Of course there is the practice of art by the artist, but an exhibition is even more so an engagement between people, places, institutions, projections, desires, coincidences, memories, and temporalities. In this monograph, artist Megan Francis Sullivan chooses the format of oral history, engaging various akteurs of the field to produce a web of language reflecting a shape of time.

With discussions with Jean-Claude Freymond-Guth, Melanie Ohnemus, David Lieske, Cornelia Kastelan, John Rasmussen, Marie Angeletti, Kelsey Olson, Megan McCready, Sara De Bondt, Antony Hudek, Alexander Schröder, Valérie Knoll, Helmut Draxler, Aura Rosenberg, John Miller, Robert Müller, Cecilie Norgaard, Moritz Scheper, Maximiliane Baumgartner and an essay by Hannes Loichinger, “The Painting of Hans Haacke.”

The focus of Owens’ essay From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life After “The Death of the Author”? is how artistic production finds its conditions for success within a social universe, and therefore is an acknowledgement of conditions related to production and reception while incorporating an understanding of how authorship in artistic work can be realized. The shift goes, as the title announces, from the work to the frame, and at the same time to a determination of those conditions that make works appear as frames.

From Work to Frame was first published in English and Swedish in 1987 in the catalogue for the exhibition Implosion: A Postmodern Perspective at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. As S*I*G #12, the text is published in English and in its first German translation, alongside a preface by Hannes Loichinger, who is editor of this issue.

The New York gallery American Fine Arts, Co.—whose name today is largely synonymous with that of its gallerist, Colin de Land (1955–2003)—represents a gallery practice in which a decided deviation from conventional models overlaps with successful activities within the framework of the art market. Today, American Fine Arts, Co. and de Land figure as uncontested projection screens for the desire for independence from or bohemian resistance against the dictate of the market.

Texts by Andrea Fraser, Manfred Hermes, Karl Holmqvist & Tobias Kaspar, Isla Leaver-Yap, Jackie McAllister, James Meyer & Christian Philipp Müller, Magnus Schäfer, Axel John Wieder, Phillip Zach; conversation between Colin de Land, Josef Strau, and Stephan Dillemuth; introduction by Hannes Loichinger and Magnus Schäfer.

In the artistic activities of Philippe Thomas (1951–1995), there was a determination to disappear: it was his procedure to transfer his title of author onto his collectors. This was the case when selling an artwork, or whenever the author’s credit was needed for a commissioned text, and in the institutional co-operations that Thomas was a participant of. With this strategy Thomas worked against his own historicization, erasing his name from the reigning European and North American art fields and with prescience Thomas “put up obstacles to block his future ‘googleability’” (Hanna Magauer). In recent years, the works and writings of the artist, who also acted on behalf of the semi-fictional agency readymades belong to everyone®, again gained greater visibility and as of current are being assigned a place in art history.

With this book, Élisabeth Lebovici elaborates on Thomas’s strategy to cede and fictionalize authorship and suggests a reading of his work that incorporates questions of gender and reproduction, the multiplicity of the subjects involved, and the unbearable disappearance of Thomas (who died of AIDS-related complications), into the process of enunciation. It is Lebovici’s suggestion that the performativity of Thomas’s work requires two versions at once: “the one where one enters into the fiction and the one where one observes the beauty of the arrangement and the plot at work. The one where one is inside and the one where one contemplates it.”

Edited by Valérie Knoll and Hannes Loichinger, with a foreword by Hanna Magauer. Designed by HIT.