I always identified with the idea of “performing the image.” —Ericka Beckman, 2013
This newspaper is published by JRP | Ringier and edited by Lionel Bovier. Issue 8, Summer 2015. Printed in 10,000 copies by Ringier Print Adligenswil AG. Not for sale
WE MAKE BOOKS WITH ART ... And now also digital ones ... We have increased our digital offer, with several new titles now available for iPad, Kindle, Kobo, Nook, etc. such as Jens Hoffmann’s (Curating) From A to Z and Mike Kelley’s Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-Chat (edited by John C. Welchman). As you will see leafing through this newspaper, we nevertheless continue to be committed to printed matters, bringing out several new publications exploring the possibilities of offset production (such as Wade Guyton’s and Doug Aitken’s), as well as special editions (page 31), and important monographs. We are proud of this season’s offer and we hope you will enjoy discovering our books when they will have landed in shops worldwide. In the meantime, here are some previews, descriptions of projects, and annoucement of recent releases. —Lionel Bovier, Publisher
Highlights
Ericka Beckman, still from Hiatus, 1999
Doug Aitken Art Basel | Year 45 Kader Attia Ericka Beckman Louis Michel Eilshemius Sylvie Fleury Wade Guyton Barbara Kasten Tony Oursler Josephine Pryde Ugo Rondinone Xanti Schawinsky Jim Shaw Avery Singer Slavs and Tatars Sylvia Sleigh Sue Williams
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Text by John Beeson Cinderella, 1986 (production shot)
I BELIEVE A LOT OF MY FRIENDS AND MYSELF LOOKED TO IMAGES THAT WE COULD APPROPRIATE FROM OUR PAST, BECAUSE WE WERE SO RADICALLY TRANSFORMED BY THE TV AND RADIO WE WATCHED AND LISTENED TO. WE CLUNG TO THEIR SHORT-LIVED STATUS AND LISTENED AND LOOKED DEEP INTO THEIR SOUNDS AND IMAGES. THE MEDIA EXPERIENCE OF MY YOUTH WAS LINEAR AND EACH NEW ONE SEQUEL, NEWS STORY, OR NEW ALBUM CHANGED OR WIPED OUT THE ONE BEFORE, IN A BLOTTER EFFECT. —Ericka Beckman
Ericka Beckman Ericka Beckman’s films are category outliers. The work of an art school graduate, they were once fixtures in the world of experimental cinema, but they correspond at least as well to the context of contemporary art–with its discourses, its modes of interpretation, and its eager historiography.
Untitled, 1983
Beckman makes films without plots in a conventional sense, rather constituting them from themes: socialization, acculturation, competition, and the organization of thoughts and memory. Since they’re structured largely according to games, they don’t have characters; they have players. And those players exhibit such vague, indeterminate characteristics that it’s no great surprise that actors appear alphabetically in the credits, without any identifying information about who they played. Like everything else about the films–the scenery, the props, the animation–the players are representative, stand-ins contributing to Beckman’s abstract ruminations on culture in a time-based medium. The fact, though, that Beckman’s films from the 1970s and 1980s cast her artist-peers as players is meaningful. The actors came from two, at times overlapping, contexts. Firstly, there’s CalArts, circa 1976, where she was a student in John Baldessari’s “Post Studio” class. There, she met several of the other artists who would become important figures in her generation as well as in her filmmaking practice: among them, Ashley Bickerton, Matt Mullican, Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, James Casebere, and James Welling. (Other students from that era include Barbara Bloom, Troy Brauntuch, John Miller, and Jim Shaw.) In the years immediately following, Beckman and Mullican were in regular dialogue. In his 1982 essay in Art in America titled “Back to the Studio,” a review of an alumni
exhibition celebrating the ten-year anniversary of CalArts, Craig Owens hit upon the similar bases underlying Mullican’s and Beckman’s practices: signs and subjectivity. Mullican, Owens wrote, was focused “on the ways in which we project ourselves into the world via the signs that we employ”—meaning the visual iconography that constitutes culture. And as he saw it, “Ericka Beckman’s Super-8 films show us, not things themselves, but signs which represent those things.” In other words, Beckman cut to the very foundation of culture’s visual vocabularies. In a conclusion intending to address all of the artists in the show, Owens wrote that their works “deal not only with the artist’s activity of encoding information, but also with the viewer’s activity of decoding the image.” [ … ] Beckman’s films don’t really lend themselves to description. Her formal language is highly specific, highly detailed, and constituted from concrete elements– largely mundane and nameable objects, character types, settings, actions, shapes, and colors. What’s more, her work is an attempt to render these elements mutable. Beckman strips them from any narrative and sets them in motion within the context of game-like activities, which are themselves a patchwork of numerous extent games. At times, these activities devolve into abstractions, still constituted from concrete elements, or they stretch from a realistic time and space into the past, the future, a dream, or a virtual realm.
Excerpted from the monograph
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Ericka Beckman The Super-8 Trilogy Between 1978 and 1981, Ericka Beckman (b. 1951) created a landmark suite of experimental films. Known as “The Super-8 Trilogy,” these films are among the most iconic and original works of the “Pictures Generation.”Featuring herself, and a cast of artist-friends (including James Welling, Matt Mullican, and Mike Kelley), the “Trilogy” is informed by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s theories on the cognitive development of children, the culture of televised sports, as well as the heyday of Metro-GoldwynMayer’s musicals. Accompanying the DVD (Multizone, PAL/SECAM, 83 minutes) is a booklet containing an introduction by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Douglas Eklund—who organized The Pictures Generation. 1974–1984 exhibition in 2009—as well as a conversation between the artist, Lionel Bovier, and Fabrice Stroun, curator of her retrospective at Kunsthalle Bern (2013). [ISBN 978-3-03764-259-7]
Boundary Figures, 1989 (detail)
The Book: Ericka Beckman Editor Fabrice Stroun, Geraldine Tedder Authors John Beeson, Lionel Bovier, Vera Dika, Jeanne Graff, Fabrice Stroun, Eric Zimmerman
Ericka Beckman
Still
Stills
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English edition October 2015 ISBN 978-3-03764-421-8 Hardcover, 280 x 272 mm 144 pages Images 120 color CHF 74 / EUR 60 / GBP 48 / US 80
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The Archives of Tony Oursler Book cover, 1930 (photo: Jason Mandella)
BIOGRAPHY
Tony Oursler Artist Tony Oursler has amassed a vast personal archive of objects and ephemera relating to magic, the paranormal, film, television, phantasmagoria, pseudoscience, and technology. For Oursler, the archive functions as an open visual resource, historical inquiry, and—most intriguingly—a family history. One of the collection’s many digressions is the friendship between the artist’s grandfather Charles Fulton Oursler—a famous early 20th-century author and publisher—and magician and escapologist Harry Houdini, their joint campaign against fraudulent mediums, and a historic interaction with Arthur Conan Doyle, who, beyond his Sherlock Holmes series, was an important advocate for spiritualism and the paranormal. This publication, released in conjunction with a major exhibition of Oursler’s archive at LUMA Foundation in Arles, features up to 2,500 objects including photographs, prints, historic
Tony Oursler, born in New York in 1957, works in video, sculpture, installation, performance, and painting. His work has been exhibited worldwide at documenta VIII and IX, Kassel, Germany; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Skulptur Projekte Münster; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; and Tate Liverpool. The artist lives and works in New York City.
manuscripts, rare books, letters, and objects. Additional topics include stage magic, thought photography, demonology, cryptozoology, optics, mesmerism, automatic writing, hypnotism, fairies, cults, the occult, color theory, and UFOs. Linking these wide-ranging materials is Oursler’s underlying interest in belief systems and human nature—the suspension of disbelief, or perhaps just our propensity to believe. The material in Oursler’s collection broadens recent explorations of technology and mystical cultural production, investigating the relationships between science, pseudoscience, religion, and the occult with visual and archival documents that demonstrate the power of images to carry and challenge our most cherished beliefs.
Hypnottist entrances young men onstage, mid-20th century (photo: Elisabeth Bernstein)
Dr. R. L. Noran, ca. 1978 (photo: Jason Mandella)
The Archives of Tony Oursler
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Tony Oursler Works 1997–2007 While Oursler’s position as a forerunner in video art is well established, his two-dimensional works have always been an essential part of his creative process. He describes his drawings and works on paper as a series of perceptions, scenes, delusions, and diagrams that are a free association of ideas and themes informing his work in video. A diary of his conceptualization process, Oursler uses drawing, painting, and collage as a means of remembering, associating, or layering thoughts. The studies, sketches, and panels explore the supernatural, methods of mass communication, the history and development of media technology, and their effect on the human psyche. This book, edited by Lionel Bovier and published with Lehmann Maupin Gallery (New York/Hong Kong), offers a chronology of Oursler’s two-dimensional work over the past ten years, showcasing his early paintings, painting on sculpture, painting with collage, and the combination of video with the painted panel. [ISBN 978-3-905829-25-9]
Poster, ca. 1920s (photo: Jason Mandella)
The Book: The Archives of Tony Oursler - Imponderable
Imponderable
Edited by Tom Eccles, Maja Hoffmann, Beatrix Ruf
Imponderable The Archives of Tony Oursler
Authors Jordan Bear, Karen Beckman, Noam Elcott, Tom Gunning, Branden W. Joseph, Peter Lamont, Fred Nadis, Stephanie O'Rourke, Pascal Rousseau, H. Darrel Rutkin, Jim Steinmeyer, Anna Thurlow, Christopher Turner
Illustrated gypsy fortune-telling cards by Nemesi, with titles in German, Serbian, Hungarian, and Slovenian, early 20th century. From left to right, top to bottom: Falseness, Longing, Disaster, Letter, Stability, Death, Annoyance, Thief, Sadness.
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Photograph, 20th c.
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English/French edition July 2015 ISBN 978-3-03764-426-3 Softcover, 210 x 280 mm, 655 p. Published with LUMA Foundation CHF 60 / EUR 50 / GBP 38 / US 65
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Retrospective monograph Working at Home, 1969
Sylvia Sleigh Although often overlooked in contemporary art, Welsh-born Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010) became an important part of New York’s feminist art scene in the 1960s and beyond. She was particularly well known for her explicit paintings of male nudes, which challenged the art historical tradition of male artists painting female subjects as objects of desire.
Triple Head of Carter Ratcliff, 1975
Sleigh trained in painting at Brighton School of Art at a time when female art students were, as she recalled, “treated in a second-rate fashion.” Despite having a solo exhibition at Kensington Art Gallery in 1953, she received little public recognition until her move to New York in the 1960s. There she and her husband, the art critic and Guggenheim curator Lawrence Alloway, created a home that welcomed artists, writers, and musicians, many of whom Sleigh painted. These works radiate a sense of friendship and emotional attachment between the artist and her sitters, in addition to presenting an array of significant cultural figures of the time, such as Eleanor Antin, Nancy Spero, Agnes Denes, and Mary Beth Edelson.
The paintings of Sylvia Sleigh testify of the couple’s embrace of the local scene. Represented dressed or unclothed, both men and women are seen absorbed in immersive environments and described by an acid-pastel palette. From the end of the 1960s until her death, Sleigh participated in almost every large-scale American exhibition of feminist art, and showed at the women-run A.I.R. Gallery and SoHo 20 in New York, which she co-founded. This book is Sleigh’s first retrospective monograph. Including texts by Linda Nochlin and curators of the first overview exhibition of her work, in 2012– 2013, it also provides a complete biography and numerous reproductions of her paintings.
The Sallick Family, 1952
Retrospective monograph
7 New release
Barbara Kasten Stages Since the 1970s Barbara Kasten has developed her expansive practice of photography through the lens of many different disciplines, including sculpture, painting, theater, textile, and installation. Spanning her nearly five-decade engagement with abstraction, light, and architectonic form, this publication situates Kasten’s practice within current conversations around sculpture and photography. Barbara Kasten: Stages is the first major survey of her work. The publication includes a biography of the artist, a conversation between Kasten and artist Liz Deschenes, and new scholarly essays by curator Alex Klein, and art historians Alex Kitnick and Jenni Sorkin. Published in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, which hosted her first retrospective in 2015. [ISBN 978-3-03764-410-2]
Annunciation, 1975
The Book: Sylvia Sleigh Edited by Giovanni Carmine, Alexis Vaillant Authors Giovanni Carmine, Francesco Manacorda, Linda Nochlin, Mats Stjernstedt, Alexis Vaillant English edition October 2015 ISBN 978-3-03764-332-7 Hardcover, 280 x 272 mm, 144 p. Published with Tate Liverpool, Stiftelsen Kunstnernes Hus, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, and CAPC Musée d'Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, and the support of FSEA CHF 78 / EUR 60 / GBP 48 / US 80
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Art Basel Ryan McNamara, ME M 4 MIAMI: A Story Ballet About the Internet, 2014
Art Basel Year 45 Following the success of its launch last year, Art Basel’s official annual publication, Year 45 captures and documents the 2014 shows in Basel, Miami Beach, and Hong Kong, and goes beyond them, featuring interviews, essays on contemporary art, and personal highlights from artists, curators, collectors, and museum directors.
Nadim Abbas, Apocalypse Postponed, Absolut Art Bar, Hong Kong 2014
“In entirely rethinking our approach to publishing, we shifted from a neutral stance to one in which great efforts and remarkable moments are spotlighted,” writes Marc Spiegler in his introduction. Designed by Gavillet & Rust (Geneva), the publication has an A-to-Z format that maps the world of Art Basel alongside profiles spotlighting each of the 528 galleries participating across the three shows in 2014. It features works from all sectors of the different shows, highlights events and talks, offering vivid and varied perspectives on the global art world as seen through the eyes of Art Basel. Giving art world experts, curators, and collectors a platform for sharing their expertise, the publication provides an insightful and immersive art experience for the reader. Interviewees and contributors include Harry Bellet, Stuart Comer, Paula Cooper, Cosmin Costinas, Bice Curiger, Douglas Fogle, Alex Gartenfeld, Massimiliano Gioni, Hou Hanru, Yuko Hasegawa, Chrissie Iles, Joan Jonas,
Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Ruba Katrib, Chus Martinez, Ryan McNamara, Jessica Morgan, Taiyana Pimentel, Sarah Thornton, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jane & Louise Wilson, Xu Zhen, and many others whose work contributed this year to the fairs on all three continents. If you are wondering what happened in Year 45 of Art Basel and which where the most discussed gallery stands or “Unlimited” participations; which “Feature” or “Kabinett” booth will soon lead to a museum survey; which young artists’ names are listed in the Top 10 of important art figures; if you are curious about Art Basel’s new Kickstarter funding program or if you missed Hans Ulrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenbach’s 14 Rooms; if you want to know how a postapocalyptic bar feels like according to Nadim Abbas or how Carsten Nicolai was able to interact with lights, sounds, and the tallest Hong Kong skyscraper— this book is what you need!
Carsten Nicolai � (alpha) pulse
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Year 45
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Carsten Nicolai, a (alpha pulse), Hong Kong 2014
� (ALPHA) PULSE
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The Book: Art Basel | Year 45
U Art Basel’s pioneering exhibition platform, established in 2000, Unlimited in Basel boasts ambitious contemporary and historical works, including massive sculptures and paintings, video projections, large-scale installations, and live performances. In 2014 Unlimited was curated by New York-based Gianni Jetzer.
2014 participants
Rita Ackermann Hauser & Wirth Richard Aldrich Bortolami Harold Ancart Hufkens Carl Andre Fischer John Bock Coles Kern Marconi Regen Projects Sprüth Magers Ian Breakwell Reynolds Anthony Caro Juda Mitchell-Innes & Nash Templon
João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva Fortes Vilaça Sies + Höke ZERO
Hanne Darboven Fischer Sprüth Magers
David Lamelas Maccarone Mot Sprüth Magers
Philippe Decrauzat Chouakri Edith Dekyndt Meert Matias Faldbakken Presenhuber Standard (Oslo) Sam Falls Presenhuber Harun Farocki Ropac Tony Feher Meier Sikkema Jenkins Hamish Fulton Paley Riis Tschudi Ryan Gander gb agency Lisson Ron Gorchov Cheim & Read
Carsten Nicolai EIGEN + ART
Bethan Huws Tschudi
Gavin Kenyon Blum & Poe Ramiken Crucible ZERO
Shooshie Sulaiman Koyama
Bruce Nauman Hauser & Wirth Zwirner
Alex Hubbard Maccarone Presenhuber
Andrew Dadson Kordansky Noero RaebervonStenglin
Mikhael Subotzky Goodman Gallery
Claudio Moser Krupp Skopia
David Nash Juda Kukje/Kim Lelong
Thomas Houseago Hauser & Wirth
Alice Channer Approach
yasumasa Morimura Luhring Augustine
Melvin Moti Meyer Riegger
Sabine Hornig Guerra
Ann Veronica Janssens Artiaco mennour Szwajcer
Tacita Dean Borch Jensen
BASEL
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys Bortolozzi Szwajcer
Richard Nonas McCaffrey Saskia Olde Wolbers Paley Trevor Paglen Metro Pictures Zander Giuseppe Penone Tucci Russo Jack Pierson Stein Michelangelo Pistoletto Lee Luhring Augustine Stein
William Leavitt Greene Naftali Julio Le Parc Bugada & Cargnel
Alex Prager Lehmann Maupin
Lee Ufan Kukje/Kim
Laure Prouvost MOT International
Richard Long Lisson
Sterling Ruby Hufkens Sprüth Magers
Christina Mackie Herald St Jeffries Supportico Lopez
Markus Schinwald Lambert Marconi
Christian Marclay Cooper
Jim Shaw Blum & Poe Lee Metro Pictures
Nick Mauss 303 Gallery
Sudarshan Shetty Krinzinger SKE Templon
Rodney McMillian Maccarone Vielmetter Ana Mendieta Cortese Jacques Lelong
Pascale Marthine Tayou Continua Rirkrit Tiravanija Gavin Brown Rosemarie Trockel Gladstone Sprüth Magers Troika OMR Daniel Turner team Andra Ursuta De Carlo Ramiken Crucible Kara Walker Miro Guido van der Werve Foxx Luhring Augustine Doug Wheeler Zwirner Cathy Wilkes Hufkens Modern Institute Ming Wong carlier gebauer Vitamin Xu Zhen Long March Haegue yang Crousel Kukje/Kim yang Fudong Marian Goodman ShanghART
Matias Faldbakken 20,000 Gun Shells 2011
U
Available at the three Art Basel shows and distributed worldwide by JRP|Ringier
uN limi ted
ISBN 978-3-03764-395-2 Hardcover, 210 x 295 mm 784 pages Images 612 color / 550 b/w CHF 70 / EUR 57 / GBP 44 / US 80
Zhan Wang Long March Zhang Huan White Cube Heimo Zobernig Aizpuru
Wiebke Siem Johnen Andreas Slominski Jablonka
Mario Merz Kewenig 690
691
English edition
UNLIMITED
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Retrospective monograph Sue Williams in the studio
Sue Williams The first comprehensive monograph dedicated to the American artist Sue Williams, this book spans her work from the early 1980s to her most recent paintings. As Ruth Erickson explains in her essay, “Wanting to paint as a student at CalArts in the 1970s heyday of conceptualism, and interested in drawing as a young artist during the painting boom of the 1980s in New York, Sue Williams tends to occupy the margins.
I WANT TO DRAW ATTENTION TO ISSUES; I WANT PEOPLE TO BE INFORMED. IT’S A SCARY TIME. EVERYTHING GETS INTEGRATED INTO THE ART, NOT ALWAYS CONSCIOUSLY. THE PAINTING BECOME A REFUGE. IF I HAVE VISIBILITY, I HAVE THE RESPONSIBILITY TO TRY CHANGE THINGS. —Sue Williams
She productively and selectively works out of step with dominant trends and discourses, devising visual strategies that engage the contexts of contemporary art and politics in striking ways. Over the course of her 40-year career, Williams has made an array of artwork, from modest paintings of mostly representational scenes in a cartoonish style to large-scale
abstract paintings erupting in brilliant colors.” Sue William’s paintings have constantly straddled a narrow line between figurative depiction and complete abstraction, as in some works of the early 2000s, in which the monochromatic brushstroke becomes a central element. In her newest works, these two realms are mixed anew, for although the images
Dessert, 1990 Try To Be More Accomodating, 1991 Oh Shopping, 2009
Retrospective monograph
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sexuality, gender, and culture in her work. Throughout her practice she has explored ambiguous boundary between a secure place and an insecure one, between the real and the imagined, drawing the viewer into her world of provocative sexual politics.
Cory Arcangel, Alex Bag & Patterson Beckwith, Judith Bernstein, Vittorio Brodmann, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Simon Denny, Harun Farocki, Jan Peter Hammer, Nic Hess, Danny McDonald, Dawn Mellor, Claus Richter, Tabor Robak, Timur Si-Qin, Michael Smith, Lily van der Stokker, Julia Wachtel, Hannah Weinberger With essays by Raphael Gygax & Judith Welter, Esther Buss, Hans Ulrich Reck, Alexander R. Galloway
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst
Sue Williams has continuously explored and challenged the fantasies of feminism,
Toys Redux—An Anthology on Play as Critical Action
New releases
are abstract, the beholder comes across recognizable details—individual body parts or formations reminiscent of human organs.
Toys Redux
An Anthology on Play as Critical Action
Toys Redux Gathering together works by Cory Arcangel, Alex Bag & Patterson Beckwith, Judith Bernstein, Vittorio Brodmann, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Simon Denny, Harun Farocki, Tabor Robak, and many others, this publication brings together artists who use formats and imagery from popular culture usually addressed to children or teenagers. The adoption of such motifs disseminated in specific entertainment formats should not be seen merely as a reference to (or appropriation of) popular culture: it becomes an implicit (or explicit) critique of a kind of capitalist production of consumer worlds that have also infiltrated the field of art for quite some time. Published with Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich. [ISBN 978-3-03764-424-9]
Ragnar Kartjansson Pax Americana, 2010
In his performances—which often extend over several weeks or months—the Icelandic artist explores not only his own physical and psychological limits and the essence of early performance art, but also the artist’s status and the different images of his role. This book unites for the first time all of Kjartansson’s works related to music from 2001 to 2012. With contributions by Philip Auslander, Heike Munder, Markús þór Andrésson, and a conversation between Edek Bartz and Ragnar Kjartansson. Published with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich. Second edition. [ISBN 978-3-03764-423-2]
The Book: Sue Williams Edited by Lionel Bovier
Sue Williams
Authors Johanna Burton, Ruth Erickson
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The Wurmsers, 2008
Road Map to Ferragamo, 2008
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English edition September 2015 ISBN 978-3-03764-374-7 Hardcover, 280 x 272 mm 144 pages Published with 303 Gallery, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Bernier/Eliades, Athens CHF 74 / EUR 60 / GBP 48 / US 80
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Exhaustive monograph
Louis Michel Eilshemius Louis Michel Eilshemius (1864–1941) was practically unknown to the general public, until Marcel Duchamp discovered him in the famous first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists at the Grand Central Palace in New York in 1917. Duchamp and Katherine S. Dreier then organized his first solo exhibitions in a public institution at the now legendary Société Anonyme in New York in 1920 and 1924. Eilshemius’s name was suddenly on everyone’s lips: some of the most prominent art critics of the time wrote about him, and some of America’s most influential collectors began to take an interest in his work. Eilshemius himself, exhausted and frustrated by his years of failure, and having grown increasingly eccentric (and perhaps also somewhat confused by the sudden change in the reception of his art), gave up painting in 1921. His works, on the other hand, received ever greater recognition and were exhibited in the most reputable galleries of New York; between 1932 and his death in 1941 there were more than 30 exhibitions of his work.
AS ROUSSEAU OF THE FRENCH SPIRIT PAINTED IN EUROPE, DOES EILSHEMIUS OF THE AMERICAN SPIRIT PAINT IN AMERICA, WITH THE CHILDLIKE SELFFAITH OF A BLAKE. —Mina Loy, 1917
Although today many museums in the United States and collectors of international renown possess works by Eilshemius, the artist has faded into ever-greater obscurity, especially since the advent of Pop and Minimal art. Eilshemius perfectly exemplifies—in an age of mass-oriented biennials and art fairs—the idea of the individualist who resolutely goes his own way; this is one of the reasons that his work today appears more contemporary than ever. This book brings together works from over 70 institutions and private collections, providing the reader with a profound insight into the oeuvre of this unusual artist. In an expansive essay Stefan Banz examines for the first time the questions of whether and to what extent Eilshemius influenced Duchamp’s artistic thinking.
City Street in the Moonlight, ca. 1916 Untitled (Waterfall), 1911
Exhaustive monograph
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Stefan Banz (ed.) Marcel Duchamp and the Forestay Waterfall In August 1946, Marcel Duchamp spent five weeks in Switzerland, including five days at the Hotel Bellevue (today, Le Baron Tavernier) near Chexbres, on Lake Geneva. During his stay he discovered the Forestay waterfall. Before this book, no research was ever done as to why the artist chose this waterfall and not another to become the starting point for, and ultimately the landscape of, his famous final masterpiece, Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas). With texts and essays by Caroline Bachmann, Stefan Banz, Etienne Barilier, Lars Blunck, Paul B. Franklin, Antje von Graevenitz, Dalia Judovitz, Michael Lüthy, Bernard Marcadé, Herbert Molderings, Adeena Mey, Stanislaus von Moos, Francis M. Naumann, Mark Nelson, Molly Nesbit, Dominique Radrizzani, Michael R. Taylor, Hans Maria de Wolf, and Philip Ursprung. Special artistic contributions by Melanie Althaus, Ecke Bonk, Andreas Glauser, Peter Roesch, Roman Signer, Tadanori Yokoo, and many others. Published with Association Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp, Cully. [ISBN 978-3-03764-156-9]
Flower Girl, 1916
The Book: Louis Michel Eilshemius - Peer of Poet-Painters
editor
Stefan Banz eilShemiuS: Peer of Poet-PainterS
Stefan Banz
eilShemiuS Peer of Poet-PainterS
The KMD (Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp | The Forestay Museum of Art) was founded in 2009 with the aim of organizing a symposium and an international event devoted to Marcel Duchamp and the Forestay Waterfall. The KMD is situated on the shores of Lake Geneva, not far from the Forestay Waterfall, which Marcel Duchamp photographed in 1946 as the starting point of his last masterpiece Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage... The KMD shows grand exhibitions of internationally acknowledged and emerging artists, and KMD edition publishes hardcover books in small format (artists’ books, works of art theory, and exhibition catalogues).
Edited by Stefan Banz Authors Stefan Banz Louis Michel Eilshemius
The KMD is an artistic project by Caroline Bachmann and Stefan Banz. ContaCt Association KMD Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp | The Forestay Museum of Art Rue de l’Indépendance 2 CH–1096 Cully hello@akmd.ch Livia Gnos livia@akmd.ch alSo with JrP|ringier Stefan Banz (ed.), Marcel Duchamp and the Forestay Waterfall, 2010. With essays by Stefan Banz, Étienne Barilier, Lars Blunck, Paul B. Franklin, Antje von Graevenitz, Dalia Judovitz, Michael Lüthy, Bernard Marcadé, Herbert Molderings, Stanislaus von Moos, Francis M. Naumann, Mark Nelson, Molly Nesbit, Dominique Radrizzani, Michael R. Taylor, Philip Ursprung, and Hans Maria de Wolf. Special artistic contributions by Caroline Bachmann, Ecke Bonk, Andreas Glauser, Peter Roesch, Roman Signer, Tadanori Yokoo, and many others.
Cover Louis M. Eilshemius Untitled (Love Bather), 1917, detail Oil on paperboard (mounted on Masonite) 41.25 x 40.5 in. | 104.8 x 102.9 cm Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York Photograph by Matthew Newton
English edition November 2015 ISBN 978-3-03764-435-5 Hardcover, 240 x 310 mm 752 pages Images 450 color / 40 b/w Published with Association KMD, Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp | The Forestay Museum of Art, Cully CHF 98 / EUR 80 / GBP 60 / US 100
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New Monograph
Ugo Rondinone Having developed very precise and obsessive series—clown sculptures and videos, target acrylic paintings on linen, rubber masks, aluminum face sculptures, oversized wax light bulbs, striped paintings on polyester, stone sculptures, landscape ink painting, bronze still-life objects, video and sound installations—Ugo Rondinone explores themes of fantasy and desire, branching out in literature and poetry, contemporary cinema, and the visual arts. This publication features his new stunning visual ensemble of works in which the whole architecture of the Rockbund Art Museum, actors, and visitors were involved. 53
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The Book: Ugo Rondinone - Breathe Walk Die Edited by Larys Frogier Author Larys Frogier English/Chinese edition September 2015 ISBN 978-3-03764-409-6 Hardcover, 240 x 310 mm 144 pages Images 86 color Published in collaboration with the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China CHF 38 / EUR 32 / GBP 23 / US 39.95 ugo rondinone
breathe walk die
New Monograph
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Doug Aitken The first book entirely dedicated to the sculptures of multimedia artist Doug Aitken, this volume offers an overview of his 3D works and includes a specially commissioned text by acclaimed novelist Steve Erickson. Designed in the artist’s studio, the publication is organized as a graphic novel more than an inventory, while offering complete information on the pieces in the index. Using words and images, technology and human perception to trigger personal reactions from the readers, the works are combined here in a new form, assembled as they are in printed form as a “Gesamt-exhibition,” one that is unique to the medium of the book.
The Book: Doug Aitken: Sculptures 2001-2015 Edited by Lionel Bovier Author Steve Erickson English edition Available ISBN 978-3-03764-420-1 Hardcover, 220 x 290 mm 168 pages Images 98 color Published with Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Victoria Miro, London; and 303 Gallery, New York CHF 60 / EUR 57 / GBP 42 / US 65
Xanti Schawinsky, Shakespeare „Die beiden Veroneser“ Räuberballett, 1925 (Courtesy of the Xanti Schawinsky Estate Zürich; photo: Daniel Schawinsky)
RECENTLY PUBLISHED: XANTI SCHAWINSKY [ISBN 978-3-03764-397-6]
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Reference monograph
Kader Attia This reference monograph, published on the occasion of his exhibition at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts of Lausanne, reflects on the variety and scope of the research carried out by Kader Attia (b. 1970) over the last two decades. “For nearly 20 years, Kader Attia has been exploring the issue of reparation in its twofold meaning of repairing an object or an injury and paying due account for the injury. This explains the significance in his oeuvre of the object and the photographic, journalistic, and ethnographic archive— tangible, material traces of History, of histories experienced, transformations completed, erosions, breaches, and injuries that demand reparation. The installation space then becomes not only a space of memory, but also a space for rethinking the intrinsic connections between political, personal, and aesthetic histories that may initially appear to be wholly discrete.” As the artist writes in 2014, “my study of the concept of repair, of traditional extra-Western cultures in relation to modern Western cultures just keeps bringing to light the infinite presence of the mysterious ‘re’ process. At first I showed an interest in the contrasting
analogies between broken and fixed objects within their initial context, and repairs in physical injuries relating to European wars, especially the First World War and the extraordinary four-year development that embodied a dazzling breakthrough from ‘brutality to subtlety’ in terms of modern maxillofacial surgery… For a few years now, this study has taken a more ‘psychological’ turn. In fact, it became clear that the essential aspect in any traditional and modern repair is inherent in two conditions: the apprehension of its reality, and its virtuality. In order to read and understand each repair, you have to take the visible and invisible reality of each thing into consideration.” [Excerpted from Nicole Schweizer’s foreword to the monograph, 2015]
The Book: Kader Attia Musée cantonal des Beaux-arts de lausanne
Authors Brigitte Derlon, Noémie Etienne, Monique Jeudy-Ballini, Kobena Mercer English/French edition Available ISBN 978-3-03764-412-6 Softcover, 237 x 286 mm 160 pages Images 158 color / 18 b/w Published with the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne CHF 50 / EUR 40 / GBP 30 / US 55
kader attia
Edited by Nicole Schweizer
Modern Genealogy
2012
92
Modern Genealogy
2012
93
Comprehensive monograph
19
Josephine Pryde This publication presents a broad selection of Josephine Pryde’s work from 1990 to 2014. In photographic works that encompass the full range of the medium’s historical and current genres, styles, and techniques, but also through sculpture and writing, the Berlin- and Londonbased artist (b. 1967) offers incisive, often ironic, and provocative commentary on the values, hierarchies, and economies subtending the field of contemporary art against the backdrop of larger societal shifts. Estranging the familiar or conversely expressing the common in a radically unforeseen manner, Pryde’s ingenuous choice of subject matter, unusual formal solutions and surprising juxtapositions continue to capture international exhibition audiences.
The Book: Josephine Pryde - The Enjoyment of Photography Edited by André Rottmann Authors Rhea Anastas, Melanie Gilligan, André Rottmann English edition Available ISBN 978-3-03764-411-9 Softcover, 220 x 280 mm 276 pages Images 365 color / 1 b/w Published with Kunsthalle Bern and Kunstverein fur die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Dusseldorf CHF 45 / EUR 35 / GBP 28 / US 49.95 188
189
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Artist's book
Wade Guyton For this artist’s book, Wade Guyton decided to print a large-format painting on a 1:1 scale. Flipping through the 360 pages, one looks at the fragments of a unique work, which could potentially be reconstructed by joining the pages together. In a sense, this book is a reflection on the questions of reproduction, the original, the source, and re-formation at the heart of Guyton’s practice. If it could be said that Guyton’s minimalistic “paintings,” which connect directly to abstraction’s history, conjure a restructuring of Modernist art and decor, this book offers a mise en abyme of these procedures.
THERE IS OFTEN A STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE PRINTER AND MY MATERIALS— AND THE TRACEA OF THIS ARE LEFT ON THE SURFACE: SNAGS, DRIPS, STREAKS, MISREGISTRATIONS, BLURS —Wade Guyton, 2004
The Book: Wade Guyton - WG3031
WG3031
English edition Available ISBN 978-3-03764-419-5 Softcover, 237 x 280 mm 360 pages Images 360 color Published with Ringier AG, in a limited edition of 700 copies CHF 50 / EUR 40 /GBP 30 / US 55
Wade Guyton
Edited by Beatrix Ruf
WG 3031
Artist's book
21 New releases
Virginia Overton
Virginia Overton First monograph on the American artist (b. 1971 Nashville, lives in New York) whose work comprises installation, sculpture, and photography, often made in response to a particular space. Through a process of trial and error, she creates sculpture that is performative, sometimes obstructing, bisecting, dividing, or joining the architecture of a space with works that are both dramatic and minimal in feel. Infused with an ethos of economy, Overton’s practice favors elemental materials, frequently recycled objects that are found on site or things discovered in the environs of the exhibition space. More commonly associated with architecture, construction work, or farming, materials such as wood, metal, Perspex, and fluorescent lighting are thus cut, bent, and hammered into works that talk about the way their materials have been used. The publication is edited by Fabrice Stroun and includes an interview with the artist by Bob Nickas. It is published with Kunsthalle Bern. [ISBN 978-3-03764-422-5]
Michael Williams
Michael Williams In the last few years New York-based artist Michael Williams has evolved from making large gestural oil paintings to similarly-scaled paintings printed with a billboard-sized inkjet printer. Despite the drastic shifting of materials there is a warmth and personal quality that persists in the presence of the printed paintings. Williams summons a large catalogue of imagery generated through a dedication to drawing and a mining of his inner psyche. The images that appear again and again in the paintings are often comical, and occasionally make jabs at the present state of mankind, although not in accusatory tone. There is a refusal in Williams’ paintings to side with representation or abstraction; rather he neglects the issue and pursues his own path of complex image making. This first monograph, produced with the support of his galleries, gives an overview of these recent shifts in Williams’ work. The publication includes texts by British fiction author and journalist George Pendle, and curator and writer Dan Nadel. [ISBN 978-3-03764-425-6]
22
Reference Monograph Camino del Sol, 2014
Sylvie Fleury
Known in the 1990s for her mises-en-scène of glamour, fashion, and luxury products, Sylvie Fleury (b. 1961, lives and works in Geneva) demonstrates a detailed knowledge of Pop and Minimal art aesthetics.
YES TO ALL! —Sylvie Fleury
Car Wash, 1995
An affirmation of the consumer society and its values at first glance, the work simultaneously surfaces a different reading: by blurring codes and organizing the contamination of one sphere by an other (the masculine world by the feminine, fashion by art or advertising—unless it is the other way around), it also appears offensive and political. In that sense, Fleury’s work reflects and anticipates her epoch just as it participates in it. After some years in New York in the early 1980s, spent learning photography, developing her interest in cinema, and experiencing the night life, she returned to Geneva and “confronted” her reflections against those of John Armleder and Olivier Mosset. From her early “shopping bags” installations to her bronze rendering of luxury clothing and
cosmetics, through her exploration of car culture and the world of Formula 1, she revisited modern and contemporary art icons such as Piet Mondrian, Andy Warhol, or John McCracken, and developed a formal idiom far more complex and disconcerting than many of her contemporaries. In her attempt to come to terms with the fetishistic attachment to material goods that is the defining feature of the world of fashion, Fleury then turned to magic light phenomena, colorful rooms, flossy surfaces, auras, pendulums, and crystals. These works of the 2000s are for the first time presented together with her classics from the 1990s in this reference monograph. It thus offers readers a new way to register Fleury’s contribution to the art of the last decades.
Giant, Large, Medium and Small Chromo Quartz, 2001
Reference Monograph
23 New releases in the "Tranzit" series, edited by Vit Havranek
1992—2015
2015
Theoretical Texts
1 These days it is no longer art that is false, it is the art viewer. If there are bits of reality in an exhibition, they are immediately destroyed by the visitor’s “falsifying” way of looking at things. It is a conscious way of looking, which incorporates in advance the rules of a cultural order involving the simulacrum and does away with any possibility of a real experience. We shall be dealing with experience here in a traditional sense, whose disappearance is observed by Giorgio Agamben, commenting on Walter Benjamin,1 namely an edifying practice of reality that is strictly distinct from knowledge, but which proceeds by way of “words and narrative” and stems from disorder, uncertainty and imagination2 � (3.1). What is in fact being played out in art today is overdetermined by its structures, institutions and history, which lay a set of affective and behavioural prescriptions over the exhibition. Henceforth, and despite himself, the visitor becomes his own go-between, passively respecting the terms of a tacit contract which has corrupted his relation to the work � (7.1). It is as if experience (in the diachronic sense) had killed experience (in the synchronic sense). The result is that there is almost no experience possible any longer in the art field, though it might have been experience’s last refuge. Let us imagine some spectators who know nothing about art, or who have forgotten everything they did once know about it. Then the relation to the work ought to be actively reinvented at each and every moment through a kind of cognitive mobility. A jointly productive way of seeing things out of necessity. We would then have the conditions of an immediate experience (im-mediacy literally without mediation), relieved of the “false”
2009 Ján Mančuška at Andrew Kreps Gallery
Ján Mančuška: The Missing Bit
Fionn Meade
Guillaume Désanges
1 Giorgio Agamben, Enfance et Histoire, 1978. 2 Giorgio Agamben, “L’expérience trouve son nécessaire corrélat moins dans la connaissance que dans l’autorité, c’est-à-dire dans la parole et le récit/ Experience finds its necessary correlate less in knowledge than in authority, that is to say, in words and narrative,” in Enfance et Histoire, 1978.
An accumulation of deliberate false starts, Ján Mančuška’s third solo exhibition at Andrew Kreps furthered his exploration of the theatrical space of art as diffracted by design. The video Reflection (all works 2008) begins with a man and a woman carrying out a Beckettian go-nowhere dialogue in which they ponder whether anything can be “seen” in a dark nearby space, qualifying each other’s lines with such novelistic rejoinders as “he said after a while” and “she answered.” With the brisk pace of seasoned performers (and wielding British stage accents), the pair ably enact the twists and turns of melodramatic dénouement minus the revelation or sentiment inherent to it. And though their exchange repeatedly invokes the off-camera (or, as Deleuze more accurately termed it, l’hors champ [the out-of-field]) as portending an eventual catharsis through disclosure (“I saw almost nothing there,” the woman says; “She answered. Do you think nothing can be there still?,” the man says), Mančuška wryly inserts long silent shots between the couple’s scenes that confirm the nearby space to be only a room filled with furniture and lighting fixtures. Projected between nearly ceiling-high walls of stacked furniture — modernist consoles, liquor cabinets, and shelves cut to fit together like puzzle pieces — the video was housed in an absurd domestic space that mirrored the used contents of the room on-screen, while intimating that the sputtering tropes of dramatic convention are equally bereft. Reinforcing this parity, slow zooms and tracking shots, techniques most often employed to heighten mood and locate impending action, frame instead an array of secondhand chandeliers, or a black leather couch and an end
Teoretické texty
Reviews
2009
Texts
2010
Nonspekta Around 2002 the group involved in the display Gallery, Boris Ondreička, Vít Havránek and I, developed the idea of Non-Spectacular Art, i.e. a form that rejected communication with the spectator that is based on the evil eye, the effect of forgetfulness, choking with entertainment, which we perceived as a highly political act focused on the application of power. In further work with texts in my installations, I programmatically rejected fiction at the outset. I was concerned with “true stories”, which I termed a form of linguistic ready-made. What was important for me was a certain verification, the fact that the story had happened and at the same time was a sort of epic (I came across the label “epic theatre” in relation to Bertolt Brecht much later). It was only later that I began writing my own fiction, my own stories. Undoubtedly certain principles from my previous
Located in the back of the gallery, the installation Someone Else? carried on the domestic mode, offering wall-mounted display cases holding various housewares on which still another dialogic exercise in futility was printed. Pitchers, creamers, mugs, sugar bowls, and the occasional teapot and ashtray serve in this work as a storyboard for the balky scenario of a man and a woman meeting for an undisclosed purpose. The reason for the tryst is hinted at but never revealed, and the he-said-she-said of the elliptical narrative ends humorously with the woman asking after a third cup: “Are you expecting someone else?” Previously overindebted to early Conceptual tactics of literalizing language’s shortcomings, Mančuška has developed here an art of the set configuration, a scripted installation form all his own, in
1 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, (trans. Vincenzo Binetti, Cesare Casarino), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2000, pp. 55—58.
Recenze
ISBN 978-3-03764-443-0
83037 644430
development stood me in good stead. One of the main elements was working with character. Character
What is a gesture? [...] The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such. [...] The gesture is, in this sense, communication of a communicability. It has nothing to say of itself, because what it shows is the beingin-language of human beings as a purely mediational capability. However, because being-in-language is not something that could be said in sentences, the gesture is always essentially a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language; it is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term, indicating first of all something that could be put in your mouth to hinder speech, as well as in the sense of the actor’s improvisation to compensate for a loss of memory or an inability to speak.1
Similarly fitful attempts to achieve clarity transpire in the video’s second act, as two men in a Prague café try to recall their initial meeting and their mutual acquaintances. Banal failures of memory and identification — “What are their names?” and “He really looks like someone else, practically his double” — serve as fodder for a comic routine in which the punch line never arrives. Unable to find direction, the actors, the prototypical “preppy” and “slacker,” exist in an almost impotent state alleviated only by the sudden appearance of the characters from the video’s otherwise unrelated first half. Yet as the clean-cut actor stands to greet the approaching couple, the female, played again by the stand-in, addresses instead the unkempt, oblivious character: “I’ve seen you somewhere before,” she says, thereby diverting any farcical resolution and reasserting the action’s fragmented misdirection.
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Ján Mančuška
Staged Reality
table. Further emphasizing the characters’ inability to emote or articulate anything beyond a play of transitions, a demonstrably poor American actress stands in for the woman in the couple’s final repartee, in which we hear once more that nothing can be seen.
First Inventory
Ján Mančuška First Inventory
První Inventura
2006
Works
Oedipus, 2006. Laser-cut aluminium letters, steel cable, dimensions variable. Detail view. Collection Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre de Création Industrielle, Paris. Gift of Société des Amis du Musée National d‘Art moderne, 2008. Projet pour l‘Art Contemporain, 2007; Collection Maddalena and Paolo Kind
2009
Works
Texty
Oidipus, 2006. Laserem vyřezávaná hliníková písmena, ocelové lanko, variabilní rozměry. Sbírka Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre de Création Industrielle, Paříž. Dar Sdružení přátel Národního muzea moderního umění, 2008. Projekt pro současné umění, 2007; Sbírka Maddalena a Paolo Kind
Eastern Europe Displayer: You grew up in former Czechoslovakia, where everyday life was influenced by socialism. To what extent did that have an impact on your thinking and artistic work back then and today? Ján Mančuška: The art industry in socialist Czechoslovakia at that time wasn’t developed like it is here in the West. In the 70s and 80s, there were no institutions fulfilling functions similar to West European ones; artists operated in a totally different environment. What’s more, East European art existed quite outside the postwar history of art. This wasn’t due to some conspiracy by Western culture. The history of art is created, or at least has been in modern times, by the system of the art industry. In my opinion, the reason why East European art was not included in the history of art is that there was no system of this kind (the circle comprising private galleries, collectors, institutions and art critics) working there. The generation before mine had worked in a specific environment. An important aspect of that was that that generation did not become a part of art history in its own day. (D) Do you consciously refrain from any political connotations in your work? (JM) The 80s generation, for instance, shared a certain distaste for political interpretation of their work, probably for a number of reasons. One of these was the official doctrine that art should be politically engaged, naturally within the constraints of Communist ideology, and so being apolitical became a political gesture. One important aspect of this was that everydayness became strongly politicized. And
Práce
Interviews
2009 What We Have in Common
Double, 2009. Video installation, sound, colour, 3:29 min. Video stills
Dvojník, 2009. Instalace, video, zvuk, barva, 3:29 min. Záběry z videa
I had already dealt with the issue of the character in my text installations that were created on the basis of selected true stories, especially in the criss-crossing texts, such as A Fragment of Asynchronous History — True Story / Jana’s Story (2005). I stretched three lines of text on steel cables at eye height in different directions. Each line signified one character, who told the same story from a personal perspective and each character was also connected to the story from a different point in time. The heroine featured in the story in the present tense, while the next character was told what had happened after a short lapse of time and the last character found out about the whole story several years later. The lines of text, each representing one character, criss-crossed in the space. I compiled the texts in such a way that at the point where they crossed it was possible to skip from one to the other and smoothly carry on reading, which was possible both grammatically and in terms of the storyline. What happened when one crossed from one line of text to another? One changed character and therefore his or her psychology and engagement in the story, but also the time changed. The installation itself offered in all thirteen different ways of reading one story. It wasn’t just about interrupting the rigid linear nature of text (of the story) as such, but also about the fact that once the spectator became involved in several possible readings of my installation, the psychology of the characters, their engagement in the story and the chronological continuity of the story all lost their urgency. The result was a sort of generality, an impersonal condition in which the protagonists (paradoxically originally real) were left floating. After a certain time I began to focus on writing my own fictional stories. This change was
here it starts to get interesting, because it is this very point of view that influences how I understand the political dimension in my work. For me, the fundamental element of political life is the concept “I” – the “I” and its relation to others. When I call certain aspects of my work “political”, I mean it in this most basic, primal sense of the term. Diversity and Aesthetics (D) The aesthetic language of your work is very reduced but the materials that you use to realize your concepts are much more versatile. One can find film works, textual installations, projections, as well as sculptural works in your oeuvre. What does materiality mean to you and how do you find the right media for each conceptual approach? (JM) I don’t like making decisions that arise from some aesthetic model, though of course you can’t escape that. In each case I try to find the simplest solution, one that allows no other way of doing it. For example, when I use text as an object and I want to hang it in a big space, it must be lightweight. At the same time, text is for me specifically connected to typesetting, so the material has to be metal, and the lightest metal is aluminium. It is this way of thinking, then, that most influences the decision-making process. Only rarely do I use surface finishing. I work with the materials as they are, because it seems the purest way of working. Not concentrating on a single medium is important for me. So the physical process of creation comes more from the other side – from what the thing is about. It’s not possible to be a professional in all fields. The fragility of the beginner is always present, at least at the moment when I begin working with a particular medium. That can be quite demanding on the psyche, but it has its place. My work has certain, let’s say, spheres. Previously I worked a lot with text, now it’s film. But I never stick with only one medium.
Práce
Rozhovory
První inventura
Ján Mančuška First Inventory The first retrospective book on Ján Mančuška gathers together his works from the second half of the 1990s to his last unrealized projects of 2011, the date of his untimely death. The book contains many sources: original texts, interviews, reviews, as well as a complete inventory of his works, which combined different media, from installation to video, through text, film, and theater. [ISBN 978-3-03764-443-0]
Eva Kotatkova Pictorial Atlas This book, Kotatkova’s most ambitious publication to date, reflects her obsession with reshaping preexisting photographic images. It presents 300 recent drawings and collages, compiled from an imaginary school book of the 1980s (when the artist was growing up, under the totalitarian regime). The text part is the outcome of research in archives: 22 sets of regulations issued by public institutions (psychiatric hospital, special-needs school, house rules, cemetery, orphanage, etc.) from the 1970s to the end of the 1980s, in Communist Czechoslovakia. [ISBN 978-3-03764-361-7] Tableau no. 1, 1992
The Book: Sylvie Fleury
Sylvie Fleury
Edited by Samuel Gross Authors Samuel Gross, Simon Lamunière English/French edition September 2015 ISBN 978-3-03764-428-7 Softcover, 237 x 286 mm 160 pages Images 100 color Published with Société des arts, Geneva CHF 50 / EUR 40 / GBP 30 / US 55
24
New monograph
Avery Singer The technically and iconographically striking paintings of Avery Singer (*1987, lives and works in New York) thwart our visual expectations. At first glance they resist clear classification as either painting or printing processes. Hence her work raises the obvious and pressing question of how the digital information that surrounds us can materialize itself—as a flat image on paper or more recently in 3D, in plastic or in every other possible material surface. Allusions to the motifs and styles of classic modernism and to postmodernist debates can be identified in her works. The insignias of the “fine arts” collide with avant-garde tropes, and parodic-autobiographical motifs constantly allude to clichés of the art world. Adopting a humorous tone, Avery Singer demonstrates rituals and social patterns, and presents stereotypes of the artist, curator, collector, and writer. This first monograph is published with Kunsthalle Zürich and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. The Book: Avery Singer Edited by Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Beatrix Ruf Authors Matthew Brannon, Isabelle Graw, Sven Loven, Aram Moshayedi, Carmen Winant English/German edition Available ISBN 978-3-03764-391-4 Hardcover, 205 x 257 mm 96 pages Images 30 color / 42 b/w CHF 38 / EUR 32 / GBP 23 / US 39.95
Artist's book
25
Slavs and Tatars A form of political writing often called “advice literature,” shared by Christian and Muslim cultures alike, “mirrors for princes” attempted to elevate statecraft (dawla) to the same level as faith/religion (din) during the Middle Ages. These guides for future rulers—such as Machiavelli’s The Prince—addressed the delicate balance between seclusion and society, spirit and state, echoes of which we continue to find in the US, Europe, and the Middle East. Today we suffer from the very opposite: there is no shortage of political commentary, but a notable lack of intelligent discourse on the role of faith and the immaterial as a valuable agent in society or public life. This publication brings together the writing of preeminent scholars using the genre of advice literature as a starting point to discuss fate and fortune versus governance, advice for female nobility, and television drama as a form of translation of statecraft. The essays are accompanied by an interview with Slavs and Tatars. The Book: Slavs and Tatars - Mirrors for Princes Edited by Anthony Downey Authors Manan Ahmed Asif, Maya Allison, David Crowley, Anna Della Subin, Anthony Downey, Lloyd Ridgeon, Beatrix Ruf, Slavs and Tatars, Neguin Yavari English edition Available ISBN 978-3-03764-407-2 Softcover, 205 x 250 mm 192 pages Images 160 color Published with NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery CHF 38 / EUR 29 / GBP 25 / US 35
26 Exhibitions
Who’s That Guy? On Guy de Cointet, January– February 2015
Ana Jotta, Bonus, April–May 2015
Since 2011, 8 rue SaintBon has established itself as an independent project space in Paris, dedicated to curatorial propositions stemming from the editorial programs of the partners sharing this location—the film producer Anna Sanders Films; the publishing houses Les presses du réel and JRP | Ringier; and the art video distribution and production company Art View/bureau des vidéos.
8 rue Saint-Bon, Paris At 8 rue Saint Bon, a project space dedicated to art, printed matters, and (graphic) design, 2015 started with an exhibition on Guy de Cointet’s (1934–1983) manipulation of signs, letters, and colors, through a selection of posters, ephemera, and works rarely seen together. In March, on the occasion of the Paris Drawing Week, we welcomed Swiss artist Marta Riniker-Radich (*1982) with a suite of exquisite and challenging drawings, based on her inquiry on structures, hues, and beliefs. May 1st was the launch day of the second 8 rue Saint-Bon artist’s calendar: Portuguese artist Ana Jotta (*1946) proposed a “décor” to accompany her project, in which a Brittany dancers couple leads us until April 30, 2016.
The Summer will mark the long-awaited presentation of Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec Drawing book limited edition—a suite of 4 ceramic vases entitled “Cloud Vases”—and a satellite program of Centre Pompidou Nouveau Festival turning 8 rue Saint-Bon into a gambling den. For the Fall, we will welcome new projects specially conceived for the space by Mai-Thu Perret (in September) and Paulina Olowska (in October). Let’s dance, let’s gamble, let’s meet at 8 rue Saint-Bon!
Information
Contact: +33 (0) 1 58 30 39 38 info@8ruesaintbon.fr & facebook For more information about the programs of the four partners: www.lespressesdureel.com www.annasandersfilms.com www.bureaudesvideos.com www.jrp-ringier.com
Marta Riniker-Radich, The sharpest pencil in the stack, March–April 2015
8 RUE SAINT-BON IS OPEN ON FRIDAYS AND SATURDAYS AND BY APPOINTMENT
Kunstgriff 27
Kunstgriff Now online, Kunstgriff’s webshop allows you to buy 24/7 from our constantly changing choice of books. We ship worldwide and we offer free shipping within Switzerland! We accept Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal. Check it out at kunstgriff.ch!
POP-UP SHOP @ Villa Flora, Winterthur During the exhibition COLLECTING LINES. Drawings from the Ringier Collection at Villa Flora, Winterthur, you can find a special selection of artists’ publications from our store. Thursday to Sunday, 2–6 pm, until November 15, 2015. Information www.collecting-lines.ch
Information
KUNSTGRIFF IS OPEN TUESDAY TO FRIDAY FROM 11AM TO 6PM AND SATURDAY–SUNDAY FROM 11AM TO 5PM Kunstgriff Limmatstrasse 270 E0 of the Löwenbräu building Contact: +41 44 272 90 66 www.kunstgriff.ch info@kunstgriff.ch JRP | Ringier Limmatstrasse 270 E1 of the Löwenbräu building Contact: +41 43 311 27 50 www.jrp-ringier.com info@jrp-ringier.com
28
From our backlist Space, 1990
Jim Shaw
69
My Mirage (1986–1991) is the first major body of work by Jim Shaw (b. 1952): composed of nearly 170 pieces—each one drawn, silk-screened, photographed, sculpted, filmed, or painted in a different style—it recounts the wandering of Billy, a white, middle-class American sucked into the whirlwind of the 1960s and 1970s.
space, 1990
His is a story of unceasing failure. After an anxious childhood, Billy later withdraws from the guilt-wracked spasms of adolescence in order to lose himself in a psychedelic utopia, which soon becomes a nightmare. In the depth of psychotic hallucinations, he follows a woman who he worships into a pagan sect, before finally returning to the religion of his youth, “reborn” as a fundamentalist Christian. Each piece appropriates an image taken from an extremely broad iconographic field ranging from children’s book to contemporary art and including comics, religious literature, and psychedelic posters. As a narrative, My Mirage is structured like a “Bildungsroman,” with successive chapters structuring the various, gradual mutations of Billy.
EXHIBITION JIM SHAW: THE END IS HERE NEW MUSEUM, NEW YORK OCTOBER 7, 2015– JANUARY 10, 2016
Sinerama: Debemus; Esse; Mortui, 1990
Power Battle, 1990
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power Battle, 1990
This narrative appears and disappears, like a mirage, according to the distance of the observer, depending on whether one considers Shaw’s image to be aggregate of heterogeneous source, moments of a personal history, or fragments of a collective cultural history. Hence while creating a quasi-encyclopedic compendium of American vernacular iconography (which includes pages from a high-school yearbook, thrift store paintings, countless grass-root, counter-culture graphic designs, as well as late 1970s neo-Christian propaganda), My Mirage thus provides a social and cultural image of an individual in the 1960s and 1970s and, moreover, produces a sharp analysis of the evolution of the subject through the cultural and social history of that era.
69
space, 1990
From our backlist
29 Also available
Jim Shaw Distorted Faces & Portraits (1978–2007) Dedicated to different types of portraits realized by the American artist between the end of the 1970s and today, this publication is presented as a luxurious, large-format album, with a dust jacket-cum-poster. Accompanied by a text by Alison Gingeras, this limited edition publication, which echoes the narrative logic of the artist, is based on fragmentation and improbable mixtures of culture: serious and popular, personal and collective, real and fictional. Published with Blondeau & Cie, Geneva. [ISBN 978-3-905701-13-5]
The Temptation of Doubting Olsen, 1992
The Book: Jimthe Shaw - My Mirage 25 temptation oF douBtinG olsen, 1990 Jim Shaw
Edited by Lionel Bovier, Fabrice Stroun
My Mirage
Author Fabrice Stroun English edition Available ISBN 978-3-03764-187-3 Softcover, 200 x 260 mm 216 pages Images 123 color / 32 b/w CHF 56 / EUR 40 / GBP 32 / US 55
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charlie loVes all, 1991
131
GreetinG cards, 1989
30
Five bookshops we love
LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA 2015
5 Bookshops HOME Bookshop stocks book and magazine, with a wide range of titles specializing in contemporary visual art, theater, cinema, craft, cultural studies, music, literature, architecture, and philosophy. It also displays local, creative, independently produced publications.
Check our books on participating artists at Electa bookshops: Adel Abdessemed Saâdane Afif Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla Walead Beshty Isa Genzken Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige Thomas Hirschhorn David Maljkovic Victor Man Helen Marten Philippe Parreno Gedi Sibony Rirkrit Tiravanija Heimo Zobernig Ugo Rondinone MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho Pamela Rosenkranz
HOME Bookshop Mon–Sun 12pm–8pm 2 Tony Wilson Place UK–Manchester M15 4FN T +44 (0)161 200 1500 E info@homemcr.org W homemcr.org/venue/bookshop
Open in 2014, VOLUME is a bookshop dedicated to architecture, urban planning, and landscape theory, as well as photography. Monographs, text books, and magazines from all over the world are gathered together to offer the best editorial selection possible. An exhibition space and a children’s book corner complete the experience.
The WIELS Bookshop offers an extensive and carefully chosen selection of books on art, photography, architecture, and design, in addition to catalogues and artists’ books produced by WIELS. It promotes up-andcoming publishers and stocks a range of journals, postcards, and rare fanzines. It operates in collaboration with Motto Distribution.
Tue–Sat 11am–8pm VOLUME 47, rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth F–75003 Paris T +33 (0)1 85 08 02 86 E contact@librairievolume.fr W www.librairievolume.fr
Mon–Tue 11am–3pm WIELS Bookshop Wed–Sun 11am–6pm Av. Van Volxemlaan 354 Nocturnes 11am–9pm BE–1190 Brussels T +32 (0)2 340 00 54 E wim@wiels.org W www.wiels.org/en/66/Practical-Info
Family Bookstore was founded in 2007 by three high school friends. We stock artist’s books, zines, literature, and other assorted artist-made items. We also host events such as readings, performances, and slide shows. We have published many small catalogues and editions, and we have reissued two out-of-print works by Charles Willeford, the late crime writer.
Claire de Rouen is a photography, fashion, and art bookshop in central London, with an abundant stock of monographs, micropublishing, magazines, look books, editions and artists’ publications. Directed by Lucy Moore and co-owned by Lily Cole, it hosts regular book signings, magazine launches, and artist presentations.
Family Bookstore Tue-Sat 1–9pm 436 N. Fairfax Ave. Sun 1–7pm Los Angeles, CA 90036 T +1 323 285 2010 E contact@familylosangeles.com W www.familylosangeles.com
Claire de Rouen Books Tue–Sat 12pm–6.30pm 125 Charing Cross Road, First Floor UK–London WC2H 0EW T +44 (0)20 7287 1813 E info@clairederouenbooks.com W clairederouenbooks.com
Information and orders at info@jrp-ringier.com
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Collector’s Editions Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec Ana Jotta Calendrier mai 2015 – avril 2016 Limited edition
Kateřina The Righ
Calendrier Katherina Seda
A calenda in April 2 by drawin the Acad by Kateři published exhibition
Fifty of th printed c signed an on the ba the artist.
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Set of 4 black enameled ceramic vases, edition of 30
Wade Guyton, Kunsthalle Zürich
4 × LP 12” (Blondes, James Campbell, I.U.D.)
Kateřina Šedá Calendrier mai 2014 – avril 2015 Limited edition
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Atlas of Transformation
Top ten
Philippe Parreno Parade?
The Encyclopedia of Fictional Artists
John Baldessari Parse
Rirkrit Tiravanija A Retrospective
Peter Fischli & David Weiss Sonne, Mond und Sterne
Dorothea von Hantelmann How to Do Things with Art
Les espaces indépendants
A Crime Against Art
A selection of titles from our backlist by artist and Albania’s Prime Minister, whose doodles were published by JRP | Ringier in a sophisticated volume edited by Anri Sala
(Photo: Blerta Kambo)
Hans Ulrich Obrist A Brief History of Curating
Edi Rama Top 10
Contacts
Distributors
JRP | Ringier Limmatstrasse 270 | CH–8005 Zurich T +41 (0) 43 311 27 50 F +41 (0) 43 311 27 51
JRP | Ringier books are available internationally at selected bookstores and from the following distribution partners:
E info@jrp-ringier.com www.jrp-ringier.com ISBN 978-3-03764-434-8
© 2015, the authors, the artists, the photographers, and JRP | Ringier Kunstverlag Design Concept: Gavillet & Rust, Geneva Layout: Nicolas Eigenheer, Vera Kaspar Typefaces: Genath by François Rappo (www.optimo.ch), Nameit by Jeremy Schorderet
For a list of our partner bookshops or for any general questions, please contact JRP | Ringier directly at info@ jrp-ringier.com, or visit our homepage www.jrp-ringier.com for further information about our program.
SWITZERLAND
GERMANY & AUSTRIA
AVA Verlagsauslieferung AG, Centralweg 16, CH–8910 Affoltern a.A., verlagsservice@ava.ch, www.ava.ch
Vice Versa Distribution, Immanuelkirchstrasse 12, D–10405 Berlin, info@vice-versa-distribution.com www.vice-versa-distribution.com
FRANCE
UK & OTHER EUROPEAN COUNTRIES
Les presses du réel, 35 rue Colson, F–21000 Dijon, info@lespressesdureel.com, www.lespressesdureel.com
Cornerhouse Publications, HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place, UK–Manchester M15 4FN, publications@cornerhouse.org, www.cornerhouse.org/books
USA, CANADA, ASIA, & AUSTRALIA ARTBOOK | D.A.P., 155 Sixth Avenue, NY 10013, orders@dapinc.com, www.artbook.com