College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism, February 2006. The HIV epidemic animates this collection of essays by a noted artist, writer, and activist. "So total was the burden of illness--mine and others'--that the only viable response, other than to cease making art entirely, was to adjust to the gravity of the predicament by using the crisis as a lens," writes Gregg Bordowitz, a film- and video-maker whose best-known works, "Fast Trip Long Drop" (1993) and "Habit" (2001), address AIDS globally and personally. In "The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous"--the title essay is inspired by Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theater Company--Bordowitz follows in the tradition of artist-writers Robert Smithson and Yvonne Rainer by making writing an integral part of an artistic practice. Bordowitz has left his earliest writings for the most part unchanged--to preserve, he says, "both the youthful exuberance and the palpable sense of fear" created by the early days of the AIDS crisis. After these early essays, the writing becomes more experimental, sometimes mixing fiction and fact; included here is a selection of Bordowitz's columns from the journal "Documents," "New York Was Yesterday." Finally, in his newest essays he reformulates early themes, and, in "My Postmodernism" (written for "Artforum"'s fortieth anniversary issue) and "More Operative Assumptions" (written especially for this book), he reexamines the underlying ideas of his practice and sums up his theoretical concerns. In his mature work, Bordowitz seeks to join the subjective--the experience of having a disease--and the objective--the fact of the disease as a global problem. He believesthat this conjunction is necessary for understanding and fighting the crisis. "If it can be written," he says, "then it can be realized."

The appearance of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus and the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) in the early 1980s and its subsequent rapid spread around the world has left deep marks in society. The illness itself and its effects on society have also caused manifold responses by artists and activists in many countries. United by AIDS, published in conjunction with an extensive group show on the topic of loss, remembrance, activism and art in response to HIV/AIDS at Zurich's Migros Museum of Contemporary Art (Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst), sheds light on the multi-faceted and complex interrelation between art and HIV/AIDS from the 1980s to the present. It examines the blurred boundaries between art production and HIV/AIDS activism and showcases artists who played - and still play - leading roles in this discourse. Alongside images of artworks and brief texts on the represented artists, the book features voices from the past and present. Essays by Douglas Crimp, Alexander Garcia Duttmann, Raphael Gygax, Elsa Himmer, Ted Kerr, Elisabeth Lebovici ,and Nurja Ritter broaden the view of the international discourse on HIV/AIDS and society's confrontation with the disease.

Douglas Crimp is the rare art critic whose work profoundly influenced a generation of artists. He is best known for his work with the "Pictures Generation" the very name of which Crimp coined to define the work of artists like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman who appropriated images from mass culture to carry out a subversive critique. But while his influence is widely recognized, we know little about Crimp's own formative experiences before "Pictures."Before Pictures tells the story of Crimp's life as a young gay man and art critic in New York City during the late 1960s through the turbulent 1970s. Crimp participated in all of what made the city so stimulating in that vibrant decade. The details of his professional and personal life are interwoven with this the particularly rich history of New York City at that time, producing a vivid portrait of both the critic and his adopted city. The book begins with his escape from his hometown in Idaho, and we quickly find Crimp writing criticism for ArtNews while working at the Guggenheim where, as a young curatorial assistant, he was one of the few to see Daniel Buren's Peinture-Sculpture before it was removed amid cries of institutional censorship. We also travel to the Chelsea Hotel (where Crimp helped the down-on-his-luck couturier Charles James organize his papers) through to his days as a cinephile and balletomane to the founding of the art journal October, where he remained a central figure for many years. As he was developing his reputation as a critic, he was also partaking of the New York night life, from drugs and late nights alongside the Warhol crowd at the Max's Kansas City to discos, roller-skating, and casual sex with famous (and not-so-famous) men. As AIDS began to ravage the closely linked art and gay communities, Crimp eventually turned his attention to activism dedicated to rethinking AIDS. Part biography and part cultural history, Before Pictures is a courageous account of an exceptional period in both Crimp's life and the life of New York City. At the same time, it offers a deeply personal and engaging point of entry into important issues in contemporary art.

One of the most continuously influential figures of the past half century, Joan Jonas (born 1936) was among the first artists to embrace the forms of video, performance and installation. From her beginnings as a sculptor, and her emergence in the New York art and performance scenes of the 1960s and 70s (including the seminal "Vertical Roll" video piece of 1972, in which the titular television malfunction enacted a memorably fractured female identity), up through her performance at the Performa 09 biennial and recent collaborations with composer Alvin Lucier and the avant-garde theater company The Wooster Group, her work has always been surprising, groundbreaking and necessary. This extensively illustrated volume, containing hundreds of full-color images, presents the definitive collection of Jonas' work. The first career-spanning monograph of the multimedia pioneer, it covers more than 40 years of performances, films, videos, installations, texts and video sculptures. In addition to documentation of the artist's crucial projects, "In the Shadow a Shadow" includes individual essays by Douglas Crimp, Barbara Clausen and Johanna Burton, a major survey text by Joan Simon, and unpublished photographs and drawings from Jonas' archives. This intensively researched and authoritative book documents the range, breadth and depth of one of most prolifically original artists of the twentieth and twenty-first century.