AGNIESZKA KURANT

Unknown Unknown

“Do we actually want the future to be totally unlike the present, or only a little bit different?” Polish artist Agnieszka Kurant’s works raise this question and more. Some of her work invokes a world of small tricks, magic sticks, cloud busters, barking birds and exits as entrances. Other pieces examine the big picture of the future, such as global politics in the year 2020 as presented by the authoritative voice of the New York Times. Kurant meticulously prepared a future-themed issue for the paper with the help of a professional clairvoyant and several journalists. Her big-picture works speak less about the small differences of the near future than the potential for absolute difference – events after which the world might never be the same again. Includes texts by Raimundas Malasauskas, Jean-Charles Massera, Jan Verwoert and an interview by Neville Wakefield with the artist.

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GABRIEL KURI

Join the Dots and Make a Point

Based in Mexico City and Brussels, sculptor and installation artist Gabriel Kuri uses simple mass-produced objects and throwaway products from cigarette butts to sand, to explore and criticize political, economic and social conditions. This monograph-exhibition catalog beautifully reproduces each work and, equally important, the precise and deliberate positioning and surprising casualness that always characterize the presentation of his objects in an exhibition. A contributor to numerous international group exhibitions, such as the 5th Berlin Biennale (2008), “Brave New Worlds” at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007), and “Unmonumental” at the New Museum, New York (2007), Kuri is an emerging artist who shifts the boundaries between art and the everyday, value and valueless-ness.

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SABRINA LABIS

You are the only one

Sigrid Hermann, Heinz Stahlhut, Eveline Suter & Claudio Vogt

In You are the only one, Swiss artist Sabrina Labis (b. 1990) reflects on values and evaluation systems, using ArtFacts.Net™ as her main point of reference. The platform, which uses an algorithm that rates artists on the basis of their participation in exhibitions, creates a corresponding ranking list. Labis leads us through a virtual art-fair architecture, a kind of empty formula that caricatures the White Cube as an ideal exhibition space. Virtually touring such rooms is reminiscent of treasure hunts in computer games in which one repeatedly encounters dead ends and various messages. Using the digital world of images as a matter of course—while linking its contents with animations, collages, and her own photos—the artist spins a multidimensional work. It asks: Who evaluates whom? And on what criteria? And, amid the antagonism between market and idealism, who wins in the end?

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LABOUR AND WAIT

Julie Joyce (Ed.)

This compelling exhibition catalog features fifteen international artists who bring 21st-century urgency to 19th-century principles of virtue through work and craftsmanship: Tonico Lemos Auad, Andrea Bowers, Colin Darke, Wim Delvoye, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel, Fischli and Weiss, Tim Hawkinson, Josiah McElheny, Grayson Perry, Mika Rottenberg, Allison Smith, Ricky Swallow, David Thorpe and Jane Wilbraham. The title, adapted from Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life,” accompanies the exhibition, which highlights contemporary culture’s preoccupation with authenticity and the handcrafted. Texts explore the contradictions and connections between the handmade and recent explosion of technological advancements. Excellent essays by Glenn Adamson, V&A Museum; Britt Salvesen, LACMA; fiction writer William Gibson and exhibition curator Julie Joyce.

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LACE: THE LIVING ARCHIVE

Selected Publications & Print Ephemera from the LACE Archives 1978 – 2008

From its founding in 1978, LACE – Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions – was a pivotal, artist-run organization committed to presenting the work of Southern California artists and highlighting bleeding-edge work. Both a treasure-trove and a grab-bag, this book reproduces a wealth of archival material from LACE’s first three decades. Flyers, postcards, memoirs, catalogs, posters, invitations: the editors have chosen an engrossing selection, including well-known names like Lita Albuquerque, Paul McCarthy, Red Grooms and Mike Kelley, and lesser-known but equally worthy artists. As Liz Kotz writes in her introduction, for a new generation of art historians, movements like Minimalism, Happenings and Conceptual Art are just names; the archive allows them to experience the history first-hand. And if you were around at the time, this book is as deeply satisfying as going through that box of stuff you have kept since college days.

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STÉPHAN LANDRY

Tout Va Bien

Musée Jenisch (Ed.)

Advertising slogans, punning neon signs and movie studio logos populate Swiss artist Stéphan Landry’s (1960–2009) world of fiction and commerce—a Hollywood idyll in which “tout va bien” (everything is fine). Baring the underlying mechanisms of the happiness industry through exaggeration, Landry turns this popular art into an intimate portrait of the artist and his everyday environs. This first in-depth publication of Landry’s artistic legacy was inspired by the museum exhibition Everything’s fine – M/2 and Stéphan Landry, at the Musée Jenisch Vevey, Geneva (2017). The exhibition focused on two critical players in the 1990s Swiss art scene, Landry and the collective M/2, and a time when issues of gender, identity and politics were front and center. Over 200 color drawings made during his short but prolific career, ranging from a Warholian alphabet to themed installations of intimate drawings, were executed in gouache, ink, glaze, synthetic varnish or felt pen. Landry’s signature mischievousness marks these iconic works with a sensuality that is less sumptuous than explicit.

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MICHAEL LANDY

Everything Must Go!

British artist Michael Landy has made a career out of “getting and spending,” whether he’s building something designed to self-destruct, or creating a “closing down sale” in an art gallery. This first major monograph of Landy’s 20-year career compiles extensive photos of exhibits, a scrapbook of press clippings, and reproductions of works on paper. Among other works, this survey discusses his infamous Break Down, where Landy destroyed all 7,227 of his (lovingly cataloged) possessions, and Semi-Detached, a full-scale model of his boyhood home. With over 800 color images, including an interview with the artist and essays by Richard Flood, Rochelle Steiner and Richard Stone. An artist with a refreshing, humorous – and profound – take on modern consumer culture.

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MICHAEL LANDY

H2NY

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MICHAEL LANDY

Break Down Inventory

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Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie

Class Hegemony in Contemporary Art

Nav Haq and Tirdad Zolghadr

Class inevitably raises awkward questions for the protagonists of contemporary art – about their backgrounds, patrons and ideological proclivities. Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie investigates this latent yet easily overlooked issue, which has been historically eclipsed by gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality. This book creates a conversation on a sensitive subject, bringing together essays by art-world types including artists, curators and critics. On one hand, the ideas here raise the question of whether a given socio-economic background still helps define an artistic career – and to which point this career might reflect or consolidate the hierarchies in question. On the other hand, the project asks whether the traditional ways of analyzing class structure are actually helpful in an examination of who makes art today.

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