Representing the Possible
Stephen Willats
Published by Victoria Miro, London, 2014, 32 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 14.8 × 21 cm, English
Price: €12

Stephen Willats has made work examining the function and meaning of art in society since the 1960s. His work has involved interdisciplinary processes and theory from sociology, systems analysis, cybernetics, semiotics and philosophy. This manifests in wall installations, project works, films & computer simulations, drawings & diagrams, bookworks and texts.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Representing the Possible at Victoria Miro, London, in spring 2014. Representing the Possible brings together previously unseen works on paper from the 1960s and the present day in a specially conceived installation. Comprising four large-scale site-specific wall drawings, the installation transformed the gallery’s architecture into an immersive drawn environment with 37 individual works on their surfaces.

#2014 #stephenwillats
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
Clairvoyant Journal 1974
Hannah Weiner
Published by Bat Editions, Paris, 2014, 56 pages (b/w ill.), 24 × 33 cm, English
Price: €15

Clairvoyant Journal 1974 by Hannah Weiner (1928–1997) is based on the typescripts Early and Clairvoyant Journals and includes the entries dated February 23 to June 10. This new edition of Clairvoyant Journal features an “Afterword” by Patrick Durgin, which completes his study on Hannah Weiner’s “clair-style” writing (“BIG SENSIBLE, Introductory Remarks on Clairvoyant Journal”) previously published on www.f-u-t-u-r-e.org.

With Clairvoyant Journal, Hannah Weiner writes a specific form of diary, using the characteristics of typographic styles (roman, italic and CAPITAL) to present an inner discussion between three separate voices. Clairvoyant Journal also gives an insight into the daily life of a writer living in New York in the 1970s, evoking a poetic, musical, and artistic scene, yoga and a poetical experience.

#2014 #concretepoetry #hannahweiner
Ecodeviance
CAConrad
Published by Wave Books, Seattle, 2014, 160 pages, 19.1 × 25.2 cm, English
Price: €19

This series of 23 new (Soma)tic poetry rituals and resulting poems by CAConrad create what we can refer to as an “extreme present” set to reveal the creative viability of everything around us. Poetry rituals such as riding escalators and showing photographs of himself to strangers asking, “Excuse me, have you seen this person?” In another he pollinates flowers for security cameras, exclaiming, “I’M A POLLINATOR, I’M A POLLINATOR!” One was written with a ghost, another by stargazing to build his own constellations. (Soma)tic rituals are a practice of unorthodox steps aimed at breaking us out of the quotidian and into a more political and physical spiritual consciousness of The New Wilderness.

#2014 #caconrad #poetry #wavebooks
Live
Oscar Tuazon
Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2014, 2 volumes in slipcase, 368 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 24.5 × 29.3 cm, English/German
Price: €25

Live Volume 1, concentrates on a major exhibition of new sculptural works at Museum Ludwig. A full-scale reproduction of fragments of the artist’s house in Los Angeles grafted onto the architecture of the Ludwig museum, the exhibition collapses two spaces together, producing a strange third space.

Live Volume 2, comprises a photographic monograph of selected works covering the artist’s unconventional production over the past five years. Combining documentation of significant individual works, exhibitions, and large-scale installations with the artist’s own production documentation of works in the studio, the book is a unique look at works in progress.

#2014 #museumludwig #oscartuazon #verlagderbuchhandlungwaltherkonig
Not Available
Marc Nagtzaam
Published by Roma Publications, Amsterdam, 2014, 64 pages + insert (b/w ill.), 22 × 29 cm, English
Price: €30 (Temporarily out of stock)

In this book, recent work by Marc Nagtzaam is shown together with installation views and some of his older drawings. As a result, the previous works can be viewed from the perspective of the new, and vice versa. Nagtzaam sees exhibitions and books as single works. The same compositional approach used when making the drawings is also reflected in the structure of this book. In this manner, Nagtzaam reveals the link between the hard-edge abstraction of the drawings, which can be read as architectural plans, and his spatial installations in which they function as elements in a larger composition, suggestive of an obscure organising principle. Designed by Marc Nagtzaam in collaboration with Roger Willems.

#2014 #marcnagtzaam #romapublications