Swiss curator, art historian, editor and author Bice Curiger (born 1948) is primarily known for cofounding and editing the contemporary art magazine Parkett in 1984. Curiger has been a central protagonist of the international art world, holding coveted curatorial positions at the Kunsthaus Zürich (1993–2013), Venice Biennale (2011) and the Foundation Vincent van Gogh (2013–present). She has also written on numerous artists, including Meret Oppenheim, Rebecca Warren, Sigmar Polke, Niko Pirosmani and Nicole Eisenman. C Is for Curator provides an overview of her career with documentation and commentary on the many exhibitions she has curated, from Frauen sehen Frauen (Zurich, 1975) to the 2011 Venice Biennale to her current work at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles. The book includes appreciations from artists and curators such as Katharina Fritsch, Kathy Halbreich, Thomas Hirschhorn, Massimiliano Gioni, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nicholas Serota and Philip Ursprung.

At 76 years old, Bruce Nauman is widely acknowledged as a central figure in contemporary art whose stringent questioning of values such as good and bad remains urgent today. Throughout his 50-year career, he has explored how mutable experiences of time, space, sound, movement and language provide an insecure foundation for our understanding of our place in the world. This richly illustrated catalogue offers a comprehensive view of Nauman’s work in all mediums, spanning drawings across the decades; early fiberglass sculptures; sound environments; architecturally scaled, participatory constructions; rhythmically blinking neons; and the most recent 3D video that harks back to one of his earliest performances. A wide range of authors – curators, artists and historians of art, architecture and film – focus on topics that have been largely neglected, such as the architectural models that posit real or imaginary sites as models for ethical inquiry and mechanisms of control. An introductory essay explores Nauman’s many acts of disappearance, withdrawal and deflection as central formal and intellectual concerns. The 18 other contributions discuss individual objects or themes that persist throughout the artist’s career, including the first extensive essay on Nauman as a photographer and the first detailed treatment on the role of color in his work. A narrative exhibition history traces his reception, and features a number of rare or previously unpublished images.

From the beginning I was trying to see if I could make art that did that. Art that was just there all at once. Like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Or better yet, like getting hit in the back of the neck. You never see it coming; it just knocks you down. I like that idea very much: the kind of intensity that doesn’t give you any trace of whether you’re going to like it or not.—Bruce Nauman “Bruce Nauman’s art is about heightened awareness, awareness of spaces we usually don’t notice (the one under the chair, out of which he made a sculpture) and sounds we don’t listen for (the one in the coffin), awareness of emotions we suppress or dread… It’s hard to feel indifferent to work like his.”—Michael Kimmelman, New York Times One of America’s most important artists, Bruce Nauman has worked in a dazzling variety of media since the mid-1960s: sculpture, photography, performance, installation, sound, holography, film, and video. What has been a constant throughout his career, however, is his persistence in exploring both art as an investigation of the self and the power of language to define that self. The latest volume in the acclaimed Art + Performance series is the first book to combine the key critical writings on Nauman with the artist’s own writings and interviews with him, as well as images of his work. Bruce Nauman offers a multifaceted portrait of an artist whose determination to experiment with style and form has created a body of work as eclectic and perhaps more influential than that of any other living American artist.

Widely considered to be one of the most engaging and fascinating artists of our time, Kiki Smith has, over the past 25 years, developed into a major figure in the world of 21st-century art. Her subject matter is as wide-ranging as the materials her work has encompassed. In the 1980s, with her earliest figural sculptures in plaster, glass, and wax, Smith developed an elaborate vocabulary around the forms and functions of the body and its metaphorical as well as physical relationship to society. By the early 1990s, she began to engage with themes of a more religious and mythological nature. Her re-imaginings of biblical women as inhabitants of physical bodies–rather than as abstract bearers of doctrine–led her to make series of sculptural works related to the figure of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, Lilith, and others. The artist has more recently considered fairy tales and folk narratives as well as nurturing a growing menagerie of work concerned with animals and the natural world. Smith has now earned a considerable reputation as a virtuoso printmaker and draftsperson, and as a re-inventor of the startling sculptural possibitilies present in materials ranging from paper and resin to bronze and porcelain. Organized by the Walker Art Center with the full collaboration of the artist, the exhibition Kiki Smith represents the artist¹s first full-scale touring museum retrospective in the United States. This accompanying exhibition catalogue is a comprensive volume that includes critical essays, an interview, a generous four-color plate section, a complete exhibition history and bibliography, and the first-ever comprehensive illustrated chronology of Smith¹s life and work. The first Kiki Smith piece that I remember seeing created a visceral shock . . . I still remember the intensity of the feeling, as though the bottom had suddenly dropped out of the sedate world of the gallery and my own place within it; to put it more physically, I felt it in my guts. –Linda Nochlin I think making beautiful things is important. But often what’s first considered ugly is beautiful, too. When I was younger, I was always trying to incorporate the ugliness. Because it’s the same thing. It’s incorporating what is shunned, outside, but incorporating it into a space of possibility, like that of beauty.

Recogninzing the importance of performance in 20th century avant-garde art, this catalogue traces the careers of three artists who have each made a significant contribution to that history. Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk and Bill T. Jones.

Working across an unusually broad range of media, including painting, photography, film, drawing and sculpture, Sigmar Polke is widely regarded as one of the most influential and experimental artists of the post-war generation. His irreverent wit and promiscuous intelligence, coupled with his exceptional grasp of the properties of his materials, provided the foundation for his punishing critiques of the conventions of art history and social behavior. Experimenting wildly with materials and tools as varied as meteor dust and the xerox machine, Polke made work of both an intimate and monumental scale, drawn from sources as diverse as newspaper headlines and Dürer prints. Polke avoided any one signature style, a fluid method best defined by the word “alibi,” which means “in or at another place.” This also is a reminder of the deflection of responsibility which shaped German behavior during the Nazi period, compelling Polke’s generation to reinvent the role of the artist. Published in conjunction with Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010, the first exhibition to encompass the artist’s work across all media, this richly illustrated publication provides an overview of his cross-disciplinary innovations and career. Essays by Kathy Halbreich, Associate Director of The Museum of Modern Art; Mark Godfrey, Curator of International Art, Tate Modern; and a range of scholars and artists examine the full range of Polke’s exceptionally inventive oeuvre and place his enormous skepticism of all social, political and artistic conventions against German history.

The rise of globalism has created tremendous challenges to old economic, political, and cultural paradigms, changes that are increasingly reflected in diverse artistic practices across the planet. If disciplinary boundaries are now crossed as easily as geographic ones, how does the new internationalism that we are facing affect aesthetics and artistic production? Is there a link, for example, between the rise of video works and the global availability of digital media? Does the global information age facilitate an international language of art and an alternative reading of history, from art history toward art histories?
From the perspective of a museum of modern and contemporary art–a purely European construct–the art institution has to overcome a major contradiction, one that exists between its mission of permanence and its mission of change. How can cultural institutions contribute to the revamping of their own structures now that the hegemony of Western modernity is being challenged? How can museums connect with new audiences through different practices, different scholarships, and different interpretive strategies that grow out of the sedimentation of their own history? To invite and encourage such dialogue, How Latitudes Become Forms looks at current scholarship on globalism and changing curatorial practices, and identifies critical models provided by artists themselves, featuring thought-provoking essays and conversations by curators, critics, and cultural programmers from across the world, as well as multidisciplinary artworks by more than 40 artists from Brazil, China, India, Japan, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States.

Edited by Philippe Vergne.
Essays by Paulo Herkenhoff, Hidenaga Otori,and Hou Hanru.
Introduction by Kathy Halbreich. Conversations with Cuauhtemoc Medina & Vasif Kortun, Kathy Halbreich & Vishakha Desai, Steve Dietz & Raqs Media Collective, Philip Bither, Baraka Sele and Philippe Vergne.