Published on the occasion of Mechanisms, a group exhibition at CCA Wattis Institute (October 12, 2017 to February 24, 2018). It includes an essay by curator Anthony Huberman as well as contributions from artists Zarouhie Abdalian, Terry Atkinson, Lutz Bacher, Eva Barto, Neil Beloufa, Patricia L. Boyd, Jay DeFeo, Harun Farocki, Richard Hamilton, Aaron Flint Jamison, Jacob Kassay, Garry Neill Kennedy, Louise Lawler, Park McArthur, Jean-Luc Moulène, William Pope.L, Charlotte Posensenke, Cameron Rowland, and Danh Vo. Trisha Donnelly designed the cover.

Instead of documenting the exhibition, the catalogue reflects and expands on some of its core ideas. Designed by Scott Ponik and Julie Peeters, the book’s fabrication makes use of different printing techniques and “machines,” including an offset printer, a letterpress, and thermography, as well as a wide range of natural and synthetic paper stocks. Contributions by each of the exhibiting artists range from photo essays, theoretical essays, video transcripts and stills, interviews, and works designed especially for the page.

A prolific writer and documenter of both her art and her relationships, the public and private, Lee Lozano kept a series of personal journals from 1968 to 1972 while living in New York’s SoHo neighbourhood. Eleven of these private books survive, containing notes on her work, detailed interactions with artist friends and commentary on the alienations of gender politics, as well as philosophical queries into art’s role in society and humorous asides from daily life.

A prolific writer and documenter of both her art and her relationships, the public and private, Lee Lozano kept a series of personal journals from 1968 to 1972 while living in New York’s SoHo neighbourhood. Eleven of these private books survive, containing notes on her work, detailed interactions with artist friends and commentary on the alienations of gender politics, as well as philosophical queries into art’s role in society and humorous asides from daily life.

This complex book by Manfred Pernice goes back to an exhibition at Museum Ludwig Cologne in 2007. At that time, he had combined the early work ­Bibette Headland (1999) with Haldensleben (2005) a work developed further specifically for the exhibition, and the Hotel Hangelar (2007), exhibited for the first time back then. These three large and, to some extent, accessible sculptures refer to the architecture of bunkers, airport towers and small town neighborhoods. Today, after a decade, it is clear that these three sculptures occupy a central ­position in the work of the artist. They illustrate Pernice’s long-standing examination of the historical and socio-political contexts of ­architecture and the aesthetics of everyday life. At the same time, his sculptures, despite their references to reality and history, exist as independent objects, as ­objectification, that present themselves in a productive reciprocal relationship of the familiar and the foreign, turning aesthetic experience into insight. The book displays, for the first time, the varied text and image material of Manfred ­Pernice’s research and ­presents it together with a survey of the realized works of art at Museum Ludwig Cologne. Texts (German/English) by Barbara Engelbach, Yilmaz Dziewior, Kasper König and various facsimiles.

Sweet Sixties is a long-term trans-regional research initiative working between art, research, media, and educational contexts in Europe, the Middle East, western and central Asia, Latin America, and northern Africa. Involving a particular group of experimentally oriented arts and research groups as well as individual artists, researchers, and media, Sweet Sixties investigates hidden histories or underexposed cultural junctions and exchange channels in the revolutionary period of the 1960s.

In the 1960s, the landscapes and cities of protectorates and former colonies from India to the Maghreb, from the Soviet Republics to the new states in the southern hemisphere were replete with the spirit and forms of modernity, forms that transmogrify and then dissolve into the thin air of the vernacular. The air of the 1960s echoes a spirit of emancipation. And the newly arising art-scapes are interspersed with double agents: diasporas bring their academies; the streams between Soviet, North and South American, Western European, Non-Aligned, etc., are full of interlocutions, hidden pathways, and narratives of trade routes beyond the seemingly stable hegemonies of the blocs. The stories and spirits of a parallel avant-garde, whose silhouettes have yet to be found on the walls of the Western canon, are the theme of this publication.

Essay #5 in the series by S*I*G Verlag. Designed in collaboration with Sara De Bondt. Edited by Megan Francis Sullivan.