Into Me/Out of Me

by Klaus Biesenbach (editor), Susan Sontag

Editor and P.S. 1/MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach credits the late Susan Sontag with sparking the idea for this survey of Body and Action art in the course of their conversations about artistic approaches that describe and question the human condition. Into Me / Out of Me gathers work focused on the imagined, descriptive and performative acts of passing into, through and out of the human body--explorations and visualizations of the wet and the dry, the inner and the outer--and the physical exchange of the body with the material world. Spanning over 40 years and featuring an international group of more than 130 artists, it addresses the primordial relationship between the internal and the external in three chapters: -Metabolism- (eating, drinking, excreting); -Reproduction- (intercourse, conception, birth); and -Violence- (shooting, impaling, perforation). Featured works range from Hannah Wilke's unflinching self-portraits in illness to Matthew Barney's performance-based installations to Kara Walker's antebellum figures. Artists include Chris Burden, Valerie Export, Bruce Nauman, Carolee Schneemann, Kiki Smith, Andy Warhol, Vito Acconci, Patty Chang, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Douglas Gordon, Mona Hatoum, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ana Mendieta, Paul McCarthy, John Miller, Frank Moore, Carolee Schneemann, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Marina Abramovic, among many others.

Genres: Art

580 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2007

About the author

Biesenbach founded Kunst-Werke (KW) Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 1991, as well as the Berlin Biennale in 1996, and remains Founding Director of both entities. Under his artistic and executive directorship, KW and the Berlin Biennale were started as self-inventive initiatives and are now federally and state funded institutions.

Biesenbach joined MoMA PS1 as a curator in 1996; the museum's director Alanna Heiss had hired him part-time while allowing him to maintain his directorship in Berlin. In 2004, Biesenbach was appointed as a curator in the MoMA's "Department of Film and Media". He was named Chief Curator of MoMA's newly formed 'Department of Media, in 2006, which was subsequently broadened to the Department of Media and Performance Art, in 2009, to reflect the Museum's increased focus on collecting, preserving, and exhibiting performance art. As Chief Curator of the department, Biesenbach led a range of pioneering initiatives, including the launch of a new performance art exhibition series; an ongoing series of workshops for artists and curators; acquisitions of media and performance art; and the Museum's presentation in 2010 of a major retrospective of the work of Marina Abramović—with whom he was formerly romantically involved.

Reviews

[jesse kamande · Rating 4 out of 5]

mom can you pick me up i’m scared.

[Cleo Gaukrodger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant book in general. I found it really useful towards artist research for my PhD work. This book shows a whole range of difference ways artists work with body apart from just paintings or something that feel stagnant in some ways. It deals with sex, life, death and all the stuff in between, loved reading this