Exhibition postcard from Jack Goldstein’s exhibition Burning Window at Corps de Garde, Groningen, Netherlands 12 August–9 September, 1978

Published on the occasion of Tetsumi Kudo’s exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 25 February–9 April, 1972. Designed by Wim Crouwel.

This publication is produced on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition of Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo of the same title at The National Museum of Art, Osaka from November 2013 to January 2014, then at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo from February to March 2014, and finally at Aomori Museum of Art from April to June 2014. 'Your Portrait' was one of Tetsumi Kudo's most frequently used titles. While the word 'you' indicates the audience constrained by a variety of established values and conventions, it also refers to Kudo himself as the work's first viewer. It is intended as a portrait of the human race as the unavoidable victim of radioactive contamination. Kudo's works might seem to be weird or repulsive, but they display his vision of a paradoxical paradise in which, in order to survive, human beings would be forced to live in harmony with nature and technology. Includes Tetsumi Kudo's writings, his biography and exhibition history, bibliography, and a catalogue of his works from 1955 to 1988. (Text from Asia Art Archive)

This bibliography catalogues and illustrates, with a wide selection of images, Allan Kaprow’s entire body of published work: from his first artist’s book in 1962, to his last anthological projects in the 1990s. This lesser-known side of his oeuvre unfolds through 32 books, booklets, and pamphlets produced over a period of 40 years. Kaprow’s work moved along two parallel tracks: Happenings—of which he was an unchallenged pioneer, starting in the 1950s—and “Activity Booklets,” which functioned as a tool to help people understand and experience these performances.

The layout of his books, the originality of their structure, the literary stature of their texts, and their aesthetic quality as objects shifted his exploration of print into a higher realm, where the book became a fully-fledged work of art.

Prague-based artist Běla Kolářová (1923–2010) began experimenting with photographic techniques in the early 1960s, creating photograms and X-ray photographs that continued the Bauhaus tradition of photography as an abstract medium. Thus, for a series of photograms she called vegetages, she produced miniature “artificial negatives” by pressing natural materials into soft paraffin and using them for the exposure of the photographic paper instantaneously as “negatives.” In the late sixties Kolářová increasingly began creating assemblages out of found objects including household items such as snap fasteners, needles and safety pins. Kolářová arranged these objects according to conceptual grids, and thus they are somewhat akin to the work of Nouveaux Realistes as well as to various conceptual practices. The work she produced in this way defied the aesthetic canon of Socialist Realism, and Kolářová developed a remarkable conceptual feminist style that was all her own.

In recent years, Kolářová’s work was shown at the documenta 12 (2007), at Raven Row in London (2010) and in solo shows at the Museum Kampa in Prague (2008) and Muzeum Umění in Olomouc (2007).

Inspired by Joseph Cornell’s assemblages and Simon Rodia’s Los Angeles monuments, the Watts Towers (made from found scrap materials), Betye Saar’s work mixes surreal, symbolic imagery with a folk art aesthetic. As a participant in the robust African-American Los Angeles art scene of the 1970s, Saar appropriated characters such as Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, and other stereotypes from folk culture and advertising in her works—usually collages and assemblages. African tribal mysticism, history, memory, and nostalgia are also important for Saar. She was invited to participate in “Pacific Standard Time,” a 2011 survey of influential LA artists, for which she created Red Time, an installation of her assemblages from both past and present that explored the relationship between personal and collective history. “I’m the kind of person who recycles materials but I also recycle emotions and feelings,” she explains.

Kellie Jones, in her essay ‘To/from Los Angeles with Betye Saar’ points out that Saar’s focus on the female body, a full decade before the pre-eminence of feminist art-making in the 1970s, speaks to her force as a member of the vanguard and the visionary.