In 1965, Jay DeFeo (1929–89) was evicted from her San Francisco apartment, along with The Rose, the two-thousand-pound painting that would make her legendary. The morning after her front window was sawed open to make way for the colossus, DeFeo attempted to salvage Estocada, a large-scale painting on paper stapled directly to her hallway wall. Unfinished and never documented, the little-known piece was ripped down in chunks, saved, and reanimated years later in the studio through photography, photocopy, collage, and relief.

Rip Tales traces Estocada’s material history, woven into this narrative are other Bay Area stories that likewise privilege transformation, multiplicity, intuition, and absence. Drawing on interviews and personal experience, curator Jordan Stein explores these themes in the work and lives of artists Zarouhie Abdalian, April Dawn Alison, Ruth Asawa, Lutz Bacher, Bruce Conner, Dewey Crumpler, Trisha Donnelly, and Vincent Fecteau.

A talk with Jordan Stein and Hilton Als about the book here.

Taking its title from the Elaine May’s 1987 film Ishtar, this group exhibition curated by Los Angeles-based critic Bruce Hainley touches on many of the same interests and dichotomies: a comedy that is political and analytical at the same time; an abstraction but also a representation; and a cultural production outside of much discourse. The catalogue traces the attempt to create an informed dialogue for artwork that evades easy classifications and readymade discussions of abstraction vs. representation. Featured artists include: Brian Calvin, Samara Caughey, Lecia Dole-Recio, Trisha Donnelly, Vincent Fecteau, Richard Hawkins, Larry Johnson, Patrick Hill, Cady Noland, Sturtevant.

Produced on the occasion of Trisha Donnelly being awarded the 2017 Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis. Foreword from Mayen Beckmann & Yilmaz Dziewior. Texts from Suzanne Cotter & Barbara Engelbach.

Booklet produced on the occasion of The Imaginary Number, 5 June–11 September, 2005 at KW, Berlin. Curated by Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg and featuring the artists Edgar Arceneaux, Trisha Donnelly, Jimmie Durham, Omer Fast, Rodney Graham, David Maljkovic, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Valérie Mréjen, Klaus Weber.

The Imaginary Number is a collection of nine single projects and new groupings of works, including drawings, installations, sculptures and video and film installations. Not primarily a thematic exhibition, the independent works on display share some motifs on various levels, mainly their concern with the complex magic of the everyday – the role of the imaginary in the way we shape and make sense of the world.

In his catalogue essay, curator Anthony Huberman explains that the works in this exhibition ‘reflect on what it could mean to contest the regime of the machine’. That is, they question the worship of usefulness in modern scientific civilisation, which is refused or even ridiculed by each piece on show. It’s a strong concept, and potentially extends to how the works are placed in the labyrinthine space of the Secession. If the point is to produce friction, then the disorganisation of Other Mechanisms—the inability of its parts to add up to a coherent whole—is a paradoxical form of success.

Concept: Anthony Huberman. Texts: Jennifer Alexander, Franco Berardi, Benjamin H. Bratton, Gilles Châtelet, Gilles Deleuze, Keller Easterling, Vilém Flusser, Sigfried Gideon, Martin Heidegger, Anthony Huberman, K.G. Hultén, Maurizio Lazzarato, Pamela Lee, Les Levine, Jean-François Lyotard, Robert King Merton, Meredith Meredith, Lewis Mumford, Gerald Raunig, Nishant Shah, Robert Snowden, Joseph Vogl. Images: Zarouhie Abdalian, Lutz Bacher, Nairy Baghramian, Eva Barto, Patricia L. Boyd, Nina Canell & Robin Watkins, Jay DeFeo, Trisha Donnelly, Harun Farocki, Howard Fried, Jacob Kassay, Garry Neill Kennedy, Frederick Kiesler, Pope.L, Louise Lawler, Sam Lewitt, Park McArthur, Jean-Luc Moulène, Cameron Rowland, Sturtevant, Danh Vo.

A Brief History of Invisible Art is a fully illustrated catalog with essay by Ralph Rugoff, which brings together artworks from six decades that place a pronounced emphasis on the conceptual and communicative possibilities of the work of art, while bypassing its seeming requirements of visibility and materiality. In surveying this terrain, the exhibition includes works that represent a wide range of aesthetic practices and that engage with surprisingly diverse concerns. Whether underscoring the role of the audience, mocking the theological aura of museum rhetoric or calling attention to the importance of linguistic description in cultural production, these works prompt us to see through the more grandiose distractions of contemporary art and so to think more clearly about its underlying functions.

Featured Artists: Art & Language, Michael Asher, Robert Barry, James Lee Byars, Maurizio Cattelan, Jay Chung, Trisha Donnelly, Tom Friedman, Carsten Höller, Bethan Huws, Bruno Jakob, Yves Klein, Glenn Ligon, Jonathan Monk, Gianni Motti, Andy Warhol.