BRUCE LABRUCE

Ride, Queer, Ride!

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ANTON BRUHIN

Dämonen

If demons are mutable and their existence dependent on context, what would a current-day demon look like? Taking this notion, Swiss artist, poet and musician Anton Bruhin (b. 1949) rehabilitates the demon with 170-odd pictures in a postmodern portrayal in this hardcover volume. Playing on patterns and archetypes innate to the human mind, Bruhin reveals a profound sense of the nature of suggestion. His pixelated creatures look hard-drinking, capable of irony, often jovial and delighting in flaunting their peculiarities. They may be misshapen, grinning, belching or besprinkled with strange shades of yellow slime—all merely toying with the terror they’re expected to personify. Bouncing back and forth between the pages, these demons’ facial expressions seem to wondrously epitomize states between gentle otherworldliness, urges to smirk and a spooky furiousness. Ultimately, they seem to know the viewer is their confederate in mischievousness. Features an essay by Swiss author Michel Mettler.

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MARIA BRUNNER

Berlin-based Austrian painter Maria Brunner (b. 1962) devoted an entire year to painting the regal amaryllis, the flowering plant from the winter-rainfall region of South Africa, whose trumpet-shaped winter blooms mark the coming of spring. For the first time these meditative paintings are included in Brunner’s new monograph featuring 90 color plates and covering the past three years of work. In addition to the amaryllis series, large-format canvases depicting floating drapery (2015) and small folded glassine ink drawings (2016) are included. Brunner’s work has transitioned over the years from her early surface-driven technique to hyperrealism to her current play with realism afloat an atmospheric ground. Characterized by profound doubts about whether things are as they seem, and overpowering in painted detail, this latest cycle of oils departs from her previous work in its focus on single subjects located within chiaroscuro backgrounds, producing a sense of magical realism.

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HILLEGON BRUNT

Once Upon a Time …
the observations of Hillegon Brunt

Visual artist Hillegon Brunt (b. 1964) studies the world around her. With precisely accurate observation of humans, animals and collected objects, she has developed a refined style of making drawings as well as collages with attention to the smallest detail. The approach for <i.Once Upon a Time . . . is an artist’s book designed as a film. In cooperation with graphic designer Art Collart, Brunt developed a concept in which she tells a new story with existing work from her extensive collection of drawings, woodcuts, etching and collages produced over almost a decade. By arranging her work, by zooming in or out and adding reference images, Brunt allows the reader/viewer to enter a creative world informed by her observations and insights. Organized into 11 parts (or acts), this fascinating book includes a perceptive look into Brunt’s work by visual artist Anuli Croon and a full index of the work.

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RUTH BUCHANAN

The Weather, A Building

Libraries are generally perceived as storehouses, spaces of neutral accumulation and containment. While the architecture may attempt to operate in this stable mode, the material contained within them is often far wilder. Histories, biographies, loose thoughts, and detailed notations are temporarily suspended, cataloged, and organized, creating relationships where perhaps previously there were none. The trajectory of the Staatsbibliothek Berlin exposes the tension between what is contained in libraries and how it is contained in a highly palpable way. This new artist book charts three narratives associated with the life of this particular library. The anecdotes become both concrete examples and metaphors through which to interrogate the production, situating, and sharing of meaning. With texts by Buchanan and Ian White.

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Patricia Bucher

Battle Panorama

Panoramic images are part of the essence of Lucerne, where the front door of the art museum opens onto the towering panorama of the Alps, and where visitors already flock to see the Bourbaki Panorama and the Gornergrat Diorama in the Alpineum. Now, Patricia Bucher, a young Swiss artist of imposing vision, has created an unprecedented 360-degree panorama for the Kunstmuseum Luzern: a history of the art of warfare, across continents, cultures and centuries, 33 feet long by 24 inches high. Bucher began with over 2000 representations of war in a variety of media, scanned them and then created tumultuous scenes spilling over into one another, where varied ethnic groups, fighting styles, and weaponry from past and future centuries violently collide. This dynamic book is equally unusual, a full-color, 30-foot-long, heavy-paper pull-out that reproduces the entire artwork on a smaller scale. Call it our era’s Bayreuth Tapestry, or just call it brilliant.

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PAUL BUCK

A Public Intimacy (A Life through Scrapbooks)

Paul Buck – poet, playwright, artist, performer, translator and teacher – is one of those rare and amazing people who has made every part of his life into art. “Improvisation is at the heart of my existence, and improvisation is based on preparation and self-discipline,” writes Buck. He was at the heart of the contemporary art scene in “Swinging London” during the 1960s, and in the 70s founded the seminal magazine, Curtains, which brought writers like Derrida, Bataille and Paul Auster to the foreground. This intimate book, part of Bookworks’s engrossing Time Machine series, is essentially an archive in the form of a scrapbook of the life Buck has led, bringing together cuttings, clippings and comments (both fiction and non-) to tell the history of the counter-currents and counter-cultures that he has lived through. Among the figures included are Kathy Acker, Maurice Blanchot, Marc Almond, Genesis P-Orridge, Raul Ruiz, Jean-Patrick Manchette and Susan Hiller.

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More from the Time Machine Series

VICTOR BURGIN

Five Pieces for Projection

Eva Schmidt (Ed.)

Crossing disciplines from media to culture and art, Victor Burgin’s iconic conceptual works have made him one of the most distinguished artists of the late 20th century. Since coming to prominence in the late 1960s, the artist has participated in historical exhibitions such as When Attitudes Became Form (Kunsthalle Bern, 1969) and Three Perspective on Photography (Hayward Gallery, 1979). Bergin’s recent projection work (2010–2014) is published here in conjunction with Burgin’s retrospective Forms of Telling at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen. The pairing of images and text in this publication explores how the artist’s work emerges from a personal experience, a preoccupation with a building or even a Romantic painting. In this recent work hazy, often double- or triple-exposed black-and-white film pieces speak to the suggestive power of appropriated imagery and exemplify postmodernism’s aesthetic and concern with psychoanalysis and critical theory. Essay by Hanne Loreck and philosopher Eva Schmidt.

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TOM BURR

Anthology: Writings 1991–2015

Florence Derieux (Ed.)

Since the late 1980s, New York–based conceptual artist Tom Burr (b. 1963) has been using appropriation strategies in his photographic and sculptural works and writings. Thirty-seven texts—works, poems, autobiographical texts and portraits—have been compiled in this extensive anthology accompanying the artist’s survey exhibition at the FRAC in France. Written over a period of 24 years and presented chronologically, it enables us to fully appreciate the conceptual and visual coherence and richness of Burr’s writings. The artist’s personal writings reveal the conceptual and aesthetic sources in his oeuvre. As did Robert Smithson’s, Burr’s art praxis extends into the field of writing, and vice versa. Art and language cannot be dissociated from each other— at times, the text precedes and anticipates the work; at others, it emanates and results from it; in most instances, it is an integral part of it. Burr’s work is collected by MOCA, LA; The Israel Museum; NY Public Library; and more, with past exhibitions at Hammer Museum, LA; Sculpture Center, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

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BURT PAYNE 3, A PROJECT

The World Is Getting to Be a Funner Place

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