LIFELINES: JOHN M. WHITE

A Retrospective Exhibition of Performance,
Installation, Sculpture, Painting & Drawing

Since emerging as a young California artist in the late 1960s, John M. White has focused on performance art, installations, and drawing and painting. This exhibition catalog for a major retrospective combines the artist’s creative actions (performances, installations and sculptures) with paintings and drawings related to the performances. In White’s primarily autobiographical work, he mines his personal environment, resulting in intriguing visuals that hint at contained narratives. White has staged hundreds of public performances and his works are included in numerous collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum.

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GLENN LIGON

A People on the Cover

In his most recent artist book, Glenn Ligon selected over 50 book covers from 1955 through 1999 to explore movingly rich and complex cultural representations of black race, beauty and body. Developed during a residency at the Walker Art Center in 2000, the project highlights the deliberate use of typography, photography and graphics on book covers by both lesser-known and seminal authors such as James Baldwin, Norman Mailer and Toni Morrison. Grouped thematically under the headings “Beauty,” “Synecdoche,” “The revolution will not be televised,” “Graphic” and “Post-” and with brief and illuminating introductions to each section, Ligon reveals the correspondences between past and present American representations of black culture in typography, photography and graphics. In his introductory essay, “Reading: A Brief History, 1960–78,” the artist gives us insight into one of the cornerstones of his life and work: the act of reading.

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GLENN LIGON

Come Out

Internationally recognized artist Glenn Ligon explores in a combination artist book and exhibition document the continuing relevance of Steve Reich’s early taped speech work, Come Out (1966), in a series of new monumental screen-printed paintings. Echoing Reich’s repetitive two-channel work sampling the voice of David Hamm, one of the badly beaten Harlem Six wrongly accused of murdering a shopkeeper, Ligon overlays the words “come out to show them” on canvas to form densely layered landscapes of text. Like Reich’s work in which the intelligibility of the words breaks apart with repetition, Ligon’s superimposed texts reflect on the shifting effects of a visual continuum. Featured is an essay by film critic Megan Ratner examining the relationship between the paintings, the phrase and the history of the Harlem Six.

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MINOUK LIM

United Paradox

Fabian Schöneich (Ed.)

South Korean artist Minouk Lim explores Korea’s traumatic political history through media representation, collective memory and rituals in United Paradox. The petite artist’s catalog from her solo exhibition at Portikus, Frankfurt (2015) and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, includes color illustrations of the installations, performances, videos and sculptures along with interview with Lim by artist and theoretician Hyunsuk Seo and a script by Seoul’s Yonsei University History and Space Studies Professor Sunghoon Han. Also inculded is a selection of Lim’s personal writings on the relationship among historiography, historical events and contemporary experience. The South Korea in Lim’s project is a nation with a hole in its chest—a nation of families divided by territorial disputes and traumatized by civilian massacres, victims of an authoritarian power in service of ideological control and economic growth. Reflecting on the representation and reappropriation of historical events in South Korea, Lim explores the past in a present that prefers to forget. A sadly relevant subject for our times.

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Linder

Linder in conversation with Dawn Ades

Linder is best known for her pioneering photomontages that replace the sexualised imagery of soft-focus pornographic centrefolds with commodities of domestic middle-class life. Surprising, humorous, and at times shocking, these precise compositions bring to light the powerful fantasies and repressions that underlie our social expectations of identity.

Spanning almost four decades, this monograph interweaves numerous photomontage series throughout Linder’s career, demonstrating the artist’s manipulation of disparate source material – from brightly saturated male pornographic imagery to softly lit portraits of ballerinas. Accompanying over 250 illustrations, a conversation between the artist and Dawn Ades reconciles her work with the history of photomontage.

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Ann Lislegaard

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More from the Danish Pavilion - Artist's Series

LIVING CONTEMPORARY

Living Contemporary, Wright’s unique auction of art and design in September 2013, features a wide selection of nearly 50 works from the collection of Joseph and Janet Shein, art patrons who have spent a lifetime collecting extraordinary works. Artists represented include Andy Warhol, Alex Katz, Jenny Hozler, Roy Lichtenstein and many more. Also exceptional among the Shein collection is a custom dining table by John Vesey. Eclectic and inspiring, the collection of Joseph and Janet Shein highlights the intersection between life, art and design.

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LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD

Sylvia Martin & Beate Ermacora (Eds.)

The creative output of a generation of artists born in the 1970s has turned again to materials and man-made production processes. Both act as a carrier of meaning and attributed values that correspond to collective social frameworks. The 12 artists featured in this book—including Karla Black, Theaster Gates, David Jablonowski and Oscar Tuazon—emphasize alchemistic strategies and gestures of display in the form of three-dimensional installations explicitly aimed at exaggerating the presence of the work. Craft takes priority over media and networks; connections to design and architecture are explored on a different level. Contributions from Robert Fleck, Sylvia Martin, and Gunnar Schmidt trace the significance of materials and materiality to the history of conceptualism, and each artist is represented with a comprehensive introductory essay. This tightly organized exhibition catalog gives necessary due to one of today’s most persistent and important artistic tendencies.

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MARIA LOBODA

Oh, Wilderness

This first monograph on the mystical-historical practice of Maria Loboda contains a selection of her work since 2009, including her installation at dOCUMENTA (13), “This Work is Dedicated to an Emperor,” an army of potted cypress trees which moved through the landscape during the course of the exhibition. Oh,  Wilderness demonstrates the artist’s equation between language and materiality as it works the other way around, translating materials expressive of a certain weak semiotics into language. Through these materials, nature is observed and read—now consti- tuting a grammar, rigorously arbitrary, formal, and conventional. Featured essay by Lars Bang Larsen points to spiritualization in Loboda’s works, Isobel Harbison analyzes the engagement with artifact in Loboda’s approach to sculpture, and a Q+A between the artist, Harbison and Caterina Rivera traces Loboda’s career and intellectual context.

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SHARON LOCKHART | NOA ESHKOL

Eva Wilson & Daniela Zyman (Eds.)

A comprehensive exhibition, originating at LACMA and traveling on to Vienna’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and the New York Jewish Museum, showcased Los Angeles–based artist Sharon Lockhart’s multimedia meditation in conversation with the late Israeli dancer and choreographer Noa Eshkol. Eshkol is best known for developing the Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation system in the 1950s, which uses a combination of symbols and numbers to define the motion of any limb around its joint. Lockhart’s images capture Eshkol’s students in performance, bringing her visionary choreographic work to light. The book features installation photographs, film stills, archival material and wall carpets by Eshkol. Texts by Walead Beshty, Ramsay Burt, Ifat Finkelman, Noémie Solomon and Eva Wilson, among others.

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