Books by Thomas McEvilley
Art, Love, Friendship: Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Together & Apart
In 1975 Marina Abramovic and Uwe Laysiepen met in Amsterdam, fell in love, and began to collaborate as performance artists. By the time their personal relationship ended twelve years later they had become two of the most famous performance artists in the world. Thomas McEvilley met them in 1983; they became close friends, and ever since he has been able to follow the development of their career together, and their careers apart, over the past twenty-seven years. Art, Love Friendship is divided into three sections. The first documents Marina Abramovic and Ulay together, including their three-month-long Great Wall Walk in 1988. The second section features Ulay's career before meeting Marina -- when, for example, he briefly "stole" Germany's most famous painting in broad daylight -- as well as his later work as a conceptual photographer. The final section features a long interview with Marina and essays about her work of the 1990s and the 2000s. The book includes 65 photographs presented throughout the text, and features a dramatic opening section of "Relation Works." The book coincides with Marina Abramovic's major retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
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Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism
From roughly 1965 to 1980, Conceptual Art and Performance Art took center stage throughout the western world, introducing new and complex ideas to the practice of contemporary art which reverberate to this day. Thomas McEvilley's The Triumph of Anti-Art not only explains the origins of these controversial and compelling art forms, but also uncovers many relatively unrecognized yet indisputably important artists, American and European. He guides the reader through a thicket of seemingly arcane meanings of these nonrepresentational art form, and brings clarity to the intentions and agendas of these artists, as well as to their real world contexts. The long-term effects of "anti-art," and the development of the pluralistic situation known as post-Modernism, are described in vivid detail. From the Greek philosopher Diogenes, through the 19th-century German romantic tradition, to the modern art critic Clement Greenberg, McEvilley traces philosophical ideas and political impulses that temporarily led to a toppling of painting and sculpture in the decades right after World War II. Following an overview of Modernism and Marcel Duchamp's influence, a chapter on Yves Klein sets the state for surveys of Conceptual Art and its practitioners, including Bernar Venet, John Baldessari, and Francis Alys. McEvilley then gives equal focus to Performance Art with chapters on Andy Warhol, Brian O'Doherty, and Marina Abramovic and Ulay, among others. At the end of the volume the "triumph" of "anti-art" is explored in depth, as are the origins of the terms, practices, and politics of global art history.
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The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism
From roughly 1965 to 1980, Conceptual Art and Performance Art took center stage throughout the western world, introducing new and complex ideas to the practice of contemporary art which reverberate to this day. Thomas McEvilley's The Triumph of Anti-Art not only explains the origins of these controversial and compelling art forms, but also uncovers many relatively unrecognized yet indisputably important artists, American and European. He guides the reader through a thicket of seemingly arcane meanings of these nonrepresentational art form, and brings clarity to the intentions and agendas of these artists, as well as to their real world contexts. The long-term effects of anti-art and the development of the pluralistic situation known as post-Modernism, are described in vivid detail. From the Greek philosopher Diogenes, through the 19th-century German romantic tradition, to the modern art critic Clement Greenberg, McEvilley traces philosophical ideas and political impulses that temporarily led to a toppling of painting and sculpture in the decades right after World War II. Following an overview of Modernism and Marcel Duchamp's influence, a chapter on Yves Klein sets the state for surveys of Conceptual Art and its practitioners, including Bernar Venet, John Baldessari, and Francis Alys. McEvilley then gives equal focus to Performance Art with chapters on Andy Warhol, Brian O'Doherty, and Marina Abramovic and Ulay, among others. At the end of the volume the triumph of anti-art is explored in depth, as are the origins of the terms, practices, and politics of global art history.
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Yves the Provocateur: Yves Klein and Twentieth-Century Art
For seven years, from 1956 to 1962, a young French artist electrified the European art world with visual, conceptual and performance art works far ahead of their time. His rise was wildly celebrated by some as the appearance of a prophetic genius, and derisively dismissed by others as scandalous nonsense. His monochrome paintings, body art works, fire paintings, conceptual exhibitions and music, and monumental public space works threatened to upend the very categories of art, in both Europe and America. Indeed, after his tragically premature death in 1962, some of the most far-reaching transformations in contemporary art would follow directly in his wake. But by the 1970s his reputation seemed headed for oblivion, until in 1977 a young classics scholar at Rice University, Thomas McEvilley, proposed Klein for a retrospective show to Dominique deMenil, then director of the Rice gallery, and wrote several texts about Klein that would transform our understanding of Yves Klein's aesthetics. The project grew to involve major institutions, resulting in 1982 with exhibitions in Houston, New York, Paris and Chicago. Virtually overnight Yves Klein's art reentered the art canon. Coincidentally, the career of an important critic was launched. Yves the Provocateur provides the "skeleton key" to clearly examine the full dimensions of Klein's accomplishment. In two opening essays, McEvilley briefly surveys and places Klein's art into context. Then, in the centerpiece essay -- which amounts to a miniature critical biography bearing all the best features of a novella -- he traces the formative and crucial events in Klein's life. Finally, he describes Klein's intellectual development, demonstrating how Klein embedded and parodied in his work the philosophical system of a particular form of Rosicrucianism. An extensive chronology is appended at the end. Yves the Provocateur collects Thomas McEvilley's writings on Klein which rejuvenated Klein's stature and hitherto have only been available in journals and hard-to-find exhibition catalogues. Together they constitute an important document in contemporary art history. The publication of this book is timed to coincide with the major Klein retrospective at the Hirshhorn Gallery in Washington, DC on May 16, 2010, and later at the Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, on October 23.
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Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (WALKER ART CENT)
by Kevin Young, Robert Storr, Thomas McEvilley, Philippe Vergne, Sander Gilman, Yasmil Raymond
Kara Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained international recognition for her room-sized tableaux, which depict historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence and subjugation and are made using the paradoxically genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the antebellum American South, Walker's compositions play off of stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters, mistresses and slave men, women and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation. Over the years, the artist has used drawing, painting, colored-light projections, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales of romance, sadism, oppression and liberation. Her scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Deploying an acidic sense of humor, Walker examines the dialectics of pleasure and danger, guilt and fulfillment, desire and fear, race and class. This landmark publication, which is sure to win international design awards, accompanies Walker's first major American museum survey. It features critical essays by Philippe Vergne, Sander L. Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr and Kevin Young, as well as an illustrated lexicon of recurring themes and motifs in the artist's most influential installations by Yasmil Raymond, more than 200 full-color images, an extensive exhibition history and bibliography, and a 36-page insert by the artist.
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Bert Long: The Artist's Journey
Review ". . . a must for a fully understanding of this larger than life, almost mythic figure." (Paper City 2016-12-31) Product Description Bert Long: The Artist’s Journey encapsulates the life and art of Bert L. Long Jr. (1940–2013). Thomas McEvilley opens the book by describing his chance encounter with Long on a Houston street in 1980. An African American artist who grew up in Houston’s Fifth Ward, Long was an energetic and enthusiastic artist who was trained as an executive chef and came to his art through his growing ability to carve ice and make decorative food in the hospitality industry. Long’s work gained a wider audience as his reputation grew in the burgeoning Houston art scene of the 1980s and 1990s through alliances with many friends, chief among them his fellow sculptor James Surls. Long made hundreds of paintings and sculptures, including ice sculptures, and took tens of thousands of photographs during his lifetime. He had the opportunity to travel extensively, including trips to both Rome and the countryside of Spain, where he lived and worked.Bert L. Long Jr.’s work, which straddles the worlds of fine art and outsider art, can be found in many collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; Fabric Workshop Museum, Philadelphia; Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont; Jack S. Blanton Museum, Austin; and others in the United States and Europe. About the Author Thomas McEvilley (1939–2013) was an art critic, poet, novelist, scholar, and art historian at Rice University and the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He was an expert in the fields of Greek and Indian culture and the history of religion and philosophy. He published books and essays on Greek and Indian poetry, philosophy, religion, and contemporary art and culture.
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The Arimaspia: Or Songs for the Rainy Season: Numbered 118/250
"The Arimaspia" is Thomas McEvilley's second version of postmodern Menippean satire: a wild, digressive, fantastical narrative, with shifting points of view, interludes of lyric poetry, and intermittent satire. The title "Arimaspia" comes from a lost ancient road trip poem of that title by Aristeas of Proconnesus, from the seventh century BCE. Herodotus says that the Arimaspi were a one-eyed people from Scythia who fought an ongoing battle with the griffons to capture their hoard of gold. This book is the site of that battle. The Arimaspia is a work of grand collage and radical pastiche, in which McEvilley's own poems, translations and narrative are hard to distinguish from the cascade of borrowed materials. Stunning in its archaic originality, The Arimaspia is a work of extraordinary learning, steeped in classical references that go well beyond the ken of most readers. At a certain point, the dance of the sources gives way to an immanent experience of refamiliarization, in which long-elided classical works come to life. "The Arimaspia" is being published in a first edition limited to 250 numbered copies.
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