CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/21/2011

Preview the ARTBOOK | D.A.P. Spring 2012 List!

During the holidays, we are pleased to offer a preview of our Spring 2012 list to those who care to download a PDF of our forthcoming catalog. To learn more about the Spring list, please see ARTBOOK | D.A.P. President and Publisher Sharon Helgason Gallagher's catalog letter, below.

Dear Reader,

Things get animated in this Spring 2012 ARTBOOK | D.A.P. catalogue. Yayoi Kusama creates pulsing, psychedelic installations; Cindy Sherman steps inside her photographs; and Louise Bourgeois gives sensual, empowering form to the unconscious in her psychoanalytic sculptures. John Chamberlain transforms the dead cold of scrap metal into expressive gesture; Ed Kienholz ignites his assemblages with the white heat of political outrage. These artists of enactment and enchantment are joined by the Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow, whose provocative objects often hover between the animate and inanimate. Szapocznikow’s work will receive its first major American exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from October 2012 to January 2013.

Animism—the belief that the universe is alive with spirits—has played the role of boogeyman, the caricatured, primitive, defining opposite of western civilization. This season we see a noticeable number of artists, curators and theorists challenging this dualism, recuperating animism and related ideas in important new publications. Animism: Modernity through the Looking Glass brings together works by Jimmie Durham, Ken Jacobs, Yayoi Kusama, Chris Marker, Ana Mendieta and others; Lars Spuybroek rethinks the Gothic in The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design; Siri Engberg’s Walker Art Center exhibition catalogue Lifelike focuses on artworks that through their handmade, labor intensive fabrication process are imbued with humanity. Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism and Kindred Spirits are two seminal titles in the sadly under-published field of Native American art history and criticism, that offer sophisticated interpretations of indigenous aesthetics and the role of the object as an embodiment of ancestral memory.

A recasting of animism also informs environmental ethics as it questions both the assumed moral superiority of humans and the “disenchantment” of nature. Richard Misrach and Kate Orff’s groundbreaking collaboration Petrochemical America combines Misrach’s haunting landscape photographs with visual data maps tracing the path of industrial destruction that became known as “Cancer Alley.” The resulting document bears elegiac witness to the devastating effects of our instrumentalist relationship to nature and makes a powerful argument for a newly attentive engagement with our environment.

These are just a few of the highlights of our Spring 2012 ARTBOOK | D.A.P. catalogue. Inside you’ll find the art world’s favorite selection of new books and exhibition catalogues from the foremost museums and publishers in the arts. Visit us online every week at artbook.com to see our featured artist, new releases, events and blog posts.

With kind regards,

Sharon Helgason Gallagher
President and Publisher
ARTBOOK | D.A.P.

SPRING 2012 CATALOG