MIT Press Teams up with London's Whitechapel Gallery

London’s famous Whitchapel Gallery and the MIT Press announce a new series, Documents of Contemporary Art.  Each volume will cover a single theme, practice, or obsession central to contemporary visual culture and will be a definitive anthology consisting of key writings on major issues in art today.  An internationally-known art historian, curator, critic, or artist will serve as guest editor for each volume, selecting writings that range from foundational texts to freshly made arguments.  The artists and writers included in this series represent diverse perspectives, generations, and voices in contemporary art.

The first two volumes in the series have just arrived—

Participation, edited by Claire Bishop, looks at the phenomenon of participation in art that has been both prevalent and contested since the 1990s.  Artists have increasingly sought to create situations and events that invite spectators to become active participants, in dialogue both their their context and with each other.  The book charts a historical lineage and theoretical framework for this tendency, presented throught the writings or artists, curators, and philosophers from the late 1950s to the present. 

And among art’s most significant developments worldwide since the 1960s has been a turn to the archive—the nextus of images, objects, documents, and traces through which we recall and revisit individual and shared memories and histories.  The Archive, edited by Charles Merewether, collects key writings by influential artists and theorists to explore ways in which the archive has become central in visual culture’s investigations of history, memory, testimony, and identity.

Also, be sure to watch for two new volumes this spring one on the rise of “design-art” and another that charts the shifting relationship between film and photography.