Exhibition guide was produced on the occasion of Choses tuées, held at Temporary Gallery, Köln, 2016.

The collective artist gerlach en koop renders things visible by repetition, copying or reuse, by displacement and misplacement, by omissions, erring and making mistakes. The smaller the distance between two identical things—differences that sometimes can only be conceived of—the more interesting.

 

The collective artist gerlach en koop renders things visible by repetition, copying or reuse, by displacement and misplacement, by omissions, erring and making mistakes. The smaller the distance between two identical things—differences that sometimes can only be conceived of—the more interesting.

This book is the second volumes in a series, produced on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition, held at Temporary Gallery, Cologne, February-March 2016. Photographs by Kristien Daem and Hartwig Schwarz. With text contributions by Regina Barunke, Valentina Desideri, Nickel van Duijvenboden, Maxine Kopsa, Candice Lin and Raimundas Malasauaskas. Designed by Louis Lüthi.

The future is no longer the distant, mythical condition it once was to us. Technology has placed it at our fingertips, it wasn’t so long ago that we marveled at devices that could tell us where we were at that exact moment; it became odd when they recently began to tell us where we would soon be. The most important issue, however, might not be whether a future coproduced and made available to us by technology is good or bad, but rather how we want to relate to it as human beings. The three essays by Douglas Coupland collected in this volume address this question.

Complete Writings 1959–1975 was first published in 1975 by The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and since then it has been the primary source for Donald Judd’s early writing. Working as an art critic for the magazines Arts, Arts Magazine and, later, Art International, Judd regularly contributed reviews of contemporary art exhibitions between 1959 and 1965, but continued to write throughout his life on a broad range of subjects. In his reviews and essays, Judd discussed in detail the work of more than 500 artists showing in New York in the early and mid-1960s, and provided a critical account of this significant era of art in America. While addressing the social and political ramifications of art production, the writings frequently addressed the work of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Kazimir Malevich, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Lee Bontecou, Yayoi Kusama, John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Kenneth Noland and Claes Oldenburg. Judd’s essay “Specific Objects,” first published in 1965, remains central to the analysis of the new art developed in the early 1960s. Other essays included in this publication are “Complaints I” (1969), “Complaints II” (1973) and his previously unpublished essay “Imperialism, Nationalism and Regionalism” (1975), all of which establish the polemical importance of Judd’s writing.

In her work, Anicka Yi explores life forms, organisms and microbiological processes with “multinatural perspectivism”. The exhibition booklet explores further the clashes and unions between natural and artificial bringing Yi’s work together with illustrations by British botanist Margaret Mee, a pioneer in environmental activism in the Amazon Basin. The double sided booklet which can be read in English or German contains the exhibition guide, the essay The Notion of Species in History and Anthropology by Eduardo Viveiros de Castello and the script of Yi’s film The Flavour Genome.

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.