Spring reading 23 upcoming titles from publishers big and small
This spring, we can rejoice in a huge selection of new books being published by independent book publishers and art spaces: monographs, readers, critical essays and more. Here is a tentative selection of things to look forward to.
Grazer Kunstverein in collaboration with Sternberg Press
Lisa Oppenheim, Works 2003 – 2013
The first publication on ten years of work by Lisa Oppenheim. Over the past decade, artist Lisa Oppenheim (b. 1975, US) has steadily developed a unique body of work exploring the usage of (historical) imagery. Balanced between appropriation and reconstruction, her work relies on substitutions applied to photographic and filmic records through which the historical and the present are transmitted and constituted through a language of today.
The publication coincides with a solo show at the Grazer Kunstverein.
Kunstverein Amsterdam
Correspondence book between Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Carson McCullers
Kunstverein is a domestic franchise (Amsterdam, New York, Milan) and functioning curatorial office that offers presentations, lectures, screenings and independent publishing. One of their upcoming publications is a correspondence book between Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Carson McCullers, published in the context of the Susanne Winterling project starting May 2014.
Onomatopee
A.C.T. DEMOC(K)RACY project
Onomatopee playfully frames and manifests our progressive capacity to design culture through exhibitions, publications and events. This spring, they will publish a book on the A.C.T. DEMOC(K)RACY project. The Art Cooperation Transmission project aims to promote contemporary art in its ability to think, invent and represent the democratic changes of Europe in an era of globalization. It intends to be a joint laboratory and a factory for inventive and collaborative democratic building.
Jap Sam Books
Nosso Lar, Brasília. Spiritism – Modernism – Architecture by Jonas Staal
Nosso Lar, Brasília explores the relationship between Spiritism and Modernism in Brazilian architecture. Central to the book is a systematic comparison between the spiritist city of Nosso Lar (1944), as described by the medium Chico de Xavier; and the modernist city of Brasília (1956), the country’s capital as designed by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer.
Casco in collaboration with Valiz Publishers
The Grand Domestic Revolution Handbook
The Grand Domestic Revolution Handbook is a compendium of living research developed by artists, designers, theorists, neighbors, and activists who investigate and expand the status of the home outside the narrow lens of private concerns, but in consideration of the great potential in supporting a privateness that revitalizes and allows for other forms of sociality.
Roma Publications
In Two Minds by Gwenneth Boelens, edited by Nickel van Duijvenboden
In Two Minds documents Gwenneth Boelens’ practice of the past ten years, comprising photography and sculpture, as well as performative and filmic works. An extensive chapter of notes, written by her partner and editor Nickel van Duijvenboden, illuminates Boelens’ work and evolving attitudes from an intimate and studious perspective. Conversations and reflections are punctuated by a rich vein of illustrations and process images, as well as citations from twentieth-century literature and philosophy, such as by Bergson, Valéry, Merleau-Ponty and Woolf. A sense of searching pervades the publication, visually as well as intellectually, resulting in a meditation on experience, thought, memory and process.
The book will be presented at San Serriffe on March 13, 2014
Sea Urchin in collaboration with Cold Turkey Press
Ira Cohen, From Journey West (All in August)
The summer of 1975 was hot. A heatwave of eighteen consecutive days singed Western Europe and turned its capitals into seething cauldrons. Ira Cohen landed on the soft tarmac of Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris, in August — his mind still filled with the opiate clouds over Kathmandu, where he had lived since 1972 — and stepped into a wildfire of events.
Fellow filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky was feverishly working on his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, a megalomaniac project involving Salvador Dali, Pink Floyd, Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, H.R. Giger and many others, which was soon to collapse under its own weight like one of Dali’s soft constructions. Ira’s friend and fellow poet Brion Gysin was undergoing Cobalt-60 radiation therapy for lung cancer and appeared to be dying from either the disease or the treatment. And former Black Panthers leader Eldridge Cleaver – whose soul may have been on ice but whose brain was thoroughly fried – was spending his last months of exile negotiating his return to the US with the FBI and launching his cock-liberating pants as ‘Eldridge de Paris’.
Witte de With
Morality in Fragments. Edited by Amira Gad, Juan A. Gaitán, Nicolaus Schafhausen and Monika Szewczyk
In the context of Morality, a multi-faceted project that was presented at Witte de With in 2009 and 2010, the book Morality in Fragments will be published as a free e-book that can be downloaded from the Witte de With website. After years of contemplation, deliberation and retrospection, this book Morality in Fragments, is the final Act of the program that summarizes and concludes the loaded Morality project.
nai010 publishers
De canon van de Nederlandse kunstkritiek
The first two installments of a series of books on Dutch art criticism, will be launched at the Stedelijk Museum on April 4, 2014. Topics that this series will cover are the return of painting, art criticism during the fin-de-siècle, globalization, artmarket and new models for presenting art and art criticism as a profession.
Black Dog Publishing
Made by Hand
A visual survey of some of the finest handmakers, the spaces in which they work and the products they create, Made By Hand is a remedy to mass production and a celebration of the return to artisan craft. The book takes the reader through tailors, shoemakers, bee keepers, micro breweries, jewelers and more. Each artisan features with interviews probing their techniques, the surrounding tradition and their motivation for working by hand.
Semiotext(e)
Under the Sign of [sic]. Sturtevant’s Volte-Face by Bruce Hainley
Asked to sum up her artistic pursuit, the American artist Elaine Sturtevant once replied: “I create vertigo.” Since the mid-1960s, Sturtevant has been using repetition to change the way art is understood. In 1965, what seemed to be a group show by then “hot” artists (Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, and James Rosenquist, among others) was in fact Sturtevant’s first solo exhibit, every work in it created by herself. Sturtevant will have a major survey at the MoMA, New York, in 2014.
In Under the Sign of [sic], Bruce Hainley unpacks the work of Sturtevant, providing the first book-length monographic study of the artist in English. Hainley draws on elusive archival materials to tackle not only Sturtevant’s work but also the essential problem that it poses.
BAK
Insurgent Publics: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art. Edited by Maria Hlavajova and Ranjit Hoskote
Within BAK’s Critical Readers series, a new installment on Insurgent Publics will be launched. The publication is part of the new BAK program Future Vocabularies. Over the course of the next three years, BAK’s program unfolds through a multifaceted series of projects realized between 2014 and 2016. Future Vocabularies is organized as a succession of a number of semesters of collaborative research, exhibitions, curricula of learning, conferences, and publications.
JRP Rignier
Monograph of Ed Atkins
In his work, which includes videos, video installations, texts, and drawings, British artist Ed Atkins (born in 1982, lives and works in London) explores the material quality of our contemporary visual world and its existential resonance. He records his videos in high-definition with powerful surround sound; these new options for technical creation and presentation have the paradoxical capacity of reproducing life-like materiality and bodies using immaterial means. This paradox is also a theme in Atkins’ work, which revolves around the cadaver, disease, and death, motifs that raise awareness of the viewers’ own corporeality.
This is the first major publication on Ed Atkins’ work and it provides a comprehensive overview of his artistic production through a detailed selection of his video works, numerous installation views, a newly commissioned text by Joe Luna, an essay by Ed Atkins, and a conversation between the the artist and Beatrix Ruf.
Book Works
A man in a room spray-painting a fly (or at least trying to) by Francesco Pedraglio
The first publication by Francesco Pedraglio presents a series of texts that explore the possibilities between the written and spoken word, and the fault lines of communication between the text and the spoken performance. Focusing on the correlation between object making and writing, his dark, absurd and often funny short stories and poetic prose texts, trace the different effects of object and narrative, in which objects are producers of the false and misunderstood, whilst narratives have greater effect as the occupiers of the abstract space within the text.
Bedford Press
Real Estates: Life Without Debt. Edited by Fulcrum
Real Estates includes essays by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Neil Brenner, Mark Campbell, Mario Carpo, Keller Easterling, Ross Exo Adams, Peer Illner, Sam Jacob, Roberta Marcaccio, Jack Self, Brett Steele, Urban-Think Tank, Wouter Vanstiphout, Eyal Weizman and Finn Williams. The focus is on neoliberalism as a wealth redistribution imperative that has made property ownership impossible or unprofitable for much of society. Whether in the form of mortgages or rent, we are consigned to living in conditions of perpetual debt. The book explores the moral, political and economic ramifications of property and ownership in neoliberal debt economies, and asks what role the architect might play in addressing widening social and spatial inequality in the built environment.
BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE
Abstract Specific / Specific Abstract by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer
BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE was founded in 2011 by Manuel Raeder and Manuel Goller in order to distribute and publish artists that have a strong interest in exploring the format of the artist’s book. Abstract Specific / Specific Abstract by the artists Daniel Steegmann Mangrané and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, is an ongoing publication project. In exhibitions it is displayed on steel modular structures. In this upcoming publication, it will be rethought for paper.
Walther König
Harun Farocki, Brave New Work. A Reader
After thirty years of neo-liberalism, the meaning and structure of work have changed radically. How we will work in the future and who has the power to decide the answer to that question are the subjects of Harun Farocki’s film Ein neues Produkt (A New Product, 2012). The film follows a team of management consultants as they develop a new consulting product, exposing, amidst flip charts and models, the psychological and ideological mechanisms of contemporary management culture.
The essays in this reader take up the topics broached by the film, exploring the spatial planning models of immaterial labour; the history of ergonomics and its social implications; the influence of management consulting on corporations; power shifts since Taylorism; the process by which the economic has continuously expanded to encompass the social; the physical aspect of immaterial labour; and the pointlessness of post-Fordist labour, culminating in the fundamental awkwardness of the office as workplace.
Occassional Papers
Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts by Robert Filliou
Long out-of-print since its first edition in 1970, Robert Filliou’s work in continuous progress remains an essential primer to the artist’s still radical ideas on participatory art making and teaching. Along with extensive writing by Filliou, the book includes interviews with numerous artists close to him, such as Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, John Cage, Dorothy Iannone, Allan Kaprow and Diter Rot. This edition is an exact facsimile of the original, in order to preserve its highly inventive bilingual (English/German) layout and idiosyncratic composition.
The book will be launched on March 13, 2014 at the Whitechapel Gallery.
Paraguay Press
The Social Life of The Book #5: "Die Toilette", after Chris Kraus, by Jon Bywater, Louise Menzies and Marnie Slater
The "next" publication in the Social Life of the Book -series by Paraguay Press will be titled Die Toilett. The book started life as a reading at castillo/corrales. Artist Louise Menzies, writer Jon Bywater, along with artist Marnie Slater did sort of a read-aloud cut-up performance, after several books by Chris Kraus. They produced, through this particular reading, a new text. This montage forms the main body of the new Social Life of the Book , with the addition of several footnotes by the contributors.
e-flux publications
Forthcoming by Jalal Toufic. Edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
Jalal Toufic is a thinker, writer, and video artist. The Daily Star, Lebanon, placed him “at the core of a small but staunch group of Beiruti artists who have — collectively and separately — made a strong case for there being an intellectually rigorous, critically engaged, and ultra-contemporary platform for cultural practice developing in Lebanon and in the region. Toufic has been instrumental not only as an artist in his own right but also as an instigator or catalyst, someone known to push his colleagues and students to create better, more complex, and more probing work.… Toufic is one of the most active and ambitious figures in the Arab world who — book by book — has endeavored to sculpt a critical, theoretical language of the Arab world.”
Nieuw Amsterdam
Jan Rothuizen, The Soft Atlas of Amsterdam
The Soft Atlas of Amsterdam contains images, both existing and new, by the artist Jan Rothuizen. During his walks, Rothuizen makes notes and sketches of what he sees, thinks and feels creating soft or subjective maps.
Valiz Publishers
Whispers: Ulay on Ulay
At the age of 69 – as his radically innovative past work in partnership with Marina Abramovic has reached the highest degrees of critical acclaim worldwide – Ulay (artist name of Uwe Frank Laysiepen – Solingen, 1943) finally reveals his best kept secrets: a startling oeuvre, coherently rooted in a personal life philosophy guided by strong ethical principles.
Bookhorse
Thomas Ruff‚ Zeitungsfotos. Edited by Lex Trueb and Christoph Schifferli
Best known for his oversized, dead-pan portraits, his unmediated shots of commonplace interiors, and his seemingly straightforward photographs of architecture, Thomas Ruff has quietly approached many familiar genres, and proceeded to discreetly reinvent them. For his Zeitungsfoto ("newspaper photo") series, Ruff found images in newspapers, and then re-photographed and enlarged them to isolate the photographs from the text, allowing Ruff’s viewer, now no longer a reader, to make assumptions about the photograph without any information to support the viewer’s inferences. The book by Bookhorse consists of 400 reproductions from German newspapers that Ruff collected over the span of 10 years (1981-1991).
Homepage: image by Sturtevant
Maaike Lauwaert