Conceptual Art: Recommended Reading List of Books & Catalogs

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  New Documents Lucy Lippard: 4,492,040 Between 1969 and 1974, the influential curator Lucy Lippard (born 1937) curated four decisive Conceptual art exhibitions, and in doing so reinvented the exhibition catalogue. 4,492,040 is a facsimile reprint of the extremely scarce and hugely important catalogues produced for those exhibitions: 557,087 (the Seattle Art Museum), 955,000 (the Vancouver Art Gallery), 7,500 (the California Institute of Art) and 2,972,453 (the Centro de Arte y Comunicación). Titled after the populations of the cities in which the shows were held, each catalogue was an envelope of loose note cards containing statements, documentation and conceptual works by each artist, to be rearranged, filed or discarded at will. If Lippard described Conceptual art as the dematerialization of the art object, these catalogues effectively announced the dematerialization of the art exhibition. (One reviewer claimed Lippard had been the artist, and that her medium had been other artists.) 4,492,040 includes such iconic figures as Vito Acconci, . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Lucy Lippard. Boxed, 6 x 4 in. / 460 pgs / illustrated throughout. Publication Date: 6/30/2012 List Price: US $35.00

  Walther König/Afterall Books/Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Van Abbemuseum From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–74 Between 1969 and 1974, Lucy Lippard curated four exhibitions of contemporary art, which have become renowned as her numbers shows.” Each took the population of the city in which it was shown as its title: 557,087 in Seattle, 955,000 in Vancouver, 2,972,453 in Buenos Aires and c. 7,500, which opened in Valencia, California, before touring the U.S. and then traveling to London. From Conceptualism to Feminism follows Lippard’s curatorial trajectory, analyzing her transition from a writer about art to a maker of exhibitions, and tracing her growing political engagement and involvement with feminism. Extensive photographic material is complemented by a major new essay by Cornelia Butler and interviews with Lucy Lippard, Seth Siegelaub and with artists in c. 7,500. The volume also includes an analysis of artists’ initiatives in Argentina, which give a context for Lippard’s emerging political consciousness. From Conceptualism to Feminism is the third publication in Afterall’s Exhibition Histories . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Cornelia Butler with Peter Plagens, Griselda Pollock, Pip Day. Interviews with Lucy Lippard, Seth Siegelaub, et al. Pbk, 6.25 x 8.75 in. / 280 pgs / 140 b&w. Publication Date: 6/30/2012 List Price: US $27.50

  DuMont Buchverlag Matt Mullican: Conversations A bricoleur of cosmologies, cities and signs, a hypnosis subject, a collaborator and a collector of art and ethnographic objects, Matt Mullican has embodied and redefined the wilder horizons of conceptual art over the course of his 40-year career. From the start, Mullican has tackled only the big themes: the self, which with some courage he has dismantled under hypnosis, performing and making art as another Matt Mullican named That Person”; and the universe, which he has imagined as a proliferating cosmology of signs, taking form under his Five Worlds” concept or as a city. In this bilingual volume of conversations with Koen Brams and Dirk Pültau, Mullican also proves himself an articulate, generous talker. The conversations are themed in five chapters: Collaboration,” Cosmologies,” Hypnosis,” City” and Collections.” Across these seemingly diverse topics, what emerges as the unifying principle throughout Mullican’s activities is his exemplariness as a true cosmonaut of inner . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Ulrich Wilmes. Conversations with Koen Brams, Dirk Pültau. Pbk, 6 x 8 in. / 224 pgs / 19 color / 19 b&w. Publication Date: 4/30/2012 List Price: US $35.00

  JRP|Ringier More Than You Wanted to Know About John Baldessari Volume 1 This first volume of JRP|Ringier’s complete John Baldessari writings project traces the genesis and development of the artist’s understanding of art in the early 1960s. More Than You Wanted to Know About John Baldessari presents Baldessari as storyteller, moralist, teacher and occasional gadfly, always concerned to accomplish what he describes as the central task of art making: to communicate in a way that people can understand. These writings address everything from matters of color in sculpture, to the dilemmas of art students in need of ideas, to the art world’s ever-conflicted relationship with money, while always returning to Baldessari’s love of language and his longstanding investigation into the tensions of word and image. With numerous never-before-published texts and facsimiles of original documents, this long-anticipated collection will prove essential reading for anyone involved in contemporary art. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Meg Cranston, Hans Ulrich Obrist. Pbk, 6 x 8.25 in. / 250 pgs / 15 b&w. Publication Date: 6/30/2012 List Price: US $29.95

  Valiz During the Exhibition the Gallery Will Be Closed Contemporary Art and the Paradoxes of Conceptualism In this collection of essays, Amsterdam art historian and critic Camiel van Winkel digs up the conceptual roots of contemporary art, design and photography to argue that the art of today is, as a whole, post-conceptual.” Focusing on the conceptual artists of the years 1965–1975, van Winkel examines how the art of that era continues to inform the art world today. Highly polemical and very readable, During the Exhibition the Gallery Will Be Closed looks at the cultural dominance of information in art discourse, the professionalization of artistic practices, the debate over good design” in art and the role institutions play in art theory. It is an essential collection for any understanding of that idea, belief and desire we today call the artist.” . . . . [see book details]

  By Camiel van Winkel. Pbk, 6 x 9 in. / 304 pgs / 100 b&w. Publication Date: 5/31/2012 List Price: US $34.95

  Ediciones Poligrafa Marcel Broodthaers: Works and Collected Writings I, too, asked myself if I could not sell something and succeed in life... Finally the idea of inventing something insincere came to me and I got to work immediately.” With this statement, penned for his first solo show in April, 1964, Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) announced his death as a poet and birth as an artist. In fact, he was to transform the category of artist completely, purging the vocation of its medium-specific implications to pursue a unified conceptualism across media such as artist's books, prints, film, installation, sculpture and writings--” where the world of plastic arts and the world of poetry might possibly, I wouldn't say meet, but at the very frontier where they part.” Broodthaers' Museum of Modern Art, Eagles Department (1968-1972) inaugurated the practice now known as institutional critique, and the linguistic foundations of his art--as well as his emphasis on printed multiples--also proved prescient for subsequent strains . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Gloria Moure. Text by Birgit Pelzer. Preface by Marie Gilissen. Clth, 8.5 x 10.25 in. / 404 pgs / 98 color / 126 duotone. Publication Date: 8/31/2012 List Price: US $75.00

  JRP|Ringier General Idea: A Retrospective 1969-1994 General Idea was founded in Toronto in 1969 by Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson as a generic identity to free the artists from the tyranny of individual genius.” Under the leadership of their fictitious muse Miss General Idea, and inspired by William Burroughs' conception of the image virus,” the collective interrogated media image culture through now legendary projects like File magazine, as well as paintings, installations, sculptures, mail art, photographs, videos, ephemera, TV programs and even a beauty pageant. General Idea came to an end in 1994, when Partz and Zontal died of AIDS. Today General Idea can be seen to anticipate the later art collectives of the 1970s as well as aspects of Relational Aesthetics in the 1990s. This volume presents an overview of the Canadian collective's bold mingling of reality and fiction and their frequently transgressive, parodic incursions upon both art and society. It traces such prevalent . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Frédéric Bonnet. Text by Jean-Christophe Ammann, AA Bronson, Louise Dompierre, Elisabeth Lebovici, David Moos. Hbk, 6.75 x 9.25 in. / 224 pgs / 151 color / 81 b&w. Publication Date: 5/31/2011 List Price: US $39.95

  Hatje Cantz Peter Downsbrough: The Books, 1968-2010 Like his contemporaries Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry and Sol LeWitt, American Conceptualist Peter Downsbrough (born 1940) combines a fondness for geometric art and typography with the possibilities of the artist's book. Since the late 1960s he has worked across media (video, film and photography), but the artist's book has proved an enduring format, a place in which to incorporate other projects and compose with text, line drawings, maps and photographs. In 1993 the publisher, book collector and curator Guy Schraenen wrote of his work: One might call it the absolute zero of the book, since it presents itself in the simplest form.” This catalogue provides a comprehensive overview of the 85 artist's books that Downsbrough has published from 1972 to the present, including such classics of Conceptualist book art as And, A Place--New York, Beside, Notes on Location 2 and Two Pipes Fourteen Locations. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Moritz Küng. Text by Ira G. Wool. Hbk, 6 x 9 in. / 332 pgs / 272 color. Publication Date: 8/31/2011 List Price: US $45.00

  JRP|Ringier Guy de Cointet Mentor to a generation of Californian Conceptualists and performance artists, Guy de Cointet (1934-1983) took language as a material from which to generate drawings, plays and performances. De Cointet collected phrases, words and even single letters culled from popular culture and literary sources, and scripted them as dialogues or props for plays inspired by the writings and homonymic compositional methods of Raymond Roussel: in the 1976 play At Sunrise... A Cry Was Heard, for example, a large painting depicting letters bisected by a white sash provides the dialogue of the lead actress, who recites its jumble of letters as if it were ordinary conversation. His drawings were often generated by geometric erasures of found text, leaving behind Concrete-style abstract patterns. A formative figure for Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy during his tenure at the Otis Art institute, de Cointet is today in the process of being rediscovered; this timely monograph is . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Marie de Brugerolle. Hbk, 6.75 x 9.5 in. / 160 pgs / 100 color. Publication Date: 9/30/2011 List Price: US $45.00

  The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles William Leavitt: Theater Objects A pioneer of Conceptual art in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and 1970s, the painter, installation artist and theater director William Leavitt (born 1941) is above all an artist of narrative devices. Since 1969, his works in all the above media have employed abrupt fragments of popular and vernacular culture and depictions of modernist architecture to construct elusive narratives of cityscapes and environments. The culture and atmosphere of Los Angeles has played a significant role in Leavitt's handling of these themes; classic southern Californian motifs of ever-present artifice and almost washed-out brightness recur throughout his work. Surveying the artist's 40-year career, this volume includes sculptural tableaux, paintings, works on paper, photographs and performances from the late 1960s to the present. Leavitt has created a remarkable oeuvre that has influenced generations of artists, and this volume is both long overdue and highly anticipated. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Erik Bluhm, Ann Goldstein, Bennett Simpson, Annette Leddy. Pbk, 12.25 x 8.5 in. / 144 pgs / 105 color / 20 b&w. Publication Date: 4/30/2011 List Price: US $40.00

  Fraenkel Gallery Mel Bochner: Photographs and Not Photographs A hugely influential presence in postwar American art, Mel Bochner (born 1940) coined some of Postminimalist and Conceptual art's most characteristic strategies—the gallery as subject, language as material, the photo documentation of works as the work itself, the appropriation of ephemeral materials by other artists—and directed those strategies towards a radical excavation of all that had been rendered peripheral to art's proper content. In the mid- to late 1960s, Bochner became deeply involved with photography, producing a groundbreaking group of photographs that hover tantalizingly between painting and photography. Mel Bochner: Photographs and Not Photographs presents superb reproductions of these early works, as well as the artist's classic 1970 essay "Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography)" and a selection of wall drawings and paintings, culminating in "NO," painted in 2010. Also included is an essay by Jeffrey Weiss, curator of the Panza collection at the Guggenheim Museum of Art, which traces the evolution . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Jeffrey Fraenkel. Text by Mel Bochner, Jeffrey Weiss. Hbk, 9.5 x 10.75 in. / 80 pgs / illustrated throughout. Publication Date: 10/31/2010 List Price: US $45.00

  Ediciones Poligrafa Donald Judd: Open Enclosed Perhaps the foremost representative of American Minimalism, Donald Judd (1928-1994) undertook a radical and revolutionary analysis of objects in space with his conflations of architecture, sculpture and painting. Employing steel, wood, aluminum and Plexiglas, Judd refused the nomenclatures of art history, instead describing these works as "specific objects," a term he coined in a 1965 essay of the same name. Judd advocated structures that did not attempt to resemble yet further objects in the world, or aspire to anything beyond their own verifiable limits. "A shape, a volume, color, a surface is something itself," he stated; "it shouldn't be concealed as part of a fairly different whole." In Donald Judd: Specific, Guillermo Zuaznabar assesses Judd's legendary essay--perhaps the most influential text by an artist made in the past century--and ranges across the entirety of Judd's output to examine the ways in which he applied his conception to actual specific objects. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Guillermo Zuaznabar. Hbk, 6 x 8.5 in. / 128 pgs / 12 color / 28 b&w. Publication Date: 6/30/2012 List Price: US $30.00

  Moderne Kunst Nürnberg Stephen Willats: Art Society Feedback Art Society Feedback is the first comprehensive survey of the great English Conceptual pioneer Stephen Willats (born 1943). This enormous volume reproduces works from the 1960s to the present, with critical commentary by several longstanding Willats scholars, as well as Willats' own writings. Many previously unpublished works are gathered here, often drawn from Willats' archive. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Anja Casser, Philipp Ziegler. Text by Ute Meta Bauer, Brigitte Franzen, et al. Pbk, 8.25 x 10.75 in. / 558 pgs / 200 color / 50 b&w. Publication Date: 4/30/2011 List Price: US $96.00

  Witte de With Publishers Billy Apple Billy Apple was created in 1962 as a work by the New Zealand-born artist Barrie Bates, who changed his name to become a living brand after graduating from London's Royal College of Art. For this volume, four writers combine to discuss the brand, providing a chronology, a contextualization of Apple's practice within institutional critique and his enduring significance for younger generations. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Zoë Gray, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Monika Szewczyk. Text by Christina Barton, Michelle Menzies, Bénédicte Ramade, William Wood. Pbk, 5 x 8 in. / 112 pgs / 26 color. Publication Date: 2/28/2010 List Price: US $15.00

  JRP|Ringier/ECART Publications John Armleder: Yellow Pages If you let your fingers do the walking through these Yellow Pages, you won't find that plumber you're looking for, but you will plumb an inviting exercise in Conceptual art from Swiss artist, prankster, performer and teacher John Armleder. He and his class at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig, Germany, who call themselves Team404, solicited original graphic works made on A4 paper from over 500 artists (Corrie Colbert, Sylvie Fleury, Thomas Hirschhorn, Odili Donald Odita, Michael Snow)--”be it a text, sketch, drawing, picture, or whatever suits your mind,” the letter said. The works were displayed in a gallery, then each was randomly put together with another artist's work to be reproduced as a black double print on yellow paper. Armleder, whose own prints and multiples were the subject of a retrospective exhibition at Geneva's Cabinet des Estampes in 1995, dials a winner. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Team 404. Paperback, 8.5 x 11.75 in. / 520 pgs. Publication Date: 8/15/2005 List Price: US $40.00

  JRP|Ringier Art & Language Homes for Homes II Art & Language is the name of a group of English artists who have spent their careers, some 40 years, working collectively, and are best known as forerunners to the current revival of collective work. Art & Language is also the title of their eponymous magazine, founded in 1968. Both the group and the publication center on critical analysis of the relationships between art, society and politics. In varied media, from painting to rock, these cofounders of conceptual art remain, even today, attentive observers of the after-effects of what they themselves call the "depressing collapse of modernism." Homes from Homes II is built around the major installation of the same title (2000-2001). Each element is described, annotated and put in the context of aesthetic, theoretical and political problematics through extended captions and essays by the artists, who question the notions of conservation, of institutional politics and the relation between art and . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Heike Munder. Essays by Mel Ramsden, Charles Harrison and Michael Baldwin. Hardcover, 6.5 x 9.25 in. / 260 pgs / 80 color. Publication Date: 8/15/2006 List Price: US $35.00

  Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco-Legion of Honor/Jordan Schnitzer Family John Baldessari: A Print Retrospective from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation Conceptual art veteran John Baldessari (born 1931) began making prints in the mid-1970s, and has placed printmaking at the center of his appropriative practice, in which found photographs of people are amended with colorful dots that blot out the heads of the subjects, redirecting the viewer's attention towards marginal detail. In my work,” he says, I found that I could be the master of my own universe and control what people see and pay attention to.” For Baldessari, keen as he is to minimize or erase his own manual presence, printmaking also helps to flatten out these collaged additions and interventions, heightening their sense of estrangement and beguiling anonymity. Many of Baldessari's prints series have been extremely influential, such as the 1970s Raw Prints series, for which he amended photos of Santa Monica mallgoers with abstracted shapes printed above the images that replicate details from them; this series was pivotal in . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Hunter Drohojowska-Philip. Clth, 10 x 12 in. / 160 pgs / 140 color. Publication Date: 4/30/2010 List Price: US $59.95

  Kerber Robert Barry: Some Places To Which We Can Come 1963-1975 The full title to this volume on Robert Barry's rarely-shown early work reads: Some places to which we can come, and for a while be free to think about what we are going to do.” This might further be understood by a typical example of Barry's work, which he designed for the sixth issue of Vito Acconci's magazine 0-9 in 1969. The contribution consisted of the following brief description: The space between pages 29 and 30 / The space between pages 74 and 75. This long-awaited volume on the early work of the New Jersey-based Conceptual artist reveals much of the work that was at the heart of the beginnings of American Conceptual art, of which Barry was a main protagonist. As early as 1967 he began working towards the limits of immateriality and invisibility, creating installations out of wire and nylon thread, performing with gases, working with acoustic frequencies and . . . . [see book details]

  Artwork by Robert Barry. Hardcover, 8.25 x 10.5 in. / 132 pgs / 44 color / 61 b&w. Publication Date: 2/2/2004 List Price: US $35.00

  Walther König, Köln Angela Bulloch: Prime Numbers This Canadian-born, Berlin-based Conceptual artist, often grouped with England's YBAs--she lived in the UK from 1977-1988, attended Goldsmiths College and was nominated for the 1997 Turner Prize--specializes in interactive sound and light sculpture. Her practice came to prominence in the 1990s with work that included lamps that dimmed or brightened in the presence of a viewer and "drawing machines" that were triggered by a viewer's touch, sound or movement. Since 2000, Bulloch has been creating increasingly ambitious installations based on the "pixel box," a highly innovative sculptural unit that combines a Minimalist cube with a programmable light system capable of illuminating almost 17,000,000 color permutations. Arranged in stacks, rows, or cinemascope screens, the boxes produce a sequence of changing colors and rhythms, creating space-altering environments that are captivatingly beautiful, while conceptually rigorous, referring to art history, film, music, TV and popular culture. This catalogue, which accompanied Bulloch's Fall 2006 exhibition at . . . . [see book details]

  Paperback, 8.5 x 11 in. / 288 pgs / 120 color. Publication Date: 2/1/2007 List Price: US $60.00

  Rectapublishers Wim Delvoye: Studies for Cloaca 1997-2006 This comprehensive volume reproduces in loving detail all of Delvoye's preliminary drawings for his infamous Cloaca project--in which a giant machine replicates the human digestive system by "eating" twice a day, digesting and eliminating. . . . . [see book details]

  Hardback, 8.75 x 11.5 in. / 288 pgs / 288 color. Publication Date: 8/1/2008 List Price: US $65.00

  Hatje Cantz Cerith Wyn Evans: Visibleinvisible In the 1980s, London-based Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans, born in 1958, worked as an assistant to filmmaker Derek Jarman, soon gaining a reputation for his own experimental shorts and his collaborations with the dancer Michael Clark. Since the 1990s, Wyn Evans has also been creating installations, often inspired by cinema history or literature, that incorporate elements like philosophical texts, mirrors, neon lights, fireworks, plants and Morse code to form a constellation of meanings that unravel into myriad poetic associations. Evans' desire to animate knowledge and reconceive the materials of the past make him analogous to Marcel Broodthaers, his erstwhile mentor Derek Jarman or even William Blake. This publication includes essays that delve into the artist's use of language and his experiments with time and perception. On the subject of Evans' purposeful inscrutability, critic Jens Asthoff has written, "Evans wants to go beyond that which we describe as understanding, to reach . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Daniel Birnbaum, Octavio Zaya. Hardback, 11 x 11.25 in. / 176 pgs / 155 color / 33 b&w. Publication Date: 7/1/2008 List Price: US $70.00

  Guggenheim Museum Felix Gonzalez-Torres In April 2006, the Department of State announced that the late Cuban-born conceptual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres would represent the United States at the 2007 Venice Biennale (June 1-November 21). This much sought-after and long-out-of-print volume, reissued by the Guggenheim Museum for the occasion, was originally published to accompany the artist's solo exhibition at the Museum in 1995, one year before his untimely death at the age of 38. Gonzalez-Torres wanted a readable book, not a catalogue per se--something, he said, that one could take to the beach. Pleasure was an integral part of his art (and his life). While he understood that art was innately political and, by necessity, a vehicle for cultural criticism, he believed that social critique and enjoyment were not, by any means, mutually exclusive. For Gonzalez-Torres, beauty was a tool for seduction and a means of contestation. Written by Nancy Spector in close consultation with the artist . . . . [see book details]

  By Nancy Spector. Hardcover, 6 x 9 in. / 228 pgs / 172 color. Publication Date: 5/1/2007 List Price: US $45.00

  The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Rodney Graham: A Little Thought One of Canada's most humorous conceptual artists--as witty as he is smart--Rodney Graham gets his first North American museum retrospective and accompanying catalogue. Rodney Graham: A Little Thought tracks the career of a brilliant, idiosyncratic artist whose work spans a range of media including photography, film, book works, installation and pop music. In this volume, amply illustrated with many never-before-seen images from early in his career as well as new photography of his most recent works, scholarly essays provide a broad context for viewing: Cornelia Butler looks at Graham's relationship to landscape and Canadian identity, Lynne Cooke examines the construction of the artist's persona in works such as City Self/ Country Self (2001), and Shep Steiner discusses the joke as a conceptual strategy for Graham. Diedrich Diederichsen considers the artist's oeuvre within the context of musical structure, and Sara Krajewski describes how Graham's video works unfold. Finally, Grant Arnold offers an . . . . [see book details]

  Essays by Cornelia Butler, Grant Arnold, Jessica Bradley, Lynne Cooke, Diedrich Diedrichsen, Sara Krajewski and Shepherd Steiner. Hardcover, 9.75 x 11.75 in. / 208 pgs / 150 color / 50 b&w / 20 duotone. Publication Date: 5/2/2004 List Price: US $39.99

  Four Corners Books Show & Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material In 1979, the artist collective Group Material opened a storefront at East 13th Street on New York's Lower East Side, from which they launched exhibitions—45 in all—that radically overhauled curatorial thought, setting art alongside artifacts, documentary material and storebought objects, within exhibitions that were oriented around topical social concerns. Group Material's original members—Julie Ault, Patrick Brennan, Beth Jaker, Mundy McLaughlin, Marybeth Nelson, Tim Rollins and Peter Szypula—came from backgrounds in feminism, Marxist theory, design and popular culture, and curated classic exhibits reflecting this eclecticism, such as It's a Gender Show, AIDS Timeline and The People's Choice—a collection of everyday objects (wedding photos, dolls, even a cigarette-pack collage) gathered from people living on their block. Show & Tell is the first monograph on Group Material, and charts the group's activities, with essays by original members, plus original documents, photographs, drawings, correspondence and interviews. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Julie Ault. Essays by Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Sabrina Locks, Tim Rollins. Flexi, 8.5 x 11 in. / 272 pgs / 180 color / 50 b&w. Publication Date: 5/31/2010 List Price: US $35.00

  Generali Foundation, Vienna Hans Haacke: We Are Who We Are Long known for bringing trenchant analyses of sociopolitical structures into museum contexts, Hans Haacke has in the past exposed corporations who use art sponsorship to booster their image and slum landlords who hide behind diversified corporations. In his first exhibition in Vienna, the title of which gives its name to this book, Haacke tackles Austria's emotionally laden understanding of its own history and national identity. A larger discourse on "the culture of memory" weaves its way through selected historical works of Haacke's, including his 1999 project for the Reichstag, as well as through the artist's own writings, available here for the first time. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Sabine Breitwieser. Essays by Hans Haacke, Christian Kravagna, Heidemarie Uhl. Foreword by Dietrich Karner. Clothbound, 7.5 x 9.5 in. / 192 pgs / 19 color / 42 b&w. Publication Date: 12/2/2001 List Price: US $39.95

  University of California, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive Everything Matters: Paul Kos, A Retrospective Born in 1942, Paul Kos has been a highly influential artist in the Bay Area for well over three decades. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he was one of the major figures on the early Conceptual art scene, notable especially for his early experimental video works and seemingly simple but technically innovative sculptural installations, which generally featured evocative audio or video components. He was one of the first to incorporate video into interactive installations. The artist's best-known work is arguably the sublime Chartres Bleu,” a 1986 video installation that re-creates in full scale a stained-glass window from the Chartres cathedral in France. Each of the 27 vertically stacked video monitors duplicates an individual leaded glass panel. The brightness of the images stimulates the light changes in a normal day, accelerated to 12 minutes. Depending on the light, the narrative scenes are clearly readable or, when brightly illuminated, dissolved into . . . . [see book details]

  Artwork by Paul Kos. Contributions by Constance Lewallen. Text by Charles Desmarais, Ron Meyers, Rachel Teagle, Beatriz Colomina, Kevin Consey. Paperback, 9 x 11.5 in. / 140 pgs / 74 color / 95 b&w. Publication Date: 4/2/2003 List Price: US $35.00

  Kerber Alexander Kosolapov: Sots Art Alexander Kosolapov is one of the most remarkable "go-betweeners" of contemporary art, a nomadic presence across ideologies and cultures and a hero of Russian Conceptualism alongside Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov and Dmitri Prigov. In 1973, he cofounded the Sots-Art movement, which satirically conflated Soviet and American capitalist iconographies; in 1975 he relocated to New York, remaining there for 30 years and immersing himself in the American art scene. Dovetailing Russian political art with American Pop, Kosolapov created such well-known images as the "Lenin Coca Cola" (1985), "Malevich Marlborough" and "Lenin McDonald's." In his most recent works, Kosolapov proposes new, nonexistent brands for post-Soviet Russia. This substantial survey appraises the entirety of his career to date. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Boris Groys, Alexander Borovsky, Lyudmila Novikova. Hbk, 8.75 x 12.25 in. / 184 pgs / 99 color / 12 b&w. Publication Date: 6/30/2010 List Price: US $55.00

  Damiani Sol LeWitt: Wall Drawings Sol LeWitt, who once worked as a draftsman for I. M. Pei, has said of his own directions for drawings executed by collaborators that, "The contribution brought by the draftsman may not be predicted by the artist, even when the artist is also the draftsman." This separation of the plan, the written score for a work, from its execution and the finished piece lies at the center of the work for which LeWitt is best known, whose execution he entrusts to strangers. Wall Drawings tracks the creation of one recent work, beginning with the plan, so spare that it looks as though it might have arrived at the gallery by fax, and continuing through to a schematic drawing on the wall, then figures on stepladders drawing intently, their faces clear but their pencils blurred. Close-ups of their scribbles and images of the completed work are followed by a picture of the . . . . [see book details]

  Essay by Giovanni Maria Accame. Essay by Ester Coen. Paperback, 11 x 11 in. / 102 pgs / 24 color and 40 b&w. Publication Date: 8/15/2006 List Price: US $28.00

  Walker Art Center The Last Picture Show Artists Using Photography 1960-1982 Photography has become an increasingly pervasive medium of choice in contemporary art practice and is even employed at times by artists who do not necessarily consider themselves to be photographers. How did this come to be? The Last Picture Show will address the emergence of this phenomenon of artists using photography by tracing the development of conceptual trends in postwar photographic practice from its first glimmerings in the 60s in the work of artists such as Bernd & Hilla Becher, Ed Ruscha and Bruce Nauman, to its rise to art-world prominence in the work of the artists of the late 70s and early 80s including Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman. Intended as a major genealogy of the rise of a still-powerful and evolving photographic practice by artists, the checklist will include a wide array of works examining a range of issues: performativity and photographic practice; portraiture and cultural identity; . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Douglas Fogle. Essays by Douglas Fogle, Kate Bush, Richard Flood, Geoffrey Batchen, Stefan Gronnert and Pamela Lee. Foreword by Kathy Halbreich. Hardcover, 8 x 10.5 in. / 304 pgs / 160 color. Publication Date: 11/2/2003 List Price: US $44.95

  Walther König Yoko Ono: Between the Sky and My Head In 1965, The New York Times called Tokyo-born, New York-based Fluxus artist Yoko Ono "a one person culture explosion." In this generous volume, Ono presents instruction pieces from 1961 to the present, including three scores from her iconic 1964 artist's book, Grapefruit--"Drinking Piece for Orchestra," "Bicycle Piece for Orchestra" and "Painting to Be Slept On"--which are republished here for the first time. Ono has explained the origin of these works: "...sometimes for financial reasons, sometimes for technical difficulties, I could never realize all the ideas which were literally bombarding me. But now, I could just write instructions. It freed me." Also included are more than 100 drawings from Franklin Summer, a series begun in 1994, comprising 1,400 inkblot drawings on paper, and Vertical Memory (1997)--dedicated to Ono's father--a photograph in 21 parts depicting a distorted face. The piece, which Ono considers her best, is a culmination of her life's work. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Thomas Kellein. Hbk, 6.75 x 9.75 in. / 208 pgs / 168 color / 15 b&w. Publication Date: 3/1/2009 List Price: US $45.00

  Kerber Romantic Conceptualism Featuring work by 23 international artists including Bas Jan Ader, Tacita Dean, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rodney Graham, Louise Lawler, Yoko Ono and Frances Stark, this illustrated reader takes on romantic motifs (desire, melancholia) and methods (fragmentation, ephemerality, process) in Conceptualism, thwarting the conventional opposition between romantic inwardness and conceptual rationalism. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Ellen Seifermann, Christine Kintisch. Text by Jörg Hiser, Susan Hiller, Collier Schorr, Jan Verwoert. Hardback, 6.75 x 9 in. / 216 pgs / 30 color / 14 b&w. Publication Date: 3/1/2008 List Price: US $39.50

  JRP|Ringier Elaine Sturtevant: The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking Since the mid-1960s, American conceptualist Elaine Sturtevant (born 1930) has been using her multidisciplinary practice to mercilessly interrogate the commercial and symbolic value of art and the male-driven art world. Working predominantly from memory, she copies iconic works by male artists such as Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys and Frank Stella. Often indistinguishable from the originals, Sturtevant's painting, sculpture, video and photographic facsimiles force thorny issues of replica and simulacra, origin and difference, to a crisis point. Designed in close collaboration with the artist, The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking offers a compilation of Sturtevant's largely unpublished writings, along with a selection of essays on her life and work. Sturtevant and her rigorous, committed conceptual strategy are central to ongoing debates on the concept of originality in contemporary art and beyond. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Anne Dressen. Text by Bruce Hainley, Fabrice Hergott. Hbk, 9.25 x 12 in. / 304 pgs / 110 color / 3 b&w. Publication Date: 8/31/2010 List Price: US $55.00

  Dia Art Foundation Lawrence Weiner: Displacement Bound in eye-catching silver cloth, Displacement is a superbly designed artist's book recording Weiner's 1992 show at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York--one of his greatest exhibitions, remembered fondly to this day. It is constituted primarily of Weiner's classic typographic settings, carefully composed for the page, with a sequence of installation shots and a brief commentary on the book and exhibition by Gary Garrels. The interdependence between book and exhibition, which is a motif of Weiner's career, here finds concise expression in a volume that is a treat to move through. . . . . [see book details]

  Artwork by Lawrence Weiner. Hardcover, 9.5 x 9.5 / 112 pgs / 40 color / 24 b&w. Publication Date: 4/2/1991 List Price: US $40.00