Produced on the occasion of Morgan Fisher’s exhibitions The Frame and Beyond at the Generali Foundation, Vienna, 2 March 2–29 July, 2012 & Translations at Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, 23 October, 2011–5 February, 2012.

Complementing Fisher’s Two Exhibitions monograph, this volume compiles the Los Angeles-based artist’s writings of the past three decades, from 1975 to the present. Fisher discusses his own films, paintings, installations and photographs and the works of artists such as Carl Andre and Blinky Palermo. A final section compiles his film and video transcripts and narrations.

Produced on the occasion of Morgan Fisher’s exhibitions The Frame and Beyond at the Generali Foundation, Vienna, 2 March 2–29 July, 2012 & Translations at Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, 23 October, 2011–5 February, 2012.

Morgan Fisher studied art history at Harvard from 1960 to 1964 before attending film school in Los Angeles and going into film. He then worked in Hollywood for several years, mostly as an editor, an experience that shaped his experimental practice. In the 1970s, Fisher created several film installations that can be described as works of Expanded Cinema. From the mid-1990s, in a further development, he turned to monochrome painting and installations of monochrome paintings.

With introductions by Sabine Folie and Susanne Titz, essays by Thom Andersen, Rainer Bellenbaum / Sabeth Buchmann, Yve-Alain Bois and short texts by Morgan Fisher

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in small press magazines, exhibition catalogs, anthologies, and album liner notes, along with other previously unpublished texts.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.

“The films of Nathaniel Dorsky blend a beauteous celebration of the sensual world with a deep sense of introspection and solitude. They are occasions for reflection and meditation, on light, landscape, time and the motions of consciousness. Their luminous photography emphasizes the elemental frisson between solidity and luminosity, between spirit and matter, while his uniquely developed montage permits a fluid and flowing experience of time. Dorsky’s films reveal the mystery behind everyday existence, providing intimations of eternity.”—Steve Polta, San Francisco Cinematheque.

In Devotional Cinema, Dorsky moves through meditations on image-moments in works by key filmmakers (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Roberto Rossellini), and arrives at the heart of what constitutes a devotional practice.

“The works of Joëlle Tuerlinckx can be typified as experiments in which destructive and constructive impulses simultaneously redeem each other. That which is destroyed—or gives that impression to be—is readily rearranged. Some of Tuerlinckx’ work is suggestive of images that fell to pieces. And yet, even those are not ruins, unrestrainedly delivered to the hands of time. In this ample volume the artist endeavours to put forward an inventory of her film and video work up to the present day, ’un travail d’archivage en cours’. Soon this book abandons its attempt at drawing up an inventory in favour of an autonomous rearrangement, a rereading of a myriad of videos, films and film fragments, installations and contexts. A very impressive document.”—Argos

Artists, scholars, filmmakers, and writers revisit the films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. Jean-Marie Straub (b. 1933) and Danièle Huillet (1936–2006) met in Paris in 1954. Straub wanted to make a film about Johann Sebastian Bach, to which Huillet thought: “He’s planning to do far too much; he won’t manage it alone.” It was the beginning of a fifty-year collaboration, which brought about one of the most unconventional and controversial bodies of work in modern cinema. Tell it to the Stones presents variations from a prolonged re-encounter with Huillet and Straub’s work that was sparked by a three-month exhibition, complete cinema retrospective, workshops, and music performances in Berlin in the fall of 2017.

Contributing artists, scholars, filmmakers, and writers have revisited this collective experience in new texts, revised transcripts, conceptual essays, and visual montages. What happens during an encounter happens in between: between language and image, gestures and words, looks and everything unsaid. “To help us build the in-between,” is how Huillet once imagined a task for those who come to see their films. The present compendium revives these encounters and reveals the urgencies of how Straub and Huillet’s oeuvre matters today, perhaps more than ever.