MARGIT BUSCH

IF-THEN-ELSE: Welcome to Transciency
Preis der Kunsthalle Wien 2016

The second recipient of the prestigious Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2016 in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, is German artist and scientist Magrit Busch (b. 1967). Five years ago, Busch created a laboratory-cum-experiment that included mealworms and beetles that consume, and thus recycle, polystyrene plastic. By generating insights into the discipline of “transciency”—perspectives, research methods, and representations operating through and beyond science—Busch’s project sheds light on the meeting points of scientific, philosophical, artistic and practical discourses. Her installation is re-created in this small but comprehensive monograph that allows thoughtful entry into Busch’s cross-pollination of art and science. Included is an essay by art critic Roland Schöny, a conversation between the artist and curator, Lucas Gehrmann, and Kunsthalle Wien director Nicolaus Schafhausen, along with installation images and a supplemental “transmap” to be viewed and enjoyed outside of the publication.

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MICHEL BUTOR | DAN GRAHAM

Conversation

Donatien Grau (Ed.)

In the fall of 2013, American conceptual artist Dan Graham and his partner artist Meiko Meguro traveled with writer Donatien Grau to Lucinges, France, to meet with renowned French writer Michel Butor at his home. Their informal, intimate and at times humorous conversation, transcribed in this slim pocket-sized book, ranges over the ideas influencing emerging artists and post-abstract expressionists of the 1960s. The interview is bookended with a brief introduction by French cultural critic Donatien Grau and a riff by artist-writer Paul McCarthy. One of the foremost innovators of postwar literature, writer-thinker Michel Butor redefined the novel with his book Second Thoughts (1957), and further developed new forms with Mobile (1962). The rigorous symmetries Butor’s writing exemplified led Roland Barthes to praise him as an epitome of structuralism, but with a lyrical sensibility more akin to Baudelaire than Robbe-Grillet.

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INGRID CALAME

Being Born

Jochen Kienbaum, (Ed.)

Ingrid Calame interviewed more than 20 people, among them children, adolescents, adults, friends and colleagues, female as well as male, in her volume Being Born about what they knew about their own birth. These naturally immensely personal conversations are accompanied by details of frottages with pigment on Mylar, which the artist created in 2014 in a cistern at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Lacoste, France, and in 2015 at the Zeche Zollverein in Essen, Germany. All these schematic and seemingly shadowy works in color direct our gaze, as it were, from the inside out. As if flooded with sunlight, indefinable traces and bumps appear in some of the images, cogs, grooves and metal ridges in others. This is precisely how the stories are presented to the readers: on the one hand, stories of precipitate deliveries, on the other hand legends of almost mythical measure. This initially sounds rather touching, and also quite scary; yet again, this is interrupted by the humor, which permeates most of these familial stories. The volume is currently the only deliverable monographic publication on the work of this abstract American painter who was born in New York in 1965, and now lives in Los Angeles. In 2014, she was included in the anthology Painting Today by Tony Godfrey; she has become known for her radical style, informed by human legacies, such as stains and graffiti, a kind of cartography of human traces.
Ingrid Calame’s works are included in permanent collections of museums worldwide including LACMA, LA, the Whitney Museum and MOMA in NY.

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Martin John Callanan

Letters 2004-2006: Confirmation that You Still Exist; I Respect Your Authority; When Will It End: One London

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Can You Hear Me?

Music Labels by Visual Artists

Francesco Spampinato

Artists have long been part of rock bands, like Mike Kelley, Walter De Maria or Kim Gordon, but Can You Hear Me? is the first survey documenting record labels founded and run by visual artists. Featuring 25 labels from Europe, the US and Mexico, from 1980 through the present, this exhibition catalog celebrates the contemporary artist as multifaceted producer of collaborative projects. Cultural historian and artist Francesco Spampinato reflects on how extra-artistic activities help redefine the role of contemporary artists as a creative and cultural catalysts, touching upon their position in a wider tradition of independent music, art rock and artists’ mock enterprises; their performative features; their collective and participative nature; and the DIY ethos embodied in the production of records and ephemera. Featuring amazing ephemera, original artworks, records, videos and rare archival treasures, including Andy Warhol’s Earhole Productions and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Tartown Record Co., among many others.

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CAPITAL ART: ON THE CULTURE OF PUNISHMENT

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MERLIN CARPENTER

London-based artist Merlin Carpenter is probably one of the few artists who posts – on his own website – negative reviews of his work from various newspapers and magazines. Rather audacious, but the posturing fits in with his series of exhibitions, called The Opening, that lampoons the conventions of the contemporary art world. All paintings at each version of The Opening are actually painted onsite, some proclaiming sentiments like “Die collector scum.” With essays by critic Caroline Busta and art historian George Baker, the book is a catalog-like compilation of installation photos and reproductions from several years of various Openings, including gallery invitations announcing Carpenter’s irreverent, politically charged action paintings.

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MERLIN CARPENTER

Midcareer Paintings

For his provocative Midcareer Paintings exhibition in 2015, British artist Merlin Carpenter (b. 1967) hung 22 packing blankets in the Kunsthalle Bern’s seven rooms. The inexpensive and disposable blankets made with recycled materials are pulled like canvases around identically scaled stretcher frames, postdated 2016, and prominently displayed as “not for sale.” Created a year after the exhibition, the large soft-cover catalog embossed with the location of Carpenter’s seven galleries—New York, London, Los Angeles, Brussels, Berlin, Miami, Lisboa/Porto—begins with a grainy black-and-white collaged image feed of the installation for exhibition, related gallery shows, advertising billboards and random street scenes and concludes with the contrast of elegant color photographs of the individual artworks. Texts by Kunsthalle Bern director Valérie Knoll and artist Sam Lewitt examine the materiality of Carpenter’s works, its mix of playfulness and earnestness, the limbo of the “midcareer” artist and the circulation of artwork as a commodity signifying material wealth and value.

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BRIAN CATLING AND IAIN SINCLAIR

Several Clouds Colliding

British philosopher, inventor, mathematician, astronomer and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) is the inspiration behind the London-based Swedenborg Society. In this intriguing collection of essays and documentary material from the society’s achives, artist/poet Brian Catling and writer/filmmaker Iain Sinclair reveal a secret history of Swedenborg: madman or messiah, you choose. The author-performers reconstruct and reflect on the extraordinary events surrounding an exhibition and performance held at the Swedenborg House on February 17, 2010. Catling is known for his teaching at Oxford and exhibitions at the Serpentine and the ICA and Sinclair for his publications and films including Ghost  Milk:  Calling  Time  on  the  Grand  Project (2011): they join forces to create this peculiar but seductively engaging journey into the psycho geography of religious ritual.

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CATPC

Congolese Plantation Workers Art League

Eva Barois De Caevel & Els Roelandt (Eds.)

CATPC is the first publication to focus on the activities of the Congolese Plantation Workers Art League, an cooperative based in Lusanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Included in this compact but hefty and fully illustrated monograph are writings and projects rethinking postcolonial power relations within the global art world. Contributors include curators Ariella Azoulay, Eva Barois De Caevel, Ruba Katrib, Alexander Koch, artists Eleonore Hellio and Renzo Martens, art historian Els Roelandt, political theorist Francois Verges, documentary filmmaker Leonard Pongo, art critic Charles Tumba Kekwo and writers J.A. Coster and Charles Siketele Gize, among others. CATPC, initiated in 2014 by Amsterdam-based artist, Renzo Martens, whose radical and controversial hybrid practice feeds into many current debates and René Ngongo, a Kinshasa-based biologist and environmental activist, this cooperative continues to develop independently and redefine the relations between art, agriculture, industry and value creation. CATPC has exhibited at The Sculpture Center, NY (2017) and MIT List Visual Art Center (2014).

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