A fully updated edition of the artist's first comprehensive monograph, more than a decade since its original publication

Francis Alÿs examines the patterns of various urban sites before weaving his own fables into their tangled social fabric with wit, sensitivity, and an acutely personal connection to his subject matter.

A scene such as a Volkswagen Beetle struggling up a hill or a man pushing a block of ice can carry a message that resonates far beyond the work's simple parameters. As Alÿs puts it, 'Sometimes doing something poetic can become political, and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.'

Alÿs's work has been included in the world's top international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the Carnegie International, and the São Paulo Biennal.

This book features two new essays by renowned anthropologist Michael Taussig as well as new writings by the artist and exhaustive visual presentations of his recent project in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The publication is timed to tie in with Alÿs's first major North American exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opening in 2020.

British artist Gillian Wearing, winner of the 1997 Turner Prize, uses photography and video to explore the intimacies and complexities of everyday life. Borrowing from popular culture, her work is disturbing and confessional. In 1992 she began the acclaimed series Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants them to say', in which random passers-by are photographed holding messages they've written, such as the mild-mannered young businessman whose sign unexpectedly reads 'I'm Desperate'. Wearing's work borrows from familiar forms of popular culture to produce direct, revealing records of deep-seated human trauma and emotion, often adopting the methods of television documentaries for her 'fly-on-the-wall' view of people's lives. Her videos can be alarming, as in Confess All ... in which masked individuals confess their darkest secrets, or humorous, as in (Slight) Reprise - a sampler of adults playing 'air guitar' in the fantasy rock stadium of their bedrooms. Her art can be disconcerting or uplifting: an honest portrait of the many sides to contemporary life. With exhibitions in Britain, the US, Europe and Japan, Wearing is among the best-known and most internationally recognized of the recent generation of British artists. This is the first publication ever to survey this remarkable young artist's gripping work in its entirety. Russell Ferguson of UCLA's Hammer Museum contextualizes Wearing's work in relation to historical precedents in painting, photography and video art. Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art Donna De Salvo discusses with the artist her collaborative approach towards her work and its subjects. London-based critic John Slyce focuses on Wearing's work 10-16, a remarkable video installation that charts our transition from childhood to adolescence. The artist has selected transcripts from director Michael Apted's acclaimed British television documentary series Seven Up, an important influence on the process Wearing uses in her own work. Published here for the first time in full are the transcripts of the artist's video works.

Bottles aligned on shelves or suspended in the air, jars of marbles and dye-filled tubes: form, substance and structure emerge from deceptively humble means in the sculpture of Tony Feher. His work uses gravity, light and repetition to isolate and animate everyday objects, creating a sculptural territory that Feher can rightfully claim as entirely his own. Published in conjunction with a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Blaffer Art Museum, this is the first publication to explore work from throughout the artist's significant and influential career. This comprehensive book reproduces his many sculptures, site-specific installations and two-dimensional works and includes major new texts on Feher's practice from Blaffer Director Claudia Schmuckli and curator and writer Russell Ferguson. Superbly realized by renowned New York design studio Matsumoto Incorporated, this publication is the definitive book on the work of a vanguard American artist.

The beautiful catalogue that accompanies the critically-acclaimed exhibition currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum Best known for her striking drawings of ocean surfaces, begun in 1968 and revisited over many years both in drawings and paintings, Vija Celmins (b. 1938) has been creating exquisitely detailed renderings of natural imagery for more than five decades. The oceans were followed by desert floors and night skies-all subjects in which vast, expansive distances are distilled into luminous, meticulous, and mesmerizing small-scale artworks. For Celmins, this obsessive "redescribing" of the world is a way to understand human consciousness in relation to lived experience. The first major publication on the artist in twenty years, this comprehensive and lavishly illustrated volume explores the full range of Celmins's work produced since the 1960s-drawings and paintings as well as sculpture and prints. Scholarly essays, a narrative chronology, and a selection of excerpts from interviews with the artist illuminate her methods and techniques; survey her early years in Los Angeles, where she was part of a circle that included James Turrell and Ken Price; and trace the development of her work after she moved to New York City and befriended figures such as Robert Gober and Richard Serra. Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Schedule: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (12/15/18-03/31/19) Art Gallery of Ontario (05/04/19-08/04/19) The Met Breuer, New York (09/24/19-01/12/20)

Out There addresses the theme of cultural marginalization - the process whereby various groups are excluded from access to and participation in the dominant culture. It engages fundamental issues raised by attempts to define such concepts as mainstream, minority, and "other," and opens up new ways of thinking about culture and representation. All of the texts deal with questions of representation in the broadest sense, encompassing not just the visual but also the social and psychological aspects of cultural identity. Included are important theoretical writings by Homi Bhabha, Helene Cixous, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Monique Wittig. Their work is juxtaposed with essays on more overtly personal themes, often autobiographical, by Gloria Anzaldua, Bell Hooks, and Richard Rodriguez, among others. This rich anthology brings together voices from many different marginalized groups - groups that are often isolated from each other as well as from the dominant culture. It joins issues of gender, race, sexual preference, and class in one forum but without imposing a false unity on the diverse cultures represented. Each piece in the book subtly changes the way every other piece is read. While several essays focus on specific issues in art, such as John Yau's piece on Wilfredo Lam in the Museum of Modern Art, or James Clifford's on collecting art, others draw from debates in literature, film, and critical theory to provide a much broader context than is usually found in work aimed at an art audience. Topics range from the functions of language to the role of public art in the city, from gay pornography to the meanings of black hair styles. Out There also includes essays by Rosalyn Deutsche, Richard Dyer, Kobena Mercer, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Gerald Vizenor and Simon Watney, as well as by the editors. Copublished with the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York Distributed by The MIT Press.

Against the Grain Since its beginnings in Paris in the mid-19th century, the idea of bohemia, an urban community of artists and intellectuals living outside bourgeois norms has been a potent trope of artistic identity. It was here that the notion of an unconventional, free-spirited life, precarious yet filled with idealism was codified and romanticized. Bohemia. History of an Idea, 1950-2000 shows the continuities and differences between the scenes and subcultures of the second half of the twentieth century, when the mainstream began to appropriate and thereby erode a way of life predicated on its rejection. Nonetheless, as an alternative to conformity the bohemian idea exerted an enduring fascination. Through photographic works by 37 artists such as Alice Neel, David Hujar, John Deakin, David Wojnarowicz, Ed van der Elsken, Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, William Gedney, Libuse Jarcovjakova, Nan Goldin, Zhang Huan and Wolfgang Tillmans, the publication explores the diversity of expressions in ten cities in Europe, North America and Asia and shows that the bohemian idea continues to galvanize and inspire.