FACING THE SUBLIME IN WATER, CA

Irene Tsatsos (Ed.)

“From the environmental devastation of the Salton Sea to the walling off of the LA River, water—where it comes from, who controls it—has been a troublesome issue in Southern California,” writes Sharon Mizota in the LA Times. From such desperation, however, can spring constructive outcomes. Artists Nicole Antebi and Enid Baxter Blader created the fictive utopian city of “Water, CA” in a web-based project, evoking a semi-plausible environmental nirvana. That project (the starting point for an exhibition, lending library and series of public programs) assembled scientific and poetic material from artists, environmentalists and historians addressing the history and representation of water through the lens of artistic production. In the resulting exhibition, works from Judie Bamber, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Emilie Halpern, Charles Long and others meditate on our aquatic obsession. This unusual catalog features a collaged poster cover, program documentation and texts from Nicole Anteb, Enid Baxter Blader, Irene Tsatsos and Marie Shurkus.

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FACING THE WORLD

Self-Portraits from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei (and Selfies)

From Rembrandt’s brooding self-portraits in oil to Ai Weiwei’s Instagram posts— 140 works by 100 artists showcase the history of the selfie in this substantial compendium of self-portraits from medieval mirror paintings to the obsessive self-questioning of modern photography and video. Fueled by the continuous self-presentation enabled by social media, self-portraiture has become more relevant than ever. Spanning 600 years in painting, drawing, photography, video and performance, this exciting selection of self-portraits by a wide variety of artists includes Simon Vouet, Rembrandt, Hyacinthe Rigaud, David Wilkie, David Octavius Hill, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, Oskar Kokoschka, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Marina Abramovich, Tracey Emin, Ai Weiwei, John Coplans, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ken Currie and Alison Watt, among many others. Curated by Dorit Schafer, Stephane Paccoud and Imogen Gibbon.

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FACING THE FINISH

Some Recent# California Art

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JOHN FAHEY

Paintings

The much-revered avant-garde guitarist John Fahey (1939–2001) incorporated influences ranging from folk, blues and bluegrass to classical music, musique concrete and noise in his primarily acoustic-based compositions. Considered a legend, Fahey released upwards of three-dozen LPs in his lifetime. Relatively late in life, Fahey extended his so-called American Primitive approach beyond music into making artworks, specifically a substantial body of paintings that reference the great abstract expressionists of his time. Working out of hotel rooms and using raw materials such as found poster board and discarded spiral notebook paper, his intuitive approach created a vibrant and strong body of work. For the first time 60 artworks created from 1990 to 2000 are featured along with a concurrent exhibition at the AVA Gallery (Fall 2014). Accompanying the work is an essay by Bomb magazine writer Keith Connolly.

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Simon Faithfull

Ice Blink: An Antarctic Essay

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CLAIRE FALKENSTEIN

A Jackson Pollock in three dimensions” is one critic’s unforgettable description of a piece by Claire Falkenstein, whose life and work spanned the 20th century. The American artist and teacher was born in Oregon in 1908 and—after living in San Francisco, Paris and New York—died in Los Angeles in 1997. This lavishly produced book is—amazingly—the first monograph ever on the work of this ceaselessly inventive artist. Falkenstein called her sculptures, paintings and prints “structures;” she also designed furniture, fountains, screens, wallpaper and jewelry. A fresh look at her multifaceted work—collected by major institutions ranging from MoMA to the TATE Britain—places Falkenstein in the company of better-known peers and further credits her explorations as prototypical of the work of post-minimal and contemporary artists.

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DENÉS FARKAS

Evident in Advance

When post-conceptual photographer Denés Farkas was chosen to represent Estonia at the 55th Venice Biennale 2013, it put the Tallinn based artist on the world map for the first time. This volume catalogs Farka’s project for the Estonian Pavilion, both an exhibition and a piece of spatial, rhythmic writing. It was a physical manifestation of the book— this book—yet to come. A quintet of interiors created the poetic fragments of a quasi-domestic setting: a library, a garden, an absent cinema, an obsession chamber. There, the plot awaits its author, the rooms their inhabitants. We are at the core of Farkas’s delirious “meaningful meaninglessness.” Essays from Daniele Monticelli, Adriana Cavarero, Maurice Blanchot, Martin Prinzhorn, Bruce Duffy and Markus Miessen.

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OMER FAST

5,000 Feet Is the Best

Milena Hoegsberg & Melanie O’Brian (Eds.)

Drone surveillance in modern warfare—that is, the use of unmanned planes operated by “pilots” on the ground—is of paramount significance to Omer Fast. Focusing a single cinematic video work of Fast’s, 5,000  Feet  is  the  Best (2011), the publication bridges the gap between a critical reader and an artist’s book. Produced to accompany two solo exhibitions in Oslo and Toronto, it includes texts from art historians Liz Kotz and T. J. Demos, an article on drones from the journal Foreign  Policy, and the artist’s research set alongside film stills. An e-mail thread between practitioners active in different fields opens the conversation into a forum on politics, ethics, aesthetics, and human experience.

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Günther Förg

Gazetta dello Sport

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VINCENT FECTEAU

The good, the bad, and the ugly.

Krist Gruijthuijsen (Ed.)

San Francisco–based American artist Vincent Fecteau (b. 1969) has, over the last two decades, forged a singular aesthetic that mixes homespun materials—Popsicle sticks, champagne corks, string and the like—meticulous craftwork and a curious formal grammar. By turns wonky, erotic, extraterrestrial or baroque, and sometimes all of these at once, his sculptures are built from small, slow accumulations in which layering, texture and the work of the hand are all visible. His work takes a new direction with this new publication produced by Grazer Kunstverein, Austria, in which the artist presents a large collection of magazine pages (mostly from architecture and interiors magazines) that he amassed and then spent months arranging until formal and narrative relationships were revealed. Originally presented as part of The Backroom project in Los Angeles, this book is a reproduction of his selection. Fecteau’s work is exhibited and collected by MoMA, NY; SF MOMA; Art Institute of Chicago, among others.

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