Published on the occasion of the 2017 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 24 September, 2016–2 January, 2017), The Uses of Photography examines a network of artists who were active in San Diego between the late 1960s and early 1980s and whose experiments with photography opened the medium to a profusion of new strategies and subjects. Working within the framework of conceptual art, these artists introduced urgent social issues and themes of everyday life into that seemingly neutral territory, with photographic works that took on hybrid forms, from books and postcards to video and text-and-image installations. If photography had come to occupy a new, more prominent position in the art world of the late 1960s, largely within the context of conceptual art, much of the medium’s radical potential nonetheless remained latent.

Tracing a crucial history of photoconceptual practice, The Uses of Photography focuses on an artistic community that formed in and around the University of California San Diego, founded in 1960, and its visual arts department, founded in 1967. Artists such as Eleanor Antin, Allan Kaprow, Fred Lonidier, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, and Carrie Mae Weems, to name a few, employed photography and its expanded forms as a means to dismantle modernist autonomy, to contest notions of photographic truth, and to engage in political critique. The influence of these artists is felt throughout the global contemporary art world today, yet their common roots in San Diego—a military town far removed from the art world—has rarely been acknowledged. While these artists are celebrated internationally for their individual achievements, this exhibition is the first to explore how their practices emerged at a critical time and place.

Published by WIELS, FRAC, Kunstmuseum Luzern & Kunsthalle Nürnberg on the occasion of Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven: Nothing more Natural. For the past thirty years, the drawings of Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven have formed the basis of an ambitious project exploring the relationship between gender, technology and representation. This exhibition revaluated the corpus of works in relation to her career and art, and placed it in the perspective of the surrealist heritage, underground and comic books. The exhibition included a chronological and thematic selection of approximately 300 drawings, a number of experimental works and the restored films which date from the beginning of her career.

Traction argues that contemporary art is defined by a moral economy of indeterminacy that allows curators and artists to imagine themselves on the other side of power. This self-positioning, in turn, leaves us politically bankrupt, intellectually stagnant, and aesthetically predictable. In his memoir-polemic, curator and writer Tirdad Zolghadr candidly reflects on his own experiences and the work of others. He also drafts possibilities for a logic and a support structure that can offer some purchase of their own, beyond the gravitational pull of business as usual. Ultimately, Traction calls for a renewed sense of profession, somewhere within the corridors of power where, for better or worse, contemporary art has long arrived. Design by Aude Lehmann, Zurich.

Over the past four decades, Barbara Bloom (American, born 1951) has engaged in a nonceptual practice centered on photography and intricate image-based installations featuring diverse elements such as sculptures, found objects, and film stills.

Bloom rarely presents a singular image or object, but concerns herself with the relationships between objects and images, and the meanings implicit in their placement and combination. Bloom’s artwork uses beauty as a premise for investigating illusion, fragility, and transience.

Reprint of Nemam vremena (1979) [I Have No Time (1979)] (1983) by Mladen Stilinović. The 1983 version was offset printed by Edition Dacic, Tubingen, in an edition of 150 copies. Nemam vremena (1979) [I Have No Time (1979)] was the first printed version of I Have No Time, and was an Artist’s Edition, 70 copies. It was offset printed in Zagreb, seven sheets, softcover, stapled, 17.5 x 13.5 cm. Nemam vremena (1978) [I Have No Time (1978)] was the original version of I Have No Time. It was handwritten by Mladen Stilinović in pencil on paper, nine sheets (four written on), cardboard covers, stapled, 17 × 24 cm.

This collection of essays by Martin Herbert considers various artists who have withdrawn from the art world or adopted an antagonistic position toward its mechanisms. A large part of the artist’s role in today’s professionalized art system is being present. Providing a counterargument to this concept of self-marketing, Herbert examines the nature of retreat, whether in protest, as a deliberate conceptual act, or out of necessity. By illuminating these motives, Tell Them I Said No offers a unique perspective on where and how the needs of the artist and the needs of the art world diverge. Essays on Lutz Bacher, Stanley Brouwn, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Trisha Donnelly, David Hammons, Agnes Martin, Cady Noland, Laurie Parsons, Charlotte Posenenske, and Albert York.