In the words of Peter Schjeldahl, writing in The New Yorker about the exhibition No Problem: Cologne/New York 1984-1989 at David Zwirner in New York, "the show's cast of artists amounts to a retrospective shopping list of what would matter and endure in art of the era." With an eye to canonizing that moment, this seminal publication examines the latter half of the 1980s through the lens of international art scenes that were based in Cologne-arguably the European center of the contemporary art world at that time-and New York. While a number of established Cologne-based gallerists, including Karsten Greve, Paul Maenz, Rolf Ricke, Michael Werner, and Rudolf Zwirner, had already begun shaping the European reception of American art in the previous decade, the 1980s marked a period during which art being produced in and around Cologne gained international attention. A burgeoning gallery scene supported the emerging work of artists based in the region, with gallerists such as Gisela Capitain, Rafael Jablonka, Max Hetzler, and Monika Spruth showing artists such as Walter Dahn, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Rosemarie Trockel, and others. The works of these German artists were exhibited along with the latest contemporary art from the US by artists like Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Christopher Wool. Conversely, the works of German artists were presented in New York, with breakout exhibitions at galleries such as Barbara Gladstone, Metro Pictures, Luhring, Augustine & Hodes, and other significant venues. Important museum exhibitions that explored work being produced and exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic also set the tone for this ongoing dialogue, among them Europa / Amerika (Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 1986) and A Distanced View: One Aspect of Recent Art from Belgium, France, Germany, and Holland (New Museum, New York, 1986). Big, bold, and vibrant, this Pentagram-designed publication revives the conversation, reproducing in full color over one hundred immensely varied artworks by the twenty-two international artists included in this massive exhibition-one of the largest in David Zwirner's history. Beyond its stunning visual components, the book features crucial new scholarship by Diedrich Diederichsen and Bob Nickas, and an illustrated chronology of the decade by Kara Carmack. The book also includes an arsenal of compelling archival material, from documentary photographs from the period to reproductions of Cologne's culture magazine Spex. Taken as a whole, this ambitious exhibition catalogue encapsulates the energy, heart, and "dissonance of styles"-in the words of Schjeldahl-embodied by this fascinating and fecund moment in global art history. Artists featured in the book include Werner Buttner, George Condo, Walter Dahn, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Gunther Foerg, Robert Gober, Georg Herold, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Albert Oehlen, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Franz West, and Christopher Wool.

The first-ever monograph on Reynaud-Dewar, one of today’s most celebrated multimedia artists

French artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar creates environments and situations in which she uses her own body to examine the dual experience of vulnerability and empowerment that results from acts of exposing oneself to the world. Evolving through a range of media such as performance, video, installation, sound, and literature, her work considers the fluid border between public and private space, challenging conventions related to the body, sexuality, power relations, and institutional spaces. This is the first book to document her remarkable career.

This is the first comprehensive monograph devoted to New York and San Francisco-based artist Renee Green. Over the past 20 years, through film, video, sound art, photographs, prints, banners, texts, websites and ephemera, Green's work has comprised complex, multi-layered archive-like installations, employing a vast array of sources, which always urge viewers to become active participants. Included in this superbly illustrated volume are newly commissioned essays by a host of esteemed media scholars, art historians, critics and curators--Nora Alter, Diedrich Diederichsen, Kobena Mercer, Catherine Queloz, Gloria Sutton and Elvan Zabunyan--who engage issues central to Green's oeuvre, such as genealogy, archives and their reworkings, movements and displacements, site specificity and location.

New essays providing innovative ways of understanding the altered position of media in Germany and beyond. The term "new media" is a current buzzword among scholars and in the media industry, referring to the ever-multiplying digitized modes of film/image and sound production and distribution. Yet how new, in fact, are these new media,and how does their rise affect the role of older media? What new theories allow us to examine our culture of ubiquitous electronic screens and networked pleasures? Is a completely new set of perspectives, concepts, and paradigmsrequired, or are older modes of discussion about the relationship between technology and art still adequate? This book reconsiders the seminal work of German media theorists such as Adorno, Benjamin, and Kracauer in order to explore today's rapidly changing mediascape, questioning the naive progressivism that informs much of today's discourse about media technologies. The contributions, by internationally-recognized critics from a variety of academic fields, encourage a view of the history of media as structured by difference, complexity, and multiplicity. Together, they offer intriguing ways of understanding the changed position of media in today's Germany and beyond. Contributors: Nora M. Alter, Michel Chaouli, Diedrich Diederichsen, Sabine Eckmann, Margit Grieb, Boris Groys, Juliet Koss, Richard Langston, Lev Manovich, Todd Presner, Juliane Rebentisch, Carsten Strathausen. Lutz Koepnick is Professor of German, Film and Media Studies, and Erin McGlothlin is Associate Professor of German and Jewish Studies, both at Washington University in St. Louis.

Artist Bruce Conner (1933-2008) moved to San Francisco in 1957 and quickly enmeshed himself in the Bay Area's distinctive cultural milieu, combining a vision and a multifaceted body of work that went beyond the limitations of any genre. From early assemblages of the 1950s and 1960s to iconic and pioneering works in film, from photography and photograms to prints, drawings, and paintings, Conner's oeuvre continues to exert tremendous influence on artists working today. This historic retrospective catalogue will be the definitive resource on this important artist for decades to come. Offering a highly anticipated contemporary perspective on Conner, it will prove revelatory in assessing his output and place in postwar art. Illustrated in full color throughout, this comprehensive volume provides access to a range of material that has never been published, including early paintings from the 1950s and works from the last decade of Conner's life, along with a trove of fascinating ephemeral materials. The publication features original scholarship by a range of luminaries, including essays by Frieling, Garrels, Stuart Comer, Diedrich Diederichsen, Rachel Federman, and Laura Hoptman as well as contributions from Michelle Barger, Kevin Beasley, Dara Birnbaum, Carol Bove, Stan Brakhage, Will Brown, David Byrne, Johanna Gosse, Roger Griffith, Kellie Jones, Christian Marclay, Greil Marcus, Michael McClure, Megan Randall, Henry S. Rosenthal, Dean Smith, and Kristine Stiles. Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Exhibition dates: Museum of Modern Art, New York: July 3-October 2, 2016 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: October 29, 2016-January 29, 2017 Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain: February 21-May 22, 2017

Scholars consider sound and its concepts, taking as their premise the idea that popular culture can be analyzed in an innovative way through sound. The wide-ranging texts in this book take as their premise the idea that sound is a subject through which popular culture can be analyzed in an innovative way. From an infant's gurgles over a baby monitor to the roar of the crowd in a stadium to the sub-bass frequencies produced by sound systems in the disco era, sound-not necessarily aestheticized as music-is inextricably part of the many domains of popular culture. Expanding the view taken by many scholars of cultural studies, the contributors consider cultural practices concerning sound not merely as semiotic or signifying processes but as material, physical, perceptual, and sensory processes that integrate a multitude of cultural traditions and forms of knowledge. The chapters discuss conceptual issues as well as terminologies and research methods; analyze historical and contemporary case studies of listening in various sound cultures; and consider the ways contemporary practices of sound generation are applied in the diverse fields in which sounds are produced, mastered, distorted, processed, or enhanced. The chapters are not only about sound; they offer a study through sound-echoes from the past, resonances of the present, and the contradictions and discontinuities that suggest the future. Contributors Karin Bijsterveld, Susanne Binas-Preisendoerfer, Carolyn Birdsall, Jochen Bonz, Michael Bull, Thomas Burkhalter, Mark J. Butler, Diedrich Diederichsen, Veit Erlmann, Franco Fabbri, Golo Foellmer, Marta Garcia Quinones, Mark Grimshaw, Rolf Grossmann, Maria Hanacek, Thomas Hecken, Anahid Kassabian, Carla J. Maier, Andrea Mihm, Bodo Mrozek, Carlo Nardi, Jens Gerrit Papenburg, Thomas Schopp, Holger Schulze, Toby Seay, Jacob Smith, Paul Theberge, Peter Wicke, Simon Zagorski-Thomas