If you attend a contemporary art exhibition lately, you're unlikely to see much traditional painting or sculpture. Indeed, artists today are preoccupied with what happens when you leave behind assumptions about particular media such as painting, or woodcuts and instead focus on collisions between them, and the new forms and ideas that those collisions generate. Garrett Stewart in Transmedium dubs this new approach Conceptualism 2.0, an allusion in part to the computer images that are so often addressed by these works. A successor to 1960s Conceptualism, which posited that a material medium was unnecessary to the making of art, Conceptualism 2.0 features artworks that are transmedial, that place the aesthetic experience itself deliberately at the boundary between often incommensurable media. The result, Stewart shows, is art whose forced convergences break open new possibilities that are wholly surprising, intellectually enlightening, and often uncanny.

With essays by Alex Alberro, Stephen Bann, Jon Bird, David Campany, Helen Molesworth, Michael Newman, Peter Osborne, Birgit Pelzer, Desa Philipagesi, Anne Rorimer, Peter Wollen and William Wood. An international movement that followed specific geographical-cultural patterns, "Conceptual Art" built on the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, redefining the institutional and social relationships among production, work and audience in ways which have comprehensively transformed the nature of the art object and forms of artistic practice, both historically and in the present. Investigating and documenting the histories, theories and forms of Conceptual Art, this timely book, including both established writers and a new generation of art historians, shows that Conceptual Art was a broad movement encompassing a range of artistic tendencies. This is the most stimulating account of the movement to date, arguing forcefully for its vitality and potential as well as examining its influence on art today.

Iconoclast and artist Pope.L uses the body, sex, and race as his materials the way other artists might use paint, clay, or bronze. His work problematizes social categories by exploring how difference is marked economically, socially, and politically. Working in a range of media from ketchup to baloney to correction fluid, with a special emphasis on performativity and writing, Pope.L pokes fun at and interrogates American society's pretenses, the bankruptcy of contemporary mores, and the resulting repercussions for a civil society. Other favorite Pope.L targets are squeamishness about the human body and the very possibility of making meaning through art and its display.
Published to accompany his wonderfully inscrutable exhibition "Forlesen" at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, "William Pope.L: Showing Up To Withhold" is simultaneously an artist's book and a monograph. In addition to reproductions of a number of his most recent artworks, it includes images of significant works from the past decade, and presents a forum for reflection and analysis on art making today with contributions by renowned critics and scholars, including Lawrie Balfour, Nick Bastis, Lauren Berlant, and K. Silem Mohammad.

The latest book of minimalist yet richly tactile projects by Dutch architect Bob Manders, illuminating his synergistic approach to light, space, and nature In this book, an inspiring combination of architecture and design, Dutch architect Bob Manders demonstrates how diverse tastes and preferences can harmoniously work together within a particular style or concept. Using nature's infinite variety as his inspiration, he creates structures that can't be easily categorized, and strongly reflect the individuality of his clients. He combines insight into architectural principles of the past with a passion for innovation, considering light and its impact, context, flexibility and versatility. His innovative treatment of space draws on his Dutch heritage, with a respect for light and shadow that acknowledges the connection between the inside and the outside. His designs feature open, fresh and white spaces, but also rooms that are warm, dark and cozy. He addresses the challenge of using all the senses when it comes to architecture, with minimalist designs which sublimely blend the traditional and the modern.

Returning to revolution's original meaning of 'cycle', Contemporary Revolutions explores how 21st-century writers, artists, and performers re-engage the arts of the past to reimagine a present and future encompassing revolutionary commitments to justice and freedom. Dealing with histories of colonialism, slavery, genocide, civil war, and gender and class inequities, essays examine literature and arts of Africa, Europe, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, and the United States. The broad range of contemporary writers and artists considered include fabric artist Ellen Bell; poets Selena Tusitala Marsh and Antje Krog; Syrian artists of the civil war and Sana Yazigi's creative memory web site about the war; street artist Bahia Shehab; theatre installation artist William Kentridge; and the recycles of Virginia Woolf by multi-media artist Kabe Wilson, novelist W. G. Sebald, and the contemporary trans movement.

In One and Five Ideas eminent critic, historian, and former member of the Art & Language collective Terry Smith explores the artistic, philosophical, political, and geographical dimensions of Conceptual Art and conceptualism. These four essays and a conversation with Mary Kelly-published between 1974 and 2012-contain Smith's most essential work on Conceptual Art and his argument that conceptualism was key to the historical transition from modern to contemporary art. Nothing less than a distinctive theory of Conceptual and contemporary art, One and Five Ideas showcases the critical voice of one of the major art theorists of our time.

Winner, Canadian Museums Association Outstanding Achievement in Publication and Melva J. Dwyer AwardIain Baxter legally changed his name to IAIN BAXTER& in 2005. He appended an ampersand to his name to underscore that art is about connectivity -- about contingency and collaboration with a viewer. He also effected the name change to perpetuate a strategy of self re-definition that is central to his creative project. BAXTER& began making art in the late-1950s under his birth name but quickly realized that the name itself was creative material, to be deployed, manipulated, and shared. In 1965, he formed a collaborative art-making entity which evolved into N.E. Thing Company, a corporate-styled entity whose co-presidents were BAXTER& and his wife Ingrid. Producing a diverse array of projects that encompassed conceptually based photography, pioneering works of appropriation art, and gallery transforming installations, the N.E. Thing Company offered a new model of art making, allowing the artists to remain anonymous and masquerade in the guise of business people. Following the dissolution of N.E. Thing Company in 1978, BAXTER& produced extensive bodies of work with Polaroid film, created numerous installations that blended painting and sculpture, and made pedagogy a focus of his creative enterprise. Consistent themes permeate his work and vector through his thinking. And by assessing these themes -- a relentless emphasis on reaching out to the viewer, a core concern with ecology and the environment, and a belief that art must assume plural means and media -- one discerns BAXTER&'s creative credo, understanding that "art is all over." This comprehensive book reviews BAXTER&'s remarkable career across all media. It accompanies a major international touring exhibition, which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in November 2011 and at the Art Gallery of Ontario in April 2012. Featuring more than 160 reproductions of BAXTER&'s work, it also includes essays by the exhibition's curator, David Moos, along with contributions by Michael Darling (James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago), Alex Alberro (Associate Professor, University of Florida), and others. The book will also feature a comprehensive bibliography compiled by Adam Lauder (W.P. Scott Chair for Research in E-Librarianship, York University).

"Reading the interviews gathered by Patricia Norvell more than thirty years ago is like opening one of the time capsules Steven Kaltenbach made at around the same time and discusses here. It makes one feel nostalgic for these uncompromising times-so much has changed, so fast! One should be immensely grateful to Norvell for her undertaking and, paradoxically, for the long delay in the publication of these conversations: nothing could have better highlighted the candor and commitment of the artists who participated in this project than their willingness, long after the fact, to let their youthful voices be heard unedited. This is a precious document that casts a fresh light on the early history of Conceptual art, revealing all the doubts and uncertainties its practitioners had to overcome."--Yve-Alain Bois, Harvard University

"These interviews, full of the rich texture and confusion of an art movement at its inception, began as a "process piece" in mid-1969 when formalism still seemed worth defeating. The artists, tired of talking about turpentine, struggle to extend the rhetoric of form, and as they do so, reveal their roles as theorists and philosophers of a newly cerebral art, Conceptualism. Alberro's helpful introduction frames both Norvell's provocative questions and the surprising responses in a useful book that continues the process of historicizing 20th century art."--Caroline Jones, author of "Machine in the Studio

"The contemporary interviews collected in this volume shift the ground on which conceptualism in the United States should be understood. The middle months of 1969 were a time of artistic and social unease when artists were anxious to test-and occasionally todeclaim, as the interviews demonstrate-ideas in conversation with a sympathetic interlocutor. Patricia Norvell proves to have been an ideal listener. She knew conceptualism well enough to keep the conversations honest, but not so well as to make the artists defensive and wary. The artists had things to say, and were not afraid to put themselves out on a limb."--John O'Brian, Professor of Art History, University of British Columbia

"A key document of the late 1960s avant-garde."--James Meyer, Emory University

"[This book is] a reminder that the project of Conceptual art and its artists' reasons for refusing the object of art were far from monolithic. The differences that emerge in the interviews are spoken in voices that are still fresh and particular, but each voice and position is tied to the moment of the late 1960s, from stoned mysticism to philosophical idealism, from political optimism to materialist critique."--Howard Singerman, author of "Art Subjects"

This engaging publication explores the artistic practices that employ evocation-the calling forth of past emotions, desires, frustrations, and memories into the present-as a mode of connecting past and present. Featuring the work of emerging artists working in a variety of media, including Ronnie Bass, Kajsa Dahlberg, Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, Fikret Atay, Katerina Seda, Maryam Jafri, and Johanna Billing, as well as films by Keren Cytter, Kevin Willmott, and Jennifer Phang, the book challenges the conventional approach to history whereby the past is kept at a distance as historical fact. Ranging from playful to haunting, the artworks presented here rupture conventional notions of time to alter the dynamic of the present moment and enhance the possibilities for radical change on both a personal and sociopolitical scale. Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art Exhibition Schedule: The Kitchen, New York (opens 5/22/09)

A FAMILY STORY AND THE TALE OF A NATION. Ai Weiwei - one of the world's most famous artists and activists - weaves a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own life and that of his father, Ai Qing, the nation's most celebrated poet. 'Engrossing...a remarkable story' Sunday Times Here, through the sweeping lens of his own and his father's life, Ai Weiwei tells an epic tale of China over the last 100 years, from the Cultural Revolution to the modern-day Chinese Communist Party. Here is the story of a childhood spent in desolate exile after his father, Ai Qing, once China's most celebrated poet, fell foul of the authorities. Here is his move to America as a young man and his return to China, his rise from unknown to art-world superstar and international rights activist. Here is his extraordinary account of how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime. It's the story of a father and a son, of exceptional creativity and passionate belief, and of how two indomitable spirits enabled the world to understand their country. 'A story of inherited resilience and self-determination' Observer 'A majestic and exquisitely serious masterpiece about his China... One of the great voices of our time' Andrew Solomon 'Intimate, unflinching...an instant classic' Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition

Mel Bochner (b. 1940) is recognized as one of the leading figures in the development of Conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. He pioneered the introduction of the use of language in the visual, probing the way they relate to one another to make us more attentive to the unspoken codes that underpin our visual engagement with the world. Featuring color plates of more than thirty new, previously unpublished paintings, and accompanied by an essay by Jeremy Sigler, this handsome publication offers a new perspective on Mel Bochner's career-long engagement with language and painting. Sigler points to how Bochner's newest images poignantly signal a return to visceral materiality, revealing the unexpected painterly roots of his body of work. Distributed for Peter Freeman, Inc.

The second in a projected four-volume series of the complete catalogue of works by John Baldessari Compiling four-hundred-plus unique works of art, this volume traces the shifts and developments in conceptual artist John Baldessari's work from 1975-86. It covers his photo-based works such as the "Strobe," "Word Chain," and "Pathetic Fallacy" series from 1975; the "Violent Space" and the seminal "Concerning Diachronic/Synchronic Time: Above, On, Under (With Mermaid)," from 1976; and the "Blasted Allegories" series from 1977-78, which drew heavily from the artist's vast collection of photo stills taken from commercial television. In the 1980s, Baldessari's art took a different direction, beginning with the expansive "Fugitive Essays" triptychs from 1980 and leading to 1982's photographic interpretations of Grimm's Fairy Tales. Building on these themes, Baldessari began producing a body of work that was inspired in part by dreams, psychology, film, and popular culture. Ensuing works were more formal, elaborate, and large-scale. From 1984 to 1986 Baldessari created a number of works that employed his soon-to-be-signature colored discs painted over people's faces in the photos. An introductory essay will provide a close reading of selected works and a historical context for understanding Baldessari's art from this period. A detailed chronology and exhibition history and bibliography are also included. This is the second of a projected four-volume catalogue raisonne. Published in association with Marian Goodman Gallery

A volume considering questions of conservation that arise with new artistic mediums and practices. Much of the artwork that rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century took on novel forms-such as installation, performance, event, video, film, earthwork, and intermedia works with interactive and networked components-that pose a new set of questions about what art actually is, both physically and conceptually. For conservators, this raises an existential challenge when considering what elements of these artworks can and should be preserved. This provocative volume revisits the traditional notions of conservation and museum collecting that developed over the centuries to suit a conception of art as static, fixed, and permanent objects. Conservators and museums increasingly struggle with issues of conservation for works created from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century that are unstable over time. The contributors ask what it means to conserve artworks that fundamentally address and embody the notion of change and, through this questioning, guide us to reevaluate the meaning of art, of objects, and of materiality itself. Object-Event-Performance considers a selection of post-1960s artworks that have all been chosen for their instability, changeability, performance elements, and processes that pose questions about their relationship to conservation practices. This volume will be a welcome resource on contemporary conservation for art historians, scholars of dance and theater studies, curators, and conservators.

Drawing Degree Zero examines a pivotal moment in the history of drawing, when the medium was disengaged from its connoisseurial associations and positioned at the forefront of contemporary art. From Mel Bochner’s seminal exhibition Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art of 1966 to the Museum of Modern Art’s major survey Drawing Now ten years later, Anna Lovatt documents this period of restless artistic experimentation and fierce political ambition. Traditionally considered a preparatory or subsidiary practice, drawing’s notational, provisional, and incidental qualities accrued new value in the context of post-Minimal and Conceptual art. Considering the work of Bochner, Sol LeWitt, Rosemarie Castoro, Dorothea Rockburne, and Richard Tuttle, Lovatt explores the strategies these artists used to confound long-standing presumptions about drawing, rendering it systematic rather than autographic, public rather than private, and conceptually rigorous rather than manually dexterous. Drawing Degree Zero argues that these artists pursued a neutral, anonymous mode of inscription analogous to Roland Barthes’s concept of “writing degree zero.” A lively examination of the resurgence of interest in drawing, Drawing Degree Zero highlights the medium’s ability to foreground issues of authorship, process, location, and participation that remain fundamental to contemporary art. Scholars and art aficionados will welcome Lovatt’s insights.

Markus Raetz is one of the most renowned contemporary artists in Switzerland. Initially educated and working as a primary school teacher, he became an artist in his early twenties. Since the 1970s, his work, including solo exhibitions, has been been on the international stage. Raetz works with a variety of materials and media. The phenomenon of perception is his main focus, rather than how something is represented. Prints form a major part of his work. Markus Raetz.The Prints 1951-2013 covers his complete body of work in this genre.; the Catalogue Raisonne is complemented by a separate volume, with essays on his work and artistic development. Exhibitions: Museum of Fine Arts Bern, early 2014 (date TBC). Markus Raetz is represented with works also in the permanent collections of museums such as: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel; Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (Main); San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla CA; Tate Gallery, London; MoMA, New York; Musee national d art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Schaulager, Munchenstein near Basel; Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

The synthetic proposition examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas, as articulated by Joseph Kosuth, and traces key strategies in contemporary art to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics: movements that have so far been historicised as mutually exclusive. The book demonstrates that while identity-based strategies were particular, their impact spread far beyond the individuals or communities that originated them. It offers a study of Adrian Piper, David Hammons, Renee Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Charles Gaines. By turning to social issues, these artists analysed the conventions of language, photography, moving image, installation and display. -- .

By the early 1960s, theorists like Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Barthes had created a world ruled by signifying structures and pictured through the grids of language, information, and systems. Artists soon followed, turning to language and its related forms to devise a new, conceptual approach to art making. Examining the ways in which artists shared the structuralist devotion to systems of many sorts, "Systems We Have Loved" shows that even as structuralism encouraged the advent of conceptual art, it also raised intractable problems that artists were forced to confront. Considering such notable art figures as Mary Kelly, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, and Rosalind Krauss, Eve Meltzer argues that during this period the visual arts depicted and tested the far-reaching claims about subjectivity espoused by theorists. She offers a new way of framing two of the twentieth century's most transformative movements - one artistic, one expansively theoretical - and she reveals their shared dream - or nightmare - of the world as a system of signs. By endorsing this view, Meltzer proposes, these artists drew attention to the fictions and limitations of this dream, even as they risked getting caught in the very systems they had adopted. The first book to describe art's embrace of the world as an information system, "Systems We Have Loved" breathes new life into the study of conceptual art.

David Askevold broke into the art scene when his work was included in the seminal exhibition Information at New York's MOMA 1970, which cemented Conceptualism as a genre. He later became recognized as one of the most important contributors to the development and pedagogy of conceptual art; his work has been included in many of the genre's formative texts and exhibitions.

This illustrated volume takes readers on an eclectic journey through the various strains of Askevold's pioneering practice -- sculpture/installation, film and video, photography and photo-text works, and digital imagery. David Askevold moved from Kansas City to Halifax in 1968 to lecture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

During the early 1970s, his famous Projects Class brought such artists as Sol Lewitt, Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Dan Graham, and Lawrence Weiner to work with his students, focusing critical attention on his adopted city and on his own unorthodox approach to making art. He quickly became on one of the most important conceptual artists practicing in Canada and throughout his career he remained at the vanguard of contemporary practice.

"David Askevold: Once Upon a Time in the East" features essays by celebrated writer-curators Ray Cronin, Peggy Gale, Richard Hertz (author of "The Beat and the Buzz"), and Irene Tsatsos as well as several of Askevold's contemporaries including Aaron Brewer, Tony Oursler, and Mario Garcia Torres. It accompanies an exhibition that will open at the National Gallery of Canada in October 2011 and will tour thereafter to the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax.

On July 9, 1975, Dutch-born artist Bas Jan Ader set sail from Chatham, Massachusetts, on a thirteen-foot sailboat. He was bound for Falmouth, England, on the second leg of a three-part piece titled "In Search of the Miraculous." The damaged boat was found south of the western tip of Ireland nearly a year later. Ader was never seen again. Since his untimely death, Ader has achieved mythic status in the art world as a figure literally willing to die for his art. Considering the artist's legacy and concise oeuvre beyond the romantic and tragic associations that accompany his peculiar end, Alexander Dumbadze resituates Ader's art and life within the conceptual art world of Los Angeles in the early 1970s and offers a nuanced argument about artistic subjectivity that explains Ader's tremendous relevance to contemporary art. "Bas Jan Ader "blends biography, theoretical reflection, and archival research to draw a detailed picture of the world in which Ader's work was rooted: a vibrant international art scene populated with peers such as Ger van Elk, William Leavitt, and Allen Ruppersberg. Dumbadze looks closely at Ader's engagement with questions of free will and his ultimate success in creating art untainted by mediation. The first in-depth study of this enigmatic conceptual artist, "Bas Jan Ader" is a thoughtful reflection on the necessity of the creative act and its inescapable relation to death.

For six years Maya Stovall staged Liquor Store Theatre, a conceptual art and anthropology video project---included in the Whitney Biennial in 2017---in which she danced near the liquor stores in her Detroit neighborhood as a way to start conversations with her neighbors. In this book of the same name, Stovall uses the project as a point of departure for understanding everyday life in Detroit and the possibilities for ethnographic research, art, and knowledge creation. Her conversations with her neighbors-which touch on everything from economics, aesthetics, and sex to the political and economic racism that undergirds Detroit's history-bring to light rarely acknowledged experiences of longtime Detroiters. In these exchanges, Stovall enacts an innovative form of ethnographic engagement that offers new modes of integrating the social sciences with the arts in ways that exceed what either approach can achieve alone.

"State of Mind," the lavishly illustrated companion book to the exhibition of the same name, investigates California's vital contributions to Conceptual art--in particular, work that emerged in the late 1960s among scattered groups of young artists. The essays reveal connections between the northern and southern California Conceptual art scenes and argue that Conceptualism's experimental practices and an array of then-new media--performance, site-specific installations, film and video, mail art, and artists' publications--continue to exert an enormous influence on the artists working today.

Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), renowned for his role in establishing Conceptualism and Minimalism as dominant art movements in the postwar era, is perhaps best known for his masterful and brilliantly colored wall drawings. Throughout his career, however, LeWitt also created many remarkable three-dimensional works suitable for display in outdoor settings. In this handsome publication, which accompanies the first major career survey of LeWitt's "structures," the artist's modular works are traced from their simplest manifestation in a single large-scale cube through multiple variations, with examples from the 1960s through the 1990s. Works from the 1980s onward explore the three-dimensional possibilities of diverse geometric forms, such as stars, and the introduction of new materials, including concrete block and fiberglass, stimulating experimentation with non-geometric, irregular forms on an increasing scale. The book includes essays by Nicholas Baume and Joe Madura that provide curatorial and critical context for the structures. Additional essays by Rachel Haidu, Anna Lovatt, and Kirsten Swenson offer fresh art-historical commentary, ranging from the problematic of site for LeWitt's initial structures to the relationship between abstract conceptual systems, architecture, and urban space. Also included is a never before published conversation among the artist, Baume, and Jonathan Flatley. Stunning color plates record the works on display in Lower Manhattan's City Hall Park, supplemented by archival and historical documentation. Distributed for the Public Art Fund, New York City Exhibition Schedule: City Hall Park, New York (05/24/11-12/02/11)