Echoes: Contemporary Art at the Age of Endless Conclusions

by Francesco Bonami

A selection of works by over 70 cutting-edge artists, combined with fascinating essays by thought-provoking writers, this book charts the drastic change of the artist's role within social and cultural structures as the threshold of the millennium approaches.


"Echoes" defines the current state of art as evolving under hyperevents, which affect mass popular attention, and the multi-modes of social change that are the frame of our present state. The cover photo suggests the state of awareness I had when reading the essays. Thinking always of the many individuals who attempt to define art in the nineties as post-conceptual, post-performance, post-identidy politics, post-multicultural, post-colonial/imperial, post-economic apocalypse of the 80's artmarket, and all of the social/economic factors that compose our cultural context as self conscious cultural workers. All the essays in "Echoes" share a need to find a way out of the dead zone which art currently inhabits--they seek to point to works that are moving through the cultural gridlock of modernism's attention to an exclusive formalism in the visual arts and the post-modern End-ism of the recent past. Artists such as Karen Kilimnik who uses popular culture icons as elements for metaphorical situations that open a narrative/identity play of the shared dialogue with the post-media viewer's "interactive" status of 90's culture...(Diane Ludin

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Francesco Bonami is an Italian art curator and writer who is currently Honorary Director of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. He lives in Milan and Manhattan, New York.