The essays assembled in this volume were all written during the past twenty years or so—a period in which Ina Blom pursued art critical writing alongside more academic work and when the boundaries between the two genres were at times deliberately blurred.

In her innovative take on early video art, Ina Blom considers the widespread notion that video technology was endowed with lifelike memory and agency. Blom documents, among other things, video’s emergence through the framework of painting, its identification with biological life, its exploration of the outer limits of technical and mental time control, and its construction of new realms of labor and collaboration.

While style has all but disappeared from art historical and art critical discourse, artistic practice since the 1960’s onwards has seemed increasingly focused on the stylistics of the life-environment, the way in which everyday life itself is formed, designed or stylized. This development calls for a new reading of the relationship between art and the question of style.

The essays assembled in this volume were all written during the past twenty years or so—a period in which Ina Blom pursued art critical writing alongside more academic work and when the boundaries between the two genres were at times deliberately blurred.

This book brings together contributions from the eponymous conference, all of which seek to speculate on the reasons as to why, since the turn of the millennium, we have encountered so many artworks that tend to reconcile Minimalism with suggestions of the human figure.

First presented in lecture format at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, these essays reflect the wealth of the exchange that exists between theoretical writing and artistic thinking, sharing the fascination that each of these authors has with both the work of an artist and how this work functions in relation to larger contexts and broader ideas.