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)

In ART THE LANGUAGE OF THE GODS artist and mystic Herman Rednick (1902-1985) describes his unusual search for the spiritual principle in art.In meditation he traverses time and space to meet with artists of the great civilizations of the past as well as with artists of renown in the not so distant past. The text is illustrated with black and white reproductions of some Rednick's oil paintings, watercolors, and lithographs.

The analytic philosophers writing here engage with the cluster of philosophical questions raised by conceptual art. They address four broad questions: What kind of art is conceptual art? What follows from the fact that conceptual art does not aim to have aesthetic value? What knowledge or understanding can we gain from conceptual art? How ought we to appreciate conceptual art?
Conceptual art, broadly understood by the contributors as beginning with Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades and as continuing beyond the 1970s to include some of today's contemporary art, is grounded in the notion that the artist's "idea" is central to art, and, contrary to tradition, that the material work is by no means essential to the art as such. To use the words of the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, "In conceptual art the idea of the concept is the most important aspect of the work . . . and the execution is a perfunctory affair." Given this so-called "dematerialization" of the art object, the emphasis on cognitive value, and the frequent appeal to philosophy by many conceptual artists, there are many questions that are raised by conceptual art that should be of interest to analytic philosophers. Why, then, has so little work been done in this area? This volume is most probably the first collection of papers by analytic philosophers tackling these concerns head-on.

Kevin Weckbach has been painting for over 20 years and is known and collected nationally. Also, he has become one of the most sought after teachers in the nation. Currently he teaches classes in Colorado with student coming in from all-over the US to study under his teachings. He is known to have the ability to articulate what he knows visually, and this is a book that brings all of those teachings into concrete words. The writings here are for those of all levels and style in painting, because the principles stated are foundational and key to the quality of painting. This is not a how-to-do technique book but a more full-filling book that will awaken you to the meaning behind painting, and give you more reason and direction with your own work.

LAND ART IN THE U.S.A.

A new study of land art in America, featuring all of the well-known land artists from the golden age of land art - the 1960s - to the present day.

Fully illustrated, with a bibliography.

EXTRACT FROM THE CHAPTER ON ROBERT SMITHSON

Robert Smithson is the key land artist, the premier artist in the world of land art. And he s been a big favourite with art critics since the early Seventies. Smithson was the chief mouthpiece of American earth/ site aesthetics, and is probably the most important artist among all land artists.

For Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim and Tony Smith were the more compelling artists today, concerned with Place or Site . Smithson was impressed by Tony Smith s vision of the mysterious aspects of a dark unfinished road and called Smith the agent of endlessness . Smith s aesthetic became part of Smithson s view of art as a complete site, not simply an aesthetic of sculptural objects. Smithson was not inspired by ancient religious sculpture, by burial mounds, for example, so much as by decayed industrial sites. He visited some in the mid-1960s that were in some way disrupted or pulverized . He said he was looking for a denaturalization rather than built up scenic beauty .

Robert Smithson said he was concerned, like many land (and contemporary artists with the thing in itself, not its image, its effect, its critical significance: I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation . Smithson s theory of the non-site was based on absence, a very ponderous, weighty absence . Smithson proposed a theory of a dialectic between absence and presence, in which the non-site and site are both interacting. In the non-site work, presence and absence are there simultaneously. The land or ground from the Site is placed in the art (Non-Site) rather than the art is placed on the ground. The Non-Site is a container within another container the room .

William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including the forthcoming Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas s books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.

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. -- .

The "Not" Theory raises the question, "How can one be free from intellectual constraints?" It then gives a basic, elementary response and reasoning. This begs the question, "Is it correct?" You will not find the answer here. Instead, the book is an instruction manual/preparation guide/workbook for testing the "Not" Theory: a structure to bring together a group of 7 artists (from any medium) to create an art project of any kind (i.e. a series of paintings, sculptures, poems, photographs, a video, theater, dance, multi-media project, etc.) It is broken down into three phases: Constraints (X), Destruction (Adding Y to X), and Freedom. The group must experience Phase I together, in the format given. However, Phase II and III cannot be forced onto the group. They must choose to continue testing the theory. Last question: "Is freedom possible?" It is up to you to determine.

Deciphering Human Chromosome 16: We Report Here, and Deciphering Human Chromosome 16: Index to the Report, by Sarah Jacobs, use text in a visual way to document the ethical, economic, political and philosophical polemics associated with mapping the human genome. The Report is an ebook which contains links to over 240 websites collected in the months following publication in the journal Nature of The sequence and analysis of duplication-rich human chromosome 16 ( Vol. 432. December 2004). Its contents change over time as the websites change, migrate or disappear. It is available as a FREE DOWNLOAD from the publisher at www.informationasmaterial.com .The Index sets fragments collected from the websites against the background of the earlier draft sequence originally published by Project Gutenberg. The solid physicality of the Index contrasts with the ever changing Report although vagaries of the printing process ensure that each copy of the Index is unique.

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.

An engaging exploration of the use of language in a complex and colorful series of paintings Mel Bochner (b. 1940) is celebrated as a key Conceptual artist of the 1960s. Less well-known are his paintings made after that period: complex works based on an exploration of language, often crowded with typography in lush, contrasting hues that both embrace and challenge the painterly tradition. Mel Bochner: Strong Language focuses on this important body of work, in which Bochner investigates the lines between text and image. Ranging from bold admonishments and witty emoticons to provocative floods of words, these works demonstrate conceptual seriousness, as well as delight in the playful potential of language. Norman L. Kleeblatt discusses the evolution of Bochner's art from his early word experiments through his return to painting, while Bochner offers a personal perspective. Both Kleeblatt and Bochner address the question of Jewishness in Bochner's work, particularly the ways in which the Jewish intellectual tradition embraces language as a visual expressive form. Published in association with the Jewish Museum, New York Exhibition Schedule: The Jewish Museum, New York (05/02/14-09/21/14)

An illustrated discussion of Fischli and Weiss's famous film The Way Things Go, marking the twentieth anniversary of its first screening, explores why this captivating work continues to fascinate viewers. The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge) is a thirty-minute film by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss featuring a series of chain reactions involving ordinary objects. It is also one of the truly amazing works of art produced in the late twentieth century. Admired, even loved, by members of the public as much as it is praised by the more specialist audience of artists, critics, and curators, The Way Things Go was perhaps the most popular work shown at Documenta 8, Kassel, in 1987. The work embodies many of the qualities that make Fischli and Weiss's work among the most captivating in the world today: slapstick humor and profound insight; a forensic attention to detail; a sense of illusion and transformation; and the dynamic exchange between states of order and chaos. In discussing what makes The Way Things Go utterly compelling to its viewers-whether they have seen it one time or many times-Jeremy Millar leaves no doubt as to why this film was chosen for the One Works series. As everyday objects crash, scrape, slide, or fly into one another with devastating, impossible, and persuasive effect, viewers find themselves witnessing a spectacle that seems at once prehistoric and postapocalyptic. Millar tells us why this extraordinary film speaks to us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. If history is "just one thing after another," then The Way Things Go is truly a historic work. Jeremy Millar is an artist. He is the author of Place (with Tacita Dean) and has contributed to many artist's monographs. He has also curated many solo and group exhibitions internationally. Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss received Europe's most coveted art prize, the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, in November 2006. A major retrospective of their work, "Flowers and Questions," originating at the Tate, London, travels to Zurich and Hamburg in 2007 and 2008.

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

In the fateful month of March 2000, shortly after opening a hugely successful show in New York that unveiled the more nefarious financial connections of Presidential candidate George W. Bush, the hugely ambitious Conceptual artist Mark Lombardi was found hanged in his studio, an apparent suicide. With museums lining up to buy his work, and the fame he had sought relentlessly at last within his reach, speculation about whether his death was suicide or murder has titillated the art world ever since. Lombardi was an enigma who was at once a compulsive truth-teller and a cunning player of the art game, a political operative and a stubborn independent, a serious artist and a Merry Prankster, a metaphysicist if not a scientist.Lombardi's spidery, elusive diagrams describing the evolution of the shadow-banking industry from a decades-old alliances between intelligence agencies, banking, government and organized crime, may have made him unique in art history as the only artist whose primary subject, the CIA, has turned around and studied him and his art work. Exhaustively researched, this is the first comprehensive biography of this immensely contradictory and brilliantly original artist whose pervasive influence in not only the art world, but also in the world of computer science and cyber-security is only now coming to light.

On July 9, 1975, artist Bas Jan Ader set sail from Chatham, Massachusetts, for Palmouth, England, on the second leg of a three-part piece titled In Search of the Miraculous. His damaged boat was found south of the western tip of Ireland nearly a year later. He was never seen again. Since his untimely death, Ader has become a legend in the art world as a figure literally willing to die for his art. Considering the artist's legacy and oeuvre beyond the mysterious circumstances of his peculiar end, Alexander Dumbadze resituates Ader's art and life within the Los Angeles conceptual art scene of the early 1970s. Blending biography, theoretical reflection, and archival research to draw a detailed picture of the world in which Ader's work was rooted, Bas Jan Ader is a thoughtful reflection on the necessity of the creative act and its inescapable relation to death.

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).

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.

This groundbreaking book examines how the notion of “the object� was transformed in Japanese experimental art during a time of rapid social, economic, and environmental change. Reviving the legacies of the historical avant-garde, Japanese artists and intellectuals of the 1960s formulated an aesthetics of disaffection through which they sought to address the stalemate of political and aesthetic representation. Ignacio A. Adriasola Muñoz draws from psychoanalytic theories of melancholia to examine the implications of such an approach, tracing a genealogy of disaffection within modernist discourse. By examining the discursive practices of artists working across a wide range of media, and through a close analysis of artwork, philosophical debates, artist theories, and critical accounts, Adriasola Muñoz shows how negativity became an efficacious means of addressing politics as a source for the creative act of undoing. In examining ideas of the object advanced by artists and intellectuals both in writing and as part of their artwork, this book brings discussions in critical art history to bear on the study of art in Japan. It will be of interest to art historians specializing in modernism, the international avant-garde, Japanese art, and the history of photography.

The interfaces between art and the scientific disciplines of biology, environmental science, neuroscience, and physics pose interdisciplinary questions that are an inspiration to researchers. The authors compare artists' experimentation set-ups and thereby reveal new levels of knowledge. The examples in the Artists-in-Labs program illustrate how artists approach problems and, in this way, create new tools for science. The authors of this illustrated volume of essays include Harriet Hawkins, Irene Hediger, Jill Scott, Arnd Schneider , Susanne Witzgall, Lisa Blackman, Jens Hauser and Dieter Mersch.

With cover artwork specially created by Ruscha, this book documents hundreds of projects and miscellaneous ephemera produced by the artist alongside his main oeuvre-including installations, films, painted book covers, contour gauge profiles, and more Introducing readers to the stunning breadth of Edward Ruscha's (b. 1937) creative output over the course of his entire life, this book includes materials dating back to his childhood and extending to his present-day output. The projects featured here fall outside Ruscha's production of paintings, drawings, prints, and artists' books. Many of these are unknown and most are reproduced here for the first time. Composed of three sections-Projects and Ephemera; Contour Gauge Profiles; and Painted Book Covers-the book offers Ruscha enthusiasts and scholars a hitherto unknown aspect of Ruscha's practice, while also showing how these projects coincide with, and sometimes even prefigure, the artistic work for which he is best known. The approximately 270 painted book covers, begun in 1990, utilize found books as support for small paintings and drawings. The 57 contour gauge profiles are silhouette-like profiles made using a mechanical device for reproducing contours. The largest section, Projects and Ephemera, consists of installations, sculpture and objects, films, book and poster design, utilitarian works, and more. Distributed for Gagosian

Wim Delvoye (b. 1965) is known for his inventive and often controversial projects, and his work has been exhibited around the world. One of a generation of Belgian artists who have revolutionized contemporary art, Delvoye explores the body and its functions, producing art that combines the attractive and the repulsive, and addresses themes including religion and politics. One of his most famous works is Cloaca, a digestion machine; another significant project involves tattooed live pigs. Coinciding with Delvoye's exhibition as guest of honor at the Louvre, Wim Delvoye Introspective is the culmination of close collaboration between the artist and distinguished scholars and critics. This publication presents a complete overview of works by the artist, demonstrating the range of media, technique, and thought-provoking subjects that defines his art. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

In the twenty-first century, we are continually confronted with the existential side of technology-the relationships between identity and the mechanizations that have become extensions of the self. Focusing on one of humanity's most ubiquitous machines, Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art combines critical theory and new media theory to form the first philosophical analysis of the car within works of conceptual art. These works are broadly defined to encompass a wide range of creative expressions, particularly in car-based conceptual art by both older, established artists and younger, emerging artists, including Ed Ruscha, Martha Rosler, Richard Prince, Sylvie Fleury, Yael Bartana, Jeremy Deller, and Jonathan Schipper. At its core, the book offers an alternative formation of conceptual art understood according to technology, the body moving through space, and what art historian, curator, and artist Jack Burnham calls "relations." This thought-provoking study illuminates the ways in which the automobile becomes a naturalized extension of the human body, incarnating new forms of "car art" and spurring a technological reframing of conceptual art. Steeped in a sophisticated take on the image and semiotics of the car, the chapters probe the politics of materialism as well as high/low debates about taste, culture, and art. The result is a highly innovative approach to contemporary intersections of art and technology.

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.