The Revolution Continues: New Art from ChinaThe Saatchi Gallery
Rizzoli, 2008
0847832066, 9780847832064
270 pages
China has emerged as the next frontier for contemporary art. Chinese artists, such as Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, Wang Guangyi, and Shen Shaomin, are producing some of today’s most provocative new work. With China set to host the world at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World’s Fair, enthusiasm for recent Chinese art continues to grow. This volume fills an important gap and provides badly needed context for the collector or connoisseur. Charles Saatchi, one of the savviest figures in the contemporary art scene, has built an unparalleled collection of new Chinese art which is presented here in glorious color reproduction on the eve of the opening of the new Saatchi Gallery in London’s Chelsea. Not only is this the seminal book on the subject, it is the first book to bring contemporary Chinese art into focus
Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the arts after Cage (a "minor" history)Branden Wayne Joseph
Zone Books, 2008
1890951862, 9781890951863
479 pages
Tony Conrad has significantly influenced cultural developments from minimalism to underground film, "concept art," postmodern appropriation, and the most sophisticated rock and roll. Creator of the "structural" film, The Flicker, collaborator on Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and Normal Love, follower of Henry Flynt's radical anti-art, member of the Theatre of Eternal Music and the first incarnation of The Velvet Underground, and early associate of Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, and Cindy Sherman, Conrad has eluded canonic histories. Yet Beyond the Dream Syndicate does not claim Conrad as a major but under-recognized figure. Neither monograph nor social history, the book takes Conrad's collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections in 1960s art. Such an approach simultaneously illuminates and estranges current understandings of the period, redrawing the map across medium and stylistic boundaries to reveal a constitutive hybridization at the base of the decade's artistic development.
This exploration of Conrad and his milieu goes beyond the presentation of a relatively overlooked oeuvre to chart multiple, contestatory regimes of power simultaneously in play during the pivotal moment of the 1960s. From the sovereign authority invoked by Young's music, to the "paranoiac" politics of Flynt, to the immanent control modeled by Conrad's films, each avant-garde project examined reveals an investment within a particular structure of power and resistance, providing a glimpse into the diversity of the artistic and political stakes that continue to define our time.
Robin Rhode: Walk OffRobin Rhode, Stephanie Rosenthal, Thomas Boutoux, André Lepecki
Hatje Cantz, 2007
3775720693, 9783775720694
183 pages
Robin Rhode, born in 1976 in Cape Town, combines drawing and performance to create a sometimes grotesque effect; for example, painting the top view of a bike on a sidewalk and then photographing himself sitting on its seat, legs apart. This volume documents his drawings, photographs and videos.
Leon Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled AlphabetsAndrea Giunta, Luis Perez-Oramas, Leon Ferrari, Rodrigo Naves, Mira Schendel
Museum of Modern Art, 2009
0870707507, 9780870707506
199 pages
Leon Ferrari (born in 1920) and Mira Schendel (1919-1988) are among the most significant Latin American artists of the twentieth century. Active simultaneously in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in the neighboring countries of Argentina and Brazil, they found inspiration in the written word and in the eloquence of spoken language, and they both used language as important visual subject matter. Published to accompany the first comprehensive survey of the work of each artist in the United States, this essential catalogue presents new insights into the artists' groundbreaking work and examines the connections and collisions between the visual arts, writing, politics and religion in their oeuvres.
James EnsorAnna Swinbourne, Susan Canning, James Ensor
Museum of Modern Art, 2009
0870707523, 9780870707520
208 pages
James Ensor's painting of 1887, "The Temptation of St. Anthony," now in The Museum of Modern Art's collection, established the artist as one of the boldest painters of all his contemporaries. Ensor (1860-1949) was a major figure in the Belgian avant-garde of the late nineteenth century and an important precursor to the development of Expressionism in the early twentieth, yet his work is underappreciated in the United States, and far too little seen. This striking volume, published on the occasion of Ensor's major 2009 exhibition in New York, gives the artist the attention he so greatly deserves. It presents approximately 90 works, organized thematically, examining Ensor's Modernity, his innovative and allegorical approach to light, his prominent use of satire, his deep interest in carnival and performance and, finally, his own self-fashioning and use of masking, travesty and role-playing. Works in the full range of his media--painting, printing and drawing--are presented in an overlapping network of themes and images to produce a complete picture of this daring body of art. The most comprehensive volume on the artist available in English, this remarkable, scholarly volume reveals Ensor as a socially engaged and self-critical artist involved with the issues of his times and contemporary debates on the very nature of Modernism.
The Klee UniverseDieter Scholz, Paul Klee, Christina Thomson, Olivier Berggruen
Hatje Cantz, 2009
3775722734, 9783775722735
368 pages
There are artists whose metier is the observation or documentation of the world, and artists who set the world aside altogether to build their own visionary cosmology, designing its constituent parts from scratch as a personal mythology relayed in motifs. Paul Klee (1879-1940) was such an artist, as his aphorism Art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes visible" testifies, and The Klee Universeaddresses his work from this perspective. In 1906, Klee noted in his diary, "All will be Klee," and in 1911, as the encyclopedist of his cosmos, he began to meticulously chronicle his works in a catalogue that, by the time he died, was to contain more than 9,000 items. Here, in the fashion of an Orbis Pictusor a Renaissance emblem book, Klee's oeuvre is made legible as a cogent entirety, in thematic units address: the human life cycle, from birth and childhood to sexual desire, parenthood and death; music, architecture, theater and religion; plants, animals and landscapes; and, finally, darker, destructive forces in the shape of war, fear and death. The Klee Universereimagines the artist as a Renaissance man, an artist of great learning whose cosmos proves to be a coherent system of ideas and images. Paul Klee(1879-1940) was born and died in Switzerland, though he never obtained Swiss citizenship. Technically of German nationality, he taught at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1926, alongside Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and others. Seventeen of his works were included in the Nazi's infamous 1937 Munich exhibition of "degenerate art.""
Aspects of Mel's Hole : artists respond to a paranormal land event occurring in radiospace
Doug Harvey
Grand Central Press, 2008
0981798705, 9780981798707
144 pages
