A bricoleur of uniquely American utopian/dystopian cosmologies, Jim Shaw (born 1952) weds themes from American religious history with motifs from 1960s and 70s counterculture, often coining rubrics--such as his invented religion of "O"--or series under which to unify these narratives. "My Mirage" is Shaw's earliest sequence of this kind. Conceived between 1986 and 1991, arranged in chapters and constituted of nearly 170 works--drawn, silk-screened, photographed, sculpted, filmed or painted in a different style--"My Mirage" recounts the wanderings of Billy, a white, middle-class American sucked into the whirlwind of the 1960s and 70s counterculture. An anxious and withdrawn youth consumed by psychotic hallucinations, Billy joins a psychedelic pagan cult, eventually and inevitably returning to the religion of his youth, "reborn" as a fundamentalist Christian. Shaw's broad iconography for this visual bildungsroman ranges from children's books to contemporary art, religious literature and psychedelic poster art, all juxtaposed en face--one image per page--to relay an associative narrative progression. From the start, the project was intended for the book format as its ideal incarnation, and this edition was therefore created in close collaboration with the artist. "My Mirage" offers one of Shaw's most concise statements on vernacular culture and the wild polarities of religious life in postwar America.

Valentin Carron's sculptures mark a three-dimensional renewal of appropriationism, through the re-employment of vernacular forms that are neither authentic nor kitsch. His objects play with the ambiguities of fake wood, concrete and bronze, and with the iconography of power and authority in public sculptures or commemorative monuments. This volume offers an overview.

In 2007, Ai Weiwei (born 1957) presented a surprising new project titled "Fairytale" at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany. He invited 1001 Chinese citizens of different ages and from various backgrounds to travel to Germany, all expenses paid, to experience their own fairytale holiday for 28 days. The logistics for this project were complex and entailed a hefty budget, as the artist later recalled, enumerating the considerations: "to design the trip and activities for the tourists, to hope to get their passports, their visas, their insurance and air tickets, to organize the place where they can live in Kassel, to hire cooks, make products which are connected to the journey and would be needed for it..." Happily, "Fairytale" was a runaway success for the artist, the participants and for Documenta. It was judged by critics to be one of the most sensational artworks at Documenta that year, and led to an acclaimed documentary and global media coverage. This publication offers critical analyses of the project from Roger M. Buergel, Daniel Birnbaum, Christian Holler, Raphael Gygax and Ai Weiwei himself.

Paulina Olowska's paintings, collages, and knitted works explore Communist Poland's fascination with Western consumerism and celebrates the spirit of what Polish writer Leopold Tyrmand called the "Applied Fantastic," or the vernacular recreations of Western styles--while also paying tribute to American Pattern and Decoration art of the 1970s. This first overview includes an interview with Adam Szymczyk and an essay by Jan Verwoert.

Australian artist David Noonan (born 1969) uses found imagery as the basis for his screenprinted canvases and sculptures. Enigmatic figures, printed in grainy black and white or sepia, pose in these elaborate artworks, invoking covert and futuristic rituals. This monograph will be the first comprehensive overview of Noonan's work.

Part of JRP]Ringer's innovative "Documents" series, published with Les Presses du Reel and dedicated to critical writings, this publication comprises a unique collection of interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist mapping the development of the curatorial field--from early independent curators in the 1960s and 70s and the experimental institutional programs developed in Europe and the U.S. through the inception of Documenta and the various biennales and fairs--with pioneering curators Anne D'Harnoncourt, Werner Hoffman, Jean Leering, Franz Meyer, Seth Siegelaub, Walter Zanini, Johannes Cladders, Lucy Lippard, Walter Hopps, Pontus Hulten and Harald Szeemann. Speaking of Szeemann on the occasion of this legendary curator's death in 2005, critic Aaron Schuster summed up, "the image we have of the curator today: the curator-as-artist, a roaming, freelance designer of exhibitions, or in his own witty formulation, a 'spiritual guest worker'... If artists since Marcel Duchamp have affirmed selection and arrangement as legitimate artistic strategies, was it not simply a matter of time before curatorial practice--itself defined by selection and arrangement--would come to be seen as an art that operates on the field of art itself?"

No less versatile in his writing than in his installations, films, architecture, and sculpture, Liam Gillick unites his critical essays in this collection, most of which were originally printed in art magazines or exhibition catalogues. Lauded for his ingenious reinterpretation of Conceptual and Minimalist art, Liam Gillick has often used language, whether in type on a wall or on a page, as a site of artistic, theoretical, and political intervention. He reveals himself here as a witness of and major actor in the largely European 1990s art scene that included Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, Carsten H ller, Angela Bulloch, Douglas Gordon, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. A key publication of discussions, references, and artistic engagements of the 1990s, the book also allows an examination of the renewed importance at this time of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, John Baldessari, and Allen Ruppersberg.