BOOKS AND IDEAS AFTER SETH SIEGELAUB

Michalis Pichler (Ed.)

Seth Siegelaub, (b. 1941–2013, New York) curator, gallery owner and author is best known for his promotion of conceptual art in New York during the 1960s and ‘70s. Books and Ideas after Seth Siegelaub looks at the books produced by Siegelaub in the ‘60s and their renewed influence on artists and their publications today. Pichler, curator of the exhibition at the Center for Book Arts NY (2013), offers this catalog as a window into an ongoing conceptual discourse with Siegelaub’s books as the platform. Extensive illustrations and bibliographic details are featured including Siegelaub’s Xerox Book (1968), which was printed in offset but has since been xeroxed and openly reproduced by numerous artists and publishers. His publications, often taken as starting points for new projects, are substantial artworks in their own right. Also included: Siegelaub’s work with the Art Workers’ Coalition, a draft of The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement on contemporary art and activism, and a last interview with Siegelaub by Pichler.

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Mike Bouchet

Selected Works 1989-2009

The work produced by Mike Bouchet in recent years seems to present a compulsion to alter one’s place in the world by reproducing and re-contextualizing “desirable” things in and of the world. His projects and exploits are one-to-one models – real transactions with their own autonomy and agency. You cannot alter your place in the world without first altering your image of the world. Bouchet’s endeavor goes beyond representation or a kind of DIY prudence, into what can best be described as a real-life parody. This artist uses everything at his disposal to grow, package, and pitch his own products. In systems such as these, even real transactions are not completely convincing, the rectification of one’s product through extensive image production is needed to make it completely viable.

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PAULINE BOUDRY/RENATE LORENZ

Aftershow

Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Anja Casser w/Electra (Eds.)

Artists’ book Aftershow engages and brilliantly captures the recent film installations of the gender-neutral artist duo Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz following their 2013 exhibition Patriarchal Poetry at the Badischer Kunstverein. Research material, scripts, film stills, and installation shots provide insight into the artists’ investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound and underground (drag) performances. The book’s title alludes to an interest in events that are belated, left backstage or off-screen. A number of (fictitious) letters to friends and collaborators such as Sharon Hayes, Yvonne Rainer, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi and Jack Smith are also included and place the work of Boudry & Lorenz in a context of debates around temporalities, activism, the archival, decolonizing practices, and queer histories.

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PAULINE BOUDRY / RENATE LORENZ

I Want

Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz (Eds.)

In this glossy, oversized soft-cover publication the collaborative Berlin-based artist team Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, re-create their recent film installation I Want (2015) presented at Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary, UK (2015). The double-projection film installation is based on a script that borrows from the work of American punk-poet Kathy Acker (1947–1997) and includes chats and materials by convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning, who describes her reasons for revealing nearly one million secret military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks while at the same time exposing her transgender identity to her superiors. Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity and the nature of collaboration. Alongside the generous color documentation are written contributions by Gregg Bordowitz, Laura Guy, Dean Spade, and Craig Willse reflecting upon the historical context and contemporary significance of this multivalent work. The duo, working since 2004, have shown internationally from Fort Worth Contemporary to the Palais de Tokyo.

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MARK BOULOS

The subjects filmed by American-born Mark Boulos inhabit the realm of documentary, but he chooses to show his large-scale, multi-screen video installations in art venues and galleries. “To call a film ‘art’ is to release it from the demands of reportage and anthropology that otherwise burden documentaries,” Boulos says. This extensively illustrated catalogue considers three of Boulos’ most recent video installations, All That is Solid Melts into Air (featured in the Projects Gallery of MoMA, NY in 2012), The Word Was God, and No Permanent Address. Boulos’ subjects include the revolutionary fervor, political militancy, sexual identity and religious ecstasy of radical organizations such as the Filipino revolutionary New People’s Army and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. Essays by Mark Boulos, Juan Gaitan, Molly Macdonald, Philippe-Alain Michaud and Scott Watson.

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Bourgeoisified Proletariat

Yang Zhenzhong, Xu Zhen and Shi Qing

Barely 50 years after the despised “bourgeois intellectual” class was ruthlessly crushed by Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Chinese artists are openly exploring the idea of “bourgeoisifying” the previously worshipped proletariat (worker). This engrossing full color book documents an impromptu, four-day exhibition put together by 50 of China’s leading artists in 2009, staged in a converted factory across from an Ikea warehouse in the far western suburbs of Shanghai. Organized around 12 probing questions (“State the class background of the last three generations of your family,” for example, or “Summarize your experience of growing up”), the artists present a group of dynamic installations that touch on human rights, political discourse, the role of the arts and other topics. Featuring over 40 artists and collectives.

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CÉLESTE BOURSIER-MOUGENOT

A Case Study
Behavioral Objects, Volume I

Samuel Bianchini & Emanuele Quinz (Eds.)

Three immersive installations by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (b. 1961) are featured in this well-illustrated reader accompanying the artist’s 2016 exhibition from here to ear at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Since 1994, Boursier-Mougenot, a musician by training, has been combining visual arts and experimental music. Using “behavioral objects” such as a roomful of roving pianos or finches roosting on amplified guitars, the artist allows the musical potential of unorthodox configurations of materials and media to generate “living” music. The history behind the concept of “behavioral objects” and the parameters of this field of research and practice, dating to the emergence of cybernetics—is also examined in the reader. Paris-based artist and the director of research group Reflective Interaction, Samuel Bianchini, and curator Emanuele Quinz edit both reader and accompanying monograph on this fascinating artist who has exhibited internationally from MoMA PS1, NY, to the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and the 2015 Venice Biennale.

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MARTIN BOYCE

2011 Turner Prize winner Martin Boyce, based in Glasgow, says he tries to capture the beauty in unloved everyday places. This exhibition catalog for the rising-star sculptor shows the powerful atmospheres he creates, transforming galleries into alternative realities filled with objects that are familiar yet skewed. Litter bins are lopsided. Rusting benches take on irregular shapes. Trees are square. Leaves with brutally straightened edges litter the floor. Sharp, haphazard letters of the alphabet cascade down the walls. Boyce says his goal is to look at “the things that we pass through every day and occasionally catch a glimpse of, and maybe see something that has a meaningful resonance.” Includes an excellent text by Renate Wiehager, and an interview with the artist.

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FRANK BRAGIGAND

The Last Painting Theory

Museum director Katia Baudin once described Dutch artist Frank Bragigand as the “last true modernist.” Over the past 10 years, as part of his “Restoring Daily Life” project, Bragigand has been over-painting building elements, discarded objects and mass-produced products he finds in the streets of New York, Amsterdam and Marrakech, transforming them and re-contextualizing them as art. His rich use of color and his sculptural sense are beautifully illustrated in over 700 photographs in this handsome survey monograph presenting over 30 years of the artist’s work. Addressing questions of production and worth, Bragigand’s work critiques mass consumption while at the same time questioning the value attributed to artwork. His objects and installations appear in design, industry, architecture, museums, public spaces and art institutions. The Last Painting Theory includes essays by Katia Baudin, artist Kie Ellens, critic/curator Jean-Marc Huitorel, writer Daphne Pappers, museum director Emmanuel Ropers and critical theorist Bart Verschaffel.

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THE BRANCUSI EFFECT

An Archival Impulse

Vanessa Joan Müller & Nicolaus Schafhausen (Eds.)

One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s use of the pedestal launched a reorientation of the relationship between object, viewer and space that influenced the aesthetics of installation for years to come. This handsome exhibition catalog co-published by Kunsthalle Wien on the occasion of the 2014 exhibition, The Brancusi Effect, uses the artist’s original photographic documentation to illustrate the adaptable and modular structure of his work and the currency of his sensibility in relationship to installation and the sculptural in contemporary art. Curators Vanessa Joan Müller and Nicolaus Schaufhausen placed the Brancusi poetic photographs in dialogue with the installations and sculptural work (referencing Brancusi) by 23 internationally known contemporary artists including An Te Liu, Olaf Nicolai, Isa Gensken, Jürgen Mayer H., Ute Müller, Josephine Meckseper and Arnold Estefan. Texts by Paola Mola, Alessio Delli Castelli.

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