By rejecting consistency, Picabia powerfully asserted the artist’s freedom to change

Irreverent and audacious, restless and brilliant, Francis Picabia achieved fame as a leader of the Dada group only to break publicly with the movement in 1921. Moving between Paris, the French Riviera, Switzerland, and New York, he led a dashing life, painting, writing, yachting, gambling, racing fast cars, and organizing lavish parties. Like no other artist before him, Picabia created a body of work that defies consistency and categorization, from Impressionist landscapes to abstraction, from Dada to stylized nudes, and from performance and film to poetry and publishing. A primary constant in his career was his vigorous unpredictability.

Illustrated with nearly 500 reproductions, this sweeping survey of Picabia’s eclectic career embraces the challenge of his work, asking how we can make sense of its wildly shifting mediums and styles. In her opening essay, curator Anne Umland writes that with Picabia, familiar oppositions “between high art and kitsch, progression and regression, modernism and its opposite, and success and failure are undone.”

In 15 superb essays, additional authors―including distinguished professors George Baker, Briony Fer, and David Joselit and renowned Picabia scholars Carole Boulbès and Arnauld Pierre―delve into the radically various mediums, styles, and contexts of Picabia’s work, discussing his Dada period, his abstractions, his mechanical paintings, his appropriations of source imagery, his multifaceted relationship with print (both in his paintings and as a publisher and contributor to vanguard journals), his forays into screenwriting and theater, and his complex politics. Marcel Duchamp, of course, but also Nietzsche and Gertrude Stein make repeat appearances along the way.

Turning to Picabia’s contemporary legacy, Cathérine Hug maps the history of his critical reception and interviews contemporary curators and artists, including Peter Fischli, Albert Oehlen, and David Salle. A lively 30-page chronology illustrated with archival photographs and ephemera gives readers a year-by-year account of the artist’s colorful life and of his interactions with fellow artists and critics, friends, and lovers.

Together these essays suggest that the unruly genius of Picabia offers us a powerfully relevant and provocative alternative to the familiar narrative of modernism.

Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction accompanies the major 2016 exhibition on the artist, jointly organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Kunsthaus Zürich.

Francis Picabia was born in 1879 in Paris, the only child of a Cuban-born Spanish father and a French mother. His first success came as a painter in an Impressionist manner. He went on to become one of the principle figures of the Dada movement in New York and Paris. In 1925 Picabia moved to the south of France, where he lived and worked through World War II. Following the war, Picabia returned to Paris, where he died in 1953.

With so many recent books on the artist, including a nearly definitive biography (Duchamp, LJ 12/96) and a newly revised catalogue raisonné (The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, LJ 9/15/97), one may question the need for a volume ostensibly focusing on the collection of Belgium gallerist Ronny van de Velde. But this contribution by renowned Dada scholar Naumann brings a fresh focus on Duchamp’s interests in reproduction and appropriation and is thus a welcome addition. In highly readable prose, Naumann recounts the artist’s career in chronological chapters, emphasizing both his early use of printing techniques to undermine deliberately his own career in painting and his later readymades and variant reproductions. Throughout, Naumann clearly shows how Duchamp harnessed mechanical reproduction paradoxically in the service of his constant striving not to repeat himself. Meticulously laid out and adorned with 440 illustrations (200 in color) of objects in van de Velde’s collection and other seminal works, the book can serve equally the newcomer and the devotee.

One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) was a master of self-invention who carefully regulated the image he projected through self-portraiture and through his collaboration with those who portrayed him. During his long career, Duchamp recast accepted modes for assembling and describing identity, indelibly altering the terrain of portraiture. This groundbreaking book (which accompanies a major exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery) demonstrates the ways in which Duchamp willfully manipulated the techniques of portraiture both to secure his reputation as an iconoclast and to establish himself as a major figure in the art world. Although scholars have explored Duchamp’s use of aliases, little attention has been paid to how this work played into, and against, existing portrait conventions. Nor has any study yet compared these explicitly self-constructed projects with the large body of portraits of Duchamp by others. Inventing Marcel Duchamp showcases approximately one hundred never-before-assembled portraits and self-portraits of Duchamp. The (broadly defined) self-portraits and self-representations include the famous autobiographical suitcase Boîte-en-Valise and Self-Portrait in Profile, a torn silhouette that became very influential for future generations of artists. The portraits by other artists include works by Duchamp’s contemporaries Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Francis Picabia, Beatrice Wood, and Florine Stettheimer as well as portraits by more recent generations of artists, including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Sturtevant, Yasumasa Morimura, David Hammons, and Douglas Gordon. Since the mid-twentieth century, as abstraction assumed a position of dominance in fine art, portraiture has been often derided as an art form; the images and essays in Inventing Marcel Duchamp counter this, and invite us to rethink the role of portraiture in modern and contemporary art.

Catálogo bilingüe español – inglés, producido especialmente por Malba, con ensayos de Olivier Debroise, Francis Alÿs y Marcelo Pacheco, además de una completa biografía del artista. La publicación incluye fotos, dibujos, mapas y croquis que documentan la evolución y el proceso de producción de la obra.

Christian Marclay was born in 1955 in San Rafael, California and was raised in Geneva, Switzerland, where he studied at the Ecole Superieure d’Art Visuel prior to attending the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. He has lived in New York since 1980. His work has been shown and performed at museums all over the world, including the Hirshhorn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Saint Louis Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Since 1979 he has, in addition to his visual arts practice, performed and recorded musical pieces by mixing altered records on multiple turntables. As a musician he has collaborated with many other performers including Butch Morris, John Zorn and Sonic Youth.

Michael Snow was born in 1929 in Toronto. He studied at the Ontario College of Art and had his first solo exhibition in 1957. Since then his work has appeared at exhibitions in every major art center in Europe and North America, and his films have been shown at retrospectives and film festivals in the United States, Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, France, Austria, and Italy. Snow has executed several prominent and popular public commissions that include Reflections, his photo mural at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, and The Audience, his sculptured frieze at Torontois SkyDome. He has received many awards and honors, including the Order of Canada, Chevalier de liordre des arts et lettres, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Los Angeles Film Criticsi Association Award, and honorary degrees from the University of Victoria, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and Brock University. He lives and works in Toronto.

Les Années pop, catalogue qui fait suite à l’exposition de Beaubourg, doit être considéré comme une véritable anthologie de la culture pop des années soixante. Organisé selon une stricte chronologie, il décline de page en page les multiples avatars d’un mouvement qui s’était étendu aux différents systèmes de la création : peinture, photographie, architecture, design, bande dessinée, mode, etc. Bourré de citations, de textes célèbres jamais encore traduits en français, d’analyses lumineuses sur l’état d’esprit d’une époque, cet ouvrage propose également une iconographie d’une rare richesse. Toutes les icônes, tous les chefs-d’œuvre produits par le pop art sont là, rassemblées dans ces pages. Autant avouer que ce catalogue constitue donc une référence incontournable. Malheureusement, certains de ses défauts en rendent son emploi malaisé. Ainsi, l’absence de pagination, son index et sa bibliographie complexe, le manque de cohérence dans sa présentation transforme ce brillant essai visuel et théorique en ouvrage destiné de préférence à ceux qui aiment les belles images ou à ceux qui possèdent déjà une très bonne connaissance de l’histoire de ce mouvement.

« Qui sont les magiciens de la terre ? les médecins ? les politiciens ? les plombiers ? les écrivains ?… »Extrait de la préface d’Alain Segen. Au printemps 1989, dans son oeuvre installée au Centre Pompidou, à l’entrée du 5e étage, l’artiste Barbara Kruger déclinait une longue liste de trente-trois professions, défiant le titre-même de l’exposition, dans une veine polémique qui persista longtemps. « L’appellation de magiciens est à mon avis plus importante que celle d’artistes, car elle inclut et dépasse la définition-même de l’art, surtout maintenant, depuis que les concepts d’art et d’artiste sont morts maintes et maintes fois. Magiciens est une prophétie d’avenir, et l’artiste devient un diseur d’oracles. » écrivait récemment Huang Yong Ping.Tout à la fois pionnière et insolite, Magiciens de la terre représenta un moment-seuil dans l’histoire des grandes expositions du xxe siècle. Du 18 mai au 14 août 1989, dans les galeries d’exposition du Centre Pompidou et de La Grande halle de la Villette, elle rassembla près de six cents oeuvres produites par plus d’une centaine d’artistes contemporains. Pour première fois sur une scène occidentale, la moitié des artistes provenaient de ces territoires géographiques (Afrique, Antilles, Asie, Europe de l’Est, Océanie) jusqu’alors ignorés par les acteurs d’un monde occidental encore tout-puissant et ethnocentré. Jean-Hubert Martin, son commissaire, en avait conçu le projet en rencontrant des artistes issus de ces cultures qu’il décrivit avec ironie comme « invisibles » et fustigeait, dans un parti-pris politique résolument anticolonial, « l’idée communément admise qu’il n’y a de création en arts plastiques que dans le monde occidental ou fortement occidentalisé. »Vingt-cinq ans après Magiciens de la Terre, à une époque où les arts visuels traversent une période de globalisation accélérée, le Centre Pompidou organise, à partir du printemps 2014, une série d’évènements qui se proposent d’examiner la genèse de Magiciens de la Terre afin de resituer l’exposition dans son contexte et de comprendre, notamment, le rôle que celle-ci a joué dans le processus d’extension géographique du marché de l’art contemporain.Cet anniversaire s’ouvrira sur un colloque international qui permettra à de grandes personnalités du monde de l’art de réfléchir au sens à donner aujourd’hui à l’entreprise des commissaires de l’exposition, à la représentation de l’Autre ou à ce qu’est un artiste de nos jours en Afrique, en Inde, en Chine, en Australie.Une exposition-documentaire offrira au public l’accès aux archives de l’exposition de 1989 à travers une mise en scène imaginéepar l’artiste Sarkis, déjà present en 1989. Une université d’été proposera également un programme d’échange et de confrontations entre jeunes chercheurs.Le légendaire catalogue d’exposition de 1989 étant depuis longtemps indisponible, il était essentiel de proposer un nouvel ouvrage qui reviendrait sur le projet en donnant la parole à des artistes, sociologues, historiens, commissaires et critiques d’art tels que Raymonde Moulin, Annie Cohen-Solal, Mark Francis, Hou Hanru ou encore au critique et théoricien de l’art Bernard Marcadé. Chacune des oeuvres exposées à l’époque sera présentée et les artistes seront invités à répondre à la question « Qu’est-ce que Magiciens de la Terre a changé pour vous? » à travers des écrits ou des oeuvres spécialement réalisées pour cet ouvrage.

Con il secondo volume di Slittamenti della performance, l’autrice conclude l’analisi sulle storie della performance art iniziata con il primo libro. Quest’ultimo saggio è dedicato alla discontinuità attivata negli ultimi due decenni, in cui l’attitudine performatica, scavalcando l’ortodossia degli anni Settanta si è rigenerata grazie all’innesto della delegated performance e all’appropriazione dello spazio pubblico. Rivitalizzata da nuovi comportamenti e differenti metodologie, la performance contemporanea offre delle visioni del mondo che vengono declinate sia attraverso le mega-produzioni istituzionali sia attraverso forme indipendenti e svincolate. Esse si interpellano sulla complessità dell’esistente. In un’avvincente indagine, l’autrice analizza i paradigmi dei più importanti artisti internazionali come Tino Sehgal, Nico Vascellari, Cesare Viel, Vanessa Beecroft, Sissi, Alessio Bolzoni, Anne Imhof, Marcello Maloberti, Ragnar Kjartansson, John Bock, Francesco Arena, Enzo Umbaca, Jacopo Miliani, Jeremy Deller, Francis Alÿs, Marinella Senatore, Theaster Gates e Andreco.

Beloved by collectors and scholars alike, Steven Leiber’s beautiful bookseller catalogs shaped the canon of publications by artists Steven Leiber was a pioneering San Francisco art dealer, collector and gallerist who specialized in the dematerialized art practices of the 1960s and 1970s and the ephemera and documentation spawned by conceptual art and other postwar movements. To sell this material, Leiber produced a series of 52 iconic catalogs between 1992 and 2010. Far from your ordinary dealer catalog, Leiber’s catalogs paid homage to the kind of historic printed matter that he bought and sold, mimicking iconic publications like Wallace Berman’s Semina journal and the exhibition catalog for Documenta V (1972). Leiber’s reputation spread via these unique volumes, which included works by John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Ray Johnson, Lucy Lippard, Allan Kaprow, Yayoi Kusama, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Weiner and many more. Across 252 pages, this book documents the full set of 52 dealer catalogs produced by Steven Leiber between 1992 and 2010. Inspired by Leiber’s often humorous borrowing for his catalog designs, the book’s format references Sol LeWitt’s Autobiography and includes an essay and contextual notes by SFMOMA Head Librarian David Senior. Additional contributors include Ann Butler, Christophe Cherix, Marc Fischer, Adam Michaels, Tom Patchett, David Platzker, Marcia Reed, Lawrence Rinder and Robin Wright.

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Un autre monde, son chef-d’œuvre, paraît en 1844. Dans cette fresque merveilleuse et critique à la fois, la relation habituelle entre texte et image est inversée. Ce sont les dessins qui priment sur le texte. Un autre monde, avec ses transformations, visions, fantasmagories, rêveries, zoomorphoses, apothéoses et autres bizarreries se veut le re?et d’une époque où le public est en permanence surpris par les innovations industrielles, médicales et scienti?ques. L’univers merveilleux et étrange de Grandville a inspiré bien des artistes après lui, depuis les surréalistes jusqu’aux artistes contemporains comme Marcel Broodthaers, César, Charles Doudelet, James Ensor, Jan Fabre, Francisco de Goya, On Kawara, Desmond Morris, Panamarenko, Odilon Redon, Angel Vergara (qui représente la Communauté française de Belgique à la 54e Biennale de Venise). Le mouvement moderne a volontiers absorbé le talent de Grandville et on retrouve de nombreux échos dans notre culture de l’image: des ?lms des Georges Meliès, des Frères Lumière, de Ladislas Starevitch, de Charlie Chaplin, de Serge Vandercam et Christian Dotremont, à la video d’artiste de Koen Theys.

2020 ushered in a new decade and with it a series of unforeseen events that have reoriented the future. As the coronavirus forced businesses and institutions to close all over the world, museums likewise shuttered. New York–based cultural strategist András Szántó took this abrupt halt of art-world activity as an opportunity to interview 28 of the world’s leading museum directors. Here, each director addresses the potential of art museums as both spaces for change and democracy, and as reflections of larger sociopolitical dilemmas, offering a glimpse into the many possible futures of museums in an accelerated phase of reappraisal and reinvention. Contributors include: Marion Ackermann (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden), Cecilia Alemani (the High Line, New York), Anton Belov (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow), Meriem Berrada (MACAAL, Marrakesh), Daniel Birnbaum (Acute Art, London), Thomas P. Campbell (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), Tania Coen-Uzzielli (Tel Aviv Museum of Art), Rhana Devenport (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide), María Mercedes González (Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín), Max Hollein (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Sandra Jackson-Dumont (Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles), Mami Kataoka (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo), Brian Kennedy (Peabody Essex Museum, Salem), Koyo Kouoh (Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town), Sonia Lawson (Palais de Lomé), Adam Levine (Toledo Museum of Art), Victoria Noorthoorn (Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires), Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Galleries, London), Anne Pasternak (Brooklyn Museum), Adriano Pedrosa (MASP, São Paulo), Suhanya Raffel (M+ Museum, Hong Kong), Axel Ruger (Royal Academy of Arts, London), Katrina Sedgwick (Australian Center for the Moving Image, Melbourne), Franklin Sirmans (Pérez Art Museum, Miami), Eugene Tan (National Gallery Singapore & Singapore Art Museum), Philip Tinari (UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing), Marc-Olivier Wahler (Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva) and Marie-Cécile Zinsou (Musée de la Fondation Zinsou, Ouidah).

How can a magic trick help us understand an artwork? The spectator of a magic trick wonders what happened in the ineffable moment when a magician disappears and reappears at the other side of the stage, in the same way a museum visitor might wonder what happened when a common object like a bar of soap, a mirror, or a shoe reappears as a sculpture. Magic, like artwork, relies on a system of belief cultivated between the magician and his or her audience. The wider the gap between what the audience sees and what it is asked to believe, the more efficient and spectacular the trick can be. A foreword by museum director and exhibition curator Marc-Olivier Wahler discusses the contemporary art exhibition within the framework of a teleportation magic trick described in Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel The Prestige. Included is an interview between Wahler and France-based curator Christophe Kihm addressing how the brain reacts when interpreting an artwork, the language with which to approach art, and how these impact the future of museums and art exhibitions. Pairing the exhibition objectives with methods of illusion, an original essay by Christopher Priest, and a text by Francis Ponge, the book provides insight into the importance of belief and the nature of visual perception. Published on the occasion of the exhibition The Transported Man at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University.

This book presents 123 calling cards of artists (painters, sculptors, photographers, architects, graphic designers, illustrators etc.) from the 18th century to the present day. The facsimiled cards are slipped like bookmarks into a book by several authors on the history of the use of calling cards, the social context in which they were produced, and related historical and fictional narratives. The often unexpected graphic qualities of these personalized objects, each designed to capture an individual identity within the narrow confines of a tiny rectangle card, implicitly recount a history of taste and typographic codes in the West. But this calling card collection also lays the foundations for a microhistory of art, inspired by the Italian microstoria, or a looser narrative that breaks free from geographic contexts and historical periods. We can imagine how social networks were formed before the advent of Facebook, and how artists defined themselves in the social sphere, whether they were students or teachers, dean of the art school or museum curator, founder of a journal, firm, restaurant or political party, and so on. Superimposed on this imaginary or idealized network formed by chance encounters is a living network of students of art or history, historians or anthropologists, librarians, archivists, gallerists, museum curators and artists themselves, the network upon which this pocket museum is constructed. The sheer variety of perspectives and stories brought together here makes this book a prodigious forum for discussion. The carded artists include: Absalon, Anni and Josef Albers, John Armleder, Iain Baxter, Larry Bell, Joseph Beuys, Joseph Binder, Max Bill, Pierrette Bloch, Rosa Bonheur, Irma Boom, Aglaüs Bouvenne, Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Broodthaers, Antonio Canova, Caran d’Ache, A.M. Cassandre, Chenue malletier, Iris Clert, Claude Closky, Le Corbusier, Silvie Défraoui, Sonia Delaunay, Fortunato Depero, Marcel Duchamp, A.R. Dunton, Céline Duval, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Yan Duyvendak, Daniel Eatock, Edward Fella, Sylvie Fleury, Schwestern Flöge, Piero Fornasetti, Hans Frank, Lene Frank, Emile Gallé, General Idea, Dan Graham, Wolfgang von Gœthe, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Walter Gropius, Guerrilla Girls, Hector Guimard, Friedrich Haeffcke, Raymond Hains, Keith Haring, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Anton Herrgesell, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Ray Johnson, Ana Jotta, Wassily Kandinsky, André Kertész, Martin Kippenberger, Paul Klee, Johann Adam Klein, Yves Klein, Július Koller, Joseph Kosuth, Yayoi Kusama, Carl Gotthard Langhans, Fernand Léger, Pierre Leguillon, George Maciunas, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Edouard Manet, Piero Manzoni, Christian Marclay, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Karel Martens, Annette Messager, Lucia Moholy, Piet Mondrian, Valérie Mréjen, Félix Nadar, Isamu Noguchi, The Offices of Jenny Holzer, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince and al., Yoko Ono, Claes Oldenburg, Nam June Paik, Francis Picabia, Adrian Piper, Emil Pirchan, Man Ray, Les ready made appartiennent à tout le monde®, Carl August Reinhardt, Gerrit Rietveld, Auguste Rodin, Edward Ruscha, Alexander Search, Willem Sandberg, Erik Satie, Gino Severini, Johan Gottfried Schadow, Egon Schiele, Oskar Schlemmer, Käthe Schmidt, Roman Signer, Alec Soth, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Jack Smith, Hélène Smith, Harald Szeemann, Sophie Taeuber, Karel Teige, Oliviero Toscani, Theo van Doesburg, Roman Vishniac, Andy Warhol, Weegee, Neill Whistler, Heimo Zobernig, Piet Zwart, Emmy Zweybrück Prochaska With texts by: Samuel Adams, Damarice Amao, Daniel Baumann, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, Géraldine Beck, Paul Bernard, Christian Besson, Christianna Bonin, Véronique Borgeaud, Marie de Brugerolle, Garance Chabert, Kyrill Charbonnel, Yann Chateigné, Manuel Cirauqui, Chiara Costa, Caroline Coutau, Jean-Baptiste Delorme, Carla Demierre, Dakota DeVos, Corinne Diserens, Eva Fabbris, Patricia Falguières, Arthur Fink, Sophie Gayerie, Kati Gegenheimer, Mark Thomas Gibson, Nicolas Giraud, Victor Guégan, Andrea Gyorody, Nastassja Haidinger, Dean Inkster, Aurélie Jacquet, Elisabeth Jobin, Vincent Jolivet, Moritz Küng, Angela Lampe, Charlotte Laubard, Anaël Lejeune, Quentin Lannes, Pierre Leguillon, Charlotte Magnin, Nicole Marchand-Zañartu, Valérie Mavridorakis, Aurélien Mole, Michael J. Moore, Adrien Mouginot, Christiane Mühlegger, Émilie Parendeau, Ying Sze Pek, Corine Pencenat, Mathias Pfund, Fabien Pinaroli, Raphaël Pirenne, Paulo Pires do Vale, Carrie Pilto, Frans Postma, Jeanne Quéheillard, Fabienne Radi, Ivan Ristić, Vincent de Roguin, Paul-Louis Roubert, Margot Sanitas, Gilles Saussier, Elana Shapira, Klaus-Peter Speidel, Friedrich Tietjen, Rebecca Topakian, Gesine Tosin, Xiaoda Wang, Christophe Wavelet, David Zerbib, Célia Zuber Co-published by HEAD – Genève (Geneva University of Art and Design) and Edition Patrick Frey under the patronage of the Museum of Mistakes Editors: Pierre Leguillon in collaboration with Barbara Fédier and Kyrill Charbonnel, Pauline Cordier, Aurélie Jacquet, Aline Melaet, Anaïs Perez, and Charlotte Schaer, students of WorkMaster at HEAD – Genève

The Art of Walking: A Field Guide is a unique look at walking as a mode of artistic practice and is the first book to explore this fascinating subject of how walking can be used as an artistic medium.

An introductory essay identifies breaks and continuities between walking artists now and the pedestrian activities of the historic- and neo-avant-gardes of the early- and mid-20th Century, respectively. Subsequent visually-led sections deal with recent art engaging with different types of walkers including pilgrims, peripatetic writers and philosophers, dandies, drifters, marchers, stalkers, tour guides and dog walkers.

Artists to be evaluated include Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Vito Acconci, Dennis Adams, Francis Alÿs, Keith Arnatt, Tim Brennan, Stanley Brouwn, Bruce Nauman, Sophie Calle, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Jeremy Deller, Simon Faithfull, Hamish Fulton, Regina José Galindo, Mona Hatoum, Akira Kanayama, Richard Long, The Long March Foundation, Melanie Manchot, Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper, Simon Pope and Kryzysztov Wodiczko.

I want it to be revealing. I’ll talk about anything you like. I want it to be truthful. Let’s do it. There is no off-limits. I’m afraid of nothing.’ Immediately recognised as a young artist with a brilliant, sordid and uncompromising imagination, Damien Hirst is the most celebrated artist Britain has produced for generations. The undisputed leader and originator of the dominant movement in contemporary art on both sides of the Atlantic, he is now so ingrained in the public consciousness that even those with only a passing interest in art are familiar with his notorious shark and pickled sheep. Gordon Burn met Hirst for the first time nine years ago. Both admirers of David Sylvester’s interviews with Francis Bacon and Jan Wenner’s interviews with John Lennon, there was always an unspoken understanding between them that they would do something similar when the time was right. The resulting conversations in On the Way to Work are electrifyingly candid. True to the undertaking Hirst gave Burn, there is no off-limits: here are Hirst’s thoughts on celebrity, money, art, alcohol, sex, death, the North of England, class, crime and cocaine; his views on Marco Pierre White, Charles Saatchi, David Bowie, Gilbert and George and Lucian Freud. More than any other individual, Damien Hirst’s art and life came to define the nineties. Like the generation Hirst has come to represent, On the Way to Work is brave, unpredictable, scabrously funny and corrosively intelligent. It is also a how-to guide to becoming the most famous artist in the world.

The chance situation or random eventówhether as a strategy or as a subject of investigationóhas been central to many artists’ practices across a multiplicity of forms, including expressionism, automatism, the readymade, collage, surrealist and conceptual photography, fluxus event scores, film, audio and video, performance, and participatory artworks. But whyóa century after Dada and Surrealism’s first systematic enquiriesódoes chance remain a key strategy in artists’ investigations into the contemporary world?

The writings in this anthology examine the gap between intention and outcome, showing it to be crucial to the meaning of chance in art. The book provides a new critical context for chance procedures in art since 1900 and aims to answer such questions as why artists deliberately set up such a gap in their practice; what new possibilities this suggests; and why the viewer finds the art so engaging.

Artists surveyed include: Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alys, William Anastasi, John Baldessari, Walead Beshty, Mark Boyle, George Brecht, Marcel Broodthaers, John Cage, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Marcel Duchamp, Brian Eno, Fischli & Weiss, Ceal Floyer, Huang Yong Ping, Douglas Huebler, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Jiri Kovanda, Jorge Macchi, Christian Marclay, Cildo Meireles, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Gabriel Orozco, Cornelia Parker, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Daniel Spoerri, Wolfgang Tillmans, Keith Tyson, Jennifer West, Ceryth Wyn Evans, La Monte Young

Writers include: Paul Auster, Jacquelynn Baas, Georges Bataille, Daniel Birnbaum, Claire Bishop, Guy Brett, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Stanley Cavell, Lynne Cooke, Fei Dawei, Gilles Deleuze, Anna Dezeuze, Russell Ferguson, Branden W. Joseph, Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Lacan, Susan Laxton, Sarat Maharaj, Midori Matsui, John Miller, Alexandra Munroe, Gabriel Perez Barreiro, Jasia Reichardt, Julia Robinson, Eric L. Santner, Sarah Valdez, Katharina Vossenkuhl

Documents of Contemporary Art series
Copublished with Whitechapel Gallery, London

Situation–a unique set of conditions produced in both space and time and ranging across material, social, political, and economic relations–has become a key concept in twenty-first-century art. Rooted in artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s, the idea of situation has evolved and transcended these in the current context of globalization. This anthology offers key writings on areas of art practice and theory related to situation, including notions of the site specific, the artist as ethnographer or fieldworker, the relation between action and public space, the meaning of place and locality, and the crucial role of the curator in recent situation specific art. In North America and Europe, the site-specific is often viewed in terms of resistance to art’s commoditization, while elsewhere situation-specific practices have defied institutions of authority. The contributors discuss these recent tendencies in the context of proliferating international biennial exhibitions, curatorial place-bound projects, and strategies by which artists increasingly unsettle the definition and legitimation of situation-based art.Artists surveyed include [from Ian 1/30]Vito Acconci, Allora & Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Carl Andre, Artist Placement Group, Michael Asher, Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Bik Van der Pol, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Janet Cardiff, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Adam Chodzko, Collective Actions, Tacita Dean, Elmgreen & Dragset, Andrea Fraser, Hamish Fulton, Dan Graham, Liam Gillick, Renée Green, Group Material, Douglas Huebler, Bethan Huws, Pierre Huyghe, Robert Irwin, Emily Jacir, Ilya Kabakov, Leopold Kessler, Július Koller, Langlands & Bell, Ligna, Richard Long, Gordon Matta-Clark, Graeme Miller, Jonathan Monk, Robert Morris, Gabriel Orozco, Walid Ra’ad, Raqs Media Collective, Paul Rooney, Martha Rosler, Allen Ruppersberg, Richard Serra, Situationist International, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Vivan Sundaram, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lawrence Weiner, Rachel Whiteread, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Qiu Zhijie Writers include Arjun Appaduri, Marc Augé, Wim Beeren, Josephine Berry Slater, Daniel Birnbaum, Ava Bromberg, Susan Buck-Morss, Michel de Certeau, Douglas Crimp, Gilles Deleuze, T. J. Demos, Rosalyn Deutsche, Thierry de Duve, Charles Esche, Graeme Evans, Patricia Falguières, Marina Fokidis, Hal Foster, Hou Hanrou, Brian Holmes, Mary Jane Jacob, Vasif Kortun, Miwon Kwon, Lu Jie, Doreen Massey, James Meyer, Ivo Mesquita, Brian O’Doherty, Craig Owens, Irit Rogoff, Peter Weibel

1,2,3… Avant-Gardes is dedicated to the ongoing history of the experiment in film and art. This book describes and analyses the works of filmmakers and artists, defining two decades of experiments in Polish avant-garde film, and juxtaposes their work with contributions by international artists, who started to work during the last fifteen years. The outstanding history of Polish experimental film, represented by the work of Bogdan Dziworski, Paweł Kwiek, Natalia LL, Józef Robakowski, Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, and many others, is presented in an archive containing descriptions of more than 30 films of the Polish avant-garde between 1920–1970 and organized around six themes: Analytical Strategies, Political Film (Soc Art), Sound and Image, Imagination, Games and Participation, and Consumption. Artist pages by Paweł Althamer and Artur Żmijewski, Bernadette Corporation, Matthew Buckingham, Judith Hopf and Katrin Pesch, Igor Krenz, Jonathan Monk, Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, and Wilhelm Sasnal complete this compendium as a contribution toward an extended examination of the history and practice of experimental filmmaking and art. Artists: Akademia Ruchu, Antosz & Andzia, Paweł Althamer/Artur Żmijewski, Piotr Andrejew, Bernadette Corporation, Kazimierz Bendkowski, Matthew Buckingham, Bogdan Dziworski, Marcin Giżycki, Janusz Haka, Oskar Hansen, Judith Hopf / Katrin Pesch, Tadeusz Junak, Jacques de Koning, Igor Krenz, Grzegorz Królikiewicz, Zofia Kulik, Paweł Kwiek, Przemysław Kwiek, Natalia LL, Jolanta Marcolla , Jonathan Monk, Ewa Partum, Andrzej Pawłowski, Zygmunt Piotrowski, Jeroen deRijke/Willem de Rooij, Józef Robakowski, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Zygmunt Rytka, Wilhelm Sasnal, Jadwiga Singer, Zdzisław Sosnowski, Mieczysław Szczuka, Michał Tarkowski, Stefan & Franciszka Themerson, Teresa Tyszkiewicz, Ryszard Waśko, Jan S. Wojciechowski, Krzysztof Zarębski, Florian Zeyfang

A personal encounter with 50 of the world’s most significant contemporary artists, “pressPlay” draws together the full texts of the complete Phaidon interviews with living artists, 1995-2005, originally appearing in “Phaidon’s Contemporary Artists” series and “Robert Mangold” monograph. Highlights include veteran painter Vija Celmins and noted sculptor Robert Gober (who represented the US at the 2001 Venice Biennale) in an intimate discussion on their differing art practices; longtime friends and fellow travellers for decades, Benjamin Buchloh and Lawrence Weiner recall 35 years of work, in the definitive, career-long interview for this key Conceptual artist; the late Sir Ernst Gombrich honoured the “Contemporary Artists” series in a discussion with the UK’s pre-eminent sculptor Antony Gormley – who confesses that it was Gombrich’ “Story of Art” that first inspired him to become an artist; the taciturn, legendary Raymond Pettibon muses on the evolution of his work with noted hip novelist Dennis Cooper; musician artist Christian Marclay is interviewed by Sonic Youth rockstar Kim Gordon. From highly established artists Louise Bourgeois and Alex Katz, to midcareer masters Richard Prince, Mike Kelley, Fischli and Weiss, Jenny Holzer, and Raymond Pettibon, to the most exciting artists of the current generation, including Maurizio Cattelan, Olafur Eliasson and Pipilotti Rist, pressPlay is a highly readable, comprehensive look at contemporary art today. Vito Acconci/Mark C Taylor; Doug Aitken/Amanda Sharp; Uta Barth/Matthew Higgs; Christian Boltanski/Tamar Garb; Louise Bourgeois/Paulo Herkenhoff; Cai Guo Qiang/Octavio Zaya; Maurizio Cattelan/Nancy Spector; Vija Celmins/Robert Gober; Richard Deacon/Pier Luigi Tazzi; Mark Dion/Miwon Kwon; Stan Douglas/Diana Thater; Marlene Dumas/Barbara Bloom; Jimmie Durham/Dirk Snauwaert; Olafur Eliasson/Daniel Birnbaum; Peter Fischli and David Weiss/Beate Soentgen; Tom Friedman/Dennis Cooper; Isa Genzken/Diedrich Diederichsen; Antony Gormley/Sir Ernst Gombrich; Dan Graham/Mark Francis; Paul Graham/Gillian Wearing; Hans Haacke/Molly Nesbit; Mona Hatoum/Michael Archer; Thomas Hirschhorn/Alison M Gingeras; Jenny Holzer/Joan Simon; Roni Horn/Lynne Cooke; Ilya Kabakov/David A Ross; Alex Katz/Robert Storr; Mary Kelly/Douglas Crimp; Mike Kelley/Isabelle Graw; William Kentridge/Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev; Yayoi Kusama/Akira Tatehata; Robert Mangold/Sylvia Plimack Mangold; Christian Marclay/Kim Gordon; Paul McCarthy/Kristine Stiles; Cildo Meireles/Gerardo Mosquera; Lucy Orta/Roberto Pinto; Raymond Pettibon/Dennis Cooper; Richard Prince/Jeff Rian; Pipilotti Rist/Hans Ulrich Obrist; Doris Salcedo/Carlos Basualdo; Thomas Schutte/James Lingwood; Lorna Simpson/Thelma Golden; Nancy Spero/Jo Anna Isaak; Jessica Stockholder/Lynne Tillman; Wolfgang Tillmans/Peter Halley; Luc Tuymans/Juan Vicente Aliaga; Jeff Wall/Arielle Pelenc; Gillian Wearing/Donna De Salvo; Lawrence Weiner/Benjamin H D Buchloh; Franz West/Bice Curiger.

The book is an introduction to the artistic process of Francis Alÿs and presents the preparatory work for The Last Clown, first exhibited at the Galerie de l’UQAM from March 3 to April 8, 2000. It includes sketches, drawings and paintings, along with an essay by curator Michèle Thériault. The author situates Alÿs’ Last Clown exhibition within the context of his previous works based on walking through the city. She draws attention to the paradoxical nature of an art practice explicitly concerned with the relationship between art and everyday life.

A photographic journey across London, taking in a selection of contemporary art and a curry along the way. Based in London, nvisible Museum is the product of twelve years’ worth of acquisitions by a collector who prefers to remain anonymous. Works are often seminal pieces by young artists early in their careers. Uniquely, the contents of collection are dispersed and nomadic, lent to friends and artists in the collection, and from time to time loaned to art institutions in thematic exhibitions, including the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Migros Museum, Zurich; Kiasma Museo, Helsinki; and Sir John Soane’s Museum, London in 2002. <I>Invisible London</I> is a photographic journey from Heathrow to Brick Lane, taking in some of the city’s public places and moving inside the flats, houses and studios where the collection of nvisible Museum is locatedin subtle and compelling opposition to the gigantism and monumentalism of contemporary art collecting. Combines art and voyeurism with glimpses of an extraordinary art collection. 90 color photographs. Artists represented: Nobuyoshi Araki; Matthew Barney; Richard Billingham; Kate Blacker; Louise Bourgeois; Jake and Dinos Chapman; Tacita Dean; Tracey Emin; Katharina Fritsch; Paul Graham; Douglas Gordon; Richard Hamilton; Tim Head; Damien Hirst; Gary Hume; Callum Innes; Emma Kay; Simon Linke; Adam Lowe; Steve McQueen; Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky; Tatsuo Miyajima; Paul Morrison; Cady Noland; Gabriel Orozco; Simon Patterson; Mark Pimlott; Marc Quinn; Liisa Roberts; Tim Rollins + K.O.S.; Gregor Schneider; Simon Starling; Georgina Starr; Thomas Struth; Sam Taylor-Wood; Mark Wallinger; Rachel Whiteread; Gerard Williams; Yves Klein.