FEATURED POSTFeatures and Themes of the Fall 2010 D.A.P. Catalog By Sharon Helgason Gallagher
This year D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. celebrates 20 years of meaningful work bringing books on art and culture to an ever-growing and ever-more engaged international audience of readers. Throughout, we have been honored to work with the world’s foremost publishers and booksellers, museums and curators, designers and critics, and, of course, artists across all media: we are grateful to all of our colleagues for entrusting us with the task of serving as the world’s single best source for intelligently edited, thoughtfully designed and superbly produced books on art, photography, architecture and design. D.A.P. is the bridge between the publishing industry and the art world, and transmitting information and meaning between the two has been an ongoing learning experience. D.A.P. is first and foremost a community of culture workers and we are proud to work with you all.
The D.A.P. catalogue has evolved over these two decades to become a publication in its own right, unique in serving both as a much-used tool for booksellers and as an international survey of emergent trends in the worlds of art and culture. Together the forthcoming titles gathered in the new Fall 2010 D.A.P. catalogue represent the work of more than 1,600 artists, photographers, architects, designers, musicians, filmmakers, dancers, curators, art historians, critics and, of course, editors and publishers.
With each publication of the D.A.P. catalogue, readers both encounter new individual titles and have the opportunity to step back and take a look at the big picture. This Fall 2010 season, we see a strong commitment among museums and publishers across the world to publishing time-based artwork in performance, installation, sound art, dance and theater. Forthcoming monographs and exhibition catalogues feature Bruce Nauman, Joan Jonas, Francis Alÿs, Robert Wilson, Renée Green, Cai Guo-Qiang, Ben Patterson and Stephan von Huene to name just a few. Time-based media invite us into a fourth dimension, time as the coordinate that enables us to describe an event--a performance, for example. Understanding time-based media retroactively transforms our understanding of traditional art forms and our cultural canon. Two intellectually adventurous catalogues from The Museum of Modern Art are a case in point: On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century and The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today. The former examines how line has stepped off the picture plane into sculpture, photography, film and dance; the latter documents the evolving interplay between sculpture and photography. Newly conceptualized from the fourth dimension, traditional notions of the two-dimensional picture and the three-dimensional sculpture have a new richness and inclusiveness and we now see that by exploring the limits of its own dimensionality, each art form necessarily bumps up against a higher dimension: the two-dimensional picture plane struggles with three dimensionality (either representationally or as surface), while the sculptural object tussles with the fourth--temporal--dimension, presenting multiple perspectives that the viewer can only occupy by moving around the work through time.
Exploring the fourth dimension of time incurs ethical demands: as Dorothea von Hantelmann eloquently writes in How to Do Things with Art, "it is of crucial significance whether a situational artwork enters history as a memory or as a document." The design of information transmission is also key to two visual manifestos this season: Cult-ure, by Rian Hughes, an intellectual toolbox for the digital era, and Sustainism by Joost Elffers and Michiel Schwartz, who question modernism’s espousal of unlimited progress.
One of the works that is featured in MoMA’s On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, is an interactive artist’s book by Anna Maria Maiolino: it is easy to imagine this book as the kind of pedagogical aid Rudolf Steiner had in mind when writing his lectures, "The Fourth Dimension." Steiner’s influence, the increasing import of time-based artwork, a call to enlightened pedagogy and the need for mindful design of information transmission can be seen again and again in the new books offered this Fall. | 