Target with Plaster Casts

In the December 1980 issue of the Italian design magazine Domus, French critic Pierre Restany made public what is perhaps the best-known contemporary votive artwork: Ex voto a Santa Rita by Yves Klein, dedicated in 1961 in the convent of Santa Rita da Caseia in Umbria (fig. 12.1)...

~Like Yvonne Rainer and like Carolee Schneeman, Vito Acconci’s work presents the body’s unintended movements for us to look at and respond to as part of his art’s forms. But Acconci takes the implications of the unintended into less seductive, more repellent territory. Acconci explored a relationship between structure and the...

In 1959, Jasper Johns bought a cheap, spring-loaded window shade and affixed it to a large canvas. After pulling the paper down and tacking it in place, he painted the whole object—in stony black, gray, and white—with his newfound vocabulary of jagged starbursts, broad horizontals, and...