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This catalogue accompanies a precedent-setting exhibition of 43 artists’ work – including Laurie Andersen, John Baldessari, Robert Cumming, Vernon Fisher, Duane Michals, and William Wiley – who have been leading a new 1970s interest in including explicit narrative structures in their work. Combining text, video, film, or sound with more traditional media such as painting and sculpture, these artists communicate ideas and express personal issues through verbal and visual story telling. Includes essays by Mark Freidus, Paul Schimmel and Alan Sondheim; documentation on the artists’ careers; and a floppy audio record with sound work by Terry Allen, Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, Ed McGowin, and Dennis Oppenheim.D

Ecstasy acts as an intersection in which structures of human consciousness meet a range of contemporary art practices. Each work in Ecstasy, which accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, enacts its own particular intervention into human consciousness—surprising us, questioning familiar realities, and suggesting alternative ways of ordering experience—through installation, painting, sculpture, and new media. Ecstasy traces two lines of contemporary inquiry into surrealism’s fixation with altered states of consciousness. One follows the tradition of artists attempting to capture metaphysical conditions in representational form—as seen in the wall-scale, resin-suspended pill paintings of Fred Tomaselli; Charles Ray’s photographic self portrait, Yes, which depicts the artist on LSD; and Franz Ackermann’s recent Mental Maps, abstract paintings that represent cities using his own subjective form of GPS. The other trajectory explores the notion of phenomenological experience through works that play on disjunctions in scale, or disrupt our means for spatial orientation. In Carsten Holler’s Upside Down Mushroom Room, for example, the ceiling and floor appear to change places, while in Jeppe Hein’s Moving Walls, museum walls begin to close in on the viewer. The 2,200 hand-painted polymer psilocybin mushrooms of Roxy Paine’s Psilocybe Cubensis Field, meanwhile, suggests other possibilities for altering our sense of reality. These and the other bold and imaginative works in Ecstasy challenge conventional notions of interactivity while creating a heightened sensory experience for the viewer. Six essays accompany the artworks, considering such topics as the relationship of altered states to art-making, both as the manifestation of the artist’s state of mind and as an experiential effect created for the viewer; drugs and the process of self-observation in literary works; and the “dark side” of altered consciousness.

Published to accompany a mid-career retrospective traveling from New York to Los Angeles to Chicago in the coming months, this is the first comprehensive look at the 45-year-old Ray, a quietly influential figure in the art world for over a decade. While Ray, who early on moved from performance to sculpture as his primary means of expression, has produced a limited output, we can now stand back and appreciate his body of work as a whole. The mostly explanatory text complements the simple eloquence of the pieces themselves, but curator Schimmel does find a trail of Freudian abnormalites and psychological concerns throughout the conceptual artist’s productions. This oversized book (11″ x 14″) does a good job of capturing the play with scale that is central to many later works; early performances (such as “Plank Piece,” during which Ray draped himself over a board against a wall) are well documented in photographs within the essays. Recommended for all libraries that collect works on contempoary artists.

Ed Ruscha: Industrial Strength is published on the occasion of the artist’s completion of “Industrial Strength Sleep,” a 23-foot by 9-foot tapestry created at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia and based on his 1989 painting of the same name. In his introductory essay, curator Paul Schimmel explains the artist’s process: “Though Ruscha has consistently pushed the boundaries of his own iconography, which typically comprises concrete words and phrases, it is in fact his range of materials and processes that has characterized the ever-changing and restless nature of his practice.” The piece–which took three years to complete–was produced at Flanders Tapestries in Wielsbeke, Belgium; Mary Anne Friel, Master Printer at The Fabric Workshop, oversaw production. The publication also includes an essay by art historian and critic Thomas E. Crow.
Over the course of his nearly 40-year career, Ruscha, who was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, has consistently used the expansive landscape of Los Angeles–where he has lived and worked since the late 1950s–in his paintings as a backdrop for the often humorous vernacular phrases with which he communicates a particular urban experience.

This comprehensive survey examines the fertile and diverse output of California artists during an extraordinary period of American history. The years between Richard Nixon’s resignation and Ronald Reagan’s election as president were difficult ones for America. Artists in particular were sensitive to enormous divisions in the country’s moods and beliefs. Examining art-making in California during a tumultuous transitional period, this catalogue accompanying a remarkable exhibition features approximately 125 California artists working in a wide array of media: from installation art to representational painting, from conceptual art to performance art, and from video to photography. Penetrating essays by leading art historians, critics, and curators explore the history and development of pluralist art practices throughout California; the artists’ responses to questions about race, gender, politics, and war; and the emergence of new movements and trends such as punk, post-studio art, and postmodernism. Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981 is part of Pacific Standard Time, an initiative of the Getty.

“Sigmar Polke’s art has perplexed critics and public alike with its multiplicity of styles, subjects, and positions“, Paul Schimmel writes. “His paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculptures have variously been described as metaphysical and profound on the one hand, and jocular and deliberately dumb-witted on the other. Trying to hit Polke’s moving target with the cannon of art historical apparatus is no easy task. His densely layered work, with its commitment to finding again and again an equivalency between subject and technique, resists facile interpretation. The interplay of photography, film, painting, and sculpture throughout Polke’s oeuvre illustrates his chameleonic nature as an artist and his ever-changing focus of attention, but it also highlights his insatiable drive to experiment with and between the boundaries of established mediums. Polke’s photographic work, in particular, is characterized by incautiousness, both in the demanding and dangerous places he visited to find his subjects and in the daredevil printing techniques he used in his makeshift studio darkroom—aiming for methods that ‘fit with their subject,’ as he characterized it.“D

Poetic and lush, Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines present layers of complex and sometimes conflicting information. This approach, first explored by Rauschenberg in the early 1950s, proved prescient and has become increasingly relevant in the current age of cascading information, when even the most ground-breaking artists are referencing and sampling disparate elements to create new forms. The Combines suggest the fragility of definitions, the fluidity of materials and the complexity of forms that are characteristic of Rauschenberg’s works. The artist’s handling of materials provides a precise physical evolutionary link between the painterly qualities of Abstract Expressionism and iconographical, subject-driven early Pop art. This book focuses on the works created roughly between 1954 and 1964, the most important decade in the artist’s 50-year career, and constitutes the most complete survey of the Combines ever presented, as well as the most rigorous analysis of their political, social, autobiographical and aesthetic significance. An introductory essay by exhibition curator Paul Schimmel titled “Reading Rauschenberg” offers an iconographic analysis of the earlier Combines, based on in-depth conversations with the artist. Other texts help to contextualize the Combines, such as Thomas Crow’s essay that calls them the major artistic statement of their time, and the one body of art that could simultaneously hold its own from de Kooning to Pop art.

The rise of performance art, and its merging with more traditional forms like painting and sculpture, is the great revolution of postwar art. Its links to theater, photography, music, dance, politics, and popular culture have made it especially appealing to contemporary artists in remote areas; more than any other movement in recent art, performance has found a place throughout the world. Covering three decades of significant and original art, this book features work by more than one hundred artists from the United States, South America, Eastern and Western Europe, and Japan who have had a profound impact on the relationship between visual and performance art in the postwar era. Among the artists included are Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, John Cage, Lygia Clark, Yves Klein, Marta Minujin, Bruce Nauman, Helio Oiticica, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint Phalle, Atsuko Tanaka, and Jean Tinguely. Their work encompasses performative objects such as sculpture, artists’ publications, drawings, photographs, and ephemera that come from performances, as well as documentary film and video stills. Published in conjunction with a major exhibition, organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Out of Actions illuminates the unique relationship between action, destruction, performance, and the creative process. Covering an unprecedented range of material, both nationally and temporally, the book offers the first critical comparisons of work that has previously been viewed as distinctly regional and unrelated. With essays by: * Paul Schimmel * Shinichiro Osaki * Hubert Klocker * Kristine Stiles * Guy Brett * Kellie Jones

This comprehensive overview, the first to appear in almost a decade, examines an artistic career, that now must be viewed as one of the most fascinating in the history of Contemporary art. From his highly controversial and seminal performance works of the early 1970s, to his complex, imaginative installations and monumental sculptures, the art of Chris Burden uniquely informs as well as incorporates the major artistic undercurrents of the last three decades. Not only has the artist made a major contribution to the history of body-related performance art, but the artist’s fascination with systems of power, societal organization, architectural structure and technological systems, have resulted in an extraordinary body of sculptural objects and environmental installations over the last 35 years. In compiling this publication the artist has worked closely with curator and long time associate Fred Hoffman, taking this opportunity to re-examine his work afresh and revealing images that are unpublished or rarely seen. Chris Burden’s unwavering commitment to aesthetic clarity and purity shows here in the detailed documentation of his major works, both old and new. It extensively illustrates how the artist has uniquely combined the essence of minimalist aesthetics with some of the most advanced technological contributions of the industrial age. Previously unpublished images from Burden’s archives and essays by distinguished scholars and critics make this an unprecedented examination of a vital artist. Essays by Fred Hoffman, Paul Schimmel, Kristine Stiles and Robert Storr.