Four Honest Outlaws

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Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon

Michael Fried

View Inside Format: Hardcover with DVD
Price: $45.00

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In this strongly argued and characteristically original book, Michael Fried considers the work of four contemporary artists--video artist and photographer Anri Sala, sculptor Charles Ray, painter Joseph Marioni, and video artist and intervener in movies Douglas Gordon. He shows how their respective projects are best understood as engaging in a variety of ways with some of the core themes and issues associated with high modernism, and indeed with its prehistory in French painting and art criticism from Diderot on. Four Honest Outlaws thus continues the author's exploration of the critical and philosophical territory opened up by his earlier book, the magisterial Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. It presents a vision of the most important contemporary art as not only not repudiating modernism in the name of postmodernism in any of the latter's many forms and manifestations, but also actually as committed to dialectically renewing certain crucial qualities and values that modernism and premodernism brought to the fore, above all those of presentness and anti-theatricality.

Four Honest Outlaws takes its title from a line in a Bob Dylan song, "To live outside the law you must be honest," meaning in this case that each of the four artists has found his own unsanctioned path to extraordinary accomplishment, in part by defying the ordinary norms and expectations of the contemporary art world. Filled with stunning images throughout and accompanied by a DVD illustrating works by Sala and Gordon discussed in its pages, Four Honest Outlaws is sure to provoke controversy even as it makes a dramatic bid to further transform the terms in which the art of the present should be understood.

Michael Fried is J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and the History of Art, Johns Hopkins University. His many books of art criticism, art history, literary criticism, and poetry include Absorption and Theatricality; Realism, Writing, Disfiguration; Courbet's Realism; and Art and Objecthood.

"Four Honest Outlaws is light-footed and groundbreaking, combative and generous, just the perfect book to introduce a new sense of involvement, sincerity, and conceptual clarity into today's writing on contemporary art."—Ralph Ubl, University of Chicago

“The bulk of the book is made up of four essays on the work of respectively, Anri Sala, Charles Ray, Joseph Marioni, and Douglas Gordon. These are preceded by an excellent and informative introduction, which concisely maps out the trajectory of Fried’s highly tenacious thought.”—Chris Sharp, Art Review

"Fried's style is sprightly and displays an unquenchable curiosity that makes him seem—in the best possible way—more like a tour guide than the author of a 245-page work of criticism. Though his theories can be controversial, the fact that he heartily opens himself up to disagreement shows that he, a true modernist, practices what he preaches."—Sarah E. Fensom, Art & Antiques

“Mr. Fried’s accounts of works by these artists are excellent, sometimes inspiring models for close looking and finely grained analysis.”—Ken Johnson, New York Times

“Fried at his best [is] sober, responsive to particular features of the work, and, best of all, deeply serious about the philosophical significance of the arts.”—Brendan Boyle, Los Angeles Review of Books

ISBN: 9780300170535
Publication Date: September 6, 2011

224 pages, 6 3/4 x 9
70 color + 9 b/w illus.

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