Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE” (1969) was a major intervention in feminist performance practices and public art. The proposal argued for an intimate relationship between creative production in the public sphere and domestic labor—a relationship whose intricacies Ukeles has been unraveling ever since. In 1977, she became the unsalaried Artist-in-Residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation, a position that enables her to introduce radical public art into an urban municipal infrastructure.

Through archival research, this monographic publication focuses on Ukeles’s work ballets—a series of seven grand-scale collaborative performances involving workers, trucks, barges, and hundreds of tons of recyclables and steel—which took place between 1983 and 2012 in New York, Pittsburgh, Givors, Rotterdam, and Tokamachi. Over the past four decades, Ukeles has pioneered how we perceive and ultimately engage in maintenance activities. The work ballets derive from her engagement in civic operations in order to reveal how they work though monumental coordination and cooperation. Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Seven Work Ballets is the first monograph on Ukeles’s seminal practice, and is as much an artist’s book as an art-historical publication.

Edited by Kari Conte. Contributions by Kari Conte, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Mierle Laderman Ukeles; conversation with Tom Finkelpearl, Shannon Jackson, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Designed by Marc Hollenstein.

“Our Group Wourk” is an attempt to NOT write a biography of Yugoslavian graphic designer Dragan Stojanovski. Stojanovski was the in-house graphic designer at SKC Belgrade (student cultural centre), a state-funded cultural institution established after the 1968 student uprisings to contain, pacify and institutionalize student culture as an “organized alternative”. At the same time, it was a place of avant-garde experimentation and new forms of political activism and self-organization. Dunja Blazevic, a director of the visual arts department at the SKC in the 1970s refers to Stojanovski as Yugoslavia’s first conceptual designer.

This publication was prompted by conversations and encounters with Sasa Stojanovski, Biljana Tomic, Sklavko Timotijevic, Ljubinka Gavran, Milica Tomic, Slobodan Jovanovic and Dunja Blazevic with Ziga Testen, Peter Rauch and Cornelia Durka in Belgrade in April 2013.

Publication produced on the occasion of Alina Szapocznikow’s exhibition at Galerie Cogeime, Brussels, 12 November–3 December, 1968.

Alina Szapocznikow was a polish sculptor who as a Holocaust survivor began working in the post-war period in a rather classical, figurative manner, her later experimentation and reconception of sculpture left behind a legacy of provocative objects—at once sexualized, visceral, humorous, and political—that sit uneasily between Surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme, and Pop Art. Her tinted polyester-resin casts of her lips and breasts transformed into quotidian objects like lamps or ashtrays, her spongy polyurethane forms often embedded with casts of bellies or live grass, and her construction of resin sculptures that incorporate found photographs remain as remarkably biting, visionary, and original today as when they were first made.

From the 1950s through ’70s, Greek proto-Arte Povera artist Vlassis Caniaris introduced specific sites of political and personal histories into gallery and museum settings with tableau arrangements created from everyday working class objects. Material, form, texture and display comprise a sophisticated vocabulary of presentation organized to draw attention to immigrant plight and the social conditions of displacement, as well as to distinct modes of viewing and viewer-object seperation as determined by exhibition environments.

Produced on the occasion ofstanley brouwn: Mens Loopt op Planeet Aarde/Man Walking Planet Earth, at the Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, 14 October, 2017–21 January, 2018.

“Where other artists give free rein to paint or pencil, stanley brouwn (1935-2017) opted for ‘distance’ and ‘measurement’ as media. His work is about directions and distances and how to move within that context. His first museological exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam was in 1970. The exhibition Man Walking Planet Earth, close on half a century later, is a tribute to the artist who evolved into one of the most prominent conceptual artists in the world. He died in May 2017.”—exhibition press release

Booklet published on the occasion of a 1996 exhibition commissioned by Paul McCarthy and featuring the work of three European artists exiled in California: Guy de Cointet, Bas Jan Ader and Wolfgang Stoerchle. The publication includes texts by McCarthy and Cornelia Butler, biographical and bibliographical notes

Guy de Cointet (American, b. France. 1934–1983) was fascinated with language, which he explored primarily through performance and drawing. His practice involved collecting random phrases, words, and even single letters from popular culture and literary sources—he often cited Raymond Roussel’s novel “Impressions of Africa” as influential—and working these elements into non-linear narratives, which were presented as plays to his audience.