Pippa Garner’s Better Living Catalog, originally published in 1982, takes the form of a mail order catalog featuring clever and whimsical inventions that parody consumer goods while simultaneously critiquing America’s obsession with ingenuity, efficiency, leisure, and comfort. These works, which were made as prototypes and photographed for the publication, take the form of improbable accessories, clothing, footwear, home appliances, and office gadgets.

For example, the “Reactiononometer,” a portable wristband, instantly measures social success, while the “Digital Diet Loafers” display the wearer’s weight with every step. If the “Munch-o-Matic” reduces deskwork interruptions by flinging a snack right into the user’s mouth, other items promise financial solvency (the controlled cash flow “Autowallet”), sustainable waste management, or mess-free companionship (the “Pet-a-Vision” TV console). The artist asserts that all of the products in the book are “absolute necessities for contemporary survival.”

The Better Living Catalog was a pop hit when it was published, earning Garner spots on nighttime TV talk shows and attention from magazines like Vogue and Rolling Stone. In a meme-filled culture, the works still resonate today, finding their analog in widely-circulating consumer products, and—in the case of the “High Heel Skates”—even appearing unattributed in the runway collection of a major luxury fashion brand.

A few years after the Better Living Catalog was published, Garner began her gender transition, which she has characterized as an artistic project that draws conceptual parallels to the altered consumer goods she has continued to create since the 1970s. The artist’s practice has always been about hacking—gender hacking, she stated, was “an excellent premise for maverick conceptual art and diametrically opposed to anything I’d ever done.”

Many of the prototypes Garner created for the publication were repurposed or recycled, making this previously rare gem of an artist book one of the artist’s few works to now be widely available.

This is a bilingual catalog of the eponymous exhibition at GAMeC Galleria dArte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo.

The exhibition illustrates the sculptural development of an artist who is known above all to the public as a painter. In fact Cucchi has never ceased to produce sculptures, or paintings that contain sculptural or indeed installational forms. Many of his earliest works expressed three-dimensionality, a spatial quality that is also apparent in his painting and drawing. He pays heed to space, consequently, his images are never flat, always being placed in a three-dimensional void. Having his output rooted in sculpture means that his works enjoy a degree of originality compared with the trends that were predominant in the late 1970s and distinguish themselves from the new purely pictorial work being done at the moment. In this way he keeps alive the experimentalism typical of the avant-gardes: his installations are made from more diverse materials, placed freely in the exhibition space, and used as supports for his painted, sculpted or drawn images. Seen from his standpoint, the exhibition at GAMeC has been conceived and will be laid out as a large installation, a single large work of art made up of many small but great works.

This catalog includes a text by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio. This was the first catalog devoted to Cucchi’s sculpture and will feature not just the works on display but also the large body of sculptural works that the artist has produced over his artistic career.

This is a catalog of exhibition, The Three Prophets: Stanley Fisher, Sam Goodman and Boris Lurie. The exhibition will present work by the three founders of the NO!art movement. This will be the first exhibition in Los Angeles to include these three revolutionary artists together, with the majority of this work never having been shown in LA. The NO!art movement was founded in 1959 in New York City by Fisher, Goodman and Lurie as a reaction to the commercialization of the art market that was just picking up steam in relationship to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Looking through the work of these three men, one is also impressed with their ability to express the pain and struggle of their lives. The approximate dates of the movement are 1959-1964. There were many artists involved with NO!, including John Fischer, Al D’Arcangelo, Gloria Graves, Wolf Vostell, Yayoi Kusama, Lil Piccard, Dorothy Gillepsie, Guenter Brus, Ferro, and Isser Aranovici (to name a few).

As the protagonist of his own films, Dutch video and performance artist Guido van der Werve makes great physical demands upon himself. His works chart approaches to the experience of self and the world by staging an existentialist competition with himself. However, he not only documents the realisation of the conceived events; this documentation is also taken as a starting point from which to condense them into complex narratives about physical endurance, struggling with (one’s own) nature, the passage of time, and the uncontrollable dynamics of chance.

This is a catalog of the exhibition NOT complacent: Boris Lurie in Mexico at el Museo Nacional de las Culturas del Mundo (MNCM).

After surviving the Holocaust, the Russian-American artist BorisLurie (1924-2008) developed a work in which he poured out his memories of that event and, once installed in New York City, he founded one of the artistic movements that they criticized. the trivialization and mercantilism of American art called “NO!art”.

The # exhibition “NOT complacent: Boris Lurie in Mexico” traces his career

This catalog accompanies Lumina, Ritsue Mishima’s first solo presentation in New York. On view in Chelsea from September 13 through October 26, 2019, the exhibition featured new blown glass sculptures and vessels by the Japanese artist. Textured and multidimensional, her work reflects and manipulates light, simultaneously illuminating their settings and becoming embedded within the surroundings.

Oscar Tuazon: Live, published in conjunction with the 2014 exhibition Alone In An Empty Room at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, is the second major book from this American artist. Composed of two volumes, the first volume in this artist’s book/exhibition catalogue concentrates on Tuazon’s major exhibition of new sculptural works at Museum Ludwig. A full-scale reproduction of fragments of the artist’s Los Angeles house grafted onto the architecture of the museum, Alone In An Empty Room collapsed two spaces together, producing a unique third space. This volume provides extensive documentation of this project, from the artist’s preliminary sketches through installation. It also includes new essays by Philipp Kaiser, Anna Brohm, and Antek Walczak, and a wide-ranging conversation between Tuazon, Miwon Kwon, and Nico Machida on the practice of sculpture, architecture, and art.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Larry Clark: Kiss the past Hello at Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (8 October 2010 - 2 January 2011).

The catalog is a box which contains a poster and two soft cover books with texts by Fabrice Hergott, Sebastien Gokalp, Jim Lewis, Thea Weistrech, Mike Kelley and Dominique Baque.

In 1977 Frank Moore took a freighter from Montreal to Santander, Spain. He traveled through Spain, France, and Morocco, finally settling in Paris, where he obtained a residency in the Cité des Arts. Upon his return to New York, Moore began a decade-long involvement with modern dance, theater, film, and video that paralleled his development as a painter. The increasing devastation of the AIDS crisis through the eighties profoundly and irrevocably transformed his life and work. His work was included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial and is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Albright Knox Art Gallery.

Text by Robert Gluck

"Stivers takes us into alcoholic twilight. Shuddering exiles in watery purgatory, the human figures as well as forests, clouds, plants, works of art and even architecture seem never actually to have existed. . . Each photograph visualizes the anguished lament of the current that runs through him. . . . All of this mirrors his dream books and journals, where the trials of actual experience and his mind's nocturnal dream machinery are indistinguishable. Stivers's pictures are figments of his material philosophy of escape." — Eugenia Parry

This is the first significant publication to explore the output of Matt Keegan, the New York-based artist known for his work across mediums, as well as independent publishing including the acclaimed editioned art journal North Drive Press. This monograph expands on a recent solo exhibition by the artist at Rogaland Kunstsenter; Stavanger, Norway, titled “Portable Document Format.” The show was organized as an idiosyncratic retrospective, with Keegan remaking sculptures dating from 2006 to 2015, initially fabricated in Sheetrock and steel, in cardboard. Like the exhibition, the publication serves both as a project and a reference for the artist’s work.

Essays by Tom McDonough and John Miller theorize Keegan’s production, while interviews with Sara VanDerBeek and Anna Craycroft underscore the artist’s ongoing engagement with his peer group. Furthered by contributions from colleagues Uri Aran, Leslie Hewitt and James Richards, situated alongside full-color installation photos and reproductions of work from the past decade, Matt Keegan: OR provides a solid introduction and layered overview of the artist’s multifarious practice.

Photography and family have been in dialogue for Geoffrey Biddle most of his life. He uniquely mediates and meditates on circles of relation, love and care through the camera’s eye. In this long-awaited memoir, Biddle narrates his photographs with a frank and moving account of surviving his wife's illness and death as a single father. Rock In A Landslide begins with the romance between Biddle and noted sculptor Mary Ann Unger, two artists who first met as picture researchers at Magnum Photos in mid 1970s New York City. He recounts their charged partnership, their parallel creative practice, and the East Village factory space they reclaimed as both home and shared studio. Their “Great Collaboration” was daughter Eve whose joyous birth was soon tempered by Unger’s breast cancer diagnosis and thirteen-year journey of treatment and recurrence. Biddle now edits and frames his images with the clarifying distance of time — making sense of the immediacy and tidal emotions enshrined in the photographs, revelatory of what so many families experience with both fear and determination.

This is a catalog for the exhibition Boris Lurie NO! at the Janco Dada Museum from June 25 to November 23, 2016.

This is a catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition New Work: Christopher Wool at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from July 6 to September 3, 1989 as part of the series by New Work to show work by younger and established artists.

"I want to make images that have open, narrative qualities, enough to suggest ideas about human limits. I want there to be a combination of the past juxtaposed with the modern. I use nature to symbolize the search, saving a tree, watering the earth. In this fabricated world, strange clouds of smog float by; there are holes in the sky. These mythic images mirror our world, where nature is domesticated, controlled, and destroyed. Through my work I explore technology and a poetry of existence. These can be very heavy, overly didactic issues to convey in art, so I choose to portray them through a more theatrically absurd approach." — Robert ParkeHarrison

Burson's catalogued work can be divided into three distinct phases. Between 1979 and 1991 she created computer-generated images of fantastical faces: composites, aged portraits, and digitally manipulated facial anomalies. From 1991 to 1995 she made photographic portraits of what she calls "special faces," children and adults whose appearances have been altered by disease, nature, or circumstance. From 1996 to the present, she has been engaged in a range of projects that interlace her natural penchant for the fantastical, her paradoxical relationship with science, and an awareness of the spiritual connections between all living things. In each of these bodies of work, Burson has gone against the grain of technological change. Her early work with computers preceded her later "straight" photography, whereas many photographers have in recent years integrated the computer into their image-making process. Her current production combines these two strategies, with a twist.

Essay by Michael L. Sand

"As the sun fell in the west, Grímsey seemed to emit a vibration, a faint buzzing that can only be felt at certain times in that far-removed place. Its tune, persistent and dense, wove through living rooms and careened over the harbor like a slow pull on a cello. It’s a pulse that can only be sensed, if even for a fleeting moment, during periods of change. The first time, for a young boy, with his father on a fishing boat. Or the loss of a brother, his memory now living in photographs and within the folds of a sweater tucked away in a closet. Or, perhaps, the first sunset alone at the northernmost tip of the island, a place the locals call The Foot. A swooping hook of land that curves down to the water, revealing caves that always seem to be whispering—telling, with a slow exhale, the secrets of the island.”

In collages and paintings, American artist Boris Lurie (1924–2008) challenged and interrogated the status of the work of art in a capitalist economy. This is the most substantial overview of his defiant art works.

This is a catalog published in conjunction with exhibition Luhring Augustine: 25 Years.

Among the works included in 25 Years are Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather, 1993, a series of two self-portrait busts made of chocolate and soap; Joel Sternfeld’s iconic McLean, Virginia, December, 1978, from his American Prospects series; Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (Black Bed), 1991; Cady Noland’s Crate of Beer, 1989; Christopher Wool’s Minor Mishap II, 2001; and the cover of Larry Clark’s 1983 book Teenage Lust. Many of the works in the exhibition are emblematic of milestones in the artists’ careers. For example, a meticulously-staged large-scale photograph by Gregory Crewdson referencing the Shakespearean character Ophelia, which later became the cover of his book Twilight in 2003; Yasumasa Morimura’s Angels Descending a Staircase, 1991, which illustrates the artist’s pioneering use of photographic manipulation; and a 1992 self-portrait by Martin Kippenberger, with whom the gallery maintained a long relationship and who was featured in solo shows at Luhring Augustine in New York and Los Angeles.

Steven Leiber (1957–2012) was a pioneering art dealer, collector, and gallerist, focused on the dematerialized art practices of the 1960s and 1970s. As an expert in the then-nascent field of artist archives and ephemera, in 1987 he opened Steven Leiber Basement. He was an important resource for numerous scholars, curators, and other enthusiasts, with a focus on the integral role of ephemera and documentation within conceptual art and other avant-garde movements.

Across 252 pages, this book documents the full set of 52 dealer catalogs produced by Steven Leiber between 1992–2010. His reputation spread via these unique volumes that paid homage to historic publications and multiples, including Wallace Berman’s Semina journal and the exhibition catalog Documenta V (1972), and included works by John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Ray Johnson, Lucy Lippard, Allan Kaprow, Yayoi Kusama, Claes Oldenburg, Lawrence Weiner, and many more.

Inspired by Leiber’s often humorous borrowing for his catalog designs, the book’s format references Sol Lewitt’s Autobiography and includes an essay and contextual notes by David Senior.

Additional contributors include Ann Butler, Christophe Cherix, Marc Fischer, Adam Michaels, Tom Patchett, David Platzker, Marcia Reed, Lawrence Rinder, and Robin Wright.

Jeremy Moon: Starlight Hour, published by Luhring Augustine, is the first comprehensive monograph of the artist’s work. The publication presents a chronology of Moon’s paintings, sculptures, and works on paper as well as illuminating and in-depth scholarly essays by Clarrie Wallis, Matthew Jeffrey Abrams, and Sam Cornish. A personal reflection written by Moon’s friend and fellow artist Phillip King is also reproduced along with a 1973 interview with the artist by Barry Martin. An illustrated timeline offers an intimate view into Moon’s personal relationships as well as his professional encounters over the course of his life and career.

As the starting point for all his paintings and drawings, Johannes Kahrs uses photos culled from the mass media, advertisements, film stills, and sometimes images from his own photographic archive. Through the use of various pictorial treatments including shifting tones, blurring, cropping, repositioning, fragmenting and erasing, Kahrs abstracts and ambiguates his subjects, while echoes of the original source image remain visible. Disassociated from their original context, any explicit meaning or narrative connected with each subject is suspended – the viewer is left guessing about what exactly is being portrayed and why.

In works like Therapy (stich) (2004), a close-up view of a male torso is presented. The subject has been “beheaded” out of the composition, and the edges of his body blurred into a deep black ground. Through a shift of perspective, the subject in Untitled (2005) also appears to be headless and out-of-focus. In both paintings, Kahrs renders his figure in a fleshy, carnal, bruise-toned palette. The images are imbued with a raw and intense physicality – a sensation of eroticism is mixed with violence.

Published by Prestel Inc. in association with Luhring Augustine, this book is a comprehensive overview of Michelangelo Pistoletto's Minus Objects. Four years after his iconic mirror paintings catapulted him to international acclaim, Pistoletto took an abrupt left turn with his series, the Minus Objects. Comprised of 28 disparate objects—an oversize cardboard rose; an industrial lamp casting green light; a minimalist iron sculpture—the Minus Objects break with the notion of a signature style and are symbolic of infinite creative possibilities. As an ensemble, it minimizes the role of authorship, permitting each enigmatic object to speak for itself as autonomous and self-sufficient.

Pistoletto is one of Italy’s most important and influential artists, and this book celebrates the creation of the Minus Objects as a radical turning point in postwar sculpture and conceptual art. The installation is represented in double-page spreads and the entire volume is designed to appear as a discrete object itself. Along with Pistoletto’s original artist statement and transcripts of conversations about his work, this volume brings together critical analyses from some of the leading voices of the contemporary art world. Together, the images and texts in this book serve to position the Minus Objects as a work of stunning originality and historical significance.

Contributions from Roland Augustine, Carlos Basualdo, Germano Celant, Jenni Lomax, Ulrich Loock, Lawrence R. Luhring, Peter Pakesch, and Christian Rattemeyer.

This is a catalog for the exhibition Boris Lurie: NO!art at Galerie Odile Ouizeman in 2015.

Boris Lurie (July 18, 1924 – January 7, 2008) was an American artist and writer. He co-founded the NO!Art movement which calls for socially and politically involved art that would resist and combat the forces of the market.

This book is a chronological series of father/daughter self-portraits by photographer Geoffrey Biddle. It begins with Eve's birth and concludes twenty-two years later after the death from cancer of his wife and her mother, artist Mary Ann Unger. Biddle writes directly to Eve in brief accompanying texts that illuminate sweet, happy details of their lives and acknowledge the emotional strain of Unger’s diagnosis and long battle to stay alive. Eve and Me was conceived as a gift from father to daughter, testimony to their shared experience and singular bond. It traverses their closest years, from city playgrounds to country fields, without and within the shadow of illness and loss. “I put myself on both sides of Eve and Me. Telling our story this way gave me clarity and a measure of control that catastrophic illness and daily parenting withhold.” By the end of this companion volume to Biddle's memoir Rock In A Landslide, the circle of life issues new chapters when both Eve and her father find love and he hints at a future with “our blended family at one table....and I get to take pictures."

Conversations brings together a broad range of dialogues between author Jan Tumlir and artist Jorge Pardo, which span a period of 20 years, beginning in 1999. They encompass contemporary art, design, publishing, and music, and connect the varied contexts of Los Angeles and Mérida, Mexico, where they took place. The result is a story of a unique intellectual friendship that has defined both of their thinking and practice.

Describing his work as “shaping space” Jorge Pardo has made work that moves freely across the notional disciplines of art, architecture, and design throughout his over thirty-year career. His constructions range from a single light sculpture, to paintings, rooms or an assembly of buildings that combine all the individual elements of his artistic creation in the mode of the Gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art.” His work contends with distinctions of private and public space, while calling to mind references as diverse as the Light and Space movement, Land art, modernist design and the color, flora and fauna of his home in Mérida, Mexico.

Jan Tumlir is an art writer and teacher, who lives and works in Los Angeles. He is a contributing editor for the art journal X-TRA, and his writing has appeared in Artforum, Aperture, Flash Art, Art Review, and Frieze. Tumlir is a member of the humanities and sciences faculty at Art Center College of Design.

The Twofold Commitment is an artist book by filmmaker, writer, and theorist, Trinh T. Minh-ha. While contextualizing the wider scope of her filmmaking practice, this publication centers on Trinh’s feature film Forgetting Vietnam (2015), which takes up one of the myths surrounding the creation of Vietnam: a fight between two dragons whose intertwined bodies fell into the South China Sea and formed Vietnam’s curving, S-shaped coastline. Commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the film draws inspiration from ancient legend to stage an ongoing, contemporary conversation between land and water, creating a third space for historical and cultural re-memory.

The book features the film’s lyrical script, along with rhythmically distributed cinematic stills. Expanding on this central focus is a series of conversations between Trinh and film and sound scholars Patricia Alvarez Astacio and Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa; Erika Balsom; Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier; Domitilla Olivieri; Stefan Östersjö; Irit Rogoff; and Xiaolu Guo. These conversations date from 2016 to 2022 and are accompanied by an index of key concepts in the artist’s work.

Ken Ohara’s photographic series of one-hour-exposure portraits create in their final form a new identity for each subject. The traditional evaluations we make of a portrait, i.e., “How do you look?” are lost in the blur of a passing hour. The soft outlines of heads and bodies take on a new power in their loss of detail, and we look to the objects that frame each sitter to give us a context for identity. Like Meatyard before him, Ohara’s collective subjects create a wry and melancholy portrait of the absent artist.

American artist Renée Green (born 1959) spent two years engaged with the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, during which she presented a series of interlinked public programs and exhibitions, culminated with her major exhibition Within Living Memory (2018). Green’s Carpenter project, Pacing, is a meditation spurred by inhabiting an architectural icon―Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center―while exploring the historical and institutional legacies of modernism’s other forms, including cinema, visual art, poetry, music and literature.

This handsome publication illuminates Green’s unfolding process, with a sequence of exhibitions that took place from 2015 and culminating in Pacing: Facing in Toronto; Tracing in Como, Italy; Placing in Berlin; Spacing in Lisbon; and Begin Again, Begin Again in Los Angeles. The result is a meditation on creative processes across histories and media, partially inspired by two architectural icons: Rudolf M. Schindler and Le Corbusier. Despite grand ambitions, Le Corbusier was only able to realize two buildings in the Americas, the Carpenter Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Casa Curuchet, in La Plata, Argentina. In Pacing, dreams, projections and geographically distant buildings are put into dialogue through time, weaving a layered constellation of unexpected relations.

Lavishly illustrated, Renée Green: Pacing features new texts by Gloria Sutton and Fred Moten, and brings together a series of previously unpublished conversations between the artist and Yvonne Rainer, Nora M. Alter and Mason Leaver-Yap. Additional contributions are provided by Nicholas Korody, William S. Smith and Carpenter Center director Dan Byers.

In his performances, which often extend over several weeks or months, the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson explores not only his own physical and psychological limits and the themes of early performance art, but also the artist's status and the different images of his role. For his installation "The Schumann Machine" (2008), created for Manifesta 7, he spent several hours every day for two weeks singing the 1840 song cycle Dichterliebe by Robert Schumann. A characteristic feature of his performances are the many melancholy but also absurdly comical moments.

This book, now in its second printing, unites for the first time all of Kjartansson's works related to music from 2001 to 2012. It includes contributions by Philip Auslander, Heike Munder, Markús πór Andrésson and a conversation between Edek Bartz and Ragnar Kjartansson.

X-TRA is a magazine that cultivates a deep understanding of contemporary art, explores a wide range of ideas and artists’ work, and strives to do so with generosity and integrity.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Boris Lurie’s birthday the catalogue Life with the Dead presents more than fifty works from 1950 to 1970 that illustrate his active commitment to social justice and the memory of the Holocaust. The Jewish artist bore witness in many ways to the horrors of the Holocaust in the German concentration camps. However, his works of art are not only expressions of suffering, but also symbols of hope for the integration of someone who would henceforth belong to the minority of survivors. Friends and companions describe Lurie’s development from his beginnings in the 1950s, through the NO! art movement, to his renaissance as one of the main representatives of Holocaust art. Tom Wolfe published his text on an exhibition at Gertrude Stein’s gallery, New York in 1964. René Block exhibited Lurie in Berlin, and Achille Bonito Oliva met Boris Lurie’s art in 1962 on the occasion of the exhibition Doom Show Boris Lurie and Sam Goodman at the Galeria Arturo Schwarz in Milan. Rafael Vostell and Jürgen Kaumkötter provide the contextual framework for the book, which is complemented by words of greeting from Gertrude Stein, Boris Lurie's lifelong friend and Jürgen Wilhelm from the Landschaftsverband Rheinland.

This publication brings together 27 works of art made across western Europe between the 12th and 16th centuries, a period spanning the Middle Ages and Renaissance. They represent some of the finest examples of sculpture, metalwork, painting and stained glass still in private hands, and together offer a startling insight into the period’s rich artistic achievements.

This book chronicles the lives of seventeen pioneering women sculptors who dared to speak their truths about inequality and injustice and overcame obstacles of gender and race in the last hundred and fifty years.

The works that these talented artists cast, carved, and molded mirror both their internal worlds and the society surrounding them. There is no better way to inspire young women to fulfill their destiny with courage than to give them these brilliantly brief and cogent portraits of great women who shaped the world of sculpting and through that, our culture, and our world. Ausherman puts the spotlight on women artists simply by celebrating them insightfully, and so well. With many helpful references for additional in-depth readings and beautiful photographs taken by Steven Taylor, this book is a gem for anyone who loves reading how immensely skillful and creative people pursue their passions through the art of sculpture.

Sculptor Roxy Paine's installations can feel like a cross between an alien landscape or a mad-scientist's laboratory inside of a Twilight Zone episode. Bringing together "science" and the natural world, his surreal and sometimes eerie work has garnered him a place among artists who create their own fantastical universes. This monograph surveys nearly 20 years of the artist's work.

Primetime Contemporary Art is a publication documenting a radical, two-year intervention by the GALA Committee on the primetime television show Melrose Place. Originally published in a limited run in 1998, this extremely rare artist book is reproduced here for the first time as a facsimile edition.

Mel Chin initiated the loose collective of artists known as the GALA Committee in 1995 in response to an invitation to participate in an upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The artist arranged with the producers of Melrose Place for the collective to create objects for the soap opera, resulting in an extensive series of political works used as plot devices and props across two seasons of the show. The GALA Committee’s intervention provided surreptitious commentary on reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS, the Gulf War, domestic terrorism, corporate malfeasance, and substance abuse, among other issues. Despite some of these topics having been banned by the FCC at the time, the group’s political critiques went unnoticed by censors, subverting corporate and government controls of primetime television with a progressive agenda.

These works were exhibited in Uncommon Sense at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1997 and then sold at an auction at Sotheby’s to support several charities. Primetime Contemporary Art, created by Chin and Helen Nagge, was used as the auction catalog for the evening, documented the artwork produced for the exhibition, and articulated the conceptual framework of the GALA Committee.

This is a catalog published alongside exhibition Yasumasa Morimura: Las Meninas Renacen de Noche (Las Meninas Reborn in the Night) at Luhring Augustine in 2014.

Morimura has been working as a conceptual photographer and filmmaker for more than three decades. Through extensive use of props, costumes, makeup, and digital manipulation, the artist masterfully transforms himself into recognizable subjects, often from the Western cultural canon. Morimura has based works on seminal paintings by Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh, and Édouard Manet, and he also uses images culled from historical materials, mass media, and popular culture in his practice. His reinvention of iconic photographs and art historical masterpieces challenges the viewer’s common associations with the subjects while also commenting on Japan’s complex relationship with and absorption of Western culture.

Live Audio Essays presents transcripts from performances and films by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, an artist known for his political and cultural reflections on sound and listening.

Abu Hamdan’s intricately crafted and heavily researched monologues are at times intimate, humorous, and entertaining, yet politically disquieting in their revelations. Using personal narratives, anecdotes, popular media, and transcripts rooted in historical and contemporary moments, the artist leads the reader through his investigations into crimes that are heard but not seen. These live audio essays turn our focus to acoustic memories, voices leaking through walls and borders, the drone of warfare, cinematic sound effects, atmospheric noise, the resonant frequencies of buildings, the echoes of reincarnated lives, and the sound of hunger.

Live Audio Essays collects seven iconic works, which were originally presented as performances, films, or video installations from 2014 through 2022. Featured pieces include Contra Diction (Speech Against Itself), Walled Unwalled, After SFX, Natq, A Thousand White Plastic Chairs, Air Pressure, and the newly-completed The 45th Parallel.

All the texts were transcribed and edited with the artist and are available here in a single volume for the first time.

Unspeaking Likeness is a series of images of forensic facial reconstruction sculptures. Occasionally, when investigators call for it, shortly after an unidentified corpse (or part thereof) is found, a forensic artists constructs an artificial face made of clay or plaster to better aid in victim identification.

"We are all too aware that when we die, the flesh goes. Memories of us may die more quickly or slowly, depending on how we were known and loved. But in both cases no one escapes decay. The transition between flesh and dust is, to those of us who witness any part of it, a nightmare. What is there beneath the skin that love or friendship would ever wish to see? And when the matter reveals itself to anyone but a surgeon, and moreover when it is rotting, it becomes an observer’s enemy. This is hardly putting the case too strongly. Our life-force naturally denies its own finitude and with all its horrified strength rejects evidence of futurity."

Essay by William T. Vollmann

This is an exhibition catalog of Boris Lurie in Habana at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in 2017.

Boris Lurie was an American artist and writer. He co-founded the NO!Art movement which calls for socially and politically involved art that would resist and combat the forces of the market.

Published on the occasion of her first solo show in the United States in twenty years, Anna Oppermann: Drawings surveys the early drawings of this underrecognized German artist. Co-published with the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, this book is the first on Oppermann produced in the United States and features a number of new texts on her work by Connie Butler, Chief Curator, Hammer Museum, UCLA; Meta Marina Beeck, Assistant Curator, Kunsthalle Bielefeld; and a conversation between Carpenter Center director Dan Byers and Ute Vorkoeper, Curator, Anna Oppermann Estate.

Beginning in the mid-1960s through the early ‘70s, Oppermann (1940–1993), best known for her immersive installations, created an astonishing series of surreal drawings that uniquely explode the private space of the home, a traditionally feminine sphere.

These early drawings contribute to a feminist re-centering of such spaces associated with women, casting everyday objects as symbolic, consequential protagonists: houseplants sprawl to take over the picture plane, windows and mirrors provide views into other worlds, and tables display drawings that open out into new domestic scenes.

By placing her own body—her knees, arms, the back of her head—as reference points in the work, Oppermann coaxes the viewer to take on her subjectivity and perspective, emphasizing the gendered realms of the home and the relationships that we form both within and to our private spaces.

Brooklyn-based painter and installation artist Roxy Paine (born 1966) conceived his Dioramas in the 1990s, but only began to produce these technically ambitious works in 2012. Brilliantly reinventing the 19th-century diorama form, these works—of which he has created seven, the last completed in 2017—deepen Paine’s engagement with altered realities and the psychogeography of American life and modern culture.

Edited by Saul Anton, the volume includes an extended conversation between Paine and Wexner Center of the Arts curator Michael Goodson, who organized Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor, a 2016 exhibition of the Dioramas at the Beeler Gallery of the Columbus College of Art & Design. It also includes essays by Blaffer Museum director Steven Matijcio and critics Saul Anton and Mia Kang that explore their rich historical and social resonance, and reflect on their place in the landscape of contemporary art and art history.

Self-published in 1968, Footprints, Poems, and Leaves collects dozens of poems written by Martin Wong between 1966 and 1968. Hand-written in a signature calligraphic style that he was just beginning to develop, the poems ebb and flow visually across the page, much like the fluctuating characters, scenes, and moods that inhabit them. This was Wong’s first book of poetry and it contains a double cover showcasing intricate drawings of skeletal angels and other tableaux, as well as a folded, looseleaf broadsheet containing two poems and a drawing of a boney leaf.

The poems were written during a relatively free period for the artist, shortly after he dropped out of Berkeley and began exploring San Francisco at the height of the hippy movement. The poems range from surrealist and pastoral descriptions of the urban subculture that surrounded him to downtrodden, travel-weary biographical entries that are both lonely and tender. Footprints, Poems, and Leaves functions like a journal capturing Wong’s tumultuous life in this period, which included being arrested at a queer, drug-fueled house party (along with Rudolf Nureyev and Dame Margot Fonteyn) and a stay in a mental institution in late 1967 and early 1968. Around the time of the book’s publication, Wong enrolled in Humboldt State University to finish his degree, beginning a new chapter for the artist.

Despite the dark backdrops of many of the works, the writing displays a playfulness with form and language and a sense of humor that can be seen throughout Wong’s later work as well. Altogether, Footprints, Poems, and Leaves creates a rich tapestry of visual poetry that is both a product of its time and the budding artistic mind of a young Martin Wong.

Fascination with the life of freedom associated with cowboys and the American West is integral to the mythology of our time and culture. In his cinematic novel Ranch, Michael Light reveals as much about the myth as he does about the specific traditional California ranch that he photographs. "Depictions of the West as a vast garden of romantic innocence and male possibility abound, but the claustrophobic violence and domination required to turn the dream into reality are perhaps less familiar." Part of a new series of books with gravure illustrations, this monograph is exquisitely reproduced.

John Patrick Salisbury's first book is the result of five years of reflection on his family's past. Hailing originally from an isolated farming village in northern California, Salisbury was preceded by seven generations. Family relations still live there, and Salisbury relives his past vicariously in this book through the lives of his cousins, Drew and Jimmy. What results is a poignant and moving portrait of boyhood in rural America.

Sketchbook, September 1977 is an early journal by Greer Lankton written during her time as an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It offers key insights into the artist’s mind before her move to New York in 1978, where she would go on to have a prolific career making lifelike dolls, theatrical sets, photographs, drawings, and paintings.

Containing drawings, behavioral diagrams, and occasionally confessional writing, the journal is a record of imagining the body and mind reconciled through transformation. In these pages, the nineteen-year-old turns an inquisitive, sociological eye toward the emotional landscape and somatic effects of her days recorded here—the time period leading up to her decision to undergo hormone treatment and gender-affirming surgery in 1979. Lankton reflects with raw vulnerability and keen self-awareness on critical questions of self-image, social perception, gender normativity, and human behavior.

The book also includes an afterword by Lankton’s lifelong friend, Joyce Randall Senechal. Sketchbook, September 1977 is one of the earliest of Greer Lankton’s journals, sketchbooks, and daybooks to appear in the artist’s archives housed in the Department of Film at The Museum of Modern Art. The majority of Lankton’s papers and archives are housed at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh.

This is a catalog of the first exhibition in New York of art from the Boris Lurie estate. It will take place at the Chelsea Art Museum, from 26 March 2011 until 15 May 2011. The show will inaugurate a series of exhibitions devoted to the NO!art Movement and its members and affiliates, as well as other long-neglected or suppressed humanist strains in the art of the latter half of the Twentieth Century. The vitriol and fury of Lurie and his cohorts still runs in the veins of their art fifty and more years after it was created; it is as fresh, powerful, and, remarkably, beautiful, as it was in the cultural near-vacuum in which it was created. Lurie is one of the legendary figures of the East Village avant-garde of the fifties and sixties, a resistor against the institutional structure of art in his day and what he called the “investment art market” and one of the powerful voices for humanity in an art world officially devoid of political or social awareness.

X-TRA is a magazine that cultivates a deep understanding of contemporary art, explores a wide range of ideas and artists’ work, and strives to do so with generosity and integrity.

This is a catalog for the exhibition KZ – KAMPF – KUNSTin the former Cologne headquarters of the Gestapo in 2014.

The exhibition, developed in cooperation with the Boris Lurie Foundation in New York and under the curatorial direction of gallery owner Gertrude Stein, features the first impressive works created directly after Lurie's release from Buchenwald concentration camp, as well as works from the 1940s and 1950s that have never been seen in Europe before. A selection of his impressive sculptural works from the 1970s will also be presented for the first time in the basement.

Boris Lurie worked on the composition of House of Anita from the 1970s almost up to the end of his life. It is his Ecce homo. In the guise of an S/M novel, if a quite surreal, absurd, and poignant S/M novel, the work attempts to come to terms with the circumstances of his traumatic youth interned in the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald, while exploring the meaning of the life of the artist and the place of art in the post-Holocaust world, and railing against the degradation of art by the market. Though not strictly speaking an allegory, and certainly not simply autobiography cloaked in leather and chains, House of Anita does employ the philosophy and vocabulary of a highly specialized mode of experience, the world of organized sado-masochism, to depict and examine the "ordinary" post-Holocaust world. In tone and sensibility the work falls in the lineage of Alfred Jarry, Franz Kafka, and Kathy Acker.

Lincoln Kirstein's life in the arts spans two thirds of a century. Many of the artists he championed, often against great odds, are indispensible in our consideration of twenttieth century art today. In lieu of written memoirs, Lincoln Kirstein has commissioned the great works in his personal collection to be photographed in a remarkable series of eight by ten, four color transparencies. to these he has added extensive captions revolving around anecdotes and aesthetics. It is the perfect way to view his accomplishments. the collection is reproduced in full page, four color plates, each object and room exquisitely photographed.

This is a catalog of the exhibition Rachel Whiteread: Long Eyes at Luhring Augustine in 2011.

Rachel Whiteread has a long list of distinctions which include winning the 1993 Turner Prize for her public sculpture House, representing Great Britain in the 1997 Venice Biennale and presenting solo exhibitions at such institutions as the Serpentine Gallery, the Deutsche Guggenheim, Kunsthaus Bregenz and the Hammer Museum. Notable public commissions include Monument in Trafalgar Square, Water Tower in New York, the Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, and most recently, the cast of a boathouse in Gran, Norway. The artist lives and works in London.

This is an exhibition catalog of Boris Lurie in Habana at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in 2017.

Boris Lurie was an American artist and writer. He co-founded the NO!Art movement which calls for socially and politically involved art that would resist and combat the forces of the market.

“'What Was An Author?' Right from the opening words of these Tempest Essays, we see the great Molly Nesbit at work undoing and radically repositioning the time codes for the artist. She creates a living archive of critical debates, politics and philosophies. She paints a vivid picture of the many junctions between people, objects, quasi-objects and non-objects throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. This is a true protest against forgetting as well as a toolbox for contemporary art criticism. Call it a guidebook to the labyrinth of reality.” —Hans Ulrich Obrist

Midnight: The Tempest Essays returns the question of pragmatism to the everyday critical practice of the art historian. Illustrated case studies on Eugène Atget, Marcel Duchamp, Jean-Luc Godard, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Rachel Whiteread, Gabriel Orozco, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lawrence Weiner, Nancy Spero, Rem Koolhaas, Martha Rosler, Gerhard Richter, Matthew Barney and Richard Serra, among others, build to form new book-length lines of continuity and investigation.

Molly Nesbit is Professor in the Department of Art at Vassar College and a contributing editor of Artforum. This is the second book in her Pre-Occupations series, following The Pragmatism in the History of Art (2013). Her other books include Atget's Seven Albums (1992) and Their Common Sense (2000).

Published by Artists Space to accompany the exhibition Till They Listen: Bill Gunn Directs America, organized by Hilton Als and The Film Desk’s Jake Perlin. Contains writing by Bill Gunn, Hilton Als, Ishmael Reed, Run Nour, Michael Boyce Gillespie, Nicholas Forster and Pearl Bowser, along with an archival interview with Gunn.

The exhibition and a series of public programs celebrates the life and towering, multi-faceted work of the filmmaker, playwright, novelist, and actor Bill Gunn (1929–1989). As a Black artist working simultaneously in Hollywood and the New York theatre world, Gunn persistently struggled to produce his work as a writer and filmmaker, and these hardships are reflected in both his art and his archive. In a 1973 letter to the New York Times, Gunn states: “It is a terrible thing to be a black artist in this country. If I were white, I would probably be called ‘fresh and different.’ If I were European, Ganja & Hess might be ‘that little film you must see.’ Because I am black, I do not even deserve the pride that one American feels for another when he discovers that a fellow countryman’s film has been selected as the only American film to be shown during Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival… Not one white critic from any of the major newspapers even mentioned it.”

Three decades after his death, Bill Gunn’s work has begun to gain long overdue visibility through film retrospectives, restorations and increased availability of his published writings. Adding to the recent scholarship around Gunn’s work, this exhibition opening will elucidate Gunn’s profound artistic vision through an unprecedented gathering of archival materials from both private collections and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s unparalleled holdings, most exhibited for the first time. This curated selection of ephemera, media, literature, and original artworks offers a complex and intimate portrait of Gunn’s seminal output, with a focus on his many unrealized projects. In conjunction with the exhibition, Artists Space will present a series of public programs, including film screenings, conversations, live musical performances, staged readings, and a publication of newly commissioned and previously uncollected writing.

Gary Briechle has forged many long-term relationships with the people he has photographed since moving to Maine nearly 20 years ago. This gives his work a peculiar intimacy, as if the pictures were made by a family member. He lives and works in midcoast Maine and doesn’t see a need to travel to make photographs: “Most everything that inspires me is within a few miles of my home. Sometimes I think that Maine is like my foster family; I’m not really entirely comfortable and will probably never feel completely settled, but Maine keeps feeding me.”

Michelangelo Pistoletto (born 1933) is one of Arte Povera's most significant protagonists. It is with the Mirror Paintings that Pistoletto's name is mostly closely identified, an ongoing series begun in 1962 that has earned him rapid and enduring international recognition. These works are made from sheets of mirror-finished stainless steel, fitted with a full-length portrait photograph that has been meticulously traced and painted onto its surface (after 1971 the image was silkscreened on). The inclusion in the work of the viewer, his or her surroundings and his or her interaction with the photographed person in the mirror is the key to the boggling reflexivity that drives this work. This book evaluates the Mirror Paintings of the past four years. It includes an interview with the artist and a fully illustrated chronology of Mirror Paintings from 1962 to the present.

This is a catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition Jeremy Moon: 1969 Grid Paintings at Rocket, London, 2006.

It includes a transcript of a public talk about Jeremy Moon by Matthew Collings.

"The disparate photographs assembled here were made over the course of twenty years. None of them were originally intended to be used in this book. By ordering and shaping them I tried to investigate the possibilities of narrative both within a single image and especially in relation to the other photographs. A Storybook Life is an attempt to discover the possibilities of meaning in the interaction of seemingly unrelated images in the hope that content can constantly mutate according to both the external and internal condition of the viewer, but remain meaningful because of its inherent, but latent content. The conscious and subconscious decisions made in editing the photographs are the real work of A Storybook Life." —Philip-Lorca diCorcia