The Pictures Generation: Key Exhibition Catalogs & Books

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  The Museum of Modern Art, New York Cindy Sherman Published to accompany the first major survey of Cindy Sherman’s work in the United States in nearly 15 years, this publication presents a stunning range of work from the groundbreaking artist’s 35-year career. Showcasing approximately 180 photographs from the mid-1970s to the present, including new works made for the exhibition and never before published, the volume is a vivid exploration of Sherman’s sustained investigation into the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation. The book highlights major bodies of work including her seminal Untitled Film Stills (1977–80); centerfolds (1981); history portraits (1989–90); head shots (2000–2002); and two recent series on the experience and representation of aging in the context of contemporary obsessions with youth and status. An essay by curator Eva Respini provides an overview of Sherman’s career, weaving together art historical analysis and discussions of the artist’s working methods, and a contribution by art historian Johanna Burton offers . . . . [see book details]

  By Eva Respini. Text by Johanna Burton. Interview by John Waters. Clth, 9.5 x 12 in. / 264 pgs / 153 color / 102 b&w. Publication Date: 2/29/2012 List Price: US $60.00

  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 Modern Art, New York Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives. Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blond actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills--or perhaps publicity pix--purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen and lounging in the bedroom. Onto something big, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her . . . . [see book details]

  Essays by Peter Galassi and Cindy Sherman. Hardcover, 9.5 x 11.25 in. / 164 pgs / 69 duotone. Publication Date: 10/2/2003 List Price: US $45.00

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

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

  Primary Information Real Life Magazine: Selected Writing and Projects 1979-1994 This long-overdue volume highlights a selection of writings and artists' projects from Real Life magazine, a seminal 1980s periodical edited by the artist, writer and curator Thomas Lawson and writer Susan Morgan. Published in 23 intermittent black-and-white issues from 1979-1994, Real Life was devoted to providing an outlet for a circle of artists who did not feel properly represented in the mainstream art world at the time--many of whom are now grouped with the Pictures and Post-Pictures artists. The anthology features both artists and art historians writing on art, media and popular culture--oftentimes infusing a new kind of humor into their cultural critiques--as well as original pictorial contributions. It includes writings by and about Eric Bogosian, Kim Gordon, Dan Graham, Barbara Kruger, Thomas Lawson, Allan McCollum, John Miller, Matt Mullican, Richard Prince, David Robbins, Michael Smith, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Wall and Lawrence Weiner, to name a few, as well as visual . . . . [see book details]

  By Miriam Katzeff, Thomas Lawson, Susan Morgan. Introductions by Thomas Lawson, Susan Morgan, Matthew Higgs. Paperback, 8.25 x 11 in. / 288 pgs / 184 b&w. Publication Date: 6/1/2007 List Price: US $30.00

  Guggenheim Museum Richard Prince For 30 years now, the American artist Richard Prince has been considered one of the most forward-thinking and innovative artists in the world. In 1977, his deceptively simple act of re-photographing advertising images from The New York Times Magazine and presenting them as his own ushered in an entirely new, critical approach to making art--one that questioned notions of originality and the privileged status of the unique aesthetic object. Prince's technique involves appropriation, and he pilfers freely from the vast image bank of popular culture to create works that simultaneously embrace and critique a quintessentially American sensibility, with images stemming from the Marlboro Man, muscle cars, biker chicks, off-color jokes, gag cartoons and pulp fiction novels, among many other sources. Organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, this major traveling retrospective brings together Prince's photographs, paintings, sculptures and works on paper in the most comprehensive examination of his work . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Nancy Spector, Glenn O'Brien, Jack Bankowsky. Hardcover, 8 x 11 in. / 368 pgs / 438 color. Publication Date: 10/1/2007 List Price: US $60.00

  Hatje Cantz Sherrie Levine: Pairs and Posses American Conceptualist Sherrie Levine (born 1947) took one of the central tenets of modernism--artistic originality--and systematically dismantled it. In 1979, she photographed pictures by master photographer Walker Evans directly out of catalogues and then exhibited them as her own; similar outright appropriations were made of works by Van Gogh, Léger and Duchamp. Again and again, Levine's works pose questions of aura, authoriality and, perhaps most importantly, value. Pairs and Posses is the first monograph to focus exclusively on the sculptural duos and trios that the artist has been making since 1992. Here, objects found on eBay and in junk or antique shops might be cast in black glass, crystal or bronze. The transposition of these objects into worthier material automatically renders kitsch objects works of "high" art. Where Levine's early work debunked modernism's aura of irrefutability, the pieces in Pairs and Posses perform an opposite inversion of cultural worth. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Martin Hentschel. Text by Howard Singerman. Clth, 9.5 x 11.5 in. / 96 pgs / 25 color. Publication Date: 2/28/2011 List Price: US $45.00

  Walther König, Köln Jack Goldstein A leading protagonist of the Pictures Generation,” Jack Goldstein (1945–2003) has long been prized by his colleagues and a specialist audience around the world for his heroic independence of spirit, but his actual work has typically remained inaccessible and unidentifiable to the wider public until now. His oeuvre is in fact characterized by its diversity, encompassing as it does performances, films, albums, paintings, aphorisms, the critique of text and image production by direct appropriation, in the vein of his colleagues Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine. Media is sensational” was a famous aphorism of Goldstein's—meaning that technology does everything for us so that we no longer have to function in terms of experience. We function in terms of aesthetics.” This first thorough catalogue on Goldstein at last does justice to his work and its influence. It contains a wide selection of illustrations, an interview with Goldstein from 1985 by Chris Dercon and . . . . [see book details]

  Foreword by Susanne Gaensheimer. Text by Klaus Görner, Chrissie Iles, Shepherd Steiner. Interview by Chris Dercon. Clth, 9 x 10.5 in. / 204 pgs / 150 color / 20 b&w. Publication Date: 3/31/2010 List Price: US $64.00

  JRP|Ringier Troy Brauntuch A member of the so-called Pictures Generation,” Troy Brauntuch (born 1954) makes appropriated works that, by removing or adding context, can, on one hand, empty out culturally charged icons, and on the other hand, supply seemingly innocuous material with massive charge. Brauntuch's work 1 2 3 provides a useful example of the tactics he likes to employ; it consists of screenprints of a set of fairly unremarkable sketches—a tank, a vestibule, a stage set—which turn out to have been drawn by one Adolf Hitler. This semiotic standoff between innocuous artwork and not-so-innocuous author compels the viewer to ponder the constructions of significance one so often unthinkingly performs when looking at art—constructions that Brauntuch has consistently sabotaged throughout his 30-year career. This first survey of Brauntuch's work includes essays by Johanna Burton and Douglas Eklund, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's critically acclaimed 2009 Pictures Generation exhibition. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Lionel Bovier. Text by Johanna Burton, Douglas Eklund. Clth, 11 x 11 in. / 144 pgs / 100 color. Publication Date: 7/31/2010 List Price: US $80.00

  Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Douglas Blau Since the 1980s, Douglas Blau has used words and pictures interchangeably to create a highly regarded and unique body of work. He emerged as a critic and curator in tandem with the Pictures Generation of artists. In 1987, his exhibition Fictions: A Selection of Pictures from the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries was the first in a maverick series to apply curatorial practice to the construction of explicit narratives. Blau creates picture epics and episodes from uniformly framed collages of printed matter: postcards, film stills, images of paintings and photographs, pictures of all kinds are cut and pasted into individual collage elements. These are composed into sequences based on formal and narrative associations that flow from frame to frame. Centuries of picture making appear distilled through Blau’s art into an essential repertoire of characters, plots, periods, styles, locations, and genres. Only the details and degrees of abstraction vary over time and . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Ingrid Schaffner. Pbk, 10 x 8.5 in. / 88 pgs / 50 color. Publication Date: 2/1/2009 List Price: US $30.00

  Charta James Casebere For the last 20 years, James Casebere has constructed increasingly complex small-scale architectural models that are carefully built and then subtly lit and photographed in the studio. These table-sized models are made of simple materials, pared down to essential forms, empty of both extraneous detail and action. Casebere's disconcerting ''sites'' recall prisons, monasteries, tunnels, factories and other such spaces. Casebere has gained increasing international acclaim in recent years as the leading proponent of what has become known as ''constructed photography.'' This is the first publication to comprehensively survey Casebere's career in its entirety, and provides an important contextual and visual framework in which to posit his soaring international reputation. His oeuvre can be seen in the full scope of its development, from his early preoccupation with the genre of the Western and the suburban home, to his concern with institutional buildings, to his recent investigations into the relationships between social control . . . . [see book details]

  Essays by Christopher Chang, Jeffrey Eugenides, Anthony Vidler. Hardcover, 9.5 x 12 in. / 176 pgs / 48 color / 15 b&w / 49 duotone. Publication Date: 8/2/2001 List Price: US $49.95

  David Zwirner, New York James Welling: Flowers This concise and beautiful exhibition catalogue features arresting, colorful, Rorschach Test-like photograms of flowers by the esteemed Los Angeles-based conceptual photographer, James Welling. For this series, Welling placed the blossoms of a common southern California plant on sheets of 8x10 film and exposed them to light. The negatives were then projected onto special photo paper through a color mural enlarger and color filters, to produce the dramatic, spectral, almost sun- or moon-dappled images reproduced here. Currently a professor of fine art at UCLA, Welling studied at CalArts in the early 1970s. Welling was the subject of a midcareer retrospective at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2000, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He is represented in New York by David Zwirner Gallery and in Los Angeles by Regen Projects. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Denise Bratton. Text by Lynne Tillman. Hardcover, 8.5 x 11 in. / 64 pgs/ 31 color. Publication Date: 6/1/2007 List Price: US $50.00

  Walther König, Köln John Baldessari: Prima Facie Marilyn's Dress More than any other artist of his generation, the Los Angeles-based Conceptual artist John Baldessari explores the relationship between reading and seeing, between language and image. In this small, provocative artist's book, Baldessari presents 16 supposedly evocative colors along with the names that they were given by the American paint companies that produced them. Across from each solid colored left-hand page, the right page offers the color's title, creating a concrete poem in four parts. For example, in part one, "Organic Order" stands beside a mulchy green, "Creative Thinker" is paired with a deep purple, "Avant Garde" goes with mustard yellow, and "Abstract" is across from sea-green. Further on we learn that warm peachy-pink stands for "Love and Happiness," while warm pinky-peach represents "Beautiful in My Eyes." Source companies include Pratt & Lambert, Benjamin Moore and Pantone. . . . . [see book details]

  Hardcover, 6.5 x 12.25 in. / 44 pgs / 16 color. Publication Date: 2/1/2007 List Price: US $35.00

  Walther König, Köln John Baldessari: Music Highly influential artist and teacher John Baldessari became known in late 1960s Southern California as a conceptual painter, and since then he has worked in a variety of other media, including photography, artist books, video and printmaking. Baldessari has engaged the theme of music off and on throughout his career, but until now, those investigations haven’t been seen in one cohesive volume. With more than 50 color images of paintings, photographs, videos and mixed media works spanning from 1970 through 2007, this compendium illustrates Baldessari’s complex relationship with text, image and sound, examining the centrality of music in his oeuvre. Featuring pieces such as the important 1972 video work, Baldessari Sings LeWitt,” in which he set Sol LeWitt’s theoretical reflections on art to music, this connoisseur’s essential also includes many lesser-known and recent works--like a 2006 drum kit print with a yellow face over-painted in yellow and blue and a 2007 . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by John C. Welchman, Stefan Gronert, Christina Vegh. Paperback, 8.25 x 11 in. / 144 pgs / 82 color / 73 b&w. Publication Date: 1/15/2008 List Price: US $48.00

  Carolina Nitsch Editions Laurie Simmons: In And Around The House Photographs 1976-78 Laurie Simmons has been dealing with issues from In and Around the House since the mid-1970s. Her seminal early work was some of the first to use set-up photography to create images with intensely psychological subtexts and forcefully feminist content. The 1950s-style constructed interiors used dolls, dollhouse furnishings, miniature props, postcards, interior decoration books, pamphlets and magazines to create images that questioned female stereotypes and American clichés with humor and charm. Though they were shot both in color and black, the latter have remained woefully under-published and are presented here, for the first time, in full, along with a critical essay by Carol Squiers, curator at the International Center of Photography in New York, and a personal account by Simmons herself. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Carolina Nitsch. Essays by Carol Squiers and Laurie Simmons. Hardcover, 11.5 x 9.5 in. / 104 pgs. Publication Date: 8/2/2003 List Price: US $39.95

  Skarstedt Fine Art Laurie Simmons: Photographs 1978/79 In a 1992 interview, Laurie Simmons stated that, in her first body of color works, she was trying to recreate a feeling, a mood from the time I was growing up: a sense of the 50s that I knew was both beautiful and lethal at the same time.” Reproduced here, her early series Interiors and Big Figures depict a post-World War II, 50s suburbia through plastic housewife and cowboy dolls placed in constructed interiors and manipulated exteriors. While the dolls provide a sense of play, the reality of the images they model is unavoidable. The female is pictured in the home, but she is alone, isolated, and vulnerable. The cowboy exudes the confidence and independence of a life of adventure, but he cannot escape the implied violence, racism and paternalism that also characterize his ideal. . . . . [see book details]

  Artwork by Laurie Simmons. Photographs by Collier Schorr. Clothbound, 9 x 8 in. / 71 pgs / 47 color. Publication Date: 3/2/2003 List Price: US $30.00

  Skarstedt Fine Art Laurie Simmons: Color Coordinated Interiors 1983 Color Coordinated Interiors catalogues a little known but characteristic and illuminating early project of Laurie Simmons's from 1983, just a few years after her first solo show in New York. Simmons is best known for her chilling and sophisticated photographs of dolls and dollhouses--seminal works that can be found in the greatest collections of contemporary art throughout the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Here, Simmons created miniature spaces using projection and illusion rather than glue-and-board craft, casting photographs behind dolls and lighting her tiny models starkly with flashlights--they're "Teenettes," three-inch-high Japanese figures whose clothes and hairstyles are all molded from the same single piece of brightly-colored plastic. The Teenettes' features are fuzzy by nature, but the scenes behind them here are photographed so that piping on every pillow pops out. This guided tour, with an interview by California artist James Welling, puts . . . . [see book details]

  Interview by James Welling. Hardcover, 8 x 10 in. / 56 pgs / 21 color. Publication Date: 6/1/2007 List Price: US $30.00

  JRP|Ringier Louise Lawler: The Tremaine Pictures 1984-2007 Louise Lawler focuses her camera on high art and its spaces, from the rarefied white cube to the windowless storeroom, from the collector’s luxurious bedroom to the featureless boardroom. Part institutional critique, part social commentary and part wandering gaze, Lawler’s glossy photographs redirect the viewer’s attention from the artworks to their environs, exposing a set of supple relationships surrounding the presentation and marketing of art and its role in conferring and reflecting power. Lawler’s emphasis on context as a defining factor in the assignment of an object’s value throws her own sumptuous photographs into a state of eloquent suspension. In 1984, Lawler was granted access to the homes of visionary collectors Burton and Emily Tremaine, and she has since tracked the works she photographed there as they have wended their way through museums and auction houses. With texts by Stephen Melville and Andrea Miller-Keller, this publication gathers almost all the Tremaine . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Marc Blondeau, Philippe Davet. Text by Andrea Miller- Keller, Stephen Melvillle. Paperback, 9.5 x 9.5 in. / 108 pgs / 40 color / 20 b&w. Publication Date: 3/1/2008 List Price: US $25.00

  JRP|Ringier Richard Prince: Jokes and Cartoons In conveying the seriousness with which he sees and uses his lighthearted material, Richard Prince has said, "Jokes and cartoons are part of any mainstream magazine. Especially magazines like The New Yorker or Playboy. They're right up there with the editorial and advertisements and table of contents and letters to the editors. They're part of the layout, part of the sights' and gags.' Sometimes they're political, sometimes they just make fun of everyday life. Once in a while they drive people to protest and storm foreign embassies and kill people. Prince has always recycled found materials from American popular culture, most often images from advertisements and magazine photography. He re-photographs, silkscreens, overpaints, frames, enlarges or composes collages, playing with the material's somehow empty meaning. Citation, deflection, appropriation: every treatment is explored and played with. Among these works, as among the pages of the magazines, jokes and cartoons occupy an important place. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Beatrix Ruf. Paperback, 8.5 x 11 in. / 216 pgs / 107 color. Publication Date: 8/15/2006 List Price: US $35.00

  Damiani James Casebere: Works 1975-2010 James Casebere (born 1953) emerged in the Pictures Generation as an artist-photographer complicating the status of the photographic image alongside Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. His earliest works dismantled the codes of American suburbia and the myth of the west, but he quickly arrived at the practice for which he is best known today: the construction of formally simplified architectural models--arenas, monasteries, tunnels, factories--which Casebere lights and photographs in his studio. In the early 1990s, as the ramifications of Michel Foucault's critiques of architecture and power took hold in American culture, Casebere's practice developed into a study of architectural typologies of the Enlightenment era, particularly prisons. The lighting in his photographs is dramatic, or rather it plays with the rhetoric of dramatic lighting, qualified by the sheer artifice of the architectural models themselves. Edited by Okwui Enwezor, this major mid-career survey includes several of Casebere's lesser-known early works, as well as . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Okwui Enwezor. Introduction by Toni Morrison, Ford Morrison. Text by Hal Foster. Clth, 11.5 x 12 in. / 316 pgs / 260 color. Publication Date: 10/31/2011 List Price: US $80.00

  Charta James Casebere For the last 20 years, James Casebere has constructed increasingly complex small-scale architectural models that are carefully built and then subtly lit and photographed in the studio. These table-sized models are made of simple materials, pared down to essential forms, empty of both extraneous detail and action. Casebere's disconcerting ''sites'' recall prisons, monasteries, tunnels, factories and other such spaces. Casebere has gained increasing international acclaim in recent years as the leading proponent of what has become known as ''constructed photography.'' This is the first publication to comprehensively survey Casebere's career in its entirety, and provides an important contextual and visual framework in which to posit his soaring international reputation. His oeuvre can be seen in the full scope of its development, from his early preoccupation with the genre of the Western and the suburban home, to his concern with institutional buildings, to his recent investigations into the relationships between social control . . . . [see book details]

  Essays by Christopher Chang, Jeffrey Eugenides, Anthony Vidler. Hardcover, 9.5 x 12 in. / 176 pgs / 48 color / 15 b&w / 49 duotone. Publication Date: 8/2/2001 List Price: US $49.95