, henimot en teori om det borgerlige samfunn.

Fra Bokkilden: Omtale:
Habermas analyserer forholdet mellom offentlighet og privatsfære i den vestlige verden gjennom ulike historiske epoker. Med materiale fra en rekke samfunnsvitenskapelige disipliner drøftes spørsmålet om de vestlige samfunns formelt demokratiske styreform i våre dager har en reell demokratisk funksjon. Han søker også å påvise at offentligheten ikke lenger utgjør noe kritisk prinsipp, samtidig som offentlighetssfæren stadig utvikler seg. Dette er Habermas' doktoravhandling fra 1961. Har litteraturliste og navne- og saksregister. © FS Informasjonstjeneste Bestilles her (Bokkilden)

Orientalismen av Edward W. Said

Sakset fra Bokkilden:
«Dersom orientalistisk viten har noen mening, må det være som påminnelse om kunnskapens forlokkende forsimpling, en hvilken som helst kunnskap, hvor som helst, når som helst.»

Fra Orientalismen - Vestlige oppfatninger av Orienten
Hovedargumentet til Edward W. Said er at Vesten, eller Oksidenten, gjennom tidene har skapt et bilde av Orienten som ikke bygger på faktiske forhold. Orienten fremstilles heller som et vrengebilde av Vesten: Det er noe ullent, fjernt, eksotisk, mystisk, sensuelt, fremmed og farlig, i motsetning til det rasjonelle, kontrollerte og håndgripelige Vesten. Vesten har, argumenterer Said, skapt et skille mellom seg og «den Andre», hvor «den Andre», orientaleren, fremstår som intet annet enn en stereotyp. Orientalismen er Saids hovedverk, og er blitt kalt alt fra polemikk, avhandling, analyse, til representasjon. Fra boken ble publisert i 1978 og frem til i dag har den vært sentral i både litterære, kulturelle og politiske debatter. Den har gitt et uvurderlig bidrag til postkoloniale studier, men også til avdekkingen av rasistiske fordommer i vår egen tid. Til tross for Saids bestrebelser med å gi orientaleren en stemme, er Orientalisme ennå i dag en sørgelig aktuell bok, ikke bare med tanke på konflikten i Midtøsten, men også i forhold til de inngrodde oppfatninger og fordommer som preger private og offentlige rom i vår vestlige kulturkrets.