From shaming and shamefulness to shame-avoidance and shamelessness, the experience of shame influences our social behaviours, decision making abilities, and desires. Shame determines what we show and what we hide. And yet, as an emotion that begs for its own concealment, what is the structure and appearance of shame? How does shame interact with the realm of the visible, and where does it surface in visual culture? In this extensive historical and contemporary analysis of shame and its power, artist Andrea Büttner probes the definitions and representations of shame. The book includes close readings of Sigmund Freud’s writings on play and fantasy, challenges theoretical approaches to Andy Warhol’s queer performativity on film, and frames Dieter Roth’s representations of shame in his writing and moving image work.

Designed by HIT.

Produced as a supplement to the work Visit (1883–2020), 2020, in the context of the group exhibition In the Presence of Absence: Proposals for the Museum Collection, curated by Britte Sloothaak and Fadwa Naamna at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 5 September, 2020–31 January, 2021.

With contributions by Marieke Bloembergen, Jan van Adrichem, Aspha Bijnaar, Sadiah Boonstra, Caroline Drieënhuizen, Mitchell Esajas, Guno Jones and Simone Zeefuik.

Designed by Jan-Pieter Karper.

Originally published in 1974, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism is a collection of essays by the English composer Cornelius Cardew that provides a Marxist critique of two of the more revered avant-garde composers of the post-war era: Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. A former assistant to Stockhausen and a champion of Cage in England, Cardew provides a cutting rebuke of the composers’ works and ideological positions, which he saw as reinforcing an imperialist order rather than spotlighting and serving the struggles of the working class.

This book extends into book form Nick Mauss’s 2018 exhibition Transmissions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which was heralded by the New York Times as “an installation, a collage of several art forms, a revisionist investigation of New York modernism and sexual expression, and an essay in queer theory…”

Including never-before published reproductions of documents and artworks by Eugene Berman, Ilse Bing, Paul Cadmus, Maya Deren, Walker Evans, Peter Hujar, George Platt Lynes, Elie Nadelman, Isamu Noguchi, PaJaMa, Dorothea Tanning, Pavel Tchelitchew, Carl Van Vechten, and many more. The essays consider subjects of ballet and the body, Mauss’s work as artist and exhibition maker, performance and historiography, and dance in museum spaces.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Not Working, Artistic production and matters of class at Kunstverein München, 12 September–22 November, 2020.

Not Working brings together the contributions by artists, theorists and writers who in their work examine the interdependence of artistic production and social class. The complex structures and substantial rise in social inequalities, particularly visible in light of the current pandemic, have given the concept of class a wide range of connotations. Despite the ongoing attempts to view contemporary art in the sense of “class homogeneity”; it remains complicit in the reproduction and masking of existing conditions which it often claims to overcome. The texts in this book form a ground were class can be mediated with respect to artistic practices and other structures in the art world.

With contributions by Annette Wehrmann, Dung Tien Thi Phuong, Josef Kramhöller, Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky, Leander Scholz, Lise Soskolne, Mahan Moalemi, Marina Vishmidt and Melanie Gilligan, and Steven Warwick.

More information on the exhibition can be found here.

Intermedia and Expanded Cinema, both as critical approach and artistic practice, left an indelible mark in a period of Japanese art history that is broadly considered to be one of its most dynamic moments in the wake of its postwar reemergence.

Despite the burgeoning interest in academic and curatorial circles in this segment of Japanese art history, the paucity of readily available material in a language other that Japanese has meant the local context, particularly the ways in which the terms were critically debated, was relatively neglected.

Rather than assuming the interpretations of the terms were the same as their counterparts abroad, translations of a selection of key texts that were instrumental in shaping the specific discourse around these terms have been commissioned.