SIX YEARS: THE DEMATERIALIZATION OF THE ART OBJECT FROM 1966 TO 1972
Lucy R. Lippard
Published by University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997, 296 pages (b/w ill.), 17.8 × 21.9 cm, English
Price: €31

In Six Years Lucy R. Lippard documents the chaotic network of ideas that has been labeled conceptual art. The book is arranged as an annotated chronology into which is woven a rich collection of original documents—including texts by and taped discussions among and with the artists involved and by Lippard, who has also provided a new preface for this edition. The result is a book with the character of a lively contemporary forum that offers an invaluable record of the thinking of the artists—a historical survey and essential reference book for the period.

#1997 #lucyrlippard
In the Shadow of Forward Motion
David Wojnarowicz
Published by Primary Information, New York, 2020, 54 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 21.5 × 28 cm, English
Price: €18 (Temporarily out of stock)

David Wojnarowicz’s In the Shadow of Forward Motion was originally published in 1989 as a limited-run zine/catalog to accompany an exhibition by the artist at P.P.O.W gallery.

Despite its meager print run of just 50 copies, the publication has garnered a legendary status. In it we find Wojnarowicz’s writing and visual art—two mediums for which the artist is renowned—sitting side by side for the first time, playing off each other in equal measure. Wojnarowicz uses the fractured experience of his day-to-day life (including dreams, which he recorded fastidiously) to expose these technologies as weapons of class, cultural, and racial oppression.

The artist’s experience living with HIV is a constant subject of the work, used to shed light on the political and social structures perpetuating discrimination against not only himself, but against women and people of colour, who faced additional barriers in their efforts to receive treatment for the illness.

#2020 #davidwojnarowicz #primaryinformation
Work 1961–73
Yvonne Rainer
Published by Primary Information, New York, 2020, 346 pages (b/w ill.), 20 × 27 cm, English
Price: €36 (Out of stock)

Originally published in 1974 by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Yvonne Rainer’s Work 1961–73 documents the artist’s landmark early works at the intersection of dance, performance, and art.

Assembled ostensibly as a survey, Work 1961–73 features a multitude of documentary forms, including scripts, excerpts from the artist’s notebooks, press reviews, correspondence, photographic documentation, literary excerpts, contextualizing texts by the artist, diagrams, film stills, floor plans, scores, and more. As such, the publication resembles an artist book that generously gives the reader access to Rainer’s modes of working, as well as the social and political context around which the work was made. The publication is also a book of writing, with the artist’s frank, witty, and sometimes humorous prose intimately leading the reader through each work.

#2020 #dance #novascotiacollegeofartanddesign #primaryinformation #yvonnerainer
Folds in time
Lili Dujourie
Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2015, 80 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 18 × 27 cm, English
Price: €28

Produced on the occasion of simultaneous exhibition Lili Dujourie: Folds in time at Mu.ZEE, Ostend, and at SMAK, Ghent, 6 June–4 October 2015.

The work by Flemish artist, Lili Dujourie unfolds out of the gap between painting and sculpture. After making debut with steel and colour objects in the late 1960s, Dujourie’s practice shifted into photography and video in the 1970s.

As well as exploring the blurring between art disciplines, in these new media she also raised gender-and identity-related issues prevalent at that time. The duality of movement and standstill inherent to film has fed the artist’s three-dimensional work from the 1980s to the present.

#2015 #lilidujourie #verlagderbuchhandlungwaltherkonig
Nightcleaners & '36 to '77
Published by Raven Row, London; LUX, London and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2018, box containing a book (148 pages) and booklet (84 pages) and two discs (DVD), (colour & b/w ill.), 21.6 × 30.4 cm, English
Price: €25 (Temporarily out of stock)

Nightcleaners (1975) by the Berwick Street Film Collective has long been recognised as a landmark of British experimental film and political cinema. Together with its companion film ’36 to ’77 (1978), it pioneered a film form as radical as the Collective’s politics. The films chronicle one of the key campaigns of the women’s movement in the 1970s. The campaign to unionise women night cleaners in London anticipates contemporary issues regarding precarious labour. To celebrate the first digital release of the films, a special box set has been produced containing the two films on disc, reproductions of historical material, including news sheets of the women’s movement – one designed by Mary Kelly, a member of the Film Collective, an interview with whom is also included as well as rare illustrations and contributions from the filmmakers.

Designed by John Morgan studio.

#2018 #johnmorganstudio #ravenrow #verlagderbuchhandlungwaltherkonig
From Cross To Crib
Paul Thek
Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2014, 112 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 22 × 28 cm, English / German
Price: €28 (Out of stock)

This publication is devoted to a little-known temporary artwork of Thek’s, made in the winter of 1973/74 while he was a guest of the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg. His expansive environment Ark, Pyramid–Christmas (“The Manger”) filled a whole room. This exhibition, organised by the director of the museum at the time, Siegfried Salzmann, was the fourth in Thek’s series of atmospheric, large-scale projects in Europe, which engaged with individualised religious symbols. The festive period provided Thek with the occasion to present, for the first time, a self-written theatre piece in the form of a nativity play featuring children from Duisburg. A great quantity of original material and documents have been discovered in the museum’s repository and enable a reconstruction of the exhibition in this book, accompanied by an interview that Marietta Franke conducted with Franz Deckwitz, who helped with the installation in 1973.

#2014 #paulthek #verlagderbuchhandlungwaltherkonig