Conceptualism and Other Fictions reveals the aesthetic range, critical wit, and literary sensibility of Argentine artist Eduardo Costa. This collection brings together essays, letters, interviews, reviews, scripts, and other texts published in Spanish and English over the past fifty-five years.
Costa is a painter, also known for his sound, video, and textual works. But more than anything else, he is a “creator of genres,” as art historian María José Herrera has called him. Fashion fictions, street works, tape poems, talking paintings, volumetric paintings: these are just a few of the art forms that he has invented or helped invent over the past half century. Costa’s innovative works have emerged from an intense reflection on the forms and materials of modern and contemporary art, as shown in his essays on Duchamp and on his friends Scott Burton, Ana Mendieta, and Hélio Oiticica.
The writings collected here reconstruct Costa’s creative development from the early 1960s until the present, and they show the importance of dialogue, collaboration, and history for this key figure in global conceptualism.
About The Authors
The artist Eduardo Costa was born in Buenos Aires in 1940. He studied painting and literature and was an active participant in the multimedia experiments in the arts that centered on the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires. From 1981 to 2003, he lived in New York, where he exhibited his work and wrote for Art in America, Flash Art, and other magazines. Since 2003, he has lived in Buenos Aires. His work is in the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, Museu de Arte Moderna do Río de Janeiro, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires), Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, and the Fundación Jumex, among others.