FRANS VAN LENT

Unnoticed Art

Maria Martens (Ed.)

Dutch performance, film and video artist Frans van Lent (b. 1955) believes that in our present time, passing unnoticed has become a noticeable experience. The popularity of social media and its promise of instant fame in fact emphasizes how much of our lives goes unmarked by public exposure or recognition. Unnoticed Art, a quietly designed index and description of the 34 performance ideas carried out by volunteers at the Unnoticed Art Festival (2014) seems designed to resist attention itself. The slender volume of black-and-white text with no other markings will pass almost invisible between other books on a bookshelf—or will it? According to van Lent, the Unnoticed Art Festival—which continues to be staged at an unannounced location and times—embraces genuine engagement with a limited number of people, allowing for a more intense connection with those present.

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WENDELIEN VAN OLDENBORGH

Amateur

Emily Pethick, Wendelien van Oldenborth & David Morris (Eds.)

Amateur is the first comprehensive publication on Dutch experimental filmmaker and visual artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s (b. 1962) moving-image works and their accompanying installations from 2005 through 2015. This handsome catalog gathers her works on communication and interaction between individuals in public locations to cast attention on repressed, incomplete and unresolved histories. Through the staging of these encounters, van Oldenborgh enabled multiple perspectives and voices to coexist, bringing to light political, social and cultural relationships. Thirteen essays by artists, curators and writers who have been key interlocutors with van Oldenborgh offer in-depth observations on her work, which is generously and imaginatively illustrated with project outtakes organized in flipbook-like pages inset chronologically between the texts. Contributors include Nana Adusei-Poku, Ricardo Basbaum, FreÅLdeÅLrique Bergholtz, Eric de Bruyn, Binna Choi, David Dibosa, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Avery F. Gordon, Tom Holert, Nataša Ilić, Charl Landvreugd, Sven Lütticken, Anna Manubens, Ruth Noack and Grant Watson. Amateur is published in conjunction with the artist’s being awarded the Heineken Prize for Art (2014).

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CHARLES VAN OTTERDIJK

Double Centre

Nick Aikens, Charles Esche & Charles van Otterdijk (Eds.)

Double Centre appears as a sort of archive revealing two mysterious buildings discovered by Dutch artist Charles van Otterdijk while wandering through the woods near his family home in the east of Germany. Photographs of the locations, taken by van Otterdijk during his long-term investigative project, suggest that they could have been rendition centers—those sovereign sites of exception used by democratic states in their effort to eliminate, contain or otherwise manufacture terror. This artist’s book, a report in photos and documents, feels similarly out of sight. The apparent objectivity of image and text belies an eerie suspicion about the truth of the narrative, where boundaries between legal and illegal, fiction and reality become blurred in our current moment of political crisis and government surveillance. Accompanying exhibitions at the Hague and the Van Abbemuseum.

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LESLEY VANCE

Los Angeles–based artist Lesley Vance, known to many for her celebrated inclusion in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, has emerged as an important contemporary voice in abstract painting. Her work engages broad histories—from Spanish still life to cubism. Rather than take these styles on directly, they become strategies and referents for Vance to deconstruct through careful brushwork and scraping gestures that are, in some sense, acts of erasure. Through her unique handling of color, paint and light, she creates illusionistic painted spaces where grounds seem to simultaneously recede and come forward. This slight but elegantly produced catalog encompasses the artist’s oil paintings and watercolors from 2009 to the present. Designed by Mark Owens and including a text from art critic and poet Barry Schwabsky.

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FREDRIK VÆRSLEV

All Around Amateur

Martin Clark, Anne Pontégnie & Steinar Sekkingstad (Eds.)

Contemporary Norwegian painter Fredrik Værslev (b. 1979) presents his new series in this deconstructed exhibition catalog/artist’s book, All Around Amateur. Inspired by sunsets taken with his iPhone, Værslev re-creates the images on canvas by using a mechanical trolley used for marking lines on roads or sports fields. The rows of applied color are rubbed into the canvas resulting in resonant toned paintings mimicking the glow of the sun. The paintings are installed to create a massive line of shimmering tones recalling the color field paintings of Rothko. The artist book, accompanying the solo exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall, is available as two different versions, each made up of 320 one-to-one digital images scanned from eight of the new “sunset” paintings and reproduced in the book sequentially, left to right, top to bottom. Full-bleed scans in each “volume” together reproduce an entire wall of paintings. Following the images are newly commissioned texts by Ina Blom, Martin Clark, and Steinar Sekkingstad plus an interview with artist Anne Pontégnie.

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MICHAEL VENEZIA

Paintings

Matthia Löbke

Works by New York–based painter Michael Venezia represent some of the most original artistic works produced within the Minimal art movement. Following the minimalist dictum of spatialization of color and the extension of pictorial space (in contrast to Flavin and Judd, who both renounced it), Venezia devoted himself solely to painting and the characteristics of its aesthetic presence: texture, paint application and process. Taking minimalism into consideration, Venezia leads painting toward a condition of being a “specific object.” His “Narrow Bar” paintings— in which color is no longer a neutral element but a full-fledged medium—occupy a unique place in the contested zone between painting and sculpture. The careful presentation of Michael Venezia’s work in this survey catalog from the museum exhibi- tion at the Kunstverein Heilbronn is interspersed with autobiographical materials and an entertaining and informative interview by Tiffany Bell, herself known as an expert interpreter of Agnes Martin and Dan Flavin.

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CHARLOTTE VERITY

Charlotte Verity’s paintings come about slowly during many hours of intense looking and close observation. She is preoccupied by the changing nature of the visual world, natural light and the passing seasons. This volume, the first monograph on the artist, accompanied the 2016 exhibition Charlotte Verity: New Paintings at Purdy Hicks in London. In addition to 37 images the book offers great insight into a five-year body of work. “In these paintings,” Edmund de Waal writes, “the seasons ebb is marked. They are a calendar, a series of poems tracing one full moment and then another.” Included along with de Waal’s incisive response to the paintings is an in-depth conversation between Verity and artist Garry Fabian Miller as well as a text by Paul Hills (author of Light in Early Italian Painting)—who is especially perceptive about the importance of light in Verity’s work.

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CECILIA VICUÑA

Read Thread
The Story of the Red Thread

Michele Faguet (Ed.)

From the 1970s to the present, Chilean artist, poet and filmmaker Cecilia Vicuña’s (b. 1948) work has used red thread to visually and poetically engage with rituals from Aboriginal Australia, South Africa, Paleolithic Europe and pre-Columbian America. Vicuña’s performances, site-specific installations, paintings and drawings relate to the symbolic function of textile and language in terms of femininity, maternity and the support and continuation of life. Published on the occasion of Vicuña’s installation in Athens for dOCUMENTA (14), Read Thread tells the story of the sanguine thread in Vicuña’s work—a kind of weaving-as-writing—and conveys the tension of ecological disaster and reparation as well as a bodily sense of the cosmic scale of landscape, history and time. Alongside historical and recent documentation of Vicuña’s large-scale installations, the softcover publication extensively illustrates her drawings, poetic texts and narratives relating the works to their political and historical context. Essays by dOCUMENTA (14) curator Dieter Roelstraete and art historian José de Nordenflycht Concha complete the book.

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ANTON VIDOKLE

New York Conversations

The first in the new Sternberg DVD/film series, New York Conversations takes place in a Chinatown storefront converted into an improvised kitchen/restaurant. It documents three days of public conversations and meals among artists, critics, curators and a free-floating public. Brussels-based art journal A Prior invited artists Nico Dockx and Anton Vidokle to facilitate the conversations, and artist Rirkrit Tiravanija – famed for his fabulous cooking – to orchestrate the meals which created the conversation-enhancing atmosphere. Instead of commissioning texts or art to be printed in the journal, the artists decided to publicly rethink the way an art journal is produced. The film explores questions concerning labor in art, the feasibility of artistic freedom, means of reclaiming dignity in art criticism, and whether the event of making the film was, in itself, an artwork. A work in the tradition of underground cinema and conceptual film.

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Anton Vidokle

Produce, Distribute, Discuss, Repeat

Anton Vidokle, artist and co-founder of the noted internet art-based site, e-flux, has commanded the attention of over 70,000 viewers daily through his collaborative art projects such as the noted “e-flux video rental” and “An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life”. But for the numerous projects he has instigated and produced his identity is almost unknown. This new volume in the Black Book series finally unveils Vidokle’s unique and extensive career through numerous essays and a unusual interview with Martha Rosler about Vidokle by Bosko Blagojevic. Contributors include, Media Farzin, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Maria Lind, Monika Szewczyk and Jan Verwoert.

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