Writings is the first collection to widely survey this singular polymath’s prolific activity as a writer. The book spans the years 1961–2012 and includes fifty-seven pieces: essays originally published in small press magazines, exhibition catalogs, anthologies, and album liner notes, along with other previously unpublished texts. Conrad writes about his own work, with substantial contributions on The Flicker, Loose Connection, Four Violins, Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals, Early Minimalism, Yellow Movies, Slapping Pythagoras, and Music and the Mind of the World, as well as that of his peers: Tony Oursler, Jack Smith, Rhys Chatham, and Henry Flynt, among others. He devotes critical essays both to grand subjects—horology, neurolinguistics, and the historical development of Western music—and more quotidian topics, such as television advertising and camouflage. Designed by Scott Ponik.
French artist Joëlle de la Casinière, Portuguese artist Ana Jotta and Flemish artist Anne Mie Van Kerckhoven have in common to pay no fealty to trends of contemporary art. Moreover, they fought unwaveringly throughout their respective careers the need to see their work being given an “official line”. Instead, they stood aside, went underground or remained indifferent to the twists and turns of the art market and institutions. They sometimes created surrogate characters, hid, or playfully modified their names to react to the branding of identity in the artworld, and to the imposed marginalization that they had to cope with as women artists, as did artists living in peripheral geographies. In a way, paradoxically, being marginalized encouraged a calculated versatility of media and styles, and the invention of an idiosyncratic vocabulary, while total freedom remained their one and only rule.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Malmö Konsthall in 2019. More information on the exhibition can be found here.
A text by Leslie Dick runs adjacent to 10 postcards featuring a Sequence of Events, a series of mostly permanent installations in homes. The project draws lines between public institutions, apartment galleries, private residences, owned homes, social housing, and rented apartments. A Sequence of Events questions the duration, visibility, and boundaries of a site, including that of an artist’s book.
Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Gabriel Kuri: sorted, resorted at WIELS, Brussels, 6 September–5 January, 2020. Using familiar materials such as receipts, newspaper, and plastic bags, Mexican-born, Los Angeles-based artist Gabriel Kuri (b. 1970) is interested in the way that money mediates almost all human relationships.
Featuring an introduction by senior curator Zoë Gray and an essay by art historian Cathleen Chaffee (Chief Curator, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo), and four texts exploring our material world by Brian Dillon (author, Professor of Creative Writing at Queen Mary, University of London). Published in English with translations in French and Dutch. Designed by OK-RM.
Blinky Palermo, is known for his large fabric and metal pictures as well as his objects and installations. Less well known, yet no less interesting, are the works he created in editions: screen prints and offset prints, lithographs, objects, and a template for painting. In their entirety, these works not only reflect Palermo’s development from the 1960s to his early death in 1977, but also show how the artist deliberately expanded his work with the possibilities of technical reproduction. Thanks to a donation from the Cologne collector Ulrich Reininghaus, in 2018 a complete set of Palermo’s editions became part of the Museum Ludwig’s collection. After having been subject to an in-depth scholarly research, they will now be presented in an exhibition for the first time. This exhibition catalogue also includes an updated version of Fred Jahn’s out-of-print catalogue raisonné from 1983.
Mondo Cane presents itself as a local folkloric museum that displays the human figure. Silent, pale and frightened, the pavilion’s inhabitants appear as aestheticized shells, stuck in a loop of formal activity that the visitor perceives as odd and out of touch with contemporary reality.
Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys have the habit of distilling fictions out of a reality that is, sometimes, ‘too real.’ Both willingly concede that they feel attracted to the psychotic state of contemporary societies, a state that they simultaneously dread and disseminate in their work.
Designed by Boy Vereecken and Antoine Begon.