ANDREA GEYER / KATYA SANDER

Meaning is what Hides the Instability of One’s Position

You’ll never see an airport the same way again: 22 photographic sequences glimpsing fragments of movements through spaces of transit form the most amazing flip-book ever. Andrea Geyer and Katya Sander’s artist’s book is a riveting photographic exprience that takes us through the so-called “transit areas” of international airports, where you’re officially between states and nations, although still within them. The artists investigate these spaces in a flow of images, meanings and politics, overlaid and interwoven with 130 terms and 57 sentences collected in various airports. In a world where the notion of borders has become both more rigid and more fluid than ever before, the artists spatialize the gap through a vocabulary of hallways, doors, lines and identifications that lead to passages granted or denied.

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GIACOMETTI – NAUMAN

Max Hollein & Esther Schlicht (Eds.)

Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) and Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) both lived during times of cultural crisis and turmoil—Giacometti experiencing the crippling effects of two world wars and Nauman, the birth of the Cold War, surveillance and the rise of technology. The surprising and hitherto overlooked connections between the works of these two artists from two different generations are the subject of both the current Schirn Kunsthalle exhibition and its accompanying catalog. Both Nauman’s and Giacometti’s oeuvres revolve primarily around the image of man and the human condition. With reduced means of representation, each artist explores fundamental existential questions: the emptiness, the relationship between figure and space, and the fragmented body. Illustrated with over 200 color plates, this critical hardcover publication features essays by critic, curator and painter Robert Storr, art historian Thierry Dufr.ne, cultural historian and sound art curator Gaby Hartel and exhibition curator Esther Schlicht, all of whom expand our perception of the significant commonalities in the work of these outstanding representatives of 20th- and 21st-century art. Giacometti emerges as a pioneer of key developments in art after 1960, regaining his original radicalism, while Nauman continues his outstanding importance as a sculptor, photographer, video and performance artist of behavioral and psychological encoding. Seen together they achieve an alternative historical significance.

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BEATRICE GIBSON

The Tiger’s Mind

Filmmaker Beatrice Gibson is inspired by historical music practices that propose more egalitarian methods of production between composers and performers. In 2010, Gibson and typographer Will Holder began a project with the intention of using experimental British composer Cornelius Cardew’s musical score, The  Tiger’s  Mind (1967), as a guide to producing improvised speech. Since the verbally (rather than graphically) rendered score concerned the changing relations between six performers, practitioners from other fields were invited to conversa- tions at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Kunstverein, Amsterdam, and CAC Brétigny over the course of the next two years. Each conversation produced a printed document to serve as a score for subsequent meetings. This book is a document of their process, culminating in the making of Gibson’s eponymous film.

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MARK THOMAS GIBSON

Early Retirement

Over the course of 2016, with the American presidential election looming, American artist Mark Thomas Gibson (b. 1980, Miami) began drawing at his kitchen table in search of answers to the question of the quest for utopia. The upshot is his second artist’s book, Early Retirement, featuring over 200 pen-and-ink drawings, his follow-up to Some Monsters Loom Large (2016), a story revolving around Mr. Wolfson, a werewolf and Doomsday prophet seeking to move up in the ranks of New York City’s highly competitive street prophecy scene. Gibson uses the traditional black-and-white palette of graphic novels to create stark contrasts and settings in which positive and negative space define the composition. Relying on a minimal aesthetic, he plays off both fine art and comic book vernacular of sequential narrative and rarely edits his drawings. Trusting his drawings to provide answers, in the process, Gibson leads the reader to some future truths. Gibson is a professor at Yale University School of Art.

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INGO GIEZENDANNER

GRR30: Urban Recordings

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Liam Gillick

How Are You Going to Behave? A Kitchen Cat Speaks

This book documents Gillick’s project for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2009. It contains an introduction by the curator, a text by Liam Gillick about his work as well as the text spoken by the kitchen cat present in the show: “She speaks from the present and fights against the echoes of building’s interior. It’s history is one of misrepresentation, misunderstanding and desires. Thus, the pavilion becomes a location for endless self-circulating histories that—in the end—represents our history as well.”

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Liam Gillick

Born in 1964, the prolific Liam Gillick was one of the artists – including Damien Hirst and Angela Bulloch – who dominated British art through the 1990s. He’s spent years as the post-conceptual crowd-pleaser, with a controversial solo show in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2009 only the most recent triumph. His sculptural forms and settings seem terse, yet, writes curator Robert Fleck, “they evince a strong – almost celebratory – intellectual presence.” This monumental 256-page, full-color catalog serves as a comprehensive mid-career retrospective, compiled by the artist himself. With his muscular combination of words, forms and ideas, the works are both narrative and non-narrative. For example, in “The State itself Becomes a Super Whatnot,” a vivid aluminum and Plexiglas installation derives, in the artist’s words, “from Brazilian research into Scandinavian car production.” Gillick has created over 2000 multi-dimensional works exploring – in his casual, playful yet deeply political way – ideas about capitalism, social organizations, social volatility and the myriad possibilities of instability. The New York-based artist’s quest has continually been something of a causal chain that investigates concepts such as utopia, parallelism, space and time, using them all as a search for utopia. As Gillick says, “One long walk … Two short piers …” The definitive volume so far on this incessantly interesting and rigorous artist. With texts by Nicolas Bourriaud and Isabelle Moffat.

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LIAM GILLICK

All Books

Collected here for the first time are Liam Gillick’s fictional writings: McNamara, Erasmus is Late, Ibuka!, The Winter School, Discussion Island/Big Conference Centre, and Literally No Place. Presenting the historical, utopian visions of society and speculating on them often through the fictionalized voices of secondary historical characters, these ideas are explored in a nonlinear, open-ended discursive format, in which the text mirrors the structure of the presented ideas. Gillick’s concern is to explore complex, paradoxical historical and ideological moments, reflecting on how the redundant utopian elements of the past continue to inform both our contemporary and post-utopian future.

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LIAM GILLICK

Susanne Gaensheimer, Nicolaus Schafhausen (Eds.)

Edited by Susanne Gaensheimer, Westfälischer Kunstverein, and Nicolaus Schafhausen, Frankfurter Kunstverein Texts by Michael Archer, Susanne Gaensheimer, Nicolaus Schafhausen

This publication constitutes the first comprehensive documentation of the work of British artist Liam Gillick. With numerous illustrations and a seminal essay by Michael Archer, the book traces Gillick’s works from the beginning in the late 1980s up to the present.

“‘If you want to fight, then you go underground, whether you’re on the inside of things or on the outside …’ The first lines from the first chapter of Robert McNamara, Liam Gillick’s unpublished 1993 novel based on his screenplay, McNamara, … appear to be a metaphor for an artistic strategy that runs throughout the entire novel and all of Gillick’s subsequent texts, installations, scenarios, and objects. This strategy is the construction of implicit, non-concrete elements around the actual meaning, which in turn remains obscure; around an unmentioned content that exists between the words and lines only as a vague context, as assumption, as something intangible and yet all-embracing, underground, invisible, and underlying everything.” Susanne Gaensheimer

Design by Surface, Berlin/Frankfurt am Main

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Liam Gillick

Five or Six

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