This book examines the complex set of cultural references and art-making strategies informing Ant Farm’s seminal 1975 performance Media Burn in which a customized Cadillac, dubbed the Phantom Dream Car, was driven through a wall of burning television sets.

Originally conceived as a conceptual architectural practice, Ant Farm evolved into a full-service art collaborative, culminating in such notable works as House of the Century (1971-73), Cadillac Ranch (1974) and The Eternal Frame (1975).

In Media Burn the artists flourished in a rich tumult of ideas that engaged contemporary media theory, an oddly complicated aesthetic spectacle, textual appropriation and an all-encompassing branding effort.

Written . . . .go to book page >>

In the wake of the Trump election, artist Matt Keegan (born 1976) began investigating the Democratic Party’s shifts over recent decades. In the late 80s, members of the Democratic Leadership Council successfully moved the party’s platform to the right by including a pro-business, pro-military, interventionist agenda, and downplaying social infrastructure as a calculated break from its New Deal-era foundation. This shift led to Bill Clinton’s consecutive terms.

1996 captures this pivotal time in American politics and society through the experience of artists who completed their undergraduate studies in that year and voted for Clinton, and others who were born in 1996 . . . .go to book page >>

First published in 2013 and quickly going out of print, Molly Nesbit’s The Pragmatism in the History of Art traces the questions that modern art history and theory has used to make sense of the changes overtaking both art and life. Opening with a consideration of pragmatism’s origins in the thought of Charles Sanders Pierce, William James and John Dewey, the book examines the overlaps and disparities between art and philosophy across several generations of art historians, crossing back and forth over the Atlantic. A genealogy emerges through case studies on the work of Schapiro, Henri Focillon, Alexander Dorner, George . . . .go to book page >>

From her beginning in the mid-1960s through the early 70s, German artist Anna Oppermann (1940–1993)—best known for her encyclopedic, immersive installations—created an astonishing series of surreal, almost psychedelic drawings that quietly explode the private space of the home, and her experience within it. These early drawings contribute to a feminist reentering of spheres traditionally associated with women, casting everyday objects as symbolic, consequential protagonists: houseplants sprawl to take over the picture plane, windows and mirrors provide views into other worlds and tables display drawings that themselves open out into new domestic scenes. By placing her own body—her knees, arms, the . . . .go to book page >>

For Mail, Los Angeles–based artist Mungo Thomson (born 1969) asked the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to let its incoming mail accumulate unopened during the run of the exhibition. Over the course of the show a pile of correspondence and packages grew, forming a temporary archive.

This book functions both as an artwork and as an elaborate and exhaustive documentation of the work as realized by the artist. Every letter, package, notice, magazine, flyer, restaurant menu, exhibition postcard, vendor catalog and piece of junk mail is represented.

Featuring an essay by Hammer Museum curator Aram Moshayedi, Mail performs a kind of autopsy . . . .go to book page >>

This volume documents Frog, a five-foot-long anatomical frog sculpture by Los Angeles–based experimental filmmaker and artist Margaret Honda (born 1961), inspired by the gargantuan frog in Bramantino’s Madonna delle Torri (1520).