Post-War Art in Los Angeles: Essential Catalogs & Books

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  Walther König, Köln Kienholz: Signs of the Time This new Ed Kienholz overview casts the Los Angeles assemblage pioneer as a powerful moral force in postwar art. Kienholz (1927–1994) was a polarizing presence in American art from the start of his career, when his first large-scale installation Roxy’s--a recreation of a brothel--was shown at the Ferus gallery in 1962 (it later caused a huge stir at Documenta 4 in 1968). War, racism, sexism and media exploitation were among his recurrent themes, and he tackled them with an ethical clarity that, at the time, was frequently mistaken for shock tactics. This substantial monograph--the first since his major touring retrospective of 1996--includes more than 200 color plates of Kienholz’s assemblages, reasserting his art as a morally driven enterprise, and pointing towards his ongoing influence among contemporary artists such as Jonathan Meese, Thomas Hirschhorn and John Bock. Edward Kienholz (1927–1994) was born in Fairfield, Washington, and grew up on a farm, where . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Max Hollein, Martina Weinhart. Foreword by Max Hollein. Introduction by Martina Weinhart. Text by Dietmar Dath, Martina Weinhart, Cécile Whiting. Interview with Nancy Reddin Kienholz by Martina Weinhart. Hbk, 10 x 9.75 in. / 256 pgs / 205 color. Publication Date: 2/29/2012 List Price: US $65.00

  Aspen Art Press Mark Grotjahn The paintings and drawings of Los Angeles artist Mark Grotjahn (born 1968) collide abstract and figurative elements into spider-webbed splinters that skew traditional perspective and dazzle the eye. This fully illustrated catalogue constitutes the first survey of his work from the late 1990s to the present and features essays by the art critic Barry Schwabsky and Aspen Art Museum Director Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson. The catalogue chronicles Grotjahn’s series of Butterfly paintings and drawings, in which he combines varying schemes of one-point perspective and a systematic investigation of color to mesmerizing effect; his penetrating flower and face paintings; and a recent series of mask” sculptures that extend Grotjahn’s idiosyncratic investment in process and ritual in painting into three dimensions. . . . . [see book details]

  Foreword by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson. Text by Barry Schwabsky, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson. Hbk, 8.25 x 11.25 in. / 128 pgs / illustrated throughout. Publication Date: 6/30/2012 List Price: US $55.00

  Foggy Notion Books/Pasadena Museum of California Art L.A. Raw: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles, 1945-1980 From Rico Lebrun to Paul McCarthy Until recently, the figurative artists who dominated the Los Angeles art scene of the 1940s and 50s had largely been written out of art history. L.A. Raw is an attempt to right that wrong. Bringing together works by 41 artists in a variety of media, it traces a lineage that connects postwar figurative expressionism to the 1960s and 70s investigations of politics, gender and ethnicity in art. The featured artists include John Altoon, Wallace Berman, William Brice, Hans Burckhardt, Chris Burden, Cameron, Judy Chicago, Connor Everts, Llyn Foulkes, Charles Garabedian, David Hammonds, Robert Heinecken, John Paul Jones, Kim Jones, Ed and Nancy Kienholz, Rico Lebrun, Paul McCarthy, Arnold Mesches, Betye Saar, Ben Sakoguchi, Barbara Smith, James Strombotne, Jan Stussy, Edward Teske, Joyce Treiman, Howard Warshaw, June Wayne, Charles White and Jack Zajac. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Michael Duncan. Afterword by Peter Selz. Hbk, 10 x 10.25 in. / 208 pgs / 161 color. Publication Date: 3/31/2012 List Price: US $45.00

  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

  Pomona College Museum of Art It Happened at Pomona Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973 From 1969 to 1973, a series of radical art projects took place at the far eastern edge of Los Angeles County at the Pomona College Museum of Art, in Claremont, California. Here, Hal Glicksman, a pioneering curator in Light and Space art and former assistant to Walter Hopps, and Helene Winer, later the director of Artists Space and founder of Metro Pictures gallery in New York, curated landmark exhibitions by young local artists who bridged the gap between postminimalism and Conceptual art and presaged the development of postminimalism in the late 1970s. Among these artists were Bas Jan Ader, Michael Asher, Mowry Baden, Lewis Baltz, Chris Burden, Judy Chicago, Ger van Elk, Jack Goldstein, Robert Irwin, William Leavitt, John McCracken, Allen Ruppersberg, James Turrell and William Wegman. Providing unprecedented and revelatory insight into the art history of postwar Los Angeles, It Happened at Pomona chronicles the activities of artists, scholars, students . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Rebecca G. McGrew, Glenn R. Phillips, Marie Shurkus. Text by Thomas Crow, David Pagel. Pbk, 9 x 13 in. / 386 pgs / 120 color / 160 b&w. Publication Date: 8/31/2011 List Price: US $49.95

  Hatje Cantz MEX/LA: Mexican Modernisms in Los Angeles 1930-1985 The years from 1945 to 1985 are often identified as the moment in which Los Angeles established itself as a leading cultural center in America. However, this conception of its history entirely excludes the very controversial presence of the Mexican muralists, as well as the work of other artists who were influenced by them and responded to their ideas. It is likewise often thought that Los Angeles' Mexican culture arrived full formed from outside it, when in fact that culture originated within the city--it was in Los Angeles and Southern California that José Vasconcelos, Ricardo Flores Magón, Octavio Paz and other intellectuals developed the iconography of modern Mexico, while Anglos and Chicanos were developing their own. David Alfaro Siqueiros, Clemente Orozco, Alfredo Ramos Martínez and Jean Charlot made some of their earliest murals in Los Angeles, influencing the Mexican, Mexican-American and Chicano artists of the 1970s and 80s. MEX/LA: Mexican Modernism(s) . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Mariana Botey, Harry Gamboa Jr., Ana Elena Mallet, Catha Paquette, Jennifer Sternad, et. al. Hbk, 8.5 x 10.5 in. / 224 pgs / 75 color / 140 b&w. Publication Date: 12/31/2011 List Price: US $60.00

  Tilton Gallery L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints L.A. Object offers a historical overview of the Los Angeles assemblage movement of the 1960s and 70s. It focuses on works by primarily African-American artists often omitted from mainstream gallery and museum historical exhibitions who were working during the civil rights movement, the 1965 Watts riots and the era's general social and cultural upheaval: Ed Bereal, Wallace Berman, Nathaniel Bustion, Alonzo Davis, Dale Brockman Davis, Charles Dickson, Mel Edwards, David Hammons, Daniel La Rue Johnson, Ed Kienholz, Ron Miyashiro, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Joe Ray, Betye Saar, Kenzi Shiokava and Timothy Washington. Central to this book are the unique body prints of David Hammons--ironic, often political commentaries relevant to the African-American experience that are presented for the first time within the context from which they arose. Also included are photographic contributions by Bruce Talamon and Harry Drinkwater. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Connie Rogers Tilton, Lindsay Charlwood. Text by Steve Cannon, Dale Davis, Josine Ianco-Starrels, Kellie Jones, Yael Lipschutz, John Outterbridge, Greg Pitts, Betye Saar, Tobias Wofford. Hbk, 10.5 x 10 in. / 424 pgs / 249 color / 252 b&w. Publication Date: 9/30/2011 List Price: US $65.00

  Hatje Cantz ASCO: Elite of the Obscure A Retrospective 1972-1987 ASCO: Elite of the Obscure is the first comprehensive monograph to survey the wide-ranging activities of the Chicano performance and conceptual art group ASCO. Active between 1972 and 1987, ASCO began as a tight-knit core of artists from east Los Angeles: Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón and Patssi Valdez. Taking their name from the Spanish idiomatic word for disgust and nausea, ASCO launched their response to turbulent socio-political conditions in Los Angeles and the larger international context through performance, public art and multimedia. Geographically and culturally segregated from the then-nascent Los Angeles contemporary art scene, and aesthetically at odds with the emerging Chicano art movement, ASCO united to explore and exploit what they saw as the unlimited media of the conceptual. ASCO: Elite of the Obscure includes reproductions of previously unpublished works and reprinted historical documents, along with new critical essays. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by C. Ondine Chavoya, Rita Gonzalez, David E. James, Amelia Jones, Chon A. Noriega, Jesse Lerner, Deborah Cullen, Maris Bustamante, Colin Gunckel, David Román, Raúl Homero Villa, Josh Kun, Tere Romo, Mario Ontiveros, Ramón García, Michelle Habell-Pallán. Hbk, 7.75 x 9.5 in. / 432 pgs / 250 color. Publication Date: 11/30/2011 List Price: US $60.00

  JRP|Ringier Jim Shaw: My Mirage 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 . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Lionel Bovier, Fabrice Stroun. Text by Fabrice Stroun. Pbk, 8.25 x 10.25 in. / 240 pgs / 150 color. Publication Date: 10/31/2011 List Price: US $55.00

  Walther König, Köln Vija Celmins The many admirers and devotees of Vija Celmins (born 1938) at last possess a serious overview of the Latvian-born, New York-based artist's work in this volume. For more than a half-century, Celmins has quietly mined a narrow but infinitely rich range of theme and palette, extrapolating whole worlds of photorealist detail from four seemingly simple motifs: the surface of the sea, the night sky, the desert and the spider web. In oil paintings, prints and charcoal or graphite pencil drawings that revisit these motifs over and over, as if researching them to comprehend their infinities of detail, Celmins confines herself to the colors black, white and gray, preserving a spacious sobriety and calm exactitude for her potentially romantic subjects. This essential volume reproduces more than 60 variations of Celmins' precisely depicted seas, skies, deserts and webs, which in the artist's seemingly dispassionate renderings restore vastness and wonder to our sense of . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Julia Friedrich, Kasper König. Texts by Hubertus Butin, Julia Friedrich. Hbk, 8.75 x 9.75 in. / 152 pgs / 70 color. Publication Date: 9/30/2011 List Price: US $55.00

  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

  Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University Elliott Hundley: The Bacchae Elliott Hundley (born 1975) conceives of his exhibitions as theatrical environments--dense narrative landscapes populated by actors. By interspersing his monumental collages with carefully placed sculptural groupings, Hundley creates immersive environments that restage and animate the classical texts that are his sources. These epic installations collapse historical and narrative time, placing equal emphasis on classical mythology, art history and the socio-political conditions of the present. Published for one of Hundley's most significant museum exhibitions to date, this catalogue is the first sustained treatment of the artist's work. Building on Hundley's previous investigations of Euripides' tragedy The Bacchae, it examines the artist's effort to elaborate a critical relationship between classical literary sources and contemporary society. Essays by Christopher Bedford, poet Anne Carson and art historian Richard Meyer explicate the many facets of Hundley's sources and processes. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Christopher Bedford, Anne Carson, Richard Meyer. Pbk, 8.5 x 10.5 in. / 84 pgs / 68 color. Publication Date: 3/31/2012 List Price: US $39.95

  JRP|Ringier Walead Beshty: Natural Histories Moments spent in elevators, check-ins at airports, subway rides—these are all examples of the kind of in-between” time that fascinates Walead Beshty and supplies so much of the material for his photographs. In-between time” applies to civic space, too—depopulated modernist housing developments that sit precariously between evacuation and demolition (explored by Beshty in his Excursionist Views), plants, weeds and vegetation on isolated highway medians (Island Flora), or abandoned shopping malls (American Passages). More recently, Beshty’s adventures in the in-between” have become a means of production, as he makes creative use of such mundane procedures as air travel or sending a package. This monograph presents a ten-year overview of Walead Beshty’s approach to photographic and sculptural representation, and contains newly commissioned essays by Suzanne Hudson and Nicolas Bourriaud, as well as a conversation between Bob Nickas and Beshty. . . . . [see book details]

  Foreword by Jacob Fabricius, Ferran Barenblit. Text by Nicolas Bourriaud, Suzanne Hudson, Bob Nickas. Pbk, 9.25 x 11.25 in. / 160 pgs / 97 color / 97 b&w. Publication Date: 5/31/2011 List Price: US $55.00

  The Power Plant Pae White: Material Mutters Pae White's work roams exuberantly across genres from furniture, textiles and graphic design to sculptural installations, in particular her monumental tapestries that form the focus of this clothbound volume. It particularly highlights Sea Beast, a 2010 work commissioned by The Power Plant, which incorporates a found macramé wall hanging. . . . . [see book details]

  Introduction by Gregory Burke. Text by Oliver Zybok, Susan Emerling. Hbk, 7.75 x 9.5 in. / 80 pgs / 32 color / 1 b&w. Publication Date: 7/31/2011 List Price: US $45.00

  D.A.P/Distributed Art Publishers/MOCA, LA/JRP|Ringier Doug Aitken: The Idea of the West Sunsets over the Pacific. "Surfers." "Movie stars." "Coyotes in the street." "Sex." Doug Aitken's The Idea of the West gathers the responses of 1,000 people on the streets who were asked "What is your idea of the West?" and assembles this amazing manifesto from their replies. Through an assortment of more than 200 color and black-and-white images juxtaposed with responses to this question, The Idea of the West takes the reader on a high-speed journey across space and time to trace the mythology of the New West. The volume also features conversational fragments by a host of creators based in the Pacific region, including Devendra Banhart, Bruce Brown, Charles Burnett, Exene Cervenka, Fallen Fruit, Simone Forti, Fritz Haeg, Miranda July, No Age, Raymond Pettibon, Rodarte and Ryan Trecartin. A hybrid artist's book that brings together elements from classic 1970s photobooks, agit-prop paperbacks and music zines, The Idea of the West reflects . . . . [see book details]

  Hbk, 11.25 x 8.75 in. / 160 pgs / 124 color / 72 b&w. Publication Date: 1/31/2010 List Price: US $55.00

  The Museum of Modern Art, New York Doug Aitken: Sleepwalkers In January and February of 2007, the Los Angeles-based video artist Doug Aitken projected a new work, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art and the New York arts institution Creative Time, onto seven facades on and around MoMA's fabled West Fifty-third Street building. Sleepwalkers was both inspired by, and offered in opposition to, the densely built midtown environment; it integrated itself onto the surfaces on which it was projected, and it challenged viewers' perceptions of architecture and public space. The piece, which follows the trajectories of five characters as they make their way through nocturnal New York, explores Aitken's key recurring themes: broken and recombined narratives, the rhythm and flow of information and images, and the relationship of individuals to their environment. The viewer, as a pedestrian, a participant and a vital component of New York's energetic system, becomes part of the work, and of the interactive personal landscape that . . . . [see book details]

  Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry and Anne Pasternak. Text by Klaus Biesenbach, Peter Eleey, Doug Aitken. Paperback, 8.75 x 10.75 in. / 176 pgs / 275 color / 5 b&w. Publication Date: 1/1/2007 List Price: US $39.95

  Radius Books Charles Arnoldi: 1972-2008 The Los Angeles painter and sculptor Charles Arnoldi has been described as an artist who draws in space” to create his unique assemblages. Throughout his long career, he has been fascinated with shape and pattern as they apply to advanced formal concerns, from his 1970s paintings made entirely of natural forms to his current work, of which the architect Frank Gehry has said, the maturing Arnoldi has a secure color sense and the ability to work at large scale as well as to produce tiny, exquisite watercolors.” Gehry, who provides the introduction for this first comprehensive monograph, also cites Arnoldi as an influence in his own work, saying, this is an artist whose best is yet to come, who…is still experimental and still willing to risk.” Charles Arnoldi is represented by Charles Cowles Gallery in New York, Modernism in San Francisco, and Charlotte Jackson Fine Art in Santa Fe. . . . . [see book details]

  Foreword by Frank Gehry. Conversation with Gregory Amenoff, Fred Hoffman, Charlotte Jackson, Michael Zakian, Hbk, 11 x 12 in. / 360 pgs / 160 color. Publication Date: 7/1/2008 List Price: US $65.00

  Walther König, Köln Art from Los Angeles: From the 60s-90s Since the 1960s, Los Angeles has been a hub for groundbreaking art. This slim volume features work by Bas Jan Ader, Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Douglas Huebler, Larry Johnson, Mike Kelley, William Leavitt, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, Raymond Pettibon, Stephen Prina, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha and Christopher Williams. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Gregory Williams. Foreword by Karola Grässlin. Paperback, 8.5 x 10.5 in. / 48 pgs / 50 color. Publication Date: 3/1/2008 List Price: US $26.00

  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

  JRP|Ringier John Baldessari: Parse John Baldessari (born 1931) is a luminary in the realms of Conceptual art and book art, and one of the most important figures in contemporary art of the last 40 years. Since his sensational Cremation Project of 1970, for which he incinerated every single painting he had made between 1953 and 1966, Baldessari's work has mined the tensions between language, image and sign-making. Baldessari unpicks the very mechanisms of media representation, and even the idea of artistic subject matter itself, using painting, photography, film/video, collage and reliefs, integrating images and text from advertising and movies into his works. Since 1980, Baldessari has worked mostly without text in serial photographs and pictures, and strategies such as overpainting, visual omissions and withheld information have increasingly taken on the earlier function of language. For this superbly designed book, Baldessari has designed a sequence of enigmatically fragmentary and geometrically emphatic images, arranged rhythmically across the . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Beatrix Ruf. Hbk, 13 x 10 in. / 312 pgs / 300 color. Publication Date: 8/31/2010 List Price: US $95.00

  Gregory R. Miller & Co. Uta Barth: The Long Now Often blurred or with only one element rendered sharply, clinging to the margin of the composition, Uta Barth's deceptively simple photographs of ordinary, ambiguous places are both elegant and challenging. Walls, windows, patches of light on a rug, the glow of an out-of-focus glance toward the horizon: all these provoke phenomenological reflections on perception and subjectivity, often suspending a viewer in the midst of the customary attempt to make sense of what is being seen, to reduce it to an accessible package of associations and meaning. "Certain expectations are unfulfilled: expectations of what a photograph normally depicts, of how we are supposed to read the space in the image, of how a picture normally presents itself on the wall," Barth has said. "This kind of questioning and reorientation is the point of entry and discovery, not only in a cognitive way, but in an almost visceral, physical and personal sense." This . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Jonathan Crary, Russell Ferguson, Holly Myers. Hbk, 11.5 x 10 in. / 384 pgs / illustrated throughout / multiple gatefolds. Publication Date: 7/31/2010 List Price: US $75.00

  RoseGallery, Los Angeles Wallace Berman: Photographs The quintessential visual artist of the Beat generation, Wallace Berman's influence has continued to radiate throughout the American art scene and in our popular culture since the 1950s. As an artist, Berman worked in relative obscurity up until his premature death, at the age of 50, in 1976. Since then, however, interest in his work, and recognition of its importance, have steadily increased. The subject of the recent--and highly lauded--traveling exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle, he was the central and binding figure in a diverse community of artists, poets, actors and musicians, and was revered for his wisdom as well as his achievements as an artist, publisher and filmmaker. However, until the 1999 discovery of an archive of his photographic negatives, very few people have known that Berman was also an extremely accomplished photographer. He documented the West Coast Beat culture of the 1950s, the . . . . [see book details]

  Edited and introduction by Kristine McKenna, Lorraine Wild. Hardcover, 9.75 x 11.75 in. / 160 pgs / 140 duotone. Publication Date: 5/1/2007 List Price: US $50.00

  Damiani The Art and Life of Chaz Bojorquez Curated by Marco Klefisch & Alberto Scabbia This monograph charts the life and career of Chaz Bojorquez, known as Chaz,” a Los Angeles-born Mexican-American artist who began in the Cholo” gang graffiti tradition but quickly arrived at his own groundbreaking style. This book includes previously unreleased photographs and traces the artist's story in fascinating detail. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Francois Chastanet, Greg Escalante, Usugrow. Compiled by Marco Klefisch, Alberto Scabbia. Hbk, 9.75 x 11.25 in. / 190 pgs / illustrated throughout. Publication Date: 3/31/2010 List Price: US $50.00

  Gregory R. Miller & Co./Aspen Art Press Mark Bradford: Merchant Posters This book gathers for the first time an extensive selection of American artist—or builder and demolisher,” as he describes himself—Mark Bradford's gorgeous, searing and heavily textured merchant posters.” The original printed posters, collected by Bradford from around his Central Los Angeles neighborhood, are brightly colored local advertisements that target the area's vulnerable lower-income residents. For Bradford, they serve as both the formal and conceptual underpinnings of his works on paper, décollages/collages that engage with the pressures of the cityscape. The sheer density of advertising creates a psychic mass, an overlay that can sometimes be very tense or aggressive,” he notes; If there's a 20-foot wall with one advertisement for a movie about war, then you have the repetition of the same image over and over—war, violence, explosions, things being blown apart. As a citizen, you have to participate in that every day. You have to walk by until it's changed.” Eagerly . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Malik Gaines, Ernest Hardy, Philippe Vergne, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson. Hbk, 11 x 9 in. / 160 pgs / 100 color. Publication Date: 3/31/2010 List Price: US $50.00

  Hatje Cantz Charles Brittin: West and South Throughout the 1950s, Charles Brittin was the unofficial house photographer for the Beat community that coalesced around the artist Wallace Berman. Brittin settled in Venice Beach, California, in 1951, and his beach shack became a hangout for the Berman circle, which included actors Dean Stockwell and Dennis Hopper, artist John Altoon, curator Walter Hopps and poet David Meltzer, among many others. A self-taught photographer, Brittin was working as a mailman at the time, and spent much of his free time wandering the streets with a camera; he came to know Venice intimately, and his pictures of the town are freighted with a hushed beauty and forlorn sweetness. In the early 1960s the focus of Brittin's life shifted dramatically when he became involved with the civil rights movement. "I suddenly realized I was compelled to do something," Brittin recalls, "because the times demanded it." As a photographer for the Congress of Racial . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Kristine McKenna, Lorraine Wild, Roman Alonso, Lisa Eisner. Hbk, 9.5 x 13 in. / 216 pgs / 150 duotone. Publication Date: 4/30/2011 List Price: US $60.00

  Locus + Publishing Ltd. Chris Burden This comprehensive overview, the first to appear in almost a decade, examines an artistic career, that now must be viewed as one of the most fascinating in the history of contemporary art. From his highly controversial and seminal performance works of the early 1970s, to his complex, imaginative installations and monumental sculptures, the art of Chris Burden uniquely informs as well as incorporates the major artistic undercurrents of the last three decades. Not only has the artist made a major contribution to the history of body-related performance art, but the artist's fascination with systems of power, societal organization, architectural structure and technological systems, have resulted in an extraordinary body of sculptural objects and environmental installations over the last 35 years. In compiling this publication the artist has worked closely with curator and long time associate Fred Hoffman, taking this opportunity to re-examine his work afresh and revealing images that are unpublished . . . . [see book details]

  Essays by Fred Hoffman, Paul Schimmel, Kristine Stiles and Robert Storr. Hardcover, 9.5 x 11.5 in. / 256 pgs / illustrated throughout. Publication Date: 11/15/2005 List Price: US $85.00

  Charta Lawrence Carroll Born in Melbourne, Australia in 1954 and based for many years in Los Angeles, Lawrence Carroll makes paintings and sculptural objects that evoke, either physically or metaphorically, the elusive intricacies of the everyday. His muted palette and introspective approach recall Giotto and Morandi, Johns and Judd. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Laura Mattioli Rossi, Angela Vettese. Hardback, 9.5 x 10.75 in. / 160 pgs / 191 color. Publication Date: 9/1/2008 List Price: US $75.00

  Paul Kasmin William N. Copley: Cply X-Rated Painter, gallerist, writer and collector William N. Copley (1919-1996) was one of Surrealism's most active advocates in America (especially in Los Angeles), and his paintings are increasingly recognized as important precursors to Pop. A close friend to Duchamp and Man Ray, Copley always courted controversy, never more memorably than with his infamous X-Rated exhibition at the New York Cultural Center in 1974. Copley's cartoonish works of the 1950s developed an overtly sexual iconography in the 1960s, which in turn prefigured his erotic and arguably pornographic work of the 1970s. Published on the occasion of Paul Kasmin Gallery's reconstruction of the 1974 show, the book includes 38 superb color plates of the paintings--many of which have not been seen since the original exhibition--as well as Copley's fascinating 1977 memoir of his early years as an exponent and gallerist for Surrealism, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dealer." . . . . [see book details]

  Hbk, 10.75 x 10.75 in. / 140 pgs / 38 color / 8 b&w. Publication Date: 4/30/2011 List Price: US $65.00

  Four Corners Books Come Alive!: The Spirited Art of Sister Corita At 18, Corita Kent (1918-1986) entered the Roman Catholic order of Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles, where she taught art and eventually ran the art department. After more than 30 years, at the end of the 1960s, she left the order to devote herself to making her own work. Over a 35-year career she made watercolors, posters, books and banners--and most of all, serigraphs--in an accessible and dynamic style that appropriated techniques from advertising, consumerism and graffiti. The earliest of it, which she began showing in 1951, borrowed phrases and depicted images from the Bible; by the 1960s, she was using song lyrics and publicity slogans as raw material. Eschewing convention, she produced cheap, readily available multiples, including a postage stamp. Her work was popular but largely neglected by the art establishment--though it was always embraced by such design luminaries as Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Julie Ault, Daniel Berrigan. Paperback, 9.75 x 11.25 in. / 128 pgs / 100 color / 5 b&w. Publication Date: 3/1/2007 List Price: US $29.95

  Charta Catherine Corman: Daylight Noir Raymond Chandler's Imagined City Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler's Imagined City comprises photographs of all those ominous, forbidding Los Angeles locations so hauntingly described by Chandler in his novels. From Malibu Pier to the Hollywood Sign, from Union Station to the Beverly Hills Hotel, from MGM Studios to Musso and Frank's Grill, these locales form the geography of Chandler's imagination, and conjure a world not yet entirely vanished. Clive James wrote of Chandler's fascination with Los Angeles that "when he said that it had as much personality as a paper cup, he was saying what he liked about it." But Chandler was also drawn to the Hopperesque loneliness of the city, to that sense of isolate existences that never merge. In these photographs, Catherine Corman (editor of Joseph Cornell's Dreams) has given us, as Jonathan Lethem writes in his preface, "a supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places... these streets and buildings we have erected in order . . . . [see book details]

  Introduction by Catherine Corman. Preface by Jonathan Lethem. Text by Raymond Chandler. Pbk, 8.5 x 8.5 in. / 128 pgs / 54 duotone. Publication Date: 10/31/2009 List Price: US $39.95

  JRP|Ringier/Halle fur Kunst Liz Craft If California is often characterized by the myth of the easy rider, by relaxed sexiness, fun and creative experimentation, Liz Craft, who was born in Mammoth and studied sculpture at UCLA, is in the right place. A Californian dream of sun, love, and peace with a sharp dose of critical awareness, her sculptures appear to be where they are by accident, as if borrowed from another age or last night's high. Her world of hallucinations, allusions and impressions is full of the folkloric and the bizarre--Watts Towers, hippie Venice Beach, unicorns, dwarves, witches and escapees from Disneyland. In this psychedelic habitat, the real develops into the surreal and the everyday becomes strange, pointing up the fleetingness of the moment and the uncertainty of being. As seen at Regen Projects in Los Angeles and Metro Pictures, Marianne Boesky and the 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Bettina Steinbruegge. Text by Bettina Steinbruegge, Bruce Hainley, Heike Munder. Hardcover, 9 x 13 in. / 160 pgs / 100 color / 20 b&w. Publication Date: 3/1/2007 List Price: US $29.00

  JRP|Ringier Meg Cranston: Hot Pants in a Cold Cold World Meg Cranston's work often combines text and imagery from popular culture. With Kippenberger-esque energy and wit, Cranston investigates anthropological and physical issues in sculpture, installation, painting and drawing. Recent shows have featured, for instance, drawings and sculptures of bad teeth and their imagined physiognomic significance, a large composite photograph of an average-size American and a performance about the life of Marvin Gaye. This first monograph on Cranston's work includes texts by Carole Ann Klonarides and Tirdad Zolghadr, as well as an interview with the artist by Nico Israel. Published with Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand. Meg Cranston has shown internationally since 1988. She has been the recipient of a New School of Social Research Faculty Development Grant, an artist grant from the Penny McCall Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a faculty research grant from the Center for Asian American Studies at UCLA. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Brian Butler, Meg Cranston, Nico Israel, Tirdad Zolghadr, Carol Ann Klonarides. Paperback, 8 x 9.5 in. / 202 pgs / 190 color / 50 b&w. Publication Date: 8/1/2008 List Price: US $49.00

  Ballroom Marfa Aaron Curry & Thomas Houseago: Two Face Two Face is an exhibition by Ballroom Marfa artists-in-residence Aaron Curry (born 1972) and Thomas Houseago (born 1972). Based in Los Angeles, Curry and Houseago are sculptors who adopt a Janus-faced approach to form and process, simultaneously looking to the past and the future. Their Marfa exhibition is the culmination of a joint residency that nurtured the intense dialogue the artists have established. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Michael Darling. Hbk, 8.25 x 11 in. / 184 pgs / 125 color. Publication Date: 12/31/2010 List Price: US $50.00

  Aperture John Divola: Three Acts In 1973, California artist John Divola began the first of three highly ambitious and original bodies of work that form Three Acts, the first book dedicated to them. His Vandalism series comprises black-and-white photographs of interiors of abandoned houses. Entering illegally, Divola spray-painted markings that referenced action painting as readily as the graffiti that was then becoming a cultural phenomenon. For the following year's Los Angeles International Airport Noise Abatement series, he photographed a condemned neighborhood bought out to serve as a noise buffer for new runways, focusing on evidence of previous unsanctioned entries by other vandals. His final work, Zuma, documents the destruction of an abandoned beachfront property by the artist and others, as it deteriorates frame by frame and eventually burns. Divola has much in common with artists such as Bruce Nauman and Robert Smithson who have used photography to investigate other topics. He describes his innovative practice succinctly: . . . . [see book details]

  Essay by David Campany. Interview by Jan Tumlir. Hardcover, 11 x 9.25 in. / 144 pgs / 38 color / 62 duotone. Publication Date: 5/1/2006 List Price: US $50.00

  The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Lecia Dole-Recio The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, features young, emerging Los Angeles-based artists in its MOCA Focus series. From August until October of 2006, the museum will feature the work of Dole-Recio, who is represented by Richard Telles Gallery. This is her first museum exhibition and the first monograph on her work. . . . . [see book details]

  Essay by Brooke Hodge. Paperback, 8 x 7 in. / 48 pgs / 30 color. Publication Date: 8/15/2006 List Price: US $24.95

  Hammer Museum Eden's Edge: Fifteen L.A. Artists Published to accompany the Hammer Museum's Summer 2007 exhibition, Eden's Edge, this exploration of art made in Los Angeles during the past decade crosses generations, mediums, and materials to link 15 artists of singular personal vision, whether internationally established or not-yet-discovered. The artists--who include Ginny Bishton, Mark Bradford, Liz Craft, Sharon Ellis, Matt Greene, Elliott Hundley, Stanya Kahn and Harry Dodge, Monica Majoli, Rebecca Morales, Matthew Monahan, Lari Pittman, Ken Price, Jason Rhodes, Anna Sew Hoy and Jim Shaw--all track, via their work and vision, a persistent consciousness of change and contradiction. The works collected here are intensely crafted and conjure richly imagistic worlds in which landscape and figure fracture and metamorphose. Together, they establish a generational continuum, integrating newly emerging artists with their more established peers. This clothbound volume includes a critical essay by curator Gary Garrels that contextualizes both the exhibition and the artists' work within the art and . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Gary Garrels. Clothbound, 8.5 x 10.25 in. / 144 pgs / 100 color. Publication Date: 6/1/2007 List Price: US $35.00

  JRP|Ringier Piero Golia: Desert Interviews or How to Jump Off the Roof and Not Hit the Ground In 2005, Italian artist Piero Golia (born 1974) founded the Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles with fellow artist and long-time friend Eric Wesley. This limited-edition book, composed of discussions between artists, explores the development of the school and its methods, which in the spirit of Fluxus, follow a trajectory based on the joys of instantaneous action. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Lisa Mark. Texts by John Armleder, Andrew Berardini, Piero Golia, Pierre Huyghe, Richard Jackson, Emilie Renard, Eric Wesley. Pbk, 5.75 x 8.25 in. / 100 pgs / 9 color / 11 b&w. Publication Date: 1/31/2011 List Price: US $28.00

  The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Alexandra Grant MOCA Focus Through a combination of conceptual and intuitive operations, Alexandra Grant transforms texts into patterns of color, shape and form, giving them new life. Her collaborations with Michael Joyce, the renowned hyperfiction writer, and the use of the writings of theorist, novelist and academic Hélčne Cixous inspired Grant to create The Ladder Quartet, a series of four large-scale paintings that can be aptly described as "wordscapes" or "landscapes of language." These paintings, along with new work, are presented here, along with essays by LA MOCA curator Alma Ruiz and Hélčne Cixous. Alexandra Grant received a MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco in 2000. She had a solo exhibition at Gallery 16:1 in Santa Monica in 2004 and has been in numerous group shows across the country. Her exhibition in L.A. MOCA's Focus series is the first major museum showing of her work. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Alma Ruiz. Text by Hélčne Cixous. Paperback, 11 x 9 in./ 72 pgs / 35 illustrations. Publication Date: 7/1/2007 List Price: US $24.95

  Deitch Projects Matt Greene: Surrender! The Los Angeles-based artist Matt Greene is becoming known for his ethereal landscapes of fleshy fungi and bushy bombshells, paintings that explore his favorite shelves in the library: vintage pornography, fairy tales, horticulture, horror films, nineteenth-century Symbolist art, and, of course, the history of Modernism. Greene's canvases unite those disparate and sometimes deliberately kitschy interests--and the weighty themes of gender, sexuality and epistemology that accompany them--in his distinctly serious and polished practice, creating a compelling tension between the two aesthetics. In this case, that tension is a bit higher than usual, as the artist shifts his attention from vintage to contemporary pornography. This new suite of paintings, the heart of his recent first solo show at Deitch Projects, is inspired by video erotica and uses its screen images to address highbrow concerns such as surface, color and space. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Benjamin Weissman, Trinie Dalton. Clothbound, 12 x 9.25 in. / 56 pgs / 14 color. Publication Date: 3/1/2007 List Price: US $20.00

  Evil Twin Publications Fritz Haeg: The Sundown Salon Unfolding Archive From 2001 to 2006, peripatetic artist Fritz Haeg (of Edible Estates fame) hosted a series of gatherings known as Sundown Salon in his geodesic domed residence in the hills of Los Angeles. Haeg's own activities include radical gardening, housing design, curation, grassroots education and political activism; such pursuits dovetail nicely with his salons, at which participants did everything from knitting to dancing. Over the years dozens of artists and orgnizations participated, including Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Anna Sew Hoy, Feral Childe, Eve Fowler, Katie Grinnan, Janfamily, Pipilotti Rist, robbinschilds and KnitKnit, LTTR, K48 and index magazines. Sundown Salon, a beautifully constructed document of those activities, is just as polymorphous, serving as both a book and an exhibition. Printed on a single accordion-folded page, the text (on one side) can be flipped through and read, or the pictures (on the other) can be unfurled to display a 140-foot artwork. Conceived by Haeg . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Fritz Haeg, Stacy Wakefield. Clth, 8.5 x 8.5 in. / 380 pgs / 800 color / 90 b&w. Limited edition of 500 copie Publication Date: 7/31/2009 List Price: US $150.00

  nyehaus/foundation 20 21 Tim Hawkinson Among other things, Tim Hawkinson's art celebrates the process and materiality of the work itself. This limited edition manual-esque exhibition catalogue, designed by the prominent New York firm, Helicopter, LLC, seeks to reflect that interaction with special features like a tough, transparent plastic jacket that exposes the book's spiral binding, printed plastic section dividers, a pull-out text by the prominent Los Angeles novelist and film critic Steve Erickson, two posters, numerous gatefolds and a sound chip. Dramatic and typically unique, this volume explores the geography of bookmaking just as Hawkinson's artwork explores the geography of the human form. Tim Hawkinson was born in San Francisco in 1960 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He has shown his work extensively for more than 25 years--recently at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Tim Nye. Text by Steve Erickson. Spiral bound, 8 x 12 in. / 50 pgs / 10 color. Publication Date: 12/15/2007 List Price: US $55.00

  Turner Yishai Jusidman: Paintworks Los Angeles-based Mexican painter Yishai Jusidman is known for conceptually playful works that implicate the viewer, often by depicting an idealized gallery space and fictional viewers within the frame of the canvas. This book is a retrospective of the 11 series of works that he has produced from 1987 to the present. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Barry Schwabsky, Christian Viveros-Faune. Clth, 10.75 x 10.5 in. / 240 pgs / 154 color. Publication Date: 8/31/2009 List Price: US $45.00

  Hatje Cantz The Work of Glenn Kaino: Communicating Rooks Cofounder of Los Angeles' artist-run Deep River Gallery, former Creative Director of Napster and creator of ueber.com, a MySpace alternative made for and by artists, Los Angeles-based artist Glenn Kaino has a multifaceted creative practice. His 2007 interactive installation work, Burning Boards--a room filled with chessboards whose pieces are different-size burning candles, in which competitors play matches using tongs to move the dripping candles--is characteristic of his playfulness and his penchant for meditating on political, pop-cultural and identity issues without being literal. This monograph, which focuses on kinetic sculptures and large-scale installations created over the past 10 years, includes contributions by Hu Fang, Director of Guangzhou's Vitamin Creative Space, LAXART founder Lauri Firstenberg and Eugenie Joo, Director of Education and Public Programs at the New Museum. Born in 1970, Glenn Kaino, who was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, is currently represented by The Project in New York. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Eungie Joo, Daniel Chamberlin, Hu Fang, Lauri Firstenberg. Hbk, 7.5 x 10 in. / 144 pgs / 150 color. Publication Date: 9/30/2009 List Price: US $55.00

  JRP|Ringier Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onwards 1995-2008 In 1995, Mike Kelley devised the Educational Complex, an amalgam of every school he attended and of the house he grew up in, "with all the parts I couldn't remember left out"--a total environment, "sort of like the model of a Modernist community college." The blind spots in this model represent forgotten ("repressed") zones, and so are reconceived by Kelley as sites of institutional abuse, for which specific traumas were devised (each having their own video and sculptural component). For Kelley, this work marks the beginning of a series of projects in which pseudo-autobiography, repressed-memory syndrome and the reinterpretation of previous pieces become the tools for a poetic deconstruction of such complexes and the way we interact with and narrate them. Educational Complex Onwards, 1995-2008 is the first book to collect these works. Each project within the series is extensively documented by artist's texts and reference material, while essays by Diedrich . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Anne Pontégnie. Text by Mike Kelley, Anne Pontégnie, Diedrich Diederichsen, Howard Singerman. Hbk, 10.25 x 12 in. / 344 pgs / 300 color. Publication Date: 1/31/2010 List Price: US $70.00

  Hatje Cantz Publishers Norman Klein: Bleeding Through Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 A loosely constructed documentary underlying a flexible literary journey, Bleeding Through is an urban bricolage held together by the outline of a novel spanning 66 years. An interactive DVD-ROM, it explores the ideas of renowned cultural historian Norman Klein. At the center of the story is Molly--based on a real-life person--who may be hiding a murderer. She lives within a three-square-mile area near downtown Los Angeles, a death zone where more cinematic murders have been committed than anywhere else in the world. This neighborhood, one of the most complex ethnographic districts in the United States, is represented in Hollywood movies, urban legends, and real estate boosterism in ways that erase the lived ethnographic reality. Out of this rich blend of narratives, users must decide what to include and what to leave out so that their own version of the story will become legible--thus the reader discovers how fictions are concocted and . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Rosemary Comella, Andreas Kratky, Norman Klein. Boxed, 9.25 x 6.5 in. / 60 pgs DVD. Publication Date: 7/2/2003 List Price: US $40.00

  Walther König, Köln David Korty This first monograph on Los Angeles painter David Korty--who is represented in LA by Michael Kohn Gallery and in London by Sadie Coles, HQ--features works from 2000 to 2008. Artforum described the work's "woozy atmospherics" as both "calming" and "hallucinogenic". . . . . [see book details]

  Pbk, 6.75 x 8.75 in. / 104 pgs / 83 color. Publication Date: 9/1/2008 List Price: US $42.00

  JRP|Ringier/BDV Bureau des videos David Lamelas: Films 1969-1972/2004 This DVD brings together, for the first time, nine films produced between 1969 and 1972 by David Lamelas, a pioneer in Conceptual cinema and art. The Buenos Aires-born and Los Angeles-based artist introduced the notion of real-time information in the gallery with the 1968 Venice Biennale installation, Office of Information About the Vietnam War. His films include A Study of Relationships Between Inner and Outer Space (1969), which explores the organization of cinematic production within the exhibition space, expanding out to take in views of the city and then current events: in another kind of space, men had recently landed on the moon. Altogether, this collection clarifies the value of Lamelas' work--which has recently appeared at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis--as an incisive analysis of the information age and a forbear of contemporary video and multimedia work. Includes notes on every film . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Nicolas Trembley. DVD video, PAL Multizone, 5.5 x 7.5 in. Publication Date: 3/1/2007 List Price: US $45.00

  The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Lisa Lapinski: MOCA Focus A onetime philosophy student who's willing to get her hands dirty, Lisa Lapinski makes elaborate sculptures that embody a kind of cognitive dissonance. "Nightstand" (2005), a room-size construction that debuted at the 2006 Whitney Biennial, reconfigures traditional Shaker furniture to suggest the frenzied psychedelia of religious ecstasy found in Shaker gift drawings. The piece, her most ambitious to date, took more than a year to complete; to acquire the skills necessary to build it out of walnut, Lapinski entered a woodworking program at a junior college outside of Los Angeles. "The retired engineers felt sorry for me, because it took me so long to catch on," she recalled, "but I can build my own kitchen cabinets now." Critic Bruce Hainley has credited Lapinsky, who received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2004, with "providing new thought about what sculpture might be." . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Lisa Mark. Text by Bennett Simpson. Hardback, 7.5 x 10 in. / 60 pgs / 50 color. Publication Date: 6/1/2008 List Price: US $24.95

  The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Liz Larner This monograph is the first U.S. museum survey of the work of Los Angeles-based sculptor Liz Larner. It will examine Larner's work of the last 15 years, a period during which she has created a body of category-defying objects and installations. Larner's work is characterized by an intensity of purpose and a deep understanding of form. . . . . [see book details]

  By Russell Ferguson. Hardcover, 9 x 11 in. / 120 pgs / 60 color / 10 b&w. Publication Date: 11/2/2001 List Price: US $24.95

  JRP|Ringier Elad Lassry Drawing on the language and conventions of media and advertizing, Israeli-born artist Elad Lassry (born 1977) focuses his attention on the surfaces and histories of the things and people he captures. The first monograph devoted to his work, this volume surveys Lassry's visually seductive photographs and films, which thematize the relationship between the image and the picture as an object. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Beatrix Ruf. Text by Bettina Funcke. Fionn Meade, Liz Kotz. Hbk, 8 x 10 in. / 112 pgs / 64 color / 11 b&w. Publication Date: 1/31/2011 List Price: US $35.00

  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

  Radius Books Michael Light: LA Day, LA Night The greater Los Angeles area covers 4,850 square miles--the size of a small country--and holds almost 18 million people. Perhaps America’s largest human creation, it has been vilified and celebrated in equal measure since its inception. Is L.A. the face of the apocalypse, or an ultimate paradise at continent’s edge--or both? With LA Day/LA Night, photographer Michael Light continues his aerial examination of the arid American West by bringing together two opposing views of the city in a double-volume set. LA Day stares directly into the sun, which blasts the metropolis in a relentless and specific light. LA Night drifts over the city as it grows darker, and begins to resemble the starry sky vaulted above. Referencing Ed Ruscha, Peter Alexander, Julius Schulman and writers from Philip K. Dick to Raymond Chandler, LA Day/LA Night continues Los Angeles’s rich cultural legacy of examining its favorite schizophrenic subject--itself. . . . . [see book details]

  Hbk, 10.5 x 16 in. / 72 pgs / 39 duotone. Publication Date: 4/30/2011 List Price: US $60.00

  JRP|Ringier Euan Macdonald: Selected Standards Euan Macdonald’s Selected Standards is an artist’s book that combines title pages from sheet music found in a secondhand store in Los Angeles with drawings and aerial photographs of the city. The represented songs are hits from jazz musicals from the 1940s and 50s. Some are well-known standards, while others are obscure. The song titles contain philosophical moments, familiar and peripheral experiences--some imagining a better world or offering a fleeting chance to escape our own. When he first encountered the sheet music, Macdonald was intrigued by the narrative relationship that developed between the titles, which are presented in the order in which they were originally found. In the spirit of improvisation and free association so closely linked with jazz, Macdonald paired each song with drawings made in his studio and aerial photographs of Los Angeles. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Kathy Slade and Christph Keller. Paperback, 9 x 12 in. / 176 pgs / 176 b&w. Publication Date: 3/1/2008 List Price: US $30.00

  Machine Project Press Machine Project: A Field Guide to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Machine Project is a Los Angeles-based social experiment that investigates art, technology, natural history, music and poetry through collaboration and conversation. On November 15, 2008, Machine Project took over the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to orchestrate ten hours of performances, workshops and events experimenting with the museum's collection and seven-acre campus. Machine Project documents over 50 artists' projects, contextualized with interviews and essays. Highlights include a nineteenth-century description of the invention of the glass harmonica, a fragmentary history of the museum's architect, instructional diagrams for do-it-yourself mechanisms, a fruit salad recipe based on the museum's collection, and a tour of the museum's campus during the Pleistocene epoch. . . . . [see book details]

  By Machine Project. Edited by Mark Allen, Jason Brown, Liz Glynn. Pbk, 7.25 x 9.25 in. / 172 pgs / 92 color / 84 b&w. Publication Date: 2/28/2010 List Price: US $25.00

  The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Florian Maier-Aichen MOCA Focus Florian Maier-Aichen's photographs portray the natural, industrial and cultural landscape with stylized eccentricity. By using the tropes of documentary photography in unconventional ways, Maier-Aichen creates sublime images rich with reference and allusion. His photographs of the California coast, the Alps and other tourist destinations are openly beautiful and seductive in their rich hues and expansive viewpoints. However, these and other images of melting cathedrals, failed industry and tragic ghost ships are nuanced with a subtle disquiet and ensuing criticality. Born in Stuttgart, Germany, and educated at the University of California, Los Angeles, Maier-Aichen begins with a traditional large-format image that he captures on film. He then applies a myriad of creative adjustments to each component that become building blocks for intricate and layered compositions. This succinct paperback contains color reproductions of new and recent works, documentary images of Maier-Aichen's process, and an essay by MOCA curator Rebecca Morse. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Rebecca Morse. Hardcover, 8 x 10.5 in./ 64 pgs / 30 color. Publication Date: 8/1/2007 List Price: US $24.95

  Hatje Cantz Daniel Joseph Martinez: A Life of Disobedience For more than 30 years, Los Angeles-born artist Daniel Joseph Martinez has been honing his politically-inflected practice, which critic Jeffrey Kastner has characterized as "unapologetically prob[ing] uncomfortable issues of personal and collective identity, seeking out threadbare spots in the fabric of conventional wisdom." A wry provocateur, Martinez incorporates an impressive array of media including text, painting, photography, sculpture, video, performance--even animatronics. Known for the controversial pin he created as an interactive piece for the 1993 Whitney Biennial that read, "I can't imagine ever wanting to be white," this volume, with essays by Michael Brenson, David Levi Strauss, Hakim Bey and Gilbert Vicario, provides an in-depth look at selected works from 1978 through Martinez's 2008 Whitney Biennial entry, "Divine Violence," including his contributions to the San Juan Triennial in 2004, the Cairo Biennial in 2006 and the Moscow Biennial in 2007. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Hakim Bey, Michael Brenson, David Levi Strauss, Gilbert Vicario. Clth, 9.75 x 12.75 in. / 248 pgs / 377 color. Publication Date: 11/30/2009 List Price: US $60.00

  Hatje Cantz Paul McCarthy's Low Life Slow Life Low Life Slow Life—a hefty, 640-page tome covering a two-part exhibition at San Francisco's CCA Wattis Institute curated by Los Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy—is packaged as an instantly recognizable recreation of a Tide box, circa 1973. A fine work of book art in its own right, it showcases a vast range of works that have influenced McCarthy's career, presenting a personal map of his individual take on art history alongside his unique creative philosophy. This personal map includes works by John Altoon, Günter Brus, Howard Fried, Dan Graham, Allan Kaprow, Rachel Khedoori, Yves Klein, Tetsumi Kudo, Yayoi Kusama, Maria Lassnig, Robert Mallary, Gustav Metzger, Yoko Ono, Lil Picard, Jason Rhoades, Dieter Roth, Barbara Smith, Stan VanDerBeek and Andy Warhol. The catalogue, which is designed by McCarthy with Jon Sueda, also includes an interview with McCarthy and an essay on his work by Wattis Institute curator Jens Hoffmann. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Jens Hoffmann. Pbk, 6.5 x 9.25 in. / 640 pgs / 700 color. Publication Date: 8/31/2010 List Price: US $75.00

  Radius Books Ed Moses A member of the group of L.A. artists immortalized as the "Cool School" in Morgan Neville's 2007 documentary of the same name, Ed Moses' first exhibition was at the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, 1957. But for two brief stints in New York (1958-60) and in Europe (1973-74), Moses has remained in Southern California for his whole life, and his career has been central to the history of West Coast art--along with peers Ed Kienholz, Robert Irwin, John Altoon and Wallace Berman. Rather than maintain one distinct style, Moses has repeatedly renewed his approach to his art, which has ranged from his early, delicate, abstract drawings to the architectural grid work and resin paintings of the 1970s, the Apparitions paintings of the late 1980s and early 1990s and the huge canvases that he is producing now. Consistent features of Moses' work are an emphasis on gesture and mark-making and an . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Barbara Haskell. Foreword by Frances Colpitt. Hbk, 11.25 x 12.25 in. / 192 pgs / 120 color. Publication Date: 12/31/2009 List Price: US $65.00

  JRP|Ringier Dave Muller: I Like Your Music I Love Your Music The exquisite paintings of record covers and spines by Los Angeles-based artist Dave Muller give us a glimpse into his cultural identity. I Like Your Music I Love Your Music presents a selection of recent works dealing with the ways in which we construct our cultural identities through music--which he represents as a network of aesthetic, social and personal exchanges. Muller's multifaceted practice includes curating, cultural agitating, DJing and record collecting--his collection tops out at 15,000 digital albums. He is particularly well known for his multitextured installations that blend his own sound tracks with his visual work. He is represented by Blum & Poe in Los Angeles and was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. This volume is published in collaboration with Spain's Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), and includes an essay by artist and Director of New York's White Columns, Matthew Higgs. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Agustin Pérez Rubio. Text by Agustin Pérez Rubio, Rafael Doctor, Matthew Higgs. Hbk, 12 x 12 in. / 168 pgs / 158 color / 6 b&w. Publication Date: 4/1/2009 List Price: US $68.00

  Kruse Publisher Karin Apollonia Müller: Angels in Fall Copies of the classic "New Objective" photo book Angels in Fall, originally published in 2001 and thought to be out of print, are now available again. In it, vast, rational parking lots loom into focus, the smoggy grid of a Los Angeles neighborhood evaporates into the horizon and a man finds shelter from a rainstorm under an orange plastic sheet in an industrial wasteland… The landscapes of the respected German-born, Los Angeles-based photographer Karin Apollonia Müller evoke human presence and absence and the spatiality of human desire at a time when all things synthetic, flexible and global have overtaken their more organic and local counterparts. According to Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's important survey The Photobook Volume II, Müller "shows non-place rather than place, an environment that has an ethereal, other-worldly quality. It is a city familiar to us from moving images, yet in her hands it emerges both fresh and . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Rodney Sappington. Hardback, 12 x 10.5 in. / 112 pgs / 44 color. Publication Date: 2/1/2008 List Price: US $65.00

  Los Angeles County Museum of Art Lee Mullican: An Abundant Harvest Of Sun Lee Mullican's paintings and drawings map the inner space of the mind and the outer space of the cosmos. Over a 50-year career, in works bursting with color, he sought a window onto the unconscious, without relinquishing the control of a skilled draftsman or references to the world around him. Influenced by Native American art and Surrealism, as well as Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, in 2005 Mullican's formidable oeuvre gets an overdue retrospective, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This exhibition catalogue is the most comprehensive collection of his work and includes an essay by organizing curator Carol S. Eliel and an homage to Mullican as a teacher and mentor by fellow Los Angeles painter Lari Pittman. Like another Lee (Bontecou) whose quiet career of working and teaching recently got a deserving retrospective, Mullican will emerge here as an American original. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Carol S. Eliel. Texts by Carol S. Eliel, Lari Pittman and Amy Gerstler. Hardcover, 8 x 10 in. / 136 pgs / 100 color / 25 b&w. Publication Date: 11/15/2005 List Price: US $45.00

  Hammer Museum Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A. Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A.--an exhibition curated by Ali Subotnick at Los Angeles' Hammer Museum--features nine idiosyncratic Los Angeles-based artists spanning several generations, including Lisa Anne Auerbach, Julie Becker, Llyn Foulkes, Charles Irvin, Hirsch Perlman, Victoria Reynolds, Kaari Upson, Jeffrey Vallance and Charlie White. These artists have in common the aim of transporting viewers to an alternate reality with work that gets under your skin and sticks in your head yet incorporates a degree of self reflection. They eschew the dreamy California cliché of superficial comfort and glamour to instead focus--in profoundly disturbing yet often humorous ways--on the world in which we live. Ali Subotnick is a curator at the Hammer Museum. In 2006, along with her frequent collaborators Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni, she co-curated the 4th Berlin Biennial. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Ali Subotnick. Hbk, 9 x 6.5 in. / 200 pgs / 70 color. Publication Date: 2/25/2009 List Price: US $30.00

  The Ice Plant Pat O'Neill: Another Kind of Record The Merger, The Indictment, and The Girl Pat O'Neill has been deeply involved in Los Angeles culture since the late 1960s. A founding father of the city's avant-garde film scene, an influential professor at CalArts and an optical effects pioneer, he is best known for experimental films like Let's Make a Sandwich (1982), Water and Power (1989), Trouble in the Image (1996) and The Decay of Fiction (2002)--playful but technically rigorous works that fit comfortably alongside those of Stan Brakhage and David Lynch. Whatever the medium, O'Neill's work often hinges on a "perceptual ambiguity" achieved through layers of image, sound and texture. This first artist's book, Another Kind of Record, compiles dozens of superb collage drawings, found texts and digital composite prints O'Neill has gathered and altered over the last several years. Intersecting his own elaborate pencil drawings with graphic and textual fragments of bygone print media (educational illustrations, advertising, reference charts, sheet music), this recent work occupies . . . . [see book details]

  Paperback, 8 x 10 in. / 96 pgs / 17 color / 40 b&w. Publication Date: 6/1/2008 List Price: US $30.00

  Guggenheim Museum Catherine Opie: American Photographer This comprehensive new exhibition catalogue, published to accompany the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's major mid-career survey of Catherine Opie's work, is the first to gather all of the artist's key projects to date in a single volume. Opie is best known for her subtle but potent portraits of people from the queer communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco. In this definitive volume, each of Opie's series--among them Portraits, Freeways, Domestic, Icehouses and In and Around Home--is reproduced in full color plates alongside works that were not displayed in the exhibition, allowing for the most complete overview of this important Los Angeles artist's work to date. In addition, this volume features a lead essay by exhibition curator Jennifer Blessing, which surveys Opie's artistic career and its historical contexts; a series of interviews with the artist by Russell Ferguson, Chair of the Department of Art at UCLA; and a brief personal reflection . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Dorothy Allison, Jennifer Blessing, Russell Ferguson, Nat Trotman. Hardback, 12.25 x 10.25 in. / 288 pgs / 272 color. Publication Date: 10/1/2008 List Price: US $65.00

  Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis Ruby Osorio: A Story Of A Girl (Who Awakes Far, Far, Away) Documented here is Los Angeles-based artist Ruby Osorio's creation A Story of a Girl (Who Awakes Far, Far Away)--an enchanting magical environment based on her unique drawings and works on paper. This series of gouache paintings incorporates thread and ink and presents this young artist's exploration into female identity and more tellingly, the construction of that identity through what is becoming a hallmark of her hand--whimsy with a punch. In this new series of painterly drawings, Osorio pushes the range of her work in scale, medium and content; thus transforming the gallery into a delicate room that presents a feminine aesthetic” through the use of cartoon-like drawings of women, girls, animals, objects and natural landscapes (some directly on the wall) that grow from tiny thumbnail sketches to large mural-sized narratives. The images within and the design of this book and the limited edition reference the delicacy and preciousness of Osorio's hand . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Shannon Fitzgerald. Essays by Shannon Fitzgerald, Tyler Stallings and Sue Spaid. Foreword by Paul Ha. Paperback, 6 x 9 in. / 50 pgs / 45 color. Publication Date: 3/15/2005 List Price: US $30.00

  Metropolis Books Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research-based educational organization that produces public programs about the built landscape of the United States from its sites in Los Angeles, Utah and the Mojave desert, with an upstate New York location opening in 2006. The Center's aim is to increase and diffuse information about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived. Recent examples of their work include a two-day "Tour of the Monuments of the Great American Void" by bus and the exhibit Immersed Remains: Towns Submerged in America. This book takes readers on a tour through the strangely unfamiliar land that Americans live in, demonstrating that we can understand ourselves and the nation by examining the clues on display all around us, often clearly visible but ignored. Each chapter explores a different topic, from an in-depth look at Ohio ("the most all-American state"); through scale shifts in model landscapes, . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Matthew Coolidge and Sarah Simons. Essay by Ralph Rugoff. Paperback, 8 x 10 in. / 240 pgs / 310 color. Publication Date: 7/1/2006 List Price: US $34.95

  Joan Perlman Joan Perlman: Element/Frumkraftur I traveled for many years to Iceland in my dreams. When I finally arrived there, I felt an affinity with its spare volcanic landscape; this resonance has sustained my creative work for over a decade… Joan Perlman's large-scale abstract paintings reflect the artist's enduring interest in the landscape and geologic phenomena of Iceland. This first monograph explores, through works on canvas and the video installation, "From Ice," the shifting light, colors and energy patterns of the powerful waters of the southeast coast's glacial rivers. In addition, it features a thoughtful and humorous introduction by the esteemed curator and critic, Lawrence Rinder, poetry by Brad Leithauser, an essay by cultural anthropologist Dr. Anne Brydon and photography by the Icelandic geologist Oddur Sigurdsson. Joan Perlman was born in New York and currently lives in Los Angeles. Her work has been the subject of exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Reykjavik. In 2008, it . . . . [see book details]

  Foreword by Pétrún Pétursdóttir. Introduction by Lawrence Rinder. Text by Anne Brydon. Poetry by Brad Leithauser. Paperback, 8 x 9 in. / 36 pgs. Publication Date: 2/1/2008 List Price: US $24.95

  atle Gerhardsen/gladstone Gallery/Regen Projects Lari Pittman: Paintings and Works on Paper 2005-2008 Employing such decorative elements as scrolls, arrows and patterns, Los Angeles-based Lari Pittman--one of the most influential and challenging voices in contemporary painting--expertly directs our eye through his busy constellations of fragmented imagery (landscapes, domestic interiors, roots, flames, rope, spiderwebs), cobbling together a truly unique language. Critic Alex Farquharson has noted that Pittman's work is cut up, overlayered and elaborately stylized... The very excess of imagery in the paintings, and the innumerable narratives they spark off, has the comparable effect of flattening illusionistic depth. This echoes the horizontal sprawl of L.A.'s diverse communities, and the pluralistic languages of commerce and dwelling with which each gives its pitch and establishes its patch. This collection of works from 2005 to 2008 features texts by independent curator and writer Klaus Kertess and Anthony Vidler, Dean and Professor at The Cooper Union School of Architecture. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Anthony Vidler, Klaus Kertess. Clth, 9.75 x 11.25 in. / 136 pgs / 63 color. Publication Date: 3/1/2009 List Price: US $60.00

  Walther König Stephen Prina: The Second Sentence of Everything I Read Is You Describing Conceptual artist and musician Stephen Prina's work in 2004, the Harvard Gazette wrote, "Prina's artwork is full of unsuspected surprises, secret compartments that pop open to release compressed bundles of meaning or coiling strands of narrative." His work at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, for example, was conceived as "a traveling spectacle--a mini-Broadway-musical-on-the-road or circus," according to the artist. This concise retrospective volume presents work from 1979 to 2008, as well as installation views of Prina's recent one-person exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in Germany. Born 1954 in Galesburg, Illinois, Stephen Prina divides his time between Los Angeles and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a professor at Harvard University. A member of the band Red Krayola and a solo performer, Prina is represented in New York by Friedrich Petzel Gallery. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Astrid Wege, Bennett Simpson, Karola Grässlin. Pbk, 8.5 x 10.75 in. / 176 pgs / 77 color / 24 b&w. Publication Date: 3/1/2009 List Price: US $45.00

  Matthew Marks Gallery Charles Ray Ever since the early 1970s, sculptor Charles Ray's protean practice has yielded some of the most memorable objects and experiences in contemporary art, causing us to confront, as Peter Schjeldahl has written, "elegant, deadpan fabrications that flip wild switches in our minds." In 1987's "Ink Line," for example, he sent a single stream of ink flowing to the middle of a gallery's floor in a slender column; outside the 1993 Whitney Biennial he parked a massive replica of a toy fire engine. His recent work is just as alluring and unsettling: a steel sculpture of a handheld bird, a poster of an ominous pumpkin, an intricate cast aluminum sculpture of a tractor. Charles Ray surveys the work the artist has made in the past dozen years; an interview by Michael Fried and an essay by John Kelsey complement texts written about each work by Ray himself. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Michael Fried, John Kelsey. Slip, Pbk, 11.25 x 9 in. / 80 pgs / 35 color. Publication Date: 10/31/2010 List Price: US $45.00

  JRP|Ringier Recent Pasts: Art In Southern California From The 1990S To Now This first volume of a series of anthologies, each based on a symposium held in Los Angeles by a consortium of the art schools of Southern California, brings out some heavy hitters for its inaugural number. A cross-disciplinary endeavor, the contributors include Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and winner of a MacArthur Foundation genius” grant; novelist Dennis Cooper (“the most important transgressive literary artist since William S. Burroughs,” according to Salon); artist Diana Thater; artist and ambient DJ Dave Muller; and Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles Curator Connie Butler. This publication presents an essential assessment of the vital and influential art scene in Southern California since 1990. Contemplating the sociopolitical context, the available cultural tools and the importance of certain Californian artists both on an aesthetic level and as teachers, the book offers perspectives on the singular Southern California art scene. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by John C. Welchman. Essays by Connie Butler, Brian Butler, Matthew Coolidge, Dennis Cooper, Mike Davis, Dave Muller, Diana Thater and Frances Stark. Paperback, 6.75 x 9.5 in. / 160 pgs / 20 b&w. Publication Date: 8/15/2005 List Price: US $25.00

  Rubell Family Collection Red Eye L.A. Artists from the Rubell Family Collection The inspiration for this book began at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art with Paul Schimmel's seminal 1992 exhibition Helter Skelter, which introduced to the world the wide-ranging, dissident influence of Los Angeles art. Upon seeing that show, Miami's Rubell family began to collect important L.A. artists of the 1980s and 90s. Recently, the Rubells added a new group of Los Angeles artists to their storied collection. This volume examines juxtapositions and interrelationships between the two generations, with work by Doug Aitken, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Brian Calvin, Mark Grotjahn, Evan Holloway, Mike Kelley, Barbara Kruger, Paul McCarthy, Jason Meadows, Catherine Opie, Kaz Oshiro, Laura Owens, Raymond Pettibon, Charles Ray, Jason Rhoades, Jim Shaw, Yutaka Sone and Ricky Swallow, among others. . . . . [see book details]

  Introduction by Jason Rubell. Text by Mark Coetzee, Michael Darling, Michael Holte. Hardback, 7 x 9.5 in. / 218 pgs / 165 color. Publication Date: 7/1/2008 List Price: US $40.00

  JRP|Ringier Rodarte, Catherine Opie, Alec Soth California Condors, Boris Karloff as Frankenstein, Japanese horror films and Gordon Matta-Clark are among the many influences that make up the world of Rodarte. In just five short years, Rodarte has upended the fashion scene, bringing Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the designers behind the company, to the forefront of contemporary design and visual culture. Kate and Laura, who live and work between downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena, California, have consistently brought their love of nature, film, art and science to bear upon their unconventional and exquisitely crafted collections. Burning, sanding, dyeing, knitting, twisting, staining and weaving are some of the many complex techniques that have entered into the Rodarte textural vocabulary. Kate and Laura's past collaborations have included artists, actors, musicians and writers such as Miranda July, Autumn de Wilde, Ryan McGinley, Ari Marcopoulos and Darren Aronofsky. Created in collaboration with two of the art world's most sought-after and acclaimed photographers, . . . . [see book details]

  By Kate and Laura Mulleavy. Photographs by Catherine Opie, Alec Soth. Edited by Brian Phillips. Text by John Kelsey. Hbk, 8.5 x 11 in. / 176 pgs / 141 color. Publication Date: 9/30/2011 List Price: US $80.00

  JRP|Ringier Sterling Ruby In a 2008 review, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith glowingly endorsed German-born, Los Angeles-based artist Sterling Ruby, calling him "one of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century. That's only eight years, of course," she added, "but the claim may stick." Ruby--who was born in 1972--uses whatever media suits his ideas; projects have included sculpture, collage, installation, painting, ceramics, video and printmaking. Fusing references to Minimalism, Art Brut and graffiti with a canny grasp of contemporary and pop culture, Ruby's accumulative approach addresses the overproduction of information, neurosis and paranoia, conflicts between individual impulses and mechanisms of social control, urban violence, consumption, anxiety and the need for control that characterizes contemporary Western society. Part of JRP|Ringier's distinctive monograph series, this well-illustrated volume is the most comprehensive reference on this rapidly emerging artist's work to date. It contains newly commissioned essays by Frieze associate editor Jörg Heiser and . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Alessandro Rabottini. Text by Jörg Heiser, Robert Hobbs, Catherine Taft. Pbk, 9.5 x 11.25 in. / 168 pgs / 100 col. Publication Date: 8/31/2009 List Price: US $55.00

  Walther König, Köln Allen Ruppersberg: One of Many This comprehensive book on one of Fluxus's most influential and entertaining artists features Ruppersberg's "Event Objects" of the 1960s and 1970s. His lists, scripts, books, signs and posters compress big ideas into mischievously tangible objects that make the viewer a part of the piece. . . . . [see book details]

  Essay by Alfred M. Fischer. Introduction by Kasper Kŕnig. Paperback, 8 x 11 in. / 215 pgs / 200 color. Publication Date: 8/15/2006 List Price: US $50.00

  D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting Transforming words into icons and images into wide-screen epics, Ed Ruscha has wholly reconceived the terms of painting for our era. Tagged variously as a Conceptualist, Pop artist or latter-day Surrealist, Ruscha flouts category, or rather incorporates all categories, always surprising and experimenting with both subject and method. His paintings are steeped in our times: cinema, advertising, logos, late capitalism and the twists and turns of postwar art have all informed his iconography since the early 1960s, arriving on the cool surfaces of his canvases with magnetic detachment. Ruscha eschews process and focuses exclusively on the final product: the means to the end has always been secondary in my art,” he has said. Ruscha has also reinvented the use of words in art, finding disquieting ways to invest language with a weird, throbbing, ambient static, never aspiring to what he calls word gestures,” since each word is an excursion unto itself.” . . . . [see book details]

  Text by James Ellroy, Ralph Rugoff, Alexandra Schwartz, Bruce Wagner, Ulrich Wilmes. Interview by Kristine McKenna. Slip, Hbk, 12 x 10 in. / 192 pgs / 153 color / 30 b&w. Publication Date: 2/28/2010 List Price: US $65.00

  Hatje Cantz Ed Ruscha: Road Tested Since his first road trip in 1956, driving from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, Ed Ruscha has continued to muse on America as seen from the road: "I like being in the car, and seeing things from that vantage point," he has said. "Sometimes I give myself assignments to go out on the road and explore different ideas. My books are an example of that." Consisting of around 75 works spanning the artist's entire career, Ed Ruscha: Road Tested includes many of the famous aforementioned artist's books, including Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations, Real Estate Opportunities, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Thirty-Four Parking Lots and the groundbreaking artist's book Every Building on the Sunset Strip; some of Ruscha's most iconic paintings, such as the "Standard Stations" and the "Hollywood Signs," as well as paintings inspired by street names and road signs; and his exploration of the topography of greater Los Angeles in paintings that . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Michael Auping, Richard Prince. Interview by Michael Auping. Hbk, 11 x 9.5 in. / 128 pgs / 128 color. Publication Date: 4/30/2011 List Price: US $40.00

  Porterhouse Fine Art Editions Mark Ryden: The Tree Show Absorbing Roman poet Ovid's tales of transformation in Metamorphoses and adding his own dash of art-historical figuration and contemporary pop culture, Mark Ryden broaches new terrain with The Tree Show. "Arcadian Gothic" might hint at the nature of this new work, and fans of Ryden will find familiar preoccupations in these new paintings, drawings and sculptures--made since his first solo show in 1998--transposed to new pastures. Never reluctant to freight his work with layers of reference that range from Renaissance landscape and Neoclassical portrait painting to occultism and literature, in his latest works Ryden combines the arcane with pop-cultural images as ground from which to make his carefully executed leaps into fantasy. Ryden's series includes depictions of oak trees consuming children, floating tree stumps with "seeing" eyes, imaginary wood nymphs and mythological characters who personify Nature herself. Ryden paints his characters with a masterful, porcelain glow reminiscent of Ingres and renders . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Holly Meyers. Hbk, 9.25 x 12.25 in. / 128 pgs / 138 color. Publication Date: 2/1/2009 List Price: US $40.00

  Walther König, Köln Eva Schlegel: L.A. Women Over six months living and working in Los Angeles, Eva Schlegel photographed and interviewed 40 women artists and architects for this book. She investigated their studios, houses, colleagues, models, manuscripts and drawings, and in the process saw an image of their environment, their community, their generation, emerge. Including biographical and bibliographical indexes. . . . . [see book details]

  Essays by Robert Fleck, Marie Therese Harnoncourt, Brigitte Huck, Andrea Lenardin, Markus Mittringer, Peter Noever, Martin Prinzhorn and Annette Südbeck. Paperback, 8.75 x 11.25 in. / 320 pgs / illustrated throughout. Publication Date: 3/1/2006 List Price: US $50.00

  The Ice Plant Mike Slack: Pyramids Mike Slack’s Pyramids builds on the striking Polaroid aesthetic of his previous books, Ok Ok Ok (2002) and Scorpio (2006), rounding out a trilogy of stand-alone volumes that together contain 123 pictures. This collection records everyday details of what could be a recent past or a very near future--a dust storm in the desert, simple geometry, stairways and windows, schoolchildren on a field trip--quietly dramatic scenes energized by a sense of anticipation rather than nostalgia. Presented as physical artifacts of fictitious events to be deciphered by the viewer, the pictures also document the travels, observations and graphic fixations of the photographer, centering on a set of three identical early 1970s office buildings (in Slack's hometown of Indianapolis), from which the book takes its title. . . . . [see book details]

  Clth, 7 x 9 in. / 80 pgs / 41 color. Publication Date: 11/30/2009 List Price: US $30.00

  The Ice Plant Mike Slack: Scorpio In his second book of Polaroids, Scorpio, Mike Slack charts a familiar but undetermined terrain through fragments of architecture, geology and space. Designed as a companion to Ok Ok Ok (2002), this collection begins with what appears to be a fallen asteroid and ends with what might be a stray, mythical dog--evocative bookends to a kind of travel narrative (or psychic puzzle) in which Slack's mastery of the Polaroid medium infuses commonplace observations with hints of a lingering, otherworldly past. . . . . [see book details]

  Hardcover, 7 x 9 in. / 80 pgs / 41 color. Publication Date: 8/15/2006 List Price: US $30.00

  Walther König, Köln Frances Stark: The Collected Works The Los Angeles-based artist and art writer Frances Stark has gathered an international cult following for her prolific prose and her smart, honest and intimate artwork. This engaging artist’s book is conceived as a companion piece to Stark’s Collected Writings 1993–2003, fashioning itself as a graphic counterpart that draws from the artist’s paintings, collages, drawings, videos, poetry and more, from 1993 to the present. Through provocative and diaristic text notes printed alongside Stark’s sometimes humorous, often self-scrutinizing images, Collected Works addresses the paradox of reproducing visual art that is essentially non-photogenic by nature--because of its tactility, detail or scale. The book formally addresses how verbiage flows in and out of the work(s), and leaves no space for the legitimizing language of the critic or curator. Neither a typical catalogue nor monograph, it pushes for a third form, a new art work constructed from existing pieces. . . . . [see book details]

  Paperback, 8.5 x 11 in. / 160 pgs / 100 color. Publication Date: 1/15/2008 List Price: US $54.00

  MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles Jennifer Steinkamp United States Presentation, 11th International Cairo Biennale Los Angeles-based new media artist Jennifer Steinkamp's installation, "Dervish," anchored the United States presentation at the 11th International Cairo Biennale in 2008. Steinkamp is known for virtually transforming architectural space through her immersive video works, in a manner that tests viewers' sense of perception, combining political and cultural elements with state-of-the-art technologies to create a sophisticated illusionism. This volume is designed to read from right to left, in accordance with Arabic conventions. It features the photographic series, Dervish Cairo, published here for the first time, as well as a newly-commissioned essay by art historian Nizan Shaked and U. S. commissioner Kimberli Meyer laying out a new theoretical basis for the artist's multifaceted practice. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Kimberli Meyer. Contributions by Nizan Shaked. Translated by Sarah Enany. Hbk, 6.25 x 9.25 in. / 104 pgs / 38 color. Publication Date: 10/31/2009 List Price: US $22.50

  Foggy Notion Books/Smart Art Press The Beautiful & The Damned Punk Photographs by Ann Summa When photographer Ann Summa arrived in Los Angeles in 1978, the city’s punk scene was still fresh, diverse, smart, utterly original—and fertile territory for a young photographer. The Beautiful & the Damned is a collection of her portraits of the musicians, artists and fans who made Los Angeles such a crucial part of the history of punk. Taken between 1978 and 1984, the images mostly revolve around L.A.’s first punk generation, and include portraits of the Germs, the Screamers, X, the Cramps and the Gun Club, among many others. From there, the book expands its scope to accommodate the cross-pollination that took place between L.A.’s punk scene and the fine art community, (at the time, the audience for avant-garde artists such as the Kipper Kids, Johanna Went and Laurie Anderson was primarily drawn from the underground music scene), and the two other cities—London and New York—that played a central role in . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Kristine McKenna. Foreword by Exene Cervenka. Hbk, 9.25 x 12.25 in. / 112 pgs / 182 b&w. Publication Date: 11/30/2010 List Price: US $39.95

  Damiani Ed Templeton: Deformer Eleven years in the making and compiling more than 30 years of material, Ed Templeton's scrapbook of his upbringing in suburban Orange County California is a much-anticipated book. Its photographs give a sun-drenched glimpse of what it might be like to be young and alive in the "suburban domestic incubator" of Orange County, conveyed in the idiom of Nan Goldin or Larry Clark (and with a sharp eye for the streets that recalls Garry Winogrand or Eugene Richards). For like his groundbreaking predecessors, Templeton is always a participant in the scenes he shoots. From the Alleged Press series curated by Aaron Rose, Deformer interweaves disciplinary letters from Templeton's grandfather and religious notes from his mother with sketches, snapshots, telling images and the occasional brutal tale, laying out an unresolved narrative that plunges readers headlong into Templeton's chaotic youth and his reliance on art and skateboarding to accommodate its stresses and joys. . . . . [see book details]

  Hardback, 9.75 x 12.75 in. / 170 pgs / 150 color. Publication Date: 10/1/2008 List Price: US $55.00

  S.M.A.K. Ed Templeton: The Cemetery of Reason Californian artist Ed Templeton (born 1972) delivers up his diagnosis of the contemporary human condition in a whirlwind of present-tense imagery, filtered through photographs, paintings and drawings. Over the past decade and a half, Templeton has built an oeuvre that closely tracks his day-to-day reality, recording life in the Southern Californian suburbs, his flawed family background, his life as a professional skateboarder, his milieu, the relationship between the artist and his muse (his wife Deanna) and much else. Templeton has also drawn deeply on artists such as Egon Schiele, Balthus, David Hockney, Larry Clark and Nan Goldin; as with their work, what begins as a very personal chronicle ultimately opens out onto grander horizons--in Templeton's case, a broad meditation on the chaos and the joy of being human. The Cemetery of Reason is the first large monographic museum publication devoted to Templeton's work. Presented as a mid-career retrospective accompanying a spring . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Thomas Caron. Text by Jean-François Chévrier, Carlo McCormick, Philippe van Cauteren, Arty Nelson, Thomas Caron. Pbk, 9 x 11.75 in. / 160 pgs / illustrated throughout. Publication Date: 8/31/2010 List Price: US $39.95

  Schunck Deanna Templeton: Scratch My Name On Your Arm For the past five years, Deanna Templeton has been photographing skateboard demonstrations, surfing competitions and other beachside congregations of kids in southern California. The photographs in Scratch My Name on Your Arm document a sexy trend emerging in Californian youth culture for getting famous surfers and skaters to autograph bare skin and underwear. Where once the autograph of an idol served primarily as a souvenir or keepsake (a scribble in a diary, on a poster or T-shirt), nowadays autographs on skin or intimate underwear have become the preferred method for drawing the attention of both the autographer and bystanders to one's scantily-clad self. In Scratch My Name on Your Arm, Templeton's black-and-white photographs record both an ephemeral form of calligraphy and body art and the burgeoning customs and styles of a subculture in the making. . . . . [see book details]

  Introduction by Stijn Huijts. Foreword by Ed Templeton. Hbk, 8.75 x 10 in. / 132 pgs / 7 color / 127 b&w. Publication Date: 7/31/2011 List Price: US $50.00

  Dia Art Foundation Diana Thater: Knots + Surfaces This book documents a year-long exhibition entitled Knots + Surfaces, at Dia Center for the Arts from January 2001 through January 2002, in which Diana Thater presented a large-scale, multiprojection video installation specifically designed to interact with the open architectural space of Dia's third-floor gallery. A charged environment, combining layered projections with a wall of clustered monitors, becomes a metaphorical charting of multidimensional space. Referring to a recent mathematical hypothesis that correlates a complex, six-dimesional spatial model to a map of a honey bee's dance, Thater expands her abiding concern with the intersection of nature and culture. Along with an introduction to both her work and the exhibition by Lynne Cooke, the book will include an essay on Thater's work by Akira Lippit. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Karen Kelly. Essays by Lynne Cooke and Akira Lippit. Foreword by Michael Govan. Paperback, 9.5 x 8 in. / 48 pgs / 10 color / 10 b&w. Publication Date: 4/2/2002 List Price: US $27.95

  Hatje Cantz Publishers Robert Weingarten: 6:30 A.M. For an entire year--whenever he was at home--Robert Weingarten photographed the view from his bedroom window overlooking Santa Monica Bay each morning, just after dawn. Every shot was taken from the same camera position, using the same lens, and focusing on the same frame of view, yet the reduced motif has a different look in every one of the atmospheric photographs reproduced here. The small sliver of land between Santa Monica Beach, Los Angeles International Airport, and the ocean undergoes amazing transformations under the influences of the changing seasons, weather, and visibility conditions. In a formal sense, Weingarten's magnificent, vividly colored images are reminiscent of abstract realism paintings. These systematic, focused observations of nature in the tradition of Claude Monet prompt viewers to stop and consider what wonders they may have passed by without really looking. . . . . [see book details]

  Photographs by Robert Weingarten. Hardcover, 11.5 x 11.5 in. / 120 pgs / 50 color. Publication Date: 4/15/2005 List Price: US $49.95

  Damiani James Welling: Glass House Over the course of three years, from 2006 to 2009, James Welling (born 1951) photographed the Glass House, the architectural landmark estate that Philip Johnson built in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1949. Welling's photos offer a decided departure from the familiar views of the house and grounds: using digital cameras set on a tripod and holding a variety of filters in front of the lens, he created tinted veils and distortions that transformed the image at the moment of exposure, endowing it with powerful swells of glowing color. As Welling described it in an interview with Artforum, the use of filters enabled his project to become "a laboratory for ideas about transparency, reflectivity and color." The 45 images presented here, which invite the viewer to draw associations between the camera's lens and the glass surfaces of the house itself, oscillate before our very eyes between photographic abstraction--a recurrent preoccupation for Welling--and . . . . [see book details]

  Introduction by Noam Elcott. Text by Sylvia Lavin. Hbk, 13 x 10 in. / 112 pgs / 45 color. Publication Date: 4/30/2011 List Price: US $50.00

  The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Eric Wesley West Coast artist Eric Wesley was born in 1973 in Los Angeles. His work, which can take the form of sculpture, painting, drawing, architectural model or public artwork proposal, often uses decrepit materials and conveys a humorous take on the world and his own identity within it. For the 2004 Whitney Biennial, he created scale sets for a faux reality show; his 2000 kinetic sculpture "Kicking Ass" was a mechanized donkey that kicked holes in the gallery wall behind it. This small monograph is the first publication dedicated solely to the artist's work, and is published on the occasion of his 2006 exhibition as part of the MOCA Focus series. . . . . [see book details]

  Essay by Cornelia Butler. Paperback, 8 x 10 in. / 60 pgs / 40 color. Publication Date: 8/15/2006 List Price: US $24.95

  JRP|Ringier Charlie White: American Minor Aiming for the jugular of the American unconscious, the photographs of Los Angeles-based artist Charlie White, born in 1972, inspect the culture's fictions not with the raw lens of a Larry Clark, but with the directorially staged artifice of, say, Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson. American Minor delves into an important and ongoing theme in White's work--the American teen, and all that goes into its manufacture. Having approached this theme with an earlier project whose protagonist was a hairy, fragile doll named Joshua, here White tackles the taboos of nascent sexuality in the American teen girl--both the vulnerability of that sexuality as a topic and the ruthlessness with which it is exploited when it goes unexamined. Cataloging studio archives, film stills, animation stills and scripts, and using images culled from White's two-year study of one teenager, archives of magazine covers featuring iconic blonde models, stills from his first 35mm film and . . . . [see book details]

  Edited and text by Christoph Doswald, Dorothea Strauss. Hbk, 9.75 x 13.75 in. / 144 pgs / 80 color. Publication Date: 3/1/2009 List Price: US $65.00

  Allen Spiegel Fine Arts Kent Williams: Amalgam Paintings and Drawings 1992-2007 In his catalogue essay on Los Angeles-based figurative painter and graphic novelist Kent Williams, Edward Lucie-Smith states, "The main thing about Williams' production, whatever form it takes, is that one feels a passionate desire to paint at work, and, in addition to that, a passionate desire to enlarge not only his own imaginative experience, but the imaginative experience of anyone who takes the trouble to give his paintings more than a glance." Quoting freely from influences like Rodin, Schiele, Kahlo, Fischl and Nerdrum, Williams makes dramatic, sexually terse and expressionistic paintings that are deeply riveting, dark and erotic. Female nudes, self-portraits, adolescent boys, landscapes and other nocturnal fantasies all play a role. Bringing together works from 1992 to present, this is the most comprehensive collection of paintings and drawings by Williams to date. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Julia Morton, Edward Lucie-Smith. Hardback, 10 x 12 in. / 168 pgs / 136 color / 3 b&w. Publication Date: 7/1/2008 List Price: US $75.60

  JRP|Ringier Christopher Williams 97,5 Mhz Los Angeles conceptualist Christopher Williams, born in 1956, studies the conditions of presentation and representation in order to call into question spoon-fed perceptions, realistic” reproductions, communication mechanisms and aesthetic conventions that influence our perception and understanding of reality. This volume presents recent works from 2003-2007. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Beatrix Rut. Paperback, 13 x 9.25 in. / 24 pgs / 12 color / 12 b&w. Publication Date: 3/1/2008 List Price: US $25.00

  PictureBox Jonas Wood: Sports Book The rising Los Angeles figurative painter Jonas Wood is known for his bold colors and woozy perspectives--whether his canvases depict a perfectly autonomous cactus on a yellow milk crate, a famous Chinese basketball player or a cluttered domestic interior. Compact and affordable, this first monograph takes as its subject a small slice of Wood's oeuvre: sports portraiture. Collected here are lanky basketball players, poised baseball players, sparring boxers--moments of serene waiting and explosive action. It's a compelling body of work combining an obvious love of the games with an expert eye for emotion and the thrill of the game. Jonas Wood was born in Boston in 1977. He received his MFA from the University of Washington in 2002. He is represented by Anton Kern Gallery, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles and RAW & CO, Cleveland. . . . . [see book details]

  Hbk, 8.25 x 10.25 in. / 48 pgs / 35 color. Publication Date: 3/1/2009 List Price: US $20.00

  Damiani Mark Wyse: Seizure American conceptualist Mark Wyse (born 1970) investigates the space between pictures to make visible the underlying discourses within images and between artists. Seizure combines Wyse's own photographs with reproductions of work by other artists. Through juxtaposition, Wyse exposes the photograph as "less a representation of the world than a representation of a thought that reflects a relationship to the world." . . . . [see book details]

  Introduction by Charlie White. Hbk, 8 x 10 in. / 80 pgs / 40 color. Publication Date: 4/30/2011 List Price: US $45.00

  CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art Mario Ybarra Jr.: Capp Street Project When referred to as a Chicano artist in the Los Angeles Times, Mario Ybarra Jr. once protested, "I make contemporary art that is filtered through a Mexican-American experience in Los Angeles." Filled with graffiti, restaurant signage and stills from music videos, with sweeping graphic lines and lyric abstractions, his outrageous, multicolored murals speak about his particular experience as an artist and a Mexican-American, both politically and aesthetically. Compactly designed by Jon Suede/Stripe, this slim, dynamic catalogue with paper changes features an essay on the artist's entire oeuvre by Jens Hoffmann, along with an engaging text by Claire Fitzsimmons. Produced to accompany Ybarra's installation at San Francisco's Capp Street Project, this volume is the artist's first monograph, as well as a thorough document of the mural he produced over the course of his residency there. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited and with text by Jens Hoffman, Claire Fitzsimmon, Mario Ybarra Jr. Paperback, 6.5 x 9.25 in. / 48 pgs / 43 color / 2 b&w / 19 monotone. Publication Date: 2/1/2008 List Price: US $12.00