Raqs Media Collective

Seepage

Raqs is a word in Persian, Arabic and Urdu meaning the trance state that whirling dervishes enter into when they whirl. You could also consider Raqs an acronym, for “rarely asked questions.” Either way, this book gathers texts authored by the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), a group that could be described as artists, curators, editors, and catalysts of cultural processes. Co-curators of the 2008 manifesta 7 biennale, they co-founded Sarai (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) and co-edit the Sarai Reader Series. Their internationally recognized work locates them at the intersection of contemporary art, research and theory - often taking the form of installations, online and offline media objects, performances and encounters.

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RARE EARTH

Boris Ondreička & Nadim Samman (Eds.)

Rare earth elements are the game-changing foundation of our most powerful innovations—mobile phones, iPods and iPads, liquid crystal displays, LEDs, light bulbs, CDs and DVDs. Often described as conflict materials due to the limited number of accessible mines, they are also integral to cyber-warfare weapon systems, medical technologies, hybrid vehicles, wind turbines, and green energy applications. Consequently, rare earth elements play an increasing role in global affairs and facilitate our changing self-image. Capturing some of today’s emergent myths and identities, the well-designed exhibition catalog brings together 17 “elements”—work by 10 artists and 7 theorists including artists Camille Henrot, The Otolith Group, Ai Weiwei, sociologist and design theorist Benjamin H. Bratton, Finnish new media theorist Jussi Parikka and political theorist Jane Bennett, among others. An attempt to define the spirit of an age, Rare Earth explores how today’s myths, identities, and cosmologies relate to current technology while challenging the rhetoric of immateriality.

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Rauschenberg At Gemini

At only 64 pages, this catalog is small but the story it tells is huge: it documents the thirty-plus years that Robert Rauschenberg created prints and multiples at Gemini G.E.L., the world-famous print house in Los Angeles. From 1967 through 2001, working with Gemini owners Sidney Felsen and Stanley Grinstein, Rauschenberg pushed the boundaries of printmaking like no other contemporary artist before or since. All of Rauschenberg’s most celebrated Gemini G.E.L. prints, print series and multiples – such as Booster, the artist’s famous X-ray self-portrait – are illustrated in this essential volume. Also included are prints using his photographs of Los Angeles, multiples created in France, India, China, and from his travels with the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, as well as works created for political or environmental causes including the first Earth Day in 1970. In addition, photographs of the artist working at Gemini are reproduced. Includes an extensive essay by curator Jay Belloli.

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BLAKE RAYNE

Tense and Spaced Out
Polar Nights, Glacial Chaos and the Ecology of Misery

Katherine Pickard & Tim Saltarelli (Eds.)

American artist Blake Rayne’s (b. 1969) approach to painting stems from the duplicity of words like script, folder, application, dissolve and screen. These operative terms situate his work between forms of linguistic description and the history of reflexive material practices in art. He begins from an orientation that considers the terms painter and painting as fictions with no stable material definition, shaped by always evolving social, institutional and physical relations. Published in conjunction with Rayne’s first survey exhibition, Cabin of the Accused at the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX (2017), Tense and Spaced Out spans Rayne’s work over the last decade, featuring long-form essays by Sean Paul, Jaleh Mansoor, Javier Sánchez Martínez and John Kelsey, and shorter statements by Laura Owens and David Lewis. The publication also includes documentation of the exhibition by a group of local high school students and a magazine dedicated to Rayne’s 2013 book-object Almanac.

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RE-VIEW: ONNASCH COLLECTION

Paul Schimmel

One of the first Germans to open a New York gallery after World War II, Reinhard Onnasch introduced artists such as Dieter Roth and Hanne Darboven to American audiences, and Americans Morris Louis, Claes Oldenburg and Kenneth Noland to German audiences. Over four decades, Onnasch built an eclectic collection— from Pop to Color Field—with a strong commitment to both American and European art, energized by a multitude of themes and stories. Curator Paul Schimmel, in his first project since leaving MoCA Los Angeles, has assembled this selected document of Onnasch’s collection for an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, London. One particular highlight is the comprehensive documentation of Onnasch’s work as a gallerist, interspersed with photographs and publication references. An elegant anthology to a life dedicated to the arts.

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Rex Reason

Simon Patterson

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REBECCA BELMORE

The Named and Unnamed

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RECENT BRITISH PAINTING

Canadian curator Tom Morton is really the focus of this thought-provoking catalog for an exhibition with the deliberately ultra-bland title Recent British Painting. Morton—a star of the London art world who staged the notorious Cyprien Gaillard exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, and a noted contributor to Frieze—looks at the world of appropriation as it applies to curators, not just to artists. The premise draws upon the programming and aesthetic of a certain group of exhibitions and publications, such as those by the British Council from the 1970s and 1980s. The specificity of these now seemingly passé exhibitions resided in the fact that there was no curatorial input; today, the curatorial reference to this exhibition practice permits the questioning of the meaning of every work under the banner of the “new.” Eleven artists are featured, including Edwin Burdis, Nicholas Byrne, Milea Dragicevic and others. From the Grimm Gallery in Holland.

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RED HORIZON

Contemporary Art and Photography
in the USSR and Russia, 1960–2010

Drew Sawyer & Tyler Cann (Eds.)

Timed to coincide with the centennial of the Russian Revolution, Red Horizon—a survey of art made shortly after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and beyond—chronicles how artists represented the growing gap between government-sanctioned orthodoxies and life in the USSR and Russia. Thoughtfully designed to read backwards for the art and forward for the photography, this softcover catalog accompanying the exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art (2017) draws from two facets of Neil K. Rector’s renowned art collection—Soviet and Russian photography from the 1970s to 1990, and the work of Moscow-based unofficial artists who came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. Combining documentary photography, conceptual art, painting and more, Red Horizon suggests how creativity and critical thinking manifest themselves under the most difficult social and ideological circumstances. Includes introductions by curators Tyler Cann and Drew Sawyer along with essays by four art historians on symbols of the Soviet state, modernism, landscape and memory, and the tension between folk and mass cultures.

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The Red Snowball

Ten Years of Cross-Cultural Activities:
Chinese European Art Center

A richly illustrated publication marking the tenth anniversary of the Chinese European Art Center (CEAC) in Xiamen, established to promote artistic exchange between the two countries. The Dutch founders of CEAC engaged with the Chinese art community before contemporary art there became a fad and a high-priced commodity. The result is a dynamic institution that has facilitated creative interaction between artists in China and Western Europe. This fine book, full of archival photos and texts which will be exhibited at the Dutch Culture Center at World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, is an important historical document. Includes work by former resident artists such as Aam Solleveld, Amy Wong, Arnoud Noordegraaf, Bas Princen, Hulya Yilmaz, Charlotte Schleiffert, Chen Quingqing, Fahretin Öhrenli, Gerald van der Kaap, Folkert de Jong, Gu Yue and Hartmut Wilkening.

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