COME ON

Peter Wächtler

John Kelsey & Jakob Schillinger (Eds.)

Passivity and contemplation characterize the ten short stories featured in Peter Wachtler’s Come On. At a moment when talking about experiences seems more important than having them, Wächtler’s writing presents a different narrative to rationalize one’s place in the world. Unlike the various fatalistic doctrines these stories mime, the author’s social consciousness creeps into the picture. Hollowed-out phrases from the repertoire of advertising agencies and shallow love songs are made to speak beautifully of a world that is not beautiful. Critical theory proves potent means for territorial fighting—as potent as fists or a Kryptonite bicycle lock. Wächtler, while guest artist (2013) at the MINI/Goethe-Institute Curatorial Residencies at Ludlow 38, New York, produced this book of short stories in collaboration with Reena Spaulings Fine Art, along with exhibiting B.A.C.K., a projected animation film starring a bachelor rat.

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HAS MAN A FUNCTION IN UNIVERSE?

Strategic Questions #2

Gavin Wade

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WE SUPPORT EVERYTHING SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME THAT HAS STRUGGLED AND STILL STRUGGLES

Introduction to Lettrist Cinema

Nicole Brenez

In this pocket-sized book on the history of Lettrist Cinema, French historian and theorist Nicole Brenez elucidates the formal innovations of this unique art form that prefigured breakthroughs in film including the nouvelle vague and the experiments of expanded cinema in the United States. Key figures and basic concepts such as the use of jarring dissonant and disassociated soundtracks, scratched and bleached celluloid and the place of Lettrist Cinema in avant-garde history are discussed and illustrated with black-and-white stills. Founded by Romanian-born French poet, film critic and artist Isidore Isou in Paris immediately after World War II, the Lettrist movement took its inspiration from Dada and Surrealism. The movement remains active to this day, having lost none of the aesthetic or ethical radicalism seeded by Isou in 1951 with his revolutionary film Venom and Eternity, which became the movement’s visual manifesto, influencing such avant-garde filmmakers as Stan Brakage.

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WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO NEW INSTITUTIONALISM?

James Voorhies (Ed.)

The first in a new series of readers from the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University, Whatever happened … considers the impact of New Institutionalism on art institutions and their curatorial strategies in light of today’s contemporary globalized culture. Originating in Europe in the 1990s, New Institutionalism sought to reconfigure the art institution from within into an active, democratic, open and egalitarian public sphere. This timely and fascinating subject is amply illustrated in the hardcover publication which brings together facsimiles of seminal texts, new critical essays, a history of trends and practices, commissioned artist projects and contributions by a variety of artists, architects, writers, historians and theorists including Martin Beck, Le Corbusier, Maria Lind and Markus Miessen. Working in these new modes, the art institution becomes a site of fluidity, unpredictability and risk. Completed in 1963, the CCVA was designed by Le Corbusier to house Harvard’s visual arts program, featuring a combination of academic workshops, artist studios and exhibitions.

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WILD PARK

Commissioning the Unexpected

Jeroen Boomgaard

Set against the backdrop of the rapidly changing Dutch landscape, this extended essay by prominent University of Amsterdam art historian Jeroen Boomgard explores the varying quality of art in public space. An artwork is defined not only by its own form and iconography but also by the functions and meanings assigned to it by the viewer’s expectations. Boomgaard, lector at the Art and Public Space Research Group at the Gerrit Reitveld Academie in Amsterdam, goes in search of works of public art that somehow succeed in escaping the limits of those expectations. The sixth publication in the series from the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture.

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EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS

Roman Letters

Oslo Editions

The second volume from Oslo Editions, Roman Letters is a collection of urgent missives addressed to unnamed friends, written from Rome by Evan Calder Williams. Initially intended to pick up the thread of ongoing conversations and debates, Roman Letters pursues theory by epistolary means, swerving through philosophy, travelogue, polemic, prose poem, speculative fiction and political reflection. Set against the backdrop of Berlusconi’s Italy and the ruins of late capitalism, Roman Letters traverses a landscape of its own design, passing from contingency to trains, dogs to wolves, tourists to partisans, graffiti to ashes, real estate to cities of the dead, ornament to bones, rage to swagger, and from pessimism to communism. A writer and theorist, Evan Calder Williams is also the author of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Zero Books, 2010)

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WORK, WORK, WORK

A Reader on Art and Labour

Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Annika Enqvist, Michele Masucci, Lisa Rosendahl & Cecilia Widenheim (Eds.)

What is the position of the artist if “creativity” has become a commodity? How can the artist’s conditions of production be described, and what role can art and architecture play in societal change? The texts in this foundational reader provide perspectives emerging from the series of interdisciplinary seminars conducted during the late fall of 2010 at Iaspis in Stockholm. They are arranged into three themes: the relationship between art and work, the current conditions of the production and organization of work within visual art and the role of art and architecture in politics and society. Texts from Pierre Bal-Blanc, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Annika Eriksson, Kirsten Forkert, Lars Bang Larsen, Maria Lind, Judith Revel, Joanna Soko/lowska, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinovic ́, and Nina Svensson, among others.

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WORLD OF MATT ER

Inke Arns (Ed.)

In light of the acute problems caused by human-induced transformation of the earth and its ecosystems we must reconsider—at a fundamental level, and in slow, subtle and matter-of-fact ways—how we understand and interact with the world of things. World of Matter, first a museum exhibition, developed into an international project investigating raw materials and the complex ecologies of which they are a part. The wide range of aesthetic and ethical approaches to the handling of resources in many world regions and post-national spaces that are presented in this book challenge the capitalistic assumption that the planet’s materials are primarily for human consumption. By drawing connections between works that derive from artistic practice, journalism, philosophy, activism and other realms of research, World of Matter provides a place for ecological imaginaries. Contributions by Nabil Ahmed, Inke Arns, Mabe Bethônico, Ursula Biemann, Gavin Bridge, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan and T. J. Demos, among others.

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YOU ARE OF VITAL IMPORTANCE

Sarah Tripp

Eloquently presented in this compact hardcover book, Glasgow-based emerging artist/writer Sarah Tripp’s collection of stories examines the proximity and distance between characters, communities and objects. Tripp’s multi-stranded practice consists of writing, performing and filmmaking, all of which she utilizes to explore how our characters and identities evolve. Her writings are marked by the use of multiple perspective, episodic structure and suspended denouement and focus on improvisation and the relationships between gestures and speech, text and object and narrative and film. Influenced by the psychodynamic writings of Adam Phillips and Christopher Bollas, the creative writing of Lydia Davis and the practice of Frances Stark and Apichatpong Weerasethakuls films, Sarah Tripp’s work is grounded in direct experience and observation. Tripp teaches at Glasgow School of Art and was recently commissioned by Creative Scotland to co-produce an installation/performance event for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art.

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REMY ZAUGG

The Art Museum of My Dreams or A Place for the Work and the Human Being

Hinrich Sachs & Eva Schmidt (Eds.)

In his influential 1986 text, now translated into English for the first time, Swiss artist Rémy Zaugg (1943–2005) laid out fundamental ideas on the art museum. For him, the museum is an everyday tool that enables the encounter between viewer and work—raising the question of the kind of architecture appropriate for such a space.

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