The Conditions of Being Art is the first book to examine the activities of groundbreaking contemporary art galleries Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts, Co. (1983–2004), and the transnational milieu of artists, dealers and critics that surrounded them.

Drawing on the archives of dealers Pat Hearn and Colin de Land—both, independently, legendary players on the New York art scene of the 1980s and ’90s, and one of the great love stories of the art world—this publication illustrates their distinctive artistic practices, significant exhibitions and events, and daily business. Hearn and de Land championed art that challenged the business of running an art gallery; artists like Renée Green and Susan Hiller, Andrea Fraser and Cady Noland, who employed conceptualism and installation, social and institutional critique.

Contributing to the history of exhibitions, institutions and curating, The Conditions of Being Art addresses a significant gap in this literature around experimental commercial spaces in recent art history. This publication is the first book-length critical account of the alternative commercial gallery practices of the 1990s, a moment and a scene that is extremely influential to many of today’s art dealers, curators and artists.

Hearn and de Land’s gallery practices explored new experimental and ethical possibilities within the selling of art, testing the relationship of contemporary art to its markets. In this volume, full-color images, in-depth scholarly investigations and detailed gallery histories vibrantly document how Hearn and de Land tested new notions of what an art gallery could be.

Publisher: CCS Bard; Dancing Foxes Press

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The work of Lee Lozano (1930-1999) is one of the best-kept secrets in today’s contemporary art world. She was a woman artist who established herself and her work in New York in the 1960s in a world dominated by men and then decided to give it all up in the early 1970s and moved to Dallas. Lozano’s work, even in the short period she was active in New York, encompassed, and in many ways mastered, a wide range of styles from text works to abstract paintings, drawings to everyday activities declared art. She knew and collaborated with some of the most famous names of minimalism and conceptualism, but she always held herself a little apart. She fought for her own idealisms, matched it with her disillusionment and questioned feminism even as she made drawings of the absurdities of a patriarchal world where tools, machines, weapons and money dominate the imagination. Her later Language Pieces can now be understood as some of the most radical expressions of the conceptual movement at that time.

This publication assembles images from her work and archives to gether with a series of texts that outline her development as an artist from the 1950s and focus on particular activities or reminiscences. There is also the partial transcript of a unique recording of a lecture Lee Lozano gave at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1971 shortly before she left the art world.

In total, this book sheds light on a fascinating individual artist and also adds another point of view to the rich, complex story of the NewYork art scene in the 1960s and its continued resonance in our culture today.

Author: Adam Szymczyk (Ed.)

Publisher: Schawbe AG / Kunsthalle Basel

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