A consideration of how contemporary art can offer a deeper understanding of selfhood.    With Each One Another, Rachel Haidu argues that contemporary art can teach us how to understand ourselves as selves—how we come to feel oneness, to sense our own interiority, and to shift between the roles that connect us to strangers, those close to us, and past and future generations. Haidu looks to intergenerational pairings of artists to consider how three aesthetic vehicles––shape in painting, characters in film and video, and roles in dance––allow us to grasp selfhood. Better understandings of our selves, she argues, complement our thinking about identity and subjecthood.   She shows how Philip Guston’s figurative works explore shapes’ descriptive capacities and their ability to investigate history, while Amy Sillman’s paintings allow us to rethink expressivity and oneness. Analyzing a 2004 video by James Coleman, Haidu explores how we enter characters through their interior monologues, and she also looks at how a 2011 film by Steve McQueen positions a protagonist’s refusal to speak as an argument for our right to silence. In addition, Haidu examines how Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s distribution of roles across dancers invites us to appreciate formal structures that separate us from one another while Yvonne Rainer’s choreography shows how such formal structures also bring us together. Through these examples, Each One Another reveals how artworks allow us to understand oneness, interiority, and how we become fluid agents in the world, and it invites us to examine—critically and forgivingly—our attachments to selfhood.

The first collection of essays on Gerhard Richter, who has been called "the greatest modern painter." The contemporary painter Gerhard Richter (born in 1932) has been heralded both as modernity's last painter and as painting's modern savior, seen to represent both the end of painting and its resurrection. Richter works in a dizzying variety of styles, from abstraction to a German cool pop that combines painterly technique and appropriation; his work includes photo paintings, large abstract canvases, and stained glass windows. This collection features writing by prominent critics, including Hal Foster, Gertrud Koch, and Thomas Crow; an essay by Rachel Haidu on Richter's family pictures that is published here for the first time; and an essay and two interviews with the artist by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Richter's "longtime sparring partner" (as the curator Robert Storr has called him). These writings examine Richter's work as a whole, from October 18, 1977, his dreamlike series of paintings depicting the dead Baader-Meinhof gang, to his abstract trio Abstract Paintings; from his unsettling portrait of "Uncle Rudi" in Nazi garb to his late series of portraits of his wife and young child. This addition to the October Files series will be an essential handbook to one of the most enigmatic figures in contemporary artContents Gerhard Richter and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Interview (1986) Gertrud Koch The Richter-Scale of Blur (1992) Thomas Crow Hand-Made Photographs and Homeless Representation (1992) Birgit Pelzer The Tragic Desire (1993) Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Divided Memory and Post-Traditional Identity: Gerhard Richter's Work of Mourning (1996) Peter Osborne Abstract Images: Sign, Image, and Aesthetic in Gerhard Richter's Painting (1998) Hal Foster Semblance According to Gerhard Richter (2003) Johannes Meinhardt Illusionism in Painting and the Punctum of Photography (2005) Rachel Haidu Arrogant Texts: Gerhard Richter's Family Pictures (2007) Gerhard Richter and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Interview (2004)