Houses To Die In and Other Essays on Art

Art critical essays focusing on artworks that, in various ways, convey a sense of unheroic "trouble."

The undead of contemporary painting, avant-garde populism, photography courting stupidity, fraught networking, synthetic atmospheres, displaced abstractions, and the mediation of pain: these are among the subjects treated in this collection of essays by art historian and critic Ina Blom. Written over the past twenty years and drawing on Blom’s familiarity with the contemporary art scene as well as the archives of twentieth-century avant-garde art, these texts share a pull towards artistic projects that are not redemptive or exemplary but that rather convey a sense of—often unheroic—trouble. Leaning into ambivalence as a methodology of criticism, Blom takes a particular interest in the detours, doubts, and difficulties that run alongside avant-garde art’s more constructively hopeful desires for transformative innovation and change.

Ina Blom is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo and Wigeland Visiting Professor at the Dept. of Art History, University of Chicago. Her fields of research are modernism/avant-garde studies and contemporary art with a particular focus on the relationship between art, technology, media, and politics. She is also an art critic, contributing to journals such as Artforum, Afterall, Texte zur Kunst, and Parkett. Blom is the author of, among other titles, On the Style Site: Art, Sociality and Media Culture and The Autobiography of Video: The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (both published by Sternberg Press).