VORRATSKAMMER / PANTRY

Kathrin Böhm, Wapke Feenstra, Antje Schiffers & Thomas Sprenger

As part of a festival of world cultures and sustainability in Berlin in 2011, the collaborative international artist initiative myvillages.org (a collective formed by artists from agricultural villages) provided food and drink for 80,000 festival-goers sourced—grown, exchanged, bartered, preserved, foraged and purchased—from 80 co-producers within “wider Berlin.” This comprehensive book shows myvillages’ months-long undertaking to organize locavores with the passion to succeed at this daunting project. For myvillages, the production and consumption of food are cultural and social activities closely intermingled with the traditions of farming and processing as well as concerns of land use, life in modern cities, sustainability and (over)consumption.

Add to your order

IAN WALLACE

A Literature of Images

Vanessa Joan Müller, Beatrix Ruf, and Nicolaus Schafhausen

This is the first extensive survey catalogue on the work of Vancouver-based artist Ian Wallace – a seminal figure in Vancouver’s fertile 1970s art scene, a teacher who taught the first generation of the Vancouver School of photo- conceptualism. He inspired superstars such as Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, and Stan Douglas. Wallace, a pioneer and theorist of photo-conceptualism, was energized by the dialectic tensions between monochrome painting and documentary or staged photography, exploring the emblematic sites of street, studio, and nature. A beautifully designed, oversized book on this vanguard artist, including excellent interpretive texts, extensive color reproductions, catalogue of exhibited works, a chronology, thorough bibliographic information, and an informative interview with Wallace by Renske Janssen.

Add to your order

JESSICA WARBOYS

Vanelephant

Margareta von Oswald (Ed.)

In the fall of 2010, Jessica Warboys discovered photographic portraits of surrealist dancer Hélène Vanel in the dis-used Bibliothèque Smith-Lesouëf, in the Parisian suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne. Among these photographs were images of Vanel performing L’Acte  manqué at the opening night of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, Paris, 1938. Soon after, an unpublished manuscript by Vanel came to light in the adjoining archives of the Maison nationale des artistes, a retirement home for elderly artists. Vanelephant contains an overview of ten chapters of Vanel’s memoirs, written between 1984 and 1985, alongside self- portraits and a selection of attributed images and text. Warboys translated the texts herself and condensed the drama, and thus Vanel’s role has shifted from manuscript to script. Texts by Curzio Malaparte and André Parinaud, Hélène Vanel and Jessica Warboys.

Add to your order

WAR AS EVER!

Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen

What is the relationship between conflict, looking and art? Derived from an exhibition at the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Scottish artists Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen investigate the relationship between the historical visual culture of war and contemporary media. This Chinese-folded book is separated into five distinct sections: in the first, appropriated images ranging from from medieval etchings to newspaper clippings document an artist’s projection, alongside text from Susan Sontag’s noted book Regarding the Pain of Others. An essay from Frits Gierstberg discusses and documents the exhibition itself, while Lina van der Wolde explores the project’s starting point—the historic Van Kittensteyn album (1613) from the Dutch War of Independence. A reproduction of the artists’ handwritten manifesto works to critique our lingering culture of violence. Mackenna and Janssen have collaborated since participating in Manifesta 1 (1997) and teach at the University of Dundee, Scotland.

Add to your order

WE WOULD LIKE TO LEARN, AND WE ARE WORKING ON A BOOK

This Book Is A Classroom

Lucie Kolb, Romy Rüegger & HIT (Eds.)

What does the process of publishing really mean for knowledge exchange? This publication engages the form of the book as the site for poly-vocal and experimental research on art, language, and the economies within and between institutions. A conceptual project offering all the physical trappings of a true academic text: an unusual binding, jacket, title page, preface, postface, table of contents, captions, cross headings, annotations, editorial notes, appendix plus various additional accessories while presenting new ideas around the structure. A must-read for those fascinated by classic Fluxus book projects, We  Would  Like   to  Learn questions the mediating role of the publication on contemporary art practice, constructed by its contributions, modeled by the filling of its structural scaffolding. Contributors include Ellen Blumenstein, Elke Krasny, Dani Gal, Egija Inzule, Karl Larsson; Falke Pisano, Simone Schardt, Andrea Thal, Danna Vajda, and Jacob Wren.

Add to your order

WE ARE LIVING ON A STAR

Tone Hansen & Marit Paasche (Eds.)

On July 22, 2011, a politically motivated explosion took place in Oslo’s government “High-Rise” building and Hannah Ryggen’s tapestry We Are Living on a Star (1958) was partially destroyed. Only a slight scar remains after its meticulous reconstruction but the wound testifies to a brutal rent in the fabric of Norwegian society of recent terrorist actions. Ryggen’s tapestry serves as centerpiece for this compelling exhibition catalog curated by Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (HOK) in which participating artists engaged public discourse on the nature of the normal and predictable—the normal being no longer familiar, and the abnormal no longer associated with the foreign. With ample color and black-and-white illustrations, introduction by art historian Marit Paasche and forword by theorist Tone Hansen, this evocative publication presents the work of 24 artists and writers contending with the interface of politics, art and the everyday.

Add to your order

We Love Artists

Artist Residencies Around the World

The one reference book that every artist needs: a listing of the best 90 Artist-in-Residence (AIR) programs in the world! And there’s more in this cool, copiously illustrated book: details of more than 100 artists who are in AIR. Color-coded by region of the globe (Asia, Oceania, Europe, North/South America, Africa/Middle East), the book includes photos of artists’ residences, studios and work they have done; descriptions of each program, including interviews with artists who have been there; and selection criteria. Of course, there’s complete contact information for all. You will find the latest news from the programs where Gauguin, Donald Judd, Takashi Murakami, Makoto Aida and others have stayed and made great art. Includes a comprehensive list of 520 AIRs.

Add to your order

GILLIAN WEARING

British conceptual artist Gillian Wearing won the Turner Prize in 1997 (while still in her mid-30s). This comprehensive, copiously illustrated exhibition catalog documents the first major retrospective of her video and photography-based works. One of the Young British Artists, Wearing is represented in important collections ranging from the Tate Modern to the Guggenheim and the Hammer Museum. “The key to unlocking the work of Gillian Wearing is found not in art history but in reality television,” writes Ben Luke in the London Evening Standard. “Not so much the tabloid fodder of the 21st century but the tough stuff from the Sixties and Seventies…Always at the grittier end of the Young British Artists spectrum, she is in essence a documentary film-maker and photographer, her work weaving around the line that documentary treads between fact and fiction.” Wearing is known for delving into questions of identity—of herself and others—and for getting members of the public to reveal their innermost secrets, often at uncomfortable levels of intimacy and emotional charge. She often masks her subjects or herself, a strategy that, paradoxically, seems to reveal more than it hides. The retrospective goes back to Wearing’s first important work, the 1992-93 Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say, in which she asked people on the street to write a personal sign and then hold it up for a photo. During the 1990s, she used dramatized scenes to explore edgy relationship issues between parents and children. In her 2010 video Bully a young adult orchestrates actors to re-create a bullying incident in which he was the victim. With over 100 illustrations and insightful essays, this catalog presents Wearing as an important mid-career artist who finds new ways to explore human emotions in the age of social media.

Add to your order

KLAUS WEBER

Secession

Klaus Weber’s work presents the natural world being made to behave in unusual ways: a cloudburst follows a moving car on a sunny day; an ordinary vacuum cleaner summons a small tornado; mushrooms push up through tarmac. This slim but comprehensive catalog documents for the first time Austrian installation artist’s body of work and reveals an intervention in the spaces that dominate our “advanced” cities. Includes color and black-and-white photographs; texts by András Pálffy, Alex Farquharson, Clemens Krümmel, and the artist; and a pull-out insert to illustrate the spectacular effect of a heliostatic (sun-gathering) mirror that Weber installed at the 2008 Vienna Secession exhibit.

Add to your order

Heinrich Weid

Model Book

At first glance, Heinrich Weid’s work reeks of conventional domestic design. But wait for the double-take, when you realize that his wild strain of thinking, camouflaged as an armchair or a vase, has turned home-sweet-home into Salvador Dali’s dollhouse, or Andy Warhol’s stage set. Weid plunges into the chaos of postmodern life, mixing forms and styles, utility and randomness, into a muscular type of design that will leave you questioning plenty of supposedly ordinary decisions about home décor. Weid wittily and wickedly brings together conflicting elements to create a memorable but not necessarily peaceful synthesis: vases made from toy cars, armchairs from car silhouettes, brick-patterned wallpaper with traffic symbols. Includes 7 sewn wallpapers: exquisite, but you’re not likely to be hanging them in the powder room.

Add to your order