Not So Simple Pleasures by Dana Friis-Hansen
4to. pp. 32. b/w illustrations. artist's biographies & bibliographies. paperback (fine condition). [Cambridge]: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1990.
Published in conjunction with an exhibition.
ISBN-10: 0938437348 / ISBN-13: 9780938437345
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Artists include: Judie Bamber, Michael Banicki, John Currin, Ronald Jones, Ken Lum, Alexis Rockman, Joyce Scott, Andres Serrano, Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz & Masami Teraoka.
This exhibition investigates painting, sculpture, crafts, and photography by ten artists from across the United States and Canada who uses various subtle strategies to embed contentious content within an attractive object or image.
With its selection of pleasant landscapes and nature scenes, portraits of sweet teenage girls, religious art in rich hues, exotic Edo-period Japanese scenes, and luxurious abstract bronzes, the art in (not so) Simple Pleasures uses the unlikely lure of pleasure to wrestle art back from popular expectations of entertainment and decoration to assert intellectual, social, and political possibilities.