The A.R.T. Library Program distributes books on art and culture free of charge to public institutions nationwide. Public libraries, schools, prisons, and reading centers that self-define as underserved are welcome to place unrestricted orders.

The Three Prophets : Stanley Fisher, Sam Goodman, and Boris Lurie

Benjamin Weissman

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).

William Wegman: Writing by Artist

Andrew Lampert, William Wegman

Writing by Artist is the first collection to focus on William Wegman’s lengthy and deeply funny relationship to language and is filled with previously unknown and wildly entertaining texts, drawings, and early photographs spanning the early 1970s to the present.

Not your standard book of essays, the publication was meticulously edited by Andrew Lampert to feature works incorporating words in one form or another. In some instances, the text is simply a caption or a few hand-written words, but all of the selected works hinge conceptually and pictorially on writing and language.

Writing by Artist offers a wide range of entry points into the artist’s universe. There are early photographic works, which may be familiar, but from there, things delightfully unravel with absurd non-sequiturs typed on Princess Cruises stationary, imagined restaurant reviews, witty annotations to a curator’s essay, musings on ancient footwear, deliberate mistranslations, reworked greeting cards, fictional advertisements for real life products, and other surprising prose forms.

Ultimately, Writing by Artists alters the logic and pushes the boundaries of what artist writing can be—shedding new light for those only familiar with Wegman’s later work, while serving as a welcome reminder of the artist’s madcap inventiveness for the already enlightened. In short, what you do or don’t know about William Wegman now conveniently fits into this strangely beguiling collection.

William Wegman was born in 1943 in Holyoke, Massachusetts. His work has been exhibited at museums and galleries internationally including retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Centre Pompidou. Recent exhibitions include Before/On/After: William Wegman and California Conceptualism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wegman has also created film and video works for Saturday Night Live, Nickelodeon, and Sesame Street and appeared on The Tonight Show, The David Letterman Show, and The Colbert Report.

Andrew Lampert is a New York-based artist, writer, archivist, and primary in the firm Chen & Lampert. His works have been internationally exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Film Festival, Getty Museum, Toronto International Film Festival, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam, among many other venues. He has edited books on Tony Conrad, Manuel De Landa, George Kuchar, and Harry Smith. Lampert was formerly Curator of Collections at Anthology Film Archives, where he preserved hundreds of films and videos and co-programmed public screenings. His videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix.

Viewer: Gary Hill Projective Installation

George Quasha, Charles Stein

Haunting and strangely provocative new installations by artist Gary Hill, celebrated worldwide in major museums and galleries, are introduced through a highly readable essay by two of the artist's long-time poet/artist collaborators. In a sort of lineup, seventeen day-workers, full-size, stare at you from the wall, eerily present by the magic of video-projection (Viewer). A solitary Native American stares you in the eyes, while he stares at himself from an adjacent wall-then the projections switch position: the watcher becomes the watched and the watched becomes the watcher (Standing Apart). This third in an ongoing series of the Quasha & Stein dialogue on Gary Hill is beautifully illustrated in full color to give a living sense of the actual installations.

The New Life

Lise Sarfati

"Sarfati’s work is defined through an opposition to the editorial urge to fix narratives to her subjects. Her images create a loose, layered and intensely rich visual project triggering emotions and thoughts that move well beyond her ostensible subjects. Sarfati’s importance in today’s debates about the role and visual languages of socially engaged photography also rests in her resistance to fully objectify the subjects that compel her to make imagery. The American Series represents one of those rare experiences for photographers where the photographs almost—just—happened. Sarfati did not overly choreograph her subjects; she also created the psychological space for them, in turn, to act upon her and to act up—or down—for the camera. This perhaps accounts for Sarfati’s success in re-presenting American young people as, simply, individually and universally the carriers of states of minds." — Clare Grafik, Photographers Gallery, London

Text by Olga Medvedkova

Tom Friedman

Tom Friedman

Tom Friedman (b. 1965, Saint Louis, MO) makes work that explores ideas of perception, logic, and possibility. His often painstakingly rendered sculptures and works on paper inhabit the grey areas between the ordinary and the monstrous, the infinitesimal and the infinite, the rational and the uncanny. His work is deceptive, its handmade intricacy masked by a seemingly mass-produced or prefabricated appearance. Luhring Augustine 2012 11.25 x 9.75 inches, 272 pages, illustrations Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-9771150-6-8

The Domestic Plane: New Perspectives on Tabletop Art Objects

Published by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2018, edited by L. Jane Calverley.

The Domestic Plane: New Perspectives on Tabletop Art Objects features work by more than eighty artists across the fields of art and craft from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, presented in a meta-group exhibition in five parts mounted by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. This fully illustrated publication features texts by curators Elizabeth Essner, Dakin Hart, Richard Klein, and Amy Smith-Stewart; a visual essay by artist and illustrator Richard McGuire; and work by participating artists including David Adamo, Yuji Agematsu, Alma Allen, Janine Antoni, Robert Arneson, Genesis Belanger, Kathy Butterly, James Lee Byars, Anthony Caro, Melvin Edwards, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Pam Lins, Tucker Nichols, Mai-Thu Perret, Jessi Reaves, Kay Sekimachi, Diane Simpson, Arlene Shechet, Alina Szapocznikow, and Nari Ward, among many others.

William Eggleston: The Outlands, Selected Works

William Eggleston

The Outlands, a series of photographs taken by Eggleston between 1969 and 1974, establishes the groundbreaking visual themes and lexicon that the artist would continue to develop for decades to come. The work offers a journey through the mythic and evolving American South, seen through the artist’s lens: vibrant colors and a profound sense of nostalgia echo throughout Eggleston’s breathtaking oeuvre. His motifs of signage, cars, and roadside scenes create an iconography of American vistas that inspired a generation of photographers. With its in-depth selection of unforgettable images—a wood-paneled station wagon, doors flung open, parked in an expansive rural setting; the artist’s grandmother in the moody interior of their family’s Sumner, Mississippi home—The Outlands is emblematic of Eggleston’s dynamic, experimental practice. The breadth of work reenergizes his iconic landscapes and forms a new perspective of the American South in transition.

Accompanying the ninety brilliant Kodachrome images and details, a literary, fictional text by the critically acclaimed author Rachel Kushner imagines a story of hitchhikers trekking through the Deep South. New scholarship by Robert Slifkin reframes the art-historical significance of Eggleston’s oeuvre, proposing affinities with work by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Graham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Smithson. A foreword by William Eggleston III offers important insights into the process of selecting and sequencing this series of images.

Photography Box Set
(12 books)

This Box Set presents a selection of books that showcase generative uses of photography as an artistic medium. It includes titles exploring photography’s role in challenging injustices, capturing everyday life, and advancing social movements. Other titles foreground how artists use this technology to interrogate the status and nature of photographic "truth" and the ways that images uphold social norms.

This Box Set is recommended for a general readership.

William Eggleston: 2 1/4

William Eggleston

Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, William Eggleston began taking pictures during the 1960s after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment. In 1966 he changed from black-and-white to color film, perhaps to make the medium more his own and less that of his esteemed predecessor. John Sarkowski, when he was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called Eggleston the ‘first color photographer,’ and the world in which we consider a color photograph as art has changed because of him.

Modern Look: Photography and the American Magazine

Mason Klein

A fascinating exploration of how photography, graphic design, and popular magazines converged to transform American visual culture at mid-century. This dynamic study examines the intersection of modernist photography and American commercial graphic design between the 1930s and the 1950s. Avant-garde strategies in photography and design reached the United States via European émigrés, including Bauhaus artists forced out of Nazi Germany. The unmistakable aesthetic made popular by such magazines as Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue—whose art directors, Alexey Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman, were both immigrants and accomplished photographers—emerged from a distinctly American combination of innovation, inclusiveness, and pragmatism. Beautifully illustrated with more than 150 revolutionary photographs, layouts, and cover designs, Modern Look considers the connections and mutual influences of such designers and photographers as Richard Avedon, Lillian Bassman, Herbert Bayer, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, Cipe Pineles, and Paul Rand. Essays draw a lineage from European experimental design to innovative work in American magazine design at mid-century and offer insights into the role of gender in fashion photography and political activism in the mass media.

Looking In, Looking Out: Latin American Photography

Delphine Sims

The documentary nature of Latin American photography has brought clarity and artistic appreciation to the countries of the region since the camera arrived in the 19th century. The photographers of Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, and other nations have captured the traditions, societal changes, urban and natural landscapes, and varied architecture of their countries. Selected from Santa Barbara Museum of Art's permanent collection, 'Looking In, Looking Out: Latin American Photography' investigates the cultures and histories of various Latin American countries through the lens of nostalgia, propaganda, a populist aesthetic, and evolving perspectives. Published in cooperation with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in conjunction with their exhibition of the same name opening in October 2015, this book will be an important addition to the literature available on Latin American photography. 'Looking In, Looking Out: Latin American Photography' presents work by twenty photographers that spans some 80 years. It opens with an insightful introduction by Delphine Sims, putting the photographers and their work into an historical, aesthetic and sociological perspective.

Stutters

Dominique Hurth

In 2014, Hurth encountered four boxes of cyanotype prints by Thomas W. Smillie, the first custodian and curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s collection of photography (active 1868 to 1917). In her new work Stutters, Hurth builds on several years’ research to rework the original cyanotypes into visual montage, sequencing images that provide a record of Museum life as it documents a ‘national’ collection in the making. The work presents photographs of empty display cabinets and staged objects within the Smithsonian’s holdings, following divergent threads of photographic history, exhibitionship and collection-making, as well as developments in various technological apparatuses across the late 19th and early 20th century.

Through a meticulous process of xerox and printing reproduction, Hurth enlarges the world of each image and traces a photographic lineage, a process itself indebted to the cyanotype. Two overlapping sets of captions from the artist offer a subjective and scientific view of the photographs, inviting a cross-referencing of the “official”, if incomplete, bibliographic record with one that moves more freely across a historical timeline as a way to reflect on gaps in the archive.

Stutters includes three new texts, with Hurth considering the book’s entwined interests, as well as her own personal history with the Smithsonian and the work of Smillie. Additional contributions by authors and curators Ruth Noack and Kari Conte consider the ways in which artists’ projects like Stutters can quietly break apart the violent taxonomy of an archive, and instead use this shifting fragmentation to envision new meaning and bring into focus voices that have been excluded from history.

Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Danny Lyon

In the summer of 1962, Danny Lyon packed a Nikon Reflex and an old Leica in an army bag and hitchhiked south. Within a week he was in jail in Albany, Georgia, looking through the bars at another prisoner, Martin Luther King Jr. Lyon soon became the first staff photographer for the Atlanta-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which already had a reputation as one of the most committed and confrontational groups fighting for civil rights.

"This young white New Yorker came South with a camera and a keen eye for history. And he used these simple, elegant gifts to capture the story of one of the most inspiring periods in America’s twentieth century." — John Lewis, US Congressman

The Spectacular of Vernacular

Darsie Alexander, Andy Sturdevant, John Brinckerhoff Jackson

The Spectacular of Vernacular addresses the role of vernacular forms in the work of 26 artists who utilize craft, folklore and roadside kitsch to explore the role of culturally specific iconography in the increasingly global world of art. Drawing inspiration from such sources as local architecture, amateur photographs and state fair banners, their work runs the spectrum from the sleek to the handcrafted. Inspired by Mike Kelley's observation that the mass culture of today is the folk art of tomorrow, these artists embrace the totems and neon signs of roadside America. Thus, alongside the visibly handcrafted works of Matthew Day Jackson and Dario Robleto we find the dense and day-glo paintings of Lari Pittman, the glittering trophy heads of Marc Swanson and the urban relics of Rachel Harrison. These works and others suggest a long road trip through the emblems and eyesores of tourist destinations and outmoded hotels. The photography component includes work by William Eggleston, whose color-saturated images gravitate toward the tawdry palette of faded billboards and road signs.

This fully-illustrated catalogue includes an essay by exhibition curator Darsie Alexander exploring artists' interest in the vernacular as a means to address aspects of folk ritual, amateur craft and sense of place in their work; a reprint of John Brinckerhoff Jackson's Vernacular from his seminal 1984 reader Discovering the Vernacular Landscape; and a reflection by artist and curator Andy Sturdevant on the evolution of roadside vernacular, and attendant histories of heartland America where it is so abundant. Also included is a reading list gathered from a cross section of art criticism and cultural studies.

Winters Berlin

Luke Abiol

Luke Abiol's project Winters Berlin is a series of large format photographs made over a period of seven years while living in Germany. These photographs look into the history that saturates Berlin's structures and streets.

Abiol is particularly interested in the layers of the city that - when peeled away - introduce the viewer to countless traces of Berlin's inhabitants. Stories are derived from space and histories are formed.

Luke Abiol was born in San Francisco, came of age in New York, started a family in Berlin and now finds himself back in San Francisco. Luke observes the traces that industry, war, nature and time have left upon our urban spaces–then leaves his own traces to be read by others.

The Institute for Other Intelligences

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

In The Institute for Other Intelligences, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian brings speculative fiction and media studies to bear on an imagined future where machine intelligences convene annually for curriculum on algorithmic equity. The book presents a transcript from one of these conferences in which a community of "AI agents" gather at a school for oppositional automata to deliver lectures on the human biases and omissions encoded in their training data. The resulting manuscript, published on the occasion of the Institute's millennial anniversary, revisits sociotechnical systems from its founding in the 21st century. Drawing on feminist, queer, and critical media scholarship, the trainings collected in the book aim to optimize the operations of future generations of intelligent machines toward just outcomes. Hakopian uses these speculative exchanges to invite the reader to consider how critical approaches to nonhuman intelligence might reroute our current path toward destructive technofutures and allow us to conceive of another way forward.

Edited by Ana Iwataki and Anuradha Vikram for X Topics, The Institute for Other Intelligences includes an introduction by Vikram and diagrammatic illustrations by Fernando Diaz, a scientist whose work focuses on the quantitative evaluation and algorithmic design of information access systems.

The Shadows

Debbie Fleming Caffery

"Debbie Fleming Caffery’s (born 1948) images can be seen as articles of faith. The relentless insistence of subject and symbol in these images is assuredly their greatest strength. This vigor results from a tension that can be both visual and emotional. In this marshy no-man’s-land between description and illusion, her photographs serve as an able guide to truths that are better sensed than seen." ―John Lawrence

"The subject matter of Debbie Fleming Caffery’s new work shifts from the mysterious and hard life of the Louisiana sugar culture to that of foreign imagery. The style of her photography remains the same. Light is never allowed to blind us to the darkness of human existence and its inexorable limitations. But neither is darkness allowed to swallow the bitter sweet moments of disclosure. She has found the spiritual, together with its enemies." ―James R. Watson

Walter De Maria: Sculptures

Lars Nittve

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Walter De Maria: The 5-7-9 Series at Gagosian, Rome.

By arranging forms according to mathematical sequences, De Maria worked at the intersections of Minimalism, Conceptual art, and Land art—drawing attention to the limits of gallery spaces, prioritizing bodily awareness, and locating the content of an artwork in the viewer. This volume is dedicated to three sculptures by the artist: The 5-7-9 Series (1992/1996), Large Rod Series: Circle/Rectangle 11 (1986), and 13-Sided Open Polygon (1984). Each work represents a major series for De Maria during the last fifty years.

The bilingual (English/Italian) publication includes a two-part essay by Lars Nittve, explanatory texts on each work, a short history of three twenty-seven-part sculptures by De Maria, and a selected exhibition history.

Will Barnet

Introduction by Bruce Weber, Essays by Gail Stavitsky, Christopher Green, Jessica Nicoll, and Ona Barnet

Will Barnet’s artistic career as a painter and printmaker spanned nearly eight decades of continuous creativity. Few artists, other than perhaps Picasso or Monet, can claim such an extended period of uninterrupted and innovative art making. From the darkness of the Great Depression to the opening decade of the twenty-first century, his oeuvre reflects his unique interpretation of the art world’s evolving genres: Social Realism, Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, and ultimately representational Minimalism with the human figure as his primary subject.

Barnet was devoted to making art every day and worked diligently even at the very end of his life. “The Old Masters are still alive after 400 years, and that’s what I want to be,” he once said. “At the age of 10 or 12, I discovered that being an artist would give me an ability to create something which would live on after death.” Live on it does; in addition to his acclaimed body of work, he influenced a broad spectrum of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, James Rosenquist, Cy Twombly, and Ethel Fisher, and he held teaching positions at the Cooper Union, Yale University, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

The Sweet Flypaper of Life (softcover)

Roy DeCarava, Langston Hughes, Sherry Turner DeCarava

Hughes’s heart-warming description of Harlem in the late 1940s and early 1950s is seen through the eyes of one grandmother, Sister Mary Bradley. As she guides the reader through the lives of those around her, we imagine the babies born, families in struggle, children yet flourishing. We experience the sights and sounds of Harlem as seen through her learned and worldly eyes, expressed here through Hughes’s poetic prose. As she states, “I done got my feet caught in the sweet flypaper of life and I’ll be dogged if I want to get loose.” DeCarava’s photographs lay open a world of sense and feeling that begins with his perception and vision. The ruminations go beyond the limit of simple observation and contend with deeper meanings to reveal these individuals as subjects worthy of art. While Hughes states “We’ve had so many books about how bad life is, maybe it’s time to have one showing how good it is,” the photographs bring us back to this lively dialogue and a complex reality, to a resolution that stands with the optimism of the photographic medium and the certainty of DeCarava’s artistic moment.

In 1952 DeCarava became the first African American photographer to win a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. The one-year grant enabled DeCarava to focus full time on the photography he had been creating since the mid-1940s and to complete a project that would eventually result in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a moving, photo-poetic work in the urban setting of Harlem. DeCarava compiled a set of images from which Hughes chose 141 and adeptly supplied a fictive narration, reflecting on life in that city-within-a-city. First published in 1955, the book, widely considered a classic of photographic visual literature, was reprinted by public demand several times. This fourth printing, the Heritage Edition, is the first authorized English-language edition since 1983 and includes an afterword by Sherry Turner DeCarava tracing the history and ongoing importance of this book.

The Portraits Speak: Chuck Close in Conversation with 27 of His Subjects

Chuck Close

Known for his large scale paintings and photographs, renowned artist Chuck Close interviews 27 artists whose portraits he has painted over the years. This volume brings together the voices of three generations of American artists, including conversations between Close and artists Nancy Graves, Richard Serra, Philip Glass, Joe Zucker, Robert Israel, Leslie Close, Klaus Kertess, Mark Greenwold, Georgia Close, Arne Glimcher, Lucas Samaras, Alex Katz, Cindy Sherman, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff, Eric Fischl, April Gornik, William Wegman, Janet Fish, John Chamberlain, Richard Artschwager, Joel Shapiro, Kiki Smith, Roy Lichtenstein, Dorothea Rockburne, Lorna Simpson, Paul Cadmus.

Thomas Schutte: Scenewright, Gloria in Memoria

Thomas Schütte

The artist Thomas Schütte, born 1954 in Oldenburg and Gerhard Richter’s student at the Dusseldorf Art Academy from 1973 to 1981, is a moralist who uses his work to posit questions and trigger uncertainty. At the same time, however, he is also a romantic and a melancholiac who, with black humor and skepticism, creates a model of the world. In this publication, which goes back to the three-part, 18-month-long show at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, in chronological sequence the works of the last two decades are documented. “Scenewright” the first installation In New York from September 1998 to January 1999, showed, among other things, the 1977 installation Grosse Mauer (large wall), as well as the work groups of the 80s that thematized views of public buildings and imaginary places, as well as theater stage sets. “Gloria in Memoria” from February to June 1999 studied the theme of the monument and the anti-hero (Mohr’s Life, 1988) from the drawings to the installation. The third exhibition “In Medias Res” from September 1999 to June 2000 concentrated on the monumental sculptures of steel – female figures and self-portraits – and of ceramic: among others, oversized urns, monumental portraits of the gallerist Konrad Fischer, nine life-size clay figures in colorful robes Die Fremden (The Strangers) from 1992.

Wes Mills

Hipólito Rafael Chacón, Ann Wilson Lloyd

The understated design of this book allows the quiet elegance of Wes Mills’ drawings to captivate viewers. High quality reproductions of forty-eight drawings made between 1994 and 2003 float in the center of muted white pages. The titles and dates of each piece, printed in a warm transparent gray, manage to both pick up some of the delicate tonalities in the drawings and to disappear altogether. A complete index of the drawings is included at the back and essays by Hipólito Rafael Chacón and Ann Wilson Lloyd discuss the work’s aesthetic and art historical significance. Mills’ marks require a fine sustained attention, the kind of attention that this exquisitely made monograph can’t help but cultivate in a reader.

Walter Chappell: Vintage Photographs 1954-1978

Walter Chappell

This is an exhibition catalogue reproducing ten black-and-white photographs in tri-tone, all taken between 1954 and 1978, culled predominantly from a small group of photographs that survived the 1963 fire that destroyed most of Chappell’s prints and negatives.

Includes a poem by Robert Creeley, composed for Chappell in 1973, and “Time Lived,” an essay by Peter Bunnell, curator of photography at the Princeton Art Museum. Bunnell succinctly reviews Chappell’s work by stating that “Chappell has always believed firmly in the duality of the corporeal and the spirit … The fundamental principle in [his work] is that the tenuous connection to photographic reality is not severed. Each subject is re-presented in such a way that our perceptual limitation is expanded. Each image suggests an inner reality, a kind of scar of the past, a reflection of an act or event once lived.”

The Esopus Reader: A Collection of Writing from Esopus, 2003-2018

Tod Lippy

The Esopus Reader’s contents include all 11 installments of Esopus’s “New Voices” series, which featured fiction written by never-before-published authors, many of whom have since gone on to publish novels and short-story collections with major imprints, including Stuart Nadler (The Inseparables, Little, Brown), Vivien Shotwell (Vienna Nocturne, Random House), and Lev AC Rosen (Camp, Little, Brown—soon to be an HBO Max movie directed by and starring Billy Porter).

Also included are essays by creators from a wide range of disciplines who explore particular aspects of their creative process. In “Haunted,” choreographer Christopher Wheeldon details the challenges of crafting a series of ballets to the work of composer Györgi Ligeti. In “Cuoca,” acclaimed chef Jody Williams (Via Carota, Buvette) relates her experience of learning the basics of Italian cooking at a renowned restaurant in Reggio Emilia. Composer Anthony Cheung expounds upon the challenges and rewards of contemporary musical composition in “New Colors.” In “On the Value of Literature,” author Karl Ove Knasugaard (My Struggle) convincingly answers his own question: “Why books, sentences, words?” Architect Michael Arad recounts the process of realizing his design for the 9/11 Memorial in “Submission 790532,” and in “Light Unseen,” legendary lighting designer Jennifer Tipton makes a convincing case for the consideration of her discipline as an art form in its own right.

The book also includes in-depth interviews with playwright and filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan (who revisits a series of illustrated, hand-typed science-fiction novels he wrote as a 10-year-old); literary translator Ann Goldstein (who offers a fascinating glimpse into her process of translating authors such as Elena Ferrante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Primo Levi); actor Lisa Kudrow and writer/director Michael Patrick King (who go into detail about their work on the first season of the critically lauded HBO series The Comeback); game designer Raphael van Lierop (The Long Dark); and the late mathematician John Conway, who muses upon the intersection of rationality and aesthetics in the model-building he would frequently employ when working on a new theorem.

Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body 1969 -1973

Vito Acconci, Gregory Volk

Between 1969 and 1973, Vito Acconci's creative output was focused on body pieces and performances, many of them seminal works now firmly lodged in the art historical canon of the time. Whether he was transforming space by masturbating under a platform extension of the gallery floor or transforming the body by tucking his genitals between his legs, Acconci promoted a radical, corporeal method of working with the human presence that has remained relevant in these less performative times. This publication traces the development of Acconci's early work through his own writings and documentations from that time. Rather than a critical study, it offers invaluable primary source materials: For each of the approximately 200 performances/works included, Acconci drafted meticulous notes, mapping out his ideas and describing the specifications of each piece. Many of the artist's works were ephemeral performances and actions, and these primary source materials are now the only extant artifacts from the work. Thus the book's contents come directly from Acconci's personal archives, and include his notes and documentations, plus photographs, where available. An introduction by Gregory Volk provides historical context and addresses the issues of body art and performance still relevant today.

The Quick and the Dead

Peter Eleey, Olaf Blanke, Ina Blom, Peter Osborne, Margaret and Christine Wertheim

Artists have always used their imaginations to see beyond visible matter—to posit other physics, other energies, new ways of conceiving the visible and new models for art but the past century has seen an explosion of such investigations. In the fashion of a Wunderkammer, The Quick and the Dead takes stock of the 1960s and 70s legacy of experimental, or research art by pioneers like George Brecht, who posited objects as motionless events and asked us to consider an art verging on the non-existent, dissolving into other dimensions, and Lygia Clark, whose foldable sculptures sought to dissolve the boundary between inside and outside, each a static moment within the cosmological dynamics from which we came and to which we are going.

In a series of encounters with art made strange by its expansions, contractions, inversions and implosions in time and space, The Quick and the Dead surveys more than 80 works by a global, multigenerational group of 50 artists, scientists and musicians — among them James Lee Byars, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Harold Edgerton, Ceal Floyer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierre Huyghe, The Institute for Figuring, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Stephen Kaltenbach, On Kawara, Christine Kozlov, David Lamelas, Louise Lawler, Paul Etienne Lincoln, Mark Manders, Kris Martin, Steve McQueen, Helen Mirra, Catherine Murphy, Bruce Nauman, Rivane Neuenschwander, Claes Oldenburg, Roman Ondák, Adrian Piper, Roman Signer and Shomei Tomatsu, among many others. Includes reprints of texts by diverse luminaries such as John McPhee, Jalal Toufic, Oliver Sacks, Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson.

Tracey Moffatt: Free-Falling

Tracey Moffatt

Documenting an exhibition at Dia by Tracey Moffatt, Free-Falling, October 9, 1997–June 14, 1998. Contents: Preface by Michael Govan; Only Angels Have Wings by Isaac Julien with Mark Nash; A Photo-Filmic Odyssey by Lynne Cooke; and Dust by Sam Shepard.

Free-falling includes two newly commissioned works: a suite of twenty-five photographs called Up in the Sky (1996) and a video installation, Moffatt's first in this medium. The subject of this video piece is a surfer, a figure close to the heart of Australia's contemporary self-image. By contrast, Up in the Sky, which was shot near Broken Hill in the Outback, draws on imagery and a landscape that have long been central to the Australian mythos. In addition, the exhibition will include Guapa (Goodlooking), a series of twelve monochrome photographs loosely based on the theme of the roller derby, which Moffatt made in 1995 while on a residency at ArtPace in San Antonio, and Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990), her early but prophetic short film. Guapa explores the intersection of violence with eroticism as sanctioned under the umbrella of sport. Silhouetted against neutral backdrops, the carefully choreographed female contestants create formally compelling images recalling at times sculptural groupings from the art of the past: artifice is as intrinsic to this sport as it is to Moffatt's aesthetic.

Unfurled: Supports/Surfaces 1966-1976

This publication accompanies the exhibition Unfurled: Supports/Surfaces 1966-1976 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in 2019.

The French art movement, Supports/Surfaces produced artwork marked by an interest in materiality, a lyrical use of color, and expansive ideas of what constitutes a painting. French society was undergoing social protests and upheavals in the 1960s that mirrored the civil rights and anti-war movements in the USA. The Supports/Surfaces artists sought new forms and methods to reflect their times: standard art materials were dropped in favor of homespun non-art materials (bed sheets, rope, dish rags) and figuration was replaced by loose, permeable grids that hinted at a more democratic method of art-making and a proposal for humane
society. Although working abstractly, these artists shared a deeply political approach to making and showing art.

Three moments of a script that never was written but might have happened

Hu Wei

This publication departs from three video works by the artist Hu Wei, exploring the possibilities of devising new scripts within the manifold connections between materials for creative works, images, and texts. The first part of the publication transcribes and recompiles the narrations in his videos into three sets of juxtaposed scripts. Each of these textual fragments showcases an “anatomical section of an era” from disparate geopolitical contexts: a family letter from Sabah, a set of Rashomonian testimony, and an anecdote about the anonymous. The second part is a notebook-like atlas that unfolds following the clues of three keywords: “Fabrication,” “Anonymity,” and “Boundary.” Within this section, different types of images and texts, including factual materials, embodied research and survey records, as well as fabricated documents, interlace with each other. They serve as an interrogation, extension, reconstruction, and reassemblage of three muted histories or events.

Yayoi Kusama: The Journal

Yayoi Kusama

The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s kaleidoscopic environments have captured the imaginations of millions of museum and gallery visitors around the world. Her quintessential polka dots, organic shapes, and optical environments that become hypnotic, merging concepts of flatness and depth, presence and absence, and beauty and the sublime. The paintings on the cover and endpapers of Kusama’s first Artist Journal provide the perfect motivation for any creative pursuit.

X#*@(ing) INDEX!: Who is Pointing at Who—and why—in Carroll Dunham's Drawings

Carroll Dunham

Carroll Dunham (b. 1949, New Haven, CT) has eschewed the conventions of abstract and figurative painting, establishing a trademark style and vast body of work that are both deeply original and enormously influential. His early works, painted on wood veneer, used the existing textures of the knotted grain to create elaborate compositions recalling both fantastic organic forms and the popular imagery of cartoons. Mining the unconscious and variously pursuing psychologically charged themes, these psychedelic depictions evolved over the years from primordial amoeba-like forms to quasi-figurative biomorphisms. A formalist by nature, Dunham’s paintings and drawings are studies in control—his line has become a protagonist in itself—nothing is accidental, whether executed in gentle pencil shading, audacious crayon scribble, or painterly ink and gouache.

The Cardiff Tapes (2019)

Garth Evans

In 1972, artist Garth Evans welcomed the opportunity to create a public sculpture in Cardiff, Wales, as part of the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation’s City Sculpture Project. Concerned that the increasing demand for his work served only to reinforce the political, social, and economic status quos, Evans hoped to unsettle this dynamic by making a sculpture that would connect with an audience outside of the art world. The morning after the installation of his sculpture, Evans recorded the responses of passersby. The Beckettian transcript of the Cardiff interviews is presented here, framed by Evans’s introduction and reflection. Art historian Jon Wood contextualizes The Cardiff Tapes within contemporaneous debates about sculpture and public space. These writings explore ideas about the social responsibilities of art and artists and make a cogent argument for the value of “difficulty” in sculpture.

Garth Evans (b. 1934, Manchester, UK) has exhibited widely across the UK and United States since the 1960s. He has received numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, the British Council Exhibitions Abroad Grant, and residencies at Yaddo and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation. In 2013, artist Richard Deacon curated the survey exhibition Garth Evans at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which coincided with the release of Garth Evans: Sculpture Beneath the Skin, edited by Ann Compton (Philip Wilson Publishers, 2013), a major publication reviewing his career to date. His work is represented in major public and private collections, including Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the British Museum. Evans currently lives and works in northeastern Connecticut and teaches in New York, where he is head of sculpture at the New York Studio School.

Jon Wood is research curator at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. In 2007, he compiled and edited The Modern Sculpture Reader, an anthology of twentieth-century writings on sculpture, with Alex Potts and David Hulks. He is presently compiling a collection of essays, in collaboration with Ian Christie, looking at the changing relationship between sculpture and film and writing a book called Sculpture Now, for Tate Publishing.

The New Yokoo Times

Tadanori Yokoo

A 20-page newspaper published to coincide with the 2001 exhibition. Formatted after the pages of the New York Times, The New Yokoo Times is a spoof on current affairs seen through the filter of an altered consciousness, with a distinct absurdist bent. In one collage titled “Who Cares” featured on the Editorials/Letters page, we view an image of a seascape. Large in the foreground is a group of 19th-century Japanese women lounging in striped swimming suits, adrift in a boat. Behind (and heading straight for them) is a group of American tourists in leisure wear, packed into a speedboat on a fishing expedition. And in the distance, yet a third vessel, an antique clipper is speeding across the frame through shark-infested waters towards a swimmer dashing by as if in a race. The headlines read: “Managing the Yokoo Incident,” “The Battle Over Money in Heaven,” “Gravel Sushi,” and “A Time of Testing.” The texts are appropriated from the New York Times and various Japanese tabloids.

William Eggleston: 2 1/4

William Eggleston

Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, William Eggleston began taking pictures during the 1960s after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment. In 1966 he changed from black-and-white to color film, perhaps to make the medium more his own and less that of his esteemed predecessor. John Sarkowski, when he was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called Eggleston the ‘first color photographer,’ and the world in which we consider a color photograph as art has changed because of him.

Urs Fischer: Beds & Problem Paintings

Urs Fischer’s work explores the genres of classical art history (still lifes, portraits, nudes, landscapes, and interiors) at the intersection with everyday life—in cast sculptures and assemblages, paintings, digital montages, spatial installations, mutating or kinetic objects, and texts. This volume includes fifty-five color illustrations from Urs Fischer’s Beds and Problem Paintings show that was exhibited at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles from February 23–April 7, 2012. This was the artist’s first major solo exhibition with the gallery. Beds and Problem Paintings was designed by the artist, and the images within the book include installation photos from the exhibition as well as photographs taken by the artist.

Viscidity

Boris Mikhailov

The photographs featured in Viscidity by Boris Mikhailov were completed and sequenced in Kharkov in 1982 but only now published as a book. Reproduced at their original scale, we have added translations from the Russian to English. In addition, the book features “I was walking through a field,” an original bilingual essay by Mikhailov illuminating the history of the work and written specially for this edition.

One of three early and critical image-text works, Viscidity was completed after Horizontal Pictures and Vertical Calendars (1978-1980) and shortly before Unfinished Dissertation (1984). As Mikhailov states: “At first the texts tautologically repeated what was visible in the image, as though they were simply drawing attention to the photograph (the first book)… gradually the texts changed and became poetic and deeper (the second book)… then I added quotations in addition to my own reflections on photography (the third book).”

Viscidity was produced during a time of “deep political stagnation. Nothing is happening — nothing at all is interesting … There was a kind of certainty that society was at the threshold of something unknown, something everyone was anticipating. Many people felt this way.”

Mikhailov is best known for provocative self-portraits and politically charged color photographs, from the earliest works in Red Series (1968–75) to the gut wrenching yet seductive images of the homeless in the Soviet Union, published in Case Studies (Scalo, 1999). A prolific and experimental artist, Mikhailov’s work rests naturally beside the most respected conceptual artists of his generation. Photographs from Viscidity have been exhibited widely throughout his career, most importantly in 2004 in the critically acclaimed exhibition and accompanying catalogue at the Serralves Museum in Portugal by Margarita and Victor Tupitsyn, Verbal Photography: Ilya Kabakov and Boris Mikhailov and the Moscow Archive of New Art.

Wendell Castle: Wandering Forms—Works from 1959-1979

Alastair Gordon

Published to accompany an exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2012, this book focuses on Wendell Castle’s exceptional early works in wood and fiberglass, which transformed the way we look at furniture making.

American studio furniture icon Wendell Castle is one of the most important, influential, and celebrated designers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For more than 50 years, he consistently pioneered new territory in design and beyond. His visionary constructions and distinctive stacked-laminate woodworking process cross the boundaries between sculpture, design, and craft. These highly original works have influenced generations of furniture makers, designers, artists, sculptors, collectors, and design enthusiasts.

Renowned writer Alastair Gordon lucidly tells the exciting story of Castle’s impact and innovations through the defining works of his career. The text is accompanied by hundreds of drawings, press clippings, and never-before-seen images of Castle, his workspace, and process. Beautifully designed by award-winning Pandiscio Green and incorporating materials from Castle’s personal archives, this book is the definitive study of one of the most significant furniture designers working in the world today and one of America’s true cultural treasures.

William Kentridge: Lexicon

William Kentridge

Lexicon is a facsimile cloth edition of an antiquarian Latin-Greek dictionary which the internationally celebrated South African artist William Kentridge (born 1954) has embellished with black ink drawings of what might seem at first to be animal silhouettes. In reproducing the work (which is uncollected elsewhere), this beautifully designed artist's book mischievously pits the model of the flipbook against the fragility of the antiquarian original, and flipping its pages animates Kentridge's lively, spiky drawings into a continuously morphing image that transforms from a cat to a coffee pot over the course of the book's 160 pages. This image is based on a disintegrating sculpture that reflects the artist's interest in the instability of objecthood. Lexiconis accompanied by a DVD containing a short film in which Kentridge flips the pages himself.

Udomsak Krisanamis: The Intimate Portrait

Udomsak Krisanamis

This artist's book, with color illustrations and accompanying text by associate curator Annetta Massie, is the first publication focused on this intriguing artist. Krisanamis, a Thai artist who has lived in the United States since 1991, taught himself English by reading the newspaper and marking out all the words he knew. This created a patterned page that became the substructure for his painting and collage combinations. In later works, traditional art materials share pictorial space with tactile ready-mades including cast-off papers, tea, and noodles on blankets, sheets, towels, and other unexpected backings.

Wolf Tones

Nancy Shaver, Maximilian Goldfarb, Sterrett Smith

When a bowed, stringed instrument is played, the vibrations of certain notes can resonate at the same frequency as the vibrations of the instrument itself. The dissonant effect that results is referred to as a “wolf tone,” for its howl, and is almost universally characterized as an unpleasant deviance. For Maximilian Goldfarb, Nancy Shaver, and Sterrett Smith, however, the wolf tone has come to serve as a productive analogy for describing forces at work in a visual field and a model for their ongoing collaboration, Wolf Tones.

Having previously brought their practices into relation in gallery installations, here, they engage with the form of the book and the space of the page by presenting an orchestrated cacophony of their distinct artworks and the source imagery from which they draw inspiration. They are joined by contributors from the realms of art, architecture, art criticism, design, literature, media studies, music, and poetry who likewise explore the potentials of dissonance. Referencing landscape, temporality, sonic surpluses, improvisation, Éliane Radigue’s Naldjorlak, and more, this book addresses the artists’ collaboration as well as the acoustic phenomenon itself, reimagining the wolf tone as something to be celebrated.

Nancy Shaver is an artist who has been exhibiting work for more than 40 years. In 2018, she was included in Outliers and American Vanguard Art (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), and One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art (MOCA, Los Angeles). Other recent exhibitions include VIVA ARTE VIVA (La Biennale di Venezia, 2017); Nancy Shaver: Reconciliation (The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2015); and Robert Gober: The Heart is Not a Metaphor (Museum of Modern Art, 2014–15). Recent gallery exhibitions include Derek Eller Gallery (NYC), 12.26 (Dallas, TX), Atlanta Contemporary (GA), and Parker Gallery (Los Angeles). Shaver has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Anonymous Was a Woman, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. A co-founder of Incident Report in Hudson, NY, Shaver also runs the store, Henry. She has been teaching in the Bard College MFA Program for more than 20 years.

Maximilian Goldfarb is an artist who produces projects in many forms. Goldfarb has completed past works with support from the Harpo Foundation, the Elizabeth Graham Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Kaplan Institute, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Experimental Television Center. He has participated in numerous exhibitions in venues including Sculpture Center, NY; Stadsgalerij, NL; Western Front, BC; White Columns, NY; The Drawing Center, NY; and Nina Freudenheim Gallery, Buffalo, NY. Goldfarb is interested in the generative potential of publication and radio transmission platforms. He is co-author of Architectural Inventions (Laurence King Publishing, UK, 2012), Deep Cycle (M49, 2010), Handbook for Human Machines (Pilot Editions, 2015), and Remote Viewing: 500 Tableaux (Publication Studio, 2017). Goldfarb is a co-founder of Incident Report in Hudson, NY. He serves on the Board of Directors of Wave Farm and is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture in the Department of Art at the University at Buffalo.

Sterrett Smith studied painting with Jim Gahagan, an American colorist who directed the Hans Hoffman School at Goddard College. She graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a BFA in painting in 1980, where she studied with Hassel Smith, Franklin Williams, Robert Hudson, and Angela Davis. She also studied in San Francisco with Helen Palmer, Diane Di Prima, Ian Grand, and Charles Ponce in the training of the intuition, the Kabbalah, and Somatic Knowledge. She was part of the group of artists and poets in Jess and Robert Duncan’s household and Diane DiPrima’s circle. She has been painting and making sculptures ever since.

The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg

Eric Crosby, Dean Otto

Since 2001, Swedish-born artist Nathalie Djurberg (born 1978) has honed a distinctive style of video animation. Set to music and sound effects by her collaborator Hans Berg, Djurberg's handcrafted cinematic tales explore revenge, lust, submission, gluttony and other primal emotions through the conventionally innocent technique of “Claymation,” which in her hands becomes a medium for nightmarish yet wry allegories of human behavior and social taboo. Increasingly, Djurberg's practice has blurred the cinematic and the sculptural in environments that integrate moving images and related set pieces. This publication accompanies the artist's largest presentation in an American museum to date. The catalogue weaves documentation of her sculptures and stills from her recent films with texts (both original and found) that trace the historical, scientific and literary threads running through her practice.

William Eggleston: 5 x 7

William Eggleston, Walter Hopps

William Eggleston’s latest monograph features photographs taken during the early 1970s using a large-format 5 x 7 camera. The book includes imagery typical of the Eggleston oeuvre—streetscapes, parked automobiles, portraits of the strange and disenfranchised. It also offers never-before-published photographs taken in the nightclubs Eggleston frequented. The portraits are offhand and spontaneous but insistently stark; their brutality is heightened by the absence of color. They have a leveling effect—whether biker or debutante, the people are clearly denizens of the same realm.

Todo Cambia

Stephanie Emerson, Paul Schimmel, Alma Ruiz

Published on the occasion of the Focus Series exhibition Todo Cambia, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, October 5, 1997 – February 8, 1998.

Commissioned from the young Cuban artist Kcho, this large-scale installation (the title of which translates as "Everything Changes") had two components: a grouping of sculptures, including a barrel, a raft, an oar, a kayak, a surfboard and a small boat, resting on small tables formerly used in studio art classes at the Superior Institute of the Arts in Havana, and a room-size boat constructed from bookshelves found in open-air book markets throughout Havana, with shelves filled by the types of books that Cuban citizens read.

The Worlds Worst: A Guide to the Portsmouth Sinfonia

Christopher M. Reeves, Aaron Walker

In 1970, galvanized in part by the musical experiments of John Cage, Gavin Bryars, and Cornelius Cardew, students at Portsmouth College of Art formed their own symphony orchestra. Christened the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the primary requirement for membership specified that all players, regardless of skill, experience, or musicianship, be unfamiliar with their chosen instruments. This restriction, coupled with the decision to play “only the familiar bits” of classical music, challenged the Sinfonia’s audience to reconsider the familiar, as the ensemble haplessly butchered the classics at venues ranging from avant-garde music festivals to the Royal Albert Hall. By the end of the decade, after three LPs of their anarchic renditions of classical and rock music and a revolving cast of over one hundred musicians—including Brian Eno and Michael Nyman—the Sinfonia would cease performing.

The World’s Worst: A Guide to the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the first book devoted to the ensemble, examines the founding tenets, organizing principles, and collective memories of the Sinfonia, whose reputation as “the world’s worst orchestra” underplays its unique accomplishment as a populist avant-garde project. While seemingly a niche musical anecdote, the story of the Portsmouth Sinfonia engenders wide-ranging conversations that touch upon the legacy of interdisciplinary art pedagogy, the power of popular music, the investment necessary in order to work and learn together, and the effects of destabilizing canonization. The unorthodox journey of the orchestra unfolds here through interviews with original members and their publicist/manager, photographs, previously uncollected archival material including ephemera and internal documents, an essay by co-editor, Christopher M. Reeves, a foreword by Gavin Bryars, and more!

The collaborative publications and curatorial projects of Christopher M. Reeves and Aaron Walker deal with the generative possibilities of collective creative making.

Christopher M. Reeves is a Chicago-based research creator and PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He currently co-runs Flatland Gallery in Chicago. His essays have been included in such publications as Incite Journal, Counter Signals 2 (Other Forms), and Emergency Index (Ugly Duckling Presse). His dissertation is entitled, “Playing Music Badly in Public: Brian Eno, Experimentalism, and the Limits of the Non-Musician.”

Aaron Walker is an artist and programmer living in South Carolina whose projects often spring out of an interest in self-organized, artist-run culture.

Wedge : Sexuality : RE/Positions

Brian Wallis, Phil Mariani, Silvia Kolbowski, Mary Kelly, Alice Jardine, Jane Warrick, Connie Hatch, Jean-François Lyotard, Lea Lublin, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Weinstock, Victor Burgin, Barbara Kruger, Carol Squiers, Lynne Tillman, Judith Barry, Sherrie Levine

Edited by Phil Mariani and Brian Wallis, Wedge was a seminal periodical combining artists’ projects and critical and theoretical writings that ran during the early to mid 1980’s. Essays on the importance of sexuality in women’s lives today and througout history. Gender roles are examined and in the spirit of the issue’s theme “re/positions” these roles.

Typewriter Poems

Peter Finch, Alison Bielski, Paula Claire, Thomas A. Clark, Bob Cobbing, Michael Gibbs, John Gilbert, dsh, Philip Jenkins, Andrew Lloyd, Peter Mayer, Cavan McCarthy, Edwin Morgan, Will Parfitt, Marcus Patton, I.D. Pedersen, Alan Riddell, John J. Sharkey, Meic Stephens, Charles Verey, J.P. Ward, Nicholas Zurbrugg

Co-published with Second Aeon Publications, Typewriter Poems gathers together twenty-two practitioners of the art of the typewriter poem–which relies on the limitations imposed by the machine to produce its form–in this slim volume of experimental letters. Featuring the work of British poets Thomas A. Clark, Bob Cobbing, Michael Gibbs, and many others.

The Extravagant Vein

Donald Moffett

The first comprehensive survey of Moffett's investigations into art history, paint, and form, Donald Moffett: The Extravagant Vein provides viewers with insight into the artist's practice over the past twenty years. As a painter, Moffett extends the traditional two-dimensional frame, converting flat planes into highly textured reliefs in oil painting, or into intricate illuminations through video projection onto canvas. The subject matter of his paintings–from landscape and nature to politics and history–is poetic, provocative, and even at times humorous. Moffett has remained engaged with issues surrounding the presence of gays in historical and contemporary culture that resonate today, as well as more timeless questions of love, loss, alienation, and death. Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2011 10.6 x 8.6 inches, 224 pp., illustrations Hardcover, ISBN 0847837270

The Killing Fields

Edited by Chris Riley and Douglas Niven

Between 1975 and 1978, the Khmer Rouge brutally executed two hundred
thousand Cambodians suspected of crimes against Pol Pot's regime. This
book is a grim yet fascinating collection of Khmer Rouge photographs of
prisoners as they were checked in to the S-21 death camp. Harrowed by
interrogation and often, torture, these faces betray their fate--forcing
the viewer to reckon with the circumstances that ever allowed these
atrocities to occur. A powerful, important book.

The Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art #4

Alexander Alberro, Jan Avgikos, Colin Gardner, Dave Hickey, Rosalind Krauss, Miwon Kwon, Ulrich Loock, Richard Shiff, Dirk Snauwaert

Since 1992, the Dia Center for the Arts has presented the Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art, an example of Dia's ongoing commitment to cross-disciplinary critical discourse. This fourth volume of collected theoretical and critical essays focuses on Dia's exhibitions from 2001 through 2002, with contributions by Alexander Alberro, Jan Avgikos, Colin Gardner, Dave Hickey, Rosalind Krauss, Miwon Kwon, Ulrich Loock, Richard Shiff and Dirk Snauwaert. These writers analyze the work of artists such as Roni Horn, Alfred Jensen, Bruce Nauman, Max Neuhaus, Panamarenko, Jorge Pardo, Gerhard Richter, Bridget Riley, Diana Thater and Gilberto Zorio. Dia Center for the Arts, 2009 200 pp., illustrations Softcover, ISBN 9780944521793

The Collected Poems of Mary Ellen Solt

Mary Ellen Solt, edited by Susan Solt

The Collected Poems of Mary Ellen Solt brings together nearly five decades of poetic work. Celebrated for her suite of visual poems Flowers in Concrete, much of Solt’s work has remained little known or unpublished. From her lyrical engagement with the “American idiom” of William Carlos Williams to her masterful forays into visual and concrete poetry, this volume, assembled and edited by her daughter Susan Solt, provides an in-depth documentation of a truly original writer who was at the center of some of the most daring global poetic developments of the mid-twentieth century.

The centerpiece of The Collected Poems of Mary Ellen Solt is the section “Words and Spaces,” which presents Solt’s concrete poems as she envisioned them: typographically precise, visually stunning, and commanding on the page. As Aram Saroyan writes in his foreword, these poems are “vivid, intimate inventions.” “The Peoplemover 1968,” a series of rarely seen political posters that grapples with the social upheavals and horrors of the late 1960s, combines Solt’s characteristic humor with a healthy dose of semiotics. Yet Solt was also composing works that encompassed everything from a brief and exacting love of nature to the sly observation of candid conversation; and, in an esoteric visual poem constructed purely from symbols, a meditation on marriage.

One of the few Americans, and rare women, in the concrete poetry movement, Solt edited the influential anthology Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968), which brought her to the forefront of that movement not only as a poet, but as an acclaimed critic. After a prominent career as an independent scholar, Solt became a professor of comparative literature at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she and her colleagues developed and expanded one of the first interarts studies programs in the United States.

Mary Ellen Solt (1920-2007), first recognized professionally for her critical writing on William Carlos Williams, was a writer, scholar, and an early proponent of concrete poetry. One of the few Americans in the concrete poetry movement, she edited the highly influential anthology Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968), which brought her to the forefront of that movement not only as a critic, but as a renowned concrete poet. After a prominent career as an independent scholar, Solt became a professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. Solt was the author of several poetry collections: Flowers in Concrete (1966), A Trilogy of Rain (1970), Marriage, ‘a code poem’ (1976), and The Peoplemover 1968: A Demonstration Poem (1978). Her poems, most notably “Forsythia” and “Moonshot Sonnet,” have appeared in countless anthologies over the years. Her “flower poems” have been exhibited internationally; of late, at the 2022 Venice Biennale and at the Getty Center in 2017.

William Eggleston: For Now

William Eggleston

A revised edition of unpublished pieces from the “B-sides” of Eggleston’s archive, curated and analyzed by Hollywood writers, directors and authors

American photographer William Eggleston approached his quotidian snapshots of Americana with a vivid and cinematic eye. For Now is a curation of Eggleston’s unpublished photographs by filmmaker Michael Almereyda, director of the 2005 documentary William Eggleston in the Real World. Almereyda pores through a collection of over 35,000 images in the archive spanning four decades of work in what he calls “the B-sides, the bootlegs, the unreleased tracks.” This oversized fourth edition includes eight additional new unpublished photographs. Essays include text by Almereyda as well as Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century; author and film critic Amy Taubin; Kristine McKenna, Los Angeles Times journalist from 1977 through 1998, and one of the first mainstream chroniclers of the L.A. punk rock scene; and director and screenwriter Lloyd Fonvielle. Unusual in its concentration on the artist’s family and friends, the book suggests an air of offhand intimacy, typical of Eggleston and typically surprising.

Viscidity

Boris Mikhailov

The photographs featured in Viscidity by Boris Mikhailov were completed and sequenced in Kharkov in 1982 but only now published as a book. Reproduced at their original scale, we have added translations from the Russian to English. In addition, the book features “I was walking through a field,” an original bilingual essay by Mikhailov illuminating the history of the work and written specially for this edition.

One of three early and critical image-text works, Viscidity was completed after Horizontal Pictures and Vertical Calendars (1978-1980) and shortly before Unfinished Dissertation (1984). As Mikhailov states: “At first the texts tautologically repeated what was visible in the image, as though they were simply drawing attention to the photograph (the first book)… gradually the texts changed and became poetic and deeper (the second book)… then I added quotations in addition to my own reflections on photography (the third book).”

Viscidity was produced during a time of “deep political stagnation. Nothing is happening — nothing at all is interesting … There was a kind of certainty that society was at the threshold of something unknown, something everyone was anticipating. Many people felt this way.”

Mikhailov is best known for provocative self-portraits and politically charged color photographs, from the earliest works in Red Series (1968–75) to the gut wrenching yet seductive images of the homeless in the Soviet Union, published in Case Studies (Scalo, 1999). A prolific and experimental artist, Mikhailov’s work rests naturally beside the most respected conceptual artists of his generation. Photographs from Viscidity have been exhibited widely throughout his career, most importantly in 2004 in the critically acclaimed exhibition and accompanying catalogue at the Serralves Museum in Portugal by Margarita and Victor Tupitsyn, Verbal Photography: Ilya Kabakov and Boris Mikhailov and the Moscow Archive of New Art.

The Singles 1999 - Now

Áda Ruilova

New York-based artist Áda Ruilova's videos combine classical cinematic devices with a distinctively low-tech sensibility, quick cuts and rhythmic, jarring soundtracks to create works that exist in the space between sound and image. Drawing equally from B-movie aesthetics and classic montage cinema, Ruilova creates dark, moody narratives that ruminate on psychology and memory. Ruilova is part of a generation of artists who employ media in innovative ways with a do-it-yourself aesthetic, often drawing upon contexts–from cinema to music to popular culture–that exist outside the art world. This catalogue was published in conjunction with the Aspen Art Museum's 2008 exhibition, which surveyed work Ruilova made since 1999; it was her first solo museum presentation. The catalogue contains several essays, along with color stills and written descriptions of each video.

Top Storie

Edited by Anne Turyn

Top Stories was a prose periodical published from 1978 to 1991 by the artist Anne Turyn in Buffalo, New York, and New York City. Over the course of twenty-nine issues, it served as a pivotal platform for experimental fiction and art through single-artist issues and two anthologies. The entire run of Top Stories is collected and reproduced here across two volumes.

Top Stories primarily featured female artists, though in Turyn’s words a few men “crept in as collaborators.” Although primarily “a prose periodical” (as its byline often stated), the issues varied in form and aesthetics, pushing the boundaries of what prose could be and, from time to time, escaping the genre altogether. In fact, the only parameters required for participants were that the periodical’s logo and issue list be included on the front and back covers, respectively.

A great deal of the works are short stories by the likes of Pati Hill, Tama Janowitz, and Kathy Acker, whose Pushcart Prize–winning “New York City in 1979” appeared for the first time in book form as part of the series. Constance DeJong contributes “I.T.I.L.O.E.,” a widely unavailable work that features the artist’s trademark prose and is sure to please fans of her novel, Modern Love. The largest issue of the periodical is undoubtedly Cookie Mueller’s How to Get Rid of Pimples,” which consists of a series of character studies of friends interspersed with photographs by David Armstrong, Nan Goldin, and Peter Hujar altered with freshly drawn blemishes.

Top Stories also celebrates less conventional literary forms. Issues by Lisa Bloomfield, Linda Neaman, and Anne Turyn take the form of artists’ books, juxtaposing image and text to construct tightly wound, interdependent narratives. Jenny Holzer and Peter Nadin present a collaborative work in copper ink comprised of truisms by Holzer on corporeal and emotional states and drawings of abstract bodies by Nadin. Janet Stein contributes a comic, while Ursule Molinaro provides a thorough index of daily life (and the contempt it produces) consisting of entries that were written just prior to lighting a cigarette.

Primary contributors include Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Sheila Ascher, Douglas Blau, Lisa Bloomfield, Linda L. Cathcart, Cheryl Clarke, Susan Daitch, Constance DeJong, Jane Dickson, Judith Doyle, Lee Eiferman, Robert Fiengo, Joe Gibbons, Pati Hill, Jenny Holzer, Gary Indiana, Tama Janowitz, Suzanne Jackson, Suzanne Johnson, Caryl Jones-Sylvester, Mary Kelly, Judy Linn, Micki McGee, Ursule Molinaro, Cookie Mueller, Peter Nadin, Linda Neaman, Glenn O’Brien, Romaine Perin, Richard Prince, Lou Robinson, Janet Stein, Dennis Straus, Sekou Sundiata, Leslie Thornton, Kirsten Thorup, Lynne Tillman, Anne Turyn, Gail Vachon, Brian Wallis, Jane Warrick, and Donna Wyszomierski.

David Armstrong, Nan Goldin, JT Hryvniak, Peter Hujar, Nancy Linn, Trish McAdams, Linda Neaman, Marcia Resnick, Michael Sticht, and Aja Thorup all make appearances as well, contributing artwork for the covers or as illustrations.

Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

James Allen, John Lewis, Leon F. Litwack, Hilton Als

“Many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe―don't want to believe―that such atrocities happened in America not so very long ago. These photographs bear witness to . . . an American holocaust."

–John Lewis, US Congressman

The Tuskegee Institute records the lynching of 3,436 Black Americans between 1882 and 1950. Many times, a photographer was present to capture these events. Without Sanctuary preserves these harrowing, death-marked depictions, saving them so that we may recognize the terrorism unleashed on America’s African American community. Editor James Allen, an American antique collector, includes nearly 100 images of lynchings in America from his own collection, including battleground cases such as the 1911 murders of Laura and Lawrence Nelson in Okemah, Oklahoma the lynching of Rubin Stacy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1935, and the infamous 1915 execution of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia. These images are accompanied by Allen’s own notes, as well as texts from the late US congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis, the late slavery and Reconstruction historian Leon Litwack, and writer and theater critic Hilton Als, professor at University of California in Berkeley and Columbia University. Now in its 17th printing, Without Sanctuary remains a singular testament to the camera’s ability to make us remember what we often choose to forget.

James Allen (born 1954) is an American collector best known for his vast collection of photographs of lynchings in America. Some of his collected items are now located in the Smithsonian and the High Museum of Art.

Leon Litwack (1929–2021) was a professor of American History at the University of California in Berkeley from 1964 to 2007. He specialized in the Reconstruction Era and the aftermath of slavery in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His 1979 book Been in the Storm So Long won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Francis Parkman Prize and the National Book Award.

Hilton Als (born 1960) is a writer and theater critic. He holds professorial positions at the University of California in Berkeley and Columbia University, and serves as a staff writer and theater critic for the New Yorker. In 2017 he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Als has also curated several group art exhibitions including Forces in Nature at Victoria Miro Gallery and Alice Neel: Uptown at David Zwirner Gallery.

John Lewis (1940–2020) became involved in the Civil Rights movement when he was still a teenager. He was introduced to both Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., and participated in the 1960 Nashville sit-ins as well as the 1961 Freedom Rides. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1963 to 1966, he was one of the “Big Six” civil rights leaders who coordinated the March on Washington. He represented Georgia’s 5th District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1987 until his death in 2020.

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