LYDIA OKUMURA

Situations

Rachel Adams & Charlie Tatum (Eds.)

For almost 50 years, Brazilian-born New York–based artist Lydia Okumura (b. 1948), like her contemporaries Dorothea Rockburne and Robert Irwin, has explored the realm of geometric abstraction by challenging our perception of space in her sculptures, installations and works on paper. In the 1970s, as a young artist in her native São Paulo, she was introduced to Conceptual art, Minimalism, Land Art and Arte Povera through the Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techou. These movements, along with Brazilian Concretism and Neoconcretism influenced Okumura’s dynamic work in which she uses simple materials such as string, glass and paint to balance line, plane and shadow. The elegant exhibition catalog accompanying the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States at the University of Buffalo Art Gallery, is a rich document of her minimal practice and independent vision. Included is an account of the Brazilian avant-garde from 1960 to 1975, an artist interview by curator Rachel Adams, and extensive photo documentation of Okumura’s work from 1970 to the present.

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EVA OLTHOF

Return to Rightful Owner

Where is history “created”? Inspired by this question, visual artist Eva Olthof works on projects in which she researches certain events or locations through testimonials and documentation. Collecting fragments—her personal photos, archive material, texts and objects—and searching for boundaries between documentary and imaginary images, Olthof’s new book explores the politics of forgetting, remembering and citing. She takes as her starting point the American Memorial Library in Berlin, built in 1954 as a gift from the American people to West Berlin. Its modern architecture made it an emblem for the American way of life. Purposely located close to the border of Russian-occupied territory, the library also had the goal of attracting East Berliners. Written with Dutch curator Doreen Menda, this publication explores the political history of the library as showcase for American freedom and democracy and the recent revelations of NSA files by Edward Snowden.

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ON THE TABLE:

Three Banquets For a Queen

Charlotte Birnbaum

Gastronomy meets art in a new series, On the Table, edited by the provocative, genre-straddling Swedish writer Charlotte Birnbaum. The first publication is a new translation of a 17th-century text describing three spectacular banquets that greeted Queen Christina of Sweden when she visited Rome in 1668. Antonio degli Effetti was on the scene, and described all three feasts in their sumptuous glory, detailing the lavish preparations for the celebrations and the dining experience itself, designed by Bernini, no less! The original text, dotted with quotations from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid, is placed in today’s context by a foreword and two essays by Birnbaum. Was it dinner or was it 300-year-old performance art?

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More from the On the Table Series

ON THE TABLE

The Futurist Cookbook: F.T. Marinetti and Fillìa

Charlotte Birnbaum (Ed.)

Fourth in the wonderful series On the Table founded and edited by Charlotte Birnbaum, The Futurist Cookbook is a manifesto-as-culinary-innovation. Written in 1932 by founder of Futurism F. T. Marinetti and his collaborator Fillia—“like all the arts, it excludes plagiarism and demands creative originality. It is no accident that this work is being published in the midst of a world financial crisis, the development and outcome of which apparently cannot be determined; what can be determined, however, is the dangerous and dispiriting panic it engenders. This panic we counter with a Futurist cuisine: in other words, optimism at the table.” Replete with experimental recipes, this book is a multilayered exploration of cultural metabolisms— with the dining table as its centerpiece, of course! Brilliantly illustrated by Jan Kietala and translated by Barbara McGilvray.

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The One Year Drawing Project:

May 2005 – October 2007

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ONE, NO ONE AND ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND

Luca Lo Pinto (Ed.)

Are there any limits to what an exhibition can be? Investigating and reformulating the conventional structure and limitations of exhibition-making and curatorial authorship is the focus of One, No One and One Hundred Thousand. The softcover newsprint style catalog documenting the experimental exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, Karlsplatz in 2016, was curated by Luca Lo Pinto and was inspired by the work of Oulipo, a literary collective whose approach to writing was to propose new “structures” that were mathematical in nature. Nine contributing artists including Darren Bader, Jason Dodge, Phanos Kyriacou, Adriana Lara, Jonathan Monk, Marlie Mul, Amalia Pica, Martin Soto Climent and Lina Viste Grønli created new works in displays that offer an unlimited number of arrangements since they can be changed by any number of visitors. The viewer is not treated as a consumer, but as a co-producer alongside the artists and the curator. Recorded in the black-and-white publication are 178 unique exhibitions, with essays by Luca Lo Pinto, Vanessa Joan Muller and Mathieu Copeland.

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OPEN FORM

Space, Interaction, and the Tradition of Oskar Hansen

Axel Wieder & Florian Zeyfang (Eds.)

Oskar Hansen’s concept of “open form”—a theory embracing art-as-process engaging viewer, recipient and user—became a key principle in performance and film leading to the development of process-oriented and interdisciplinary artistic techniques in the following decades. Open Form examines the extraordinary impact of Hansen’s ideas within contemporary visual culture and the redefined role of the viewer since the 1960s. In-depth interviews with some of the most important experimental artists in Poland from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, where Hansen taught architecture nearly his entire life, examine his impact on the arts. Developed in the context of international debates around late-modern architecture in the 1950s, “open form” assumed artistic expression incomplete until appropriated by the beholder. Contributions examining the theory’s influence on the younger generation and ample visual material by Hansen and other artists complete this fascinating and extensive volume.

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LISA OPPENHEIM

Works 2003–2013

Florence Derieux, Krist Gruijthuijsen & Bettina Steinbrügge (Eds.)

After appearing on the collective art world radar in the MoMA, NY, Emerging Photography exhibition (2013), American artist Lisa Oppenheim has now been recognized with her first major solo exhibition and monographic publication, cataloging a decade of practice. By exposing and re-exposing archival material, Oppenheim bridges past and present by introducing new meaning to historical images, often resulting in film and photographic projects. Using textiles to produce images and images to produce textiles, Oppenheim inserts punch cards of randomly chosen historical textile images into a traditional Jacquard loom, intentionally “jamming” the machine to produce unusual results. One could define this non-narrative, photo process based work as an archaeology of time and visual culture. Texts by Karen Archey, Angie Keefer, Lisa Oppenheim and Christian Rattemeyer.

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OPTIMUNDUS

M HKA 08 02 13 - 19 05 13

Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys

Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys’s art casts a merciless perspective on reality. The duo visualizes their imaginings of the parallel world inherent within the modern human psyche, along with how it manifests itself in the everyday aspects of life and civic conformity. Everything from work, leisure and family, to social class, masculinity and marginalization are envisaged through convening an unlikely cast of nonprofessional actors, family members, friends, beards, objects and mannequins alike, often in banal, homespun settings. This book accompanies their major exhibition at M HKA of the same title—the term the artists use for their particular conception of the parallel world. Narratives and criticism by Michael Van den Abeele, Nav Haq, Jennifer Krasinski, Dieter Roelstraete and artist Peter Wächtler.

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Options With Nostrils

Alexis Vaillant

Options with Nostrils brings together a collection of previously unpublished essays, both theoretical and visual, by artists, curators and a group of post-graduates from the Fine Art program at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, who together founded the Office for the Unknown. The writings investigate notions of the unpredictable and the unknown while looking at ways in which these notions enable a critical view on conditions of art making within the context of the present. Mirroring the process, this volume presents a chaos of ideas. Labyrinthine in structure and outlook, Options with Nostrils aims to destabilize the belief that there is an order of things in response to which the artist holds a decisive position. Because, as Sarat Maharaj has said, “The artist has an unknowability: the ability to unknow.” Featured contributors include Anthony Huberman, Raimundas Malasauskas, Linda Quinlan plus many more.

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