Tate Papers no.32 Autumn 2019

Five articles in this issue seek to reassess the category of ‘American art’ in relation to provincialism and transnationalism, highlighting the ways in which the idea of American art has bestowed authority on some practices while serving to marginalise others. The articles in this group look at the critical reception of US art in the French journal Tel Quel; a travelling exhibition to Australia organised by the Museum of Modern Art; Clement Greenberg and the Washington Color School; Los Angeles artists and the idea of ‘the frontier’; and Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Physichromies series. Also in this issue are two papers on the work of Joseph Beuys, extending the grouping devoted to the German artist published in Tate Papers no.31: one looks at the artist’s participation in the 1974 exhibition Art into Society – Society into Art, while the other examines Beuys’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s ideas on performativity. The two articles that complete the issue are an exploration of Nam June Paik’s early video works and a survey of experimental Philippine art and discourse in the 1960s and 1970s.