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    Essays on Modern Art: Andy Warhol - Criticisms and Essays on Previously Unseen Art in the Koolhaas Collection
    Essays on Modern Art: Andy Warhol - Criticisms and Essays on Previously Unseen Art in the Koolhaas Collection
    Essays on Modern Art: Andy Warhol - Criticisms and Essays on Previously Unseen Art in the Koolhaas Collection
    Ebook51 pages38 minutes

    Essays on Modern Art: Andy Warhol - Criticisms and Essays on Previously Unseen Art in the Koolhaas Collection

    By Justice Koolhaas

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    About this ebook

    Justice Koolhaas’s Essays on Modern Art are reproduced alongside at least one of each artist’s works that she owned. Unusually, these works were discards; even more unusually, she obtained them on condition that each artist signed a statement disowning them as artworks.
    Her theory work, a refusenikism written in deliberate opacity, is inspired by her collection of art refuse. She unblinkingly grappled with the socially mediated aspects to art production in a technological world while trying to maintain some kind of contact with the personal and bodily aspects to aesthetics that our symbolic reality potentially disavows.
    Straddling Lacan, Saussure and Levi-Strauss, her essay, ‘Warhol’s Difference Engine’, is a full-on verbal rodeo that literally and metaphorically rides roughshod and bareback on the male cult of the cowboy in Warhol’s work. Her ‘non-feminist feminism’ embraces the self-actualising elements from pop art and takes Warhol as an ambivalent philosopher whose originality was in his capacity to define the new by ambivalently fiddling with its copy.
    Most controversially, Koolhaas suggests that covertly hidden within the interstices of the Warholian is a desire to transcend the machinations he overtly celebrated. Beneath his flat surfaces is a sado-masochism that is bivalent in both sympathising with and exploiting the subjects of his gaze.
    C. M. Cohen’s comprehensive interpretations mean that the uninitiated Koolhaas student can pick and mix material from this book to suit their purposes without feeling pressured to grasp everything at once.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJustice Koolhaas
    Release dateNov 30, 2015
    ISBN9781311999528
    Essays on Modern Art: Andy Warhol - Criticisms and Essays on Previously Unseen Art in the Koolhaas Collection
    Author

    Justice Koolhaas

    Born in Bloemfontein in 1940, Justice Koolhaas was raised in Utrecht and Lausanne. Her twin, Patience, died shortly after birth. Justice always felt that her philosophical interests were a search for presences that haunt everyday life beyond the reach of conventional rationality. Her recently discovered oeuvre extends theory in the humanities and arts beyond its existing frontiers and expectations.She came top her class at the Sorbonne. She studied under Roland Barthes and was privately admired and supported by several European intellectuals. Despite this, she found few doors open to her in the academy. Her sense of foreignness became integral to her work, particularly her adherence to writing in Dutch, which kept her out of print, along with other more personal reasons. Since her death in 2011, her family has committed to ensuring that all her work is published posthumously. Its purview hybridises disciplines ranging from philosophy to sociology to anthropology to cultural studies to media studies to her most beloved subject area of all, art. Her span of theorists, writers and artists includes Pierre Bourdieu, Hélène Cixous, Guy Debord, Jacques Derrida, Tracey Emin, Donna Haraway, G.W.F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Franz Kafka, Julia Kristeva, Barbara Kruger, Jean-François Lyotard, Karl Marx, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hannah Wilke, Frank Zappa, and Slavoj Žižek.C.M. Cohen completed his linguistics PhD in 1980. He worked as an interpreter for the U.N. for 23 years before acting as a consultant translator whose clients have included the South African government, the Commonwealth Games committee, the Antarctic Survey, and several mining corporations. He is now retired. His friendship with Koolhaas, along with his professional experience outside academia, bring a deep empathy in his translations and introductions of her highly stylised literary and philosophical legacy.

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      Book preview

      Essays on Modern Art - Justice Koolhaas

      Copyright

      Essays on Modern Art: Andy Warhol

      Justice Koolhaas

      Smashwords Edition.

      Copyright 2015 Justice Koolhaas.

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

      Acknowledgements

      The research and translation for this text was match-funded via the B route: application 1227H/2014.

      The translator would like to, as ever, thank Sofietje and Jan.

      Cover design: D. Janssen.

      ‘Mickey’ circa 1980. Gold leaf on panel.

      Dimensions approx. 120 x 165 cm.

      Table of Contents

      Translator's Introduction

      Warhol's Difference Engine

      Textual Connexivities

      Also by Justice Koolhaas

      Translator's Introduction

      Series Introduction

      It is difficult for today’s students to find source materials that are original enough to give their assignments an edge. There are so many books and so little time. This is especially so in the labyrinthine world of art and its accompanying theories. What can another book add about the artists that form the backbone of art history? The Essays on Modern Art series offers three things: each book is short, discusses a previously unseen artwork, and carries the prestige in presenting a new and startling theorist – Justice Koolhaas.

      Her thought has only recently been made available, and is introduced at length in a previous publication, Creative Theory, Radical Example (Koolhaas 2015). Her art theory has, over five decades, covered mainstream figures and lesser known ones alike. Each of her theoretical essays, introduced by myself, is reproduced alongside at least one of each artist’s works owned by Koolhaas.

      The artworks are from a collection of over fourteen hundred that she amassed between the nineteen sixties and early 2000s. These range from paintings and sculptures to videos and installations. Each was obtained in an unorthodox manner. She used her position as an outsider theorist to ingratiate herself with art professionals and hangers-on, the kind of people who typically accrete around artists once their work begins to gather some commercial and critical momentum. Sometimes this resulted in studio visits that sometimes resulted in her asking about any recent work that had been discarded. The discussion about that discarded work occasionally led to her asking to keep it, but with a proviso. She asked each artist to write a note directly onto the work itself (typically an obscured facet, such as the obverse of a painting) to the effect that the artist disowned the work and wished for it to have no market value.*

      Most refused. Those who agreed will have done so for their own reasons. Either way, her proposition would have fascinated many. She claimed that she

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