ARTIST MONOGRAPHS

Merce Cunningham

Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays


     

ACTIVE BACKLIST

Merce Cunningham: Changes

THE SONG CAVE/MERCE CUNNINGHAM TRUST
Edited by Frances Starr.

Pbk, 6 x 9.25 in. / 188 pgs / 16 color / 160 bw. | 6/18/2019 | In stock
$25.00


Merce Cunningham: Common Time

WALKER ART CENTER
Edited with text by Fionn Meade, Joan Rothfuss. Foreword by Olga Viso. Text by Carlos Basualdo, Juliet Bellow, Philip Bither, Roger Copeland, Mary L. Coyne, Douglas Crimp, Hiroko Ikegami, Kelly Kivland, Claudia La Rocco, Benjamin Piekut, David Vaughan. Interviews by Victoria Brooks, Danielle Goldman, Aram Moshayedi.

How Cunningham transformed postwar culture through collaboration

Hbk, 9 x 11.75 in. / 456 pgs / 250 color / 150 bw. | 4/25/2017 | In stock
$49.95


Merce Cunningham: Beyond the Perfect Stage

DAMIANI
Afterword by Nancy Dalva. Composition by Trevor Carlson

Hbk, 9 x 9 in. / 96 pgs / illustrated throughout. | 4/26/2016 | Out of stock
$50.00


      

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

Merce Cunningham: A Pictures Book for John Cage Xmas 1984

THE JOHN CAGE TRUST

Slip, spiralbound, 6 x 9 in. / 80 pgs / 39 color. | 5/31/2012 | Not available
$45.00


Mikhail Baryshnikov: Merce My Way

THE BARYSHNIKOV FOUNDATION

Clth, 11 x 9.75 in. / 128 pgs / 177 color. | 2/1/2009 | Not available
$45.00


Cunningham/Monk/Jones

WALKER ART CENTER
Artwork by Merce Cunningham. Contributions by Thelma Golden, Meredith Jones, Laura Kuhn.

Paperback, 9 x 7.5 in. / 176 pgs / 25 color / 200 duotone | 7/2/1998 | Not available
$29.95


Merce Cunningham: ChangesMerce Cunningham: Changes

Notes on Choreography

Published by The Song Cave/Merce Cunningham Trust.
Edited by Frances Starr.

On the occasion of Merce Cunningham’s centennial comes this handsome new edition of his classic and long-out-of-print artist’s book Changes: Notes on Choreography, first published in 1968 by Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press. The book presents a revealing exposition of Cunningham’s compositional process by way of his working notebooks, containing in-progress notations of individual dances with extensive speculations about the choreographic and artistic problems he was facing.

Illustrated with over 170 photographs and printed in color and black and white, the book was described by its original publisher as “the most comprehensive book on choreography to emerge from the new dance … [which] will come to stand with Eisenstein’s and Stanislavsky’s classics on the artistic process.” By the time these notebooks were published, Cunningham had already led the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for 15 years, and had collaborated with Cage and others on milestones such as Variations V (1966) and RainForest (1968), the latter with Andy Warhol, David Tudor and Jasper Johns.

Along with his essay collection Dancing in Space and Time (1978), Changes is one of the most significant publications on Cunningham’s enduring contributions to dance, which developed through collaboration with John Cage to incorporate formal innovation with regard to chance, silence and stillness.



PUBLISHER
The Song Cave/Merce Cunningham Trust

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 6 x 9.25 in. / 188 pgs / 16 color / 160 bw.

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Catalog: FALL 2019 p. 97   

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ISBN 9780998829074 TRADE
List Price: $25.00 CAD $34.95 GBP £22.00

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Merce Cunningham: Common TimeMerce Cunningham: Common Time

Published by Walker Art Center.
Edited with text by Fionn Meade, Joan Rothfuss. Foreword by Olga Viso. Text by Carlos Basualdo, Juliet Bellow, Philip Bither, Roger Copeland, Mary L. Coyne, Douglas Crimp, Hiroko Ikegami, Kelly Kivland, Claudia La Rocco, Benjamin Piekut, David Vaughan. Interviews by Victoria Brooks, Danielle Goldman, Aram Moshayedi.

Renowned as both choreographer and dancer, Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) also revolutionized dance through his partnerships with the many artists who created costumes, lighting, films and videos, and décor and sound for his choreographic works. Cunningham, together with partner John Cage, invited those artists to help him rethink what dance could mean, both on the stage and in site-responsive contexts. His notion that movement, sound and visual art could share a “common time” remains one of the most radical aesthetic models of the 20th century and yielded extraordinary works by dozens of artists and composers, including Charles Atlas, John Cage, Morris Graves, Jasper Johns, Rei Kawakubo, Robert Morris, Gordon Mumma, Bruce Nauman, Ernesto Neto, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, David Tudor, Stan VanDerBeek, Andy Warhol and La Monte Young, among many others. These collaborations bring to the fore Cunningham’s direct impact upon postwar artistic practice.

This 456-page volume, published in conjunction with the Walker Art Center and MCA Chicago’s exhibition, reconsiders the choreographer and his collaborators as an extraordinarily generative interdisciplinary network that preceded and predicted dramatic shifts in performance, including the development of site-specific dance, the use of technology as a choreographic tool and the radical separation of sound and movement in dance. It features ten new essays by curators and historians, as well as interviews with contemporary choreographers—Beth Gill, Maria Hassabi, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener—who address Cunningham’s continued influence. These are supplemented by rarely published archival photographs, reprints of texts by Cunningham, Cage and other key dancers, artists and scholars, several appendices and an extensive illustrated chronology placing Cunningham’s activities and those of his collaborators in the context of the 20th century, particularly the expanded arts scene of the 1960s and 1970s. This book is an essential volume for anyone interested in contemporary art, music and dance.



PUBLISHER
Walker Art Center

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9 x 11.75 in. / 456 pgs / 250 color / 150 bw.

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Catalog: SPRING 2017 p. 9   

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Merce Cunningham: Beyond the Perfect StageMerce Cunningham: Beyond the Perfect Stage

Photographs by Stephanie Berger

Published by Damiani.
Afterword by Nancy Dalva. Composition by Trevor Carlson

In Beyond the Perfect Stage, Stephanie Berger captures the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing in a series of site-specific “Events” from 2008 to 2011 from a multiplicity of perspectives, creating a photographic choreography that combines the “Events” in a new way. The Cunningham dancers warm up and then perform in various situations—as Cunningham called the galleries and the especially constructed stages for each “Event”—including Richard Serra’s steel sculptures, Dan Flavin’s neon light installations, Sol LeWitt’s Minimalist white boxes and the vast Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory. Berger captures Cunningham’s evanescent art, constructing a new experience while at the same time preserving the original, thus operating very much within the aesthetic framework Cunningham himself proposed. Vivid, immediate, unmediated yet curated, her photographic “Event” contextualizes the dances in a personal but entirely available form.

PUBLISHER
Damiani

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9 x 9 in. / 96 pgs / illustrated throughout.

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Catalog: SPRING 2016 p. 148   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9788862084659 TRADE
List Price: $50.00 CAD $67.50

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Out of stock

STATUS: Out of stock

Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.

Merce Cunningham: A Pictures Book for John Cage Xmas 1984Merce Cunningham: A Pictures Book for John Cage Xmas 1984

Published by The John Cage Trust.

A Pictures Book for John Cage Xmas 1984 is a facsimile edition of a spiralbound notebook filled with choreographic notation by Merce Cunningham (1919–2009), a leader of the American avant-garde throughout his 70-year career and one of the most important choreographers and dancers of all time. This previously unpublished document is one of the most extensive elaborations of Cunningham’s choreographic notation in print, offering a rare glimpse into his methods, and in particular the stage work Pictures (1984). Originally presented as a holiday gift from Cunningham to his lifetime partner, John Cage, this lovingly reproduced edition now in turn serves as a gift from the John Cage Trust to the Cunningham Dance Foundation, on the occasion of the dance company’s final performance, New Year’s Eve 2011. With exquisite color notations that blend drawing and dance, it will also make a perfect gift for any fan of modern art or music.

PUBLISHER
The John Cage Trust

BOOK FORMAT
Slip, spiralbound, 6 x 9 in. / 80 pgs / 39 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Out of print

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Catalog: SPRING 2012 p. 101   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781935202790 TRADE
List Price: $45.00 CAD $55.00

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Not available

STATUS: Out of print | 00/00/00

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Mikhail Baryshnikov: Merce My WayMikhail Baryshnikov: Merce My Way

Published by The Baryshnikov Foundation.

Mikhail Baryshnikov, a photographer most of his adult life, has turned his lens on dance, and here pays vibrant homage to the work of master choreographer Merce Cunningham. In his introduction to Merce My Way Baryshnikov writes, "Watching Cunningham's dances through the eye of a lens is a lesson in the extremes and restraints of a dancer's body... to a dancer, such nakedness is revelatory." This volume offers 85 of Baryshnikov's striking, never-before-published color images, in which he seizes the essence of Cunningham's choreography by anticipating the dancers' motions and capturing the streaming fluidity of the dance. His images are radiant and electric--blurring motion, past, present and future into a single frame. Featuring images of six recent Cunningham dances, the book is a revelation for all those who revere dance--and the work of these two masters.

PUBLISHER
The Baryshnikov Foundation

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 11 x 9.75 in. / 128 pgs / 177 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Out of print

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Catalog: SPRING 2009 p. 38   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780982172605 TRADE
List Price: $45.00 CAD $55.00

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STATUS: Out of print | 00/00/00

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Merce Cunningham: Fifty YearsMerce Cunningham: Fifty Years

Published by Aperture.
Essay by David Vaughan.

The book on Mr. Cunningham aims at, and is, as complete and clear a portrait of the modern dance choreographer and his epochal work as has ever been published... The surprise of the Cunningham book is the grace with which it almost definitively sums up Mr. Cunningham's 63-year life in dance ... Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years is a compelling portrait of a simple yet complex man and an artist who has seldom faltered in his explorations of life and art on the simplest and most complex levels. --Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times
“What emerges from this dispassionate, scrupulous account is much more than the chronicle of fifty years in the amazing and creative life of Merce Cunningham... Kudos to David Vaughan who has given us a noble work. As archivist for the Cunningham company for twenty years, he knows better than anyone how to turn this book about a great artist and about the art of this century into a work of art in itself.”
--Mikhail Baryshnikov
Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years celebrates the career of one of the most important artists of the twentieth century from his first innovative and explosive solo dances to the present. This unique book incorporates images of performances by many world renowned photographers, including Imogen Cunningham, Barbara Morgan, Annie Leibovitz, Peter Hujar and Arnold Eagle.

PUBLISHER
Aperture

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.5 x 12 in. / 320 pgs / 242 reproductions.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
No longer our product

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PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780893816247 TRADE
List Price: $75.00 CAD $90.00

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Merce Cunningham: Other AnimalsMerce Cunningham: Other Animals

Published by Aperture.
Essays by David Vaughan and Merce Cunningham.

Known worldwide for his remarkable, groundbreaking choreography, Merce Cunningham has a secret: he also draws. For the first time he opens a door into his fantastical animal kingdom with Aperture's publication of Other Animals. Cunningham, an obsessive observer with a colossal sense of humor, revels in nature with the same childlike vision and expressiveness that infuses his dances. Like his dances, his drawings are impressions, inventions, gestures and interactions. Cunningham introduces us to a bird riding a turtle, a bizarre hybrid creature wearing a fashionable sweater and an ostrich that rivals the gracefulness of his dancers.
The drawings are collected in a beautifully produced, colorful volume, with selected entries from Cunningham's journals and photographs of some of his dances and their notations. These drawings offer a key to understanding how Cunningham renders his vision of the world through dance--and how his vision is translated into costuming through his collaboration with designers such as Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garconnes.

PUBLISHER
Aperture

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 8.5 x 9.75 in. / 96 pgs / 70 reproductions.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
No longer our product

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PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780893819460 TRADE
List Price: $22.98 CAD $25.00

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Merce CunninghamMerce Cunningham

Published by Charta.
Artwork by Merce Cunningham. Edited by Germano Celant. Contributions by David Vaughn. Text by Melissa Harris.



PUBLISHER
Charta

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 6.75 x 9.5in. / 320 pgs / 57 bw / 21 duotone

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
No longer our product

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 1999

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9788881582167 TRADE
List Price: $45.00 CAD $55.00

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Cunningham/Monk/JonesCunningham/Monk/Jones

Art Performs Life

Published by Walker Art Center.
Artwork by Merce Cunningham. Contributions by Thelma Golden, Meredith Jones, Laura Kuhn.

Recogninzing the importance of performance in 20th century avant-garde art, this catalogue traces the careers of three artists who have each made a significant contribution to that history. Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk and Bill T. Jones.

PUBLISHER
Walker Art Center

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 9 x 7.5 in. / 176 pgs / 25 color / 200 duotone

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 1998

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780935640564 TRADE
List Price: $29.95 CAD $35.00

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Not available

STATUS: Out of print | 6/1/2005

For assistance locating a copy, please see our list of recommended out of print specialists

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