The Future of Art: A Manual

Ingo Niermann

In this book/DVD combo, Niermann, everybody’s favorite kindacomic provocateur asks, “Could a single object transform the future of art? Could an artist succeed in merely creating this one object?” With artist Erik Niedling, Niermann starts asking art-world figures for advice on his quest to create an artwork of epochal importance; the results, on paper and video, will surprise you. With guidance by Thomas Bayrle, Lady Jaye and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Olafur Eliasson, Boris Groys, Damien Hirst, Gregor Jansen, Terence Koh, Marcos Lutyens, Philomene Magers, Antje Majewski, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Thomas Olbricht and Tobias Rehberger; and commentary by Chus Martínez. Including the DVD The Future of Art by Erik Niedling and Ingo Niermann (HD, 157 min.).

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FUTUREFARMERS

A Variation on Powers of Ten

Amy Franceschini & Michael Swaine

The interstellar rollercoaster ride of Charles and Ray Eames’ experimental 1968 film, The  Powers  of  Ten, changed the way that the average American thought about science. In this project, the art and design collective Futurefarmers used the Eames’ IBM-commissioned film’s opening picnic scene as its inspiration and score. Researchers whose work relates to each one of the magnitudes of ten compare today’s practices with those of 1968 and discuss the changing land- scapes of their respective fields. The collaboration came about through a residency at the University of California, Berkeley. Included in the publication are essays by Futurefarmers members, interviews with researchers, and documentation of ten delightfully re-staged picnics, representing fields of inquiry from philosophy to ecology. Contributors include Peter Galison, Jake Kosek, Rick and Megan Shaw Prelinger, Sara Seager, and Ignacio Valero.

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DANI GAL

Historical Records

Berlin-based Israeli sound and video artist Dani Gal’s (b. 1975) central focus is the relationship of memory and historiography. With the aim of stimulating our study of history, Gal deconstructs historical material he has compiled since 2005, and reconstructs it within a contemporary context. Drawing from his massive archive of vinyl records of recordings that range from World War II (Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill, etc.), speeches by Evita Perón, the American Cold War (Kennedy, Nixon, Jesse Jackson), and recordings from the Israeli Six-Day War, the artist manipulates original narratives to reveal the difference between the “truth” of collective memory conveyed by media and individual subjective feelings. Extensively illustrated with 450 color plates, this monograph documents Gal’s meticulous research in media archives and moving installations, performances and collaborations during a time when historical reflection is so important. Gal has exhibited at the Jewish Museum, NY; MAK Vienna; and the Hammer Museum, L.A.

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ANYA GALLACCIO

Doro Globus & Elli Resvanis (Eds.)

British installation artist Anya Gallaccio, now living in San Diego, works largely with natural materials—typically flowers, trees, sugar and salt—to create often site-specific installations focusing on the decomposition and transformation of the organic materials. Gallaccio’s work shifts between minimal approaches to form and a highly intuitive process. This exquisite monograph catalogues the artist’s work over 20 years of her impressive career (she was one of the Young British Aartists from the 1980’s, short-listed for the Turner Prize, withexhibitions at the Stedelijk and the TATE Britain). Numerous essays explore Gallaccio’s work; also includes an artist interview by Clarrie Wallis, andtexts by Lucía Sanromán, who investigates the role of the landscape; Norman Bryson analyzing the notion of ‘psychic fantasy’ in the installation blessed; Briony Fer, who discusses the artist’s use of natural light and earth; and Jan van Adrichem looking at Gallaccio’s move to bronze casts.

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CHARLES GARABEDIAN

A Retrospective

Now in his nineties, American painter Charles Garabedian is hardly a household name. But he is a highly influential artist whose works are collected by LACMA, the Met, MoMA, the Whitney, the Corcoran and the Smithsonian, among other institutions, and the subject of this extensively illustrated exhibition catalog from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. This revelatory group of intimate representational paintings and drawings – from Garabedian’s first museum show in almost 30 years – explores themes of war, music, the body, dismemberment, heroism, comic pretention, love and death. An exciting discovery of surprising importance.

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DORA GARCÍA

All the Stories

“A man/a woman recites all the stories of the world in a loud voice. When she is done, all the stories, all men and women, all time and all places will have passed through her lips.” With the minimum of instructions and a restricted format of four lines, no more, Dora García’s collaborative and participatory project in the form of a blog has now collected over 2,500 stories. This 500-page paperback contains every story submitted from the blog’s beginning in 2004 to the start of 2011. Collected in book form for the first time, the stories range from mundane to the extraordinary, four-line vignettes revealing the shared fears and fantasies of the contributors, the pervasiveness of popular culture and the possibilities of the imagination.

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DORA GARCIA

Mad Marginal, Cahier #4
I See Words, I Hear Voices

Chantal Pontbriand (Ed.)

Mad Marginal Cahier #4, the massive 400-page reader on Spanish multidisci- plinary artist Dora Garcia, edited by Chantal Pontbriand, brings together major essays by international authors who delve into different threads of Garcia’s research. In her recent exhibitions, Exhausted Books (2013) and Mad Marginal Charts (2014), García uses compulsive writing, collective reading, endless or circular books, graphomania and the parallels and intersections between reading and writing to examine the wellsprings of artistic experience, alter the traditional relationships between artist, work and viewer, and question the daily behavior of the individual through performance, film and discussion. Mad Marginal Cahier, in which Garcia creates an abstract mapping of references central to her idea of marginality as an artistic position, marks this new cycle of works. Contributions by Caroline Andrieux, David Dorenbaum, Dora García, Maria C. Havstam, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Vanessa Ohlraun, Britta Peters, Chantal Pontbriand, Kjetil Røed, Margit Säde, Caroline von Taysen and David Tomas.

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DORA GARCÍA

Mad Marginal – Cahier #2 : The Inadequate

Are artists crazy? Is that a good thing? Is being an outsider a requirement for creating truly tradition-shattering art? Mad Marginal, part of the Spanish Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, is a project by Brussels-based Spanish artist Dora García. She uses the tradition of anti-psychiatric and anti-institutional movements as a prism to look at the work of artists who have either consciously chosen to remain outsiders or been defined as outsiders by others. Through a series of conversations documented in this book, which is presented in the form of notebooks, García explores the relationship between radical politics and radical art during the 1970s, and follows the theme to today. Includes conversations with Claudia De Michelis (Museo Laboratorio della Mente), artist Cesare Pietroiusti and Nicola Valentino (co-founder of the publishing house Sensibili alle foglie).

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ANDRÉS RAMÍREZ GAVIRIA

Between Forms of Representation and Interpretation

Informed by technological processes and building on forms, figures and discourses from the histories of art, design and technology, artist Andrés Ramírez Gaviria creates compelling visual and sonic experiences. Born in Bogotá and currently living and working between New York and Vienna, his aesthetically minimalist work uses new media (and new media dressed up as traditional media in the form of clunky televisions and film projectors) to address notions of autonomy and communication in 21st-century life. This first English-language survey of Gavira’s practices includes texts by Freek Lomme and María A. Lovino.

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MARK GEFFRIAUD

The Curve of Forgotten Things

Francesco Pedraglio and Gavin Everall

Another fascinating narrative experience from the seminal Time Machine series, edited by Francesco Pedraglio. Paris-based artist Mark Geffriaud takes the reader and writer on two opposite journeys, from the preface and in reverse from the “postface.” Where the sections meet halfway, the reader finds a discussion with an anthropologist about a ceremonial dialogue between two people of a Jivaroan tribe, in which the two participants barely listen to each other but speak almost from the other’s point of view, creating a rhythm, and a game. The slippages, gestures, duality and rhythms are replayed in the framing sections in which two voices appear, drift apart into two columns, run parallel then syncopated, before slowly merging again.

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