Qualifying the ancient Greek saying “Man is the measure,” Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) asserted instead “You are the measure,” conveying the defining theme in an oeuvre that would exert a powerful influence on fellow artists and architects. In artworks that combined minimalist, conceptual, and performative practices, Matta-Clark gave primary importance to the individual and considerations of everyday life. This comprehensive book incorporates important new information from the Matta-Clark archive, presenting a compelling reappraisal of the unique beauty and radical nature of Matta-Clark’s punnings, plans, performances, and interventions evident in the many media in which he worked: sculptural objects (most notably from building cuts), drawings, films, photographs, and documentary material.
The son of Chilean Surrealist painter Roberto Matta and godson of Marcel Duchamp, Matta-Clark trained as an architect. He is renowned for his poignant use of urban landscapes, creating many site-specific works (often outside of a museum or gallery context) in New York and abroad. In this handsome book, distinguished scholars of contemporary art provide new insights into Matta-Clark’s work: the reception of his art during his lifetime; the impact of his socially engaged lifestyle; the production of his films; his photography, in particular his collages that have not been thoroughly explored; the creation and conservation of his building cut Splitting; and much more.

In An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Taryn Simon documents spaces that are integral to America’s foundation, mythology and daily functioning, but remain inaccessible or unknown to a public audience. She has photographed rarely seen sites from domains including: science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature security and religion. This index examines subjects that, while provocative or controversial, are currently legal. The work responds to a desire to discover unknown territories, to see everything. Simon makes use of the annotated-photograph’s capacity to engage and inform the public. Transforming that which is off-limits or under-the-radar into a visible and intelligible form, she confronts the divide between the privileged access of the few and the limited access of the public. Photographed with a large format view camera (except when prohibited), Simon’s 70 color plates form a seductive collection that reflects and reveals a national identity. In addition to this monograph, there is also an exhibition of Simon’s work opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art in March 2007.

Mel Bochner (b. 1940) is considered a pioneer of the Post-Minimal and Conceptual art movements. Perhaps best known for his paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Bochner became deeply involved with photography in the mid- to late 1960s, although most of these works have only recently been exhibited. This significant book provides the first critical look at a virtually unknown body of Bochner’s extremely varied photographs dating from 1966-1969. Some 75 of his photographs are presented, many in color and most published for the first time. Also included are a number of Bochner’s drawings that directly informed his photographic works. Scott Rothkopf explores the crucial role of photography in Bochner’s artistic development as well as key issues in the relation of photography to Minimal and Conceptual art. In Bochner’s photography, Rothkopf argues, a clear arc can be traced from his grappling with Minimalism toward a more rigorous and nuanced articulation of Conceptual art. Examining this shift, the author compares Bochner’s work with that of other artists who were engaged with photography during this period, among them Robert Smithson, Sol LeWitt, and Bruce Nauman. For Bochner and others, Rothkopf concludes, photography was used as a response to the limits of minimal sculpture and helped make possible the birth of Conceptual art. The book also features an essay by Elisabeth Sussman on the relevance of Bochner’s 1966 film experiments to his later photographic projects.

Eva Hesse, a pivotal figure in the development of postwar international art, created paintings, sculpture, and works on paper that were striking in their beauty and playful sensibility. Although much has been written about Hesse’s dramatic life – her childhood flight from Nazi Germany, her struggles to gain acceptance as a young female artist, her battle with cancer, and her tragic death in 1970 at the age of 34 – her art has yet to receive the critical attention it deserves. This lavishly illustrated catalogue redresses that omission, focusing on Hesse’s innovative working methods and choices of materials as well as on the larger aesthetic and philosophical questions raised by her artistic practice. The book presents and documents over two hundred works by Hesse in all media. Particular attention is devoted to the degradation and ageing of her sculptures over the past three decades. Essays by a distinguished team of writers deal with themes of mutability and decay in Hesse’s art; discuss her little-known early career in New York and Germany; explore her innovative use of translucent materials; and examine the role of drawing and collage in her creative process. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition that will be on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from February to May 2002; the Museum Wiesbaden, Germany, from July to September 2002; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from September to December 2002.

Published to accompany the 1996 mid-career survey organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, I’ll Be Your Mirror remains the most comprehensive and critically praised publication on the work of photographer Nan Goldin. Covering two decades of her life and art, from her time in Boston in the 1970s through her move to downtown New York City and her subsequent and stratospheric rise in the art world, Goldin’s most memorable work is collected here. Amongst the many powerful images are photographs of friends and lovers sometimes in pain, sometimes in repose; self portraits taken during an abusive relationship, from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; the transvestite and transgendered kings and queens of The Other Side; and the harrowing and moving documentation of the slow death from AIDS of close friend Cookie Mueller. Scalo Publishers is pleased to offer this seminal book at a new and more affordable price, making this classic title accessible to an even wider audience of Goldin’s fans than everbefore.

Robert Gober’s sculptural works trigger disquieting thoughts and feelings about the most commonplace aspects of our daily lives. Gober first came to public attention in the mid-80s with his simple variations on the domestic sink, which were deprived of faucets and drains and thus rendered nonfunctional–highlighting, among other things, a neurotic frustration particular to rituals of cleansing. Since then Gober’s work has rarely strayed from the recreation of such familiar objects as drains, doors, children’s furniture and the human body. In his hands, these routine props of existence–always crafted meticulously by the artist–suggest larger themes around childhood, domesticity, sexuality, victimization and religion.At 544 pages, Robert Gober: Sculptures 1979-2007 is a monumental catalogue raisonne of sculptures and installations. It includes approximately 250 works, all of which are reproduced in large format. Comprehensive descriptions are complemented by the artist’s own commentary on individual works, as well as technical information on their manufacture.

New painting and drawing is the subject of Remote Viewing, which accompanies an exhibition at the Whitney Museum. The book brings together eight artists, some well known, others emerging, all of whom create new worlds that exist somewhere between abstraction and representation. Each of the featured artists-Franz Ackermann, Steve DiBenedetto, Carroll Dunham, Ati Maier, Julie Mehretu, Matthew Ritchie, Alexander Ross, and Terry Winters -is part of a revitalization that has been seen in recent years in contemporary painting and drawing. Their work grapples with the overwhelming abundance of information now present in our lives, information that is historical, scientific, technological, geographical, visual, literary, hallucinogenic, mass-media, or otherwise, and shares a fascination with assertive color, invented form, and the construction of dynamic spaces. The book includes color illustrations of works in the exhibition as well as studio photography of each artist.

As this highly engrossing companion to a traveling mid-career retrospective suggests, photographer Goldin’s influence has trickled in from the margins to the mainstream, from contemporary museum exhibitions to the latest Calvin Klein advertising campaign. Once a cult portraitist of drag queens, drug addicts and nightclub bohemians, Goldin has earned a broad audience and wide critical praise for a visually opulent, harshly intimate body of work. Arriving in New York in the early 1970s, Goldin began exhibiting The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a constantly evolving, audio-visual slide show depicting the bacchanalian, at times nihilistic, demimonde of the Lower East Side and Times Square. Those heady days are chronicled here, as are their grim aftermath, evinced in Goldin’s subsequent, lavishly colorful snapshots of friends afflicted with AIDS, of her own battering at the hands of a lover and of her recent recovery from drug addiction at McLean hospital in Belmont, Mass. An overview by curator Elizabeth Sussman, who places Goldin in an artistic context ranging from Larry Clark to Lucien Freud, is accompanied by personal commentary from an impressive cast of Goldin’s friends, including camp movie actress Cookie Mueller and artist David Wojnarowicz (both of whom died of AIDS). Two other friends, Luc Sante and Darryl Pinckney, reminisce in separate essays about the edgy, outrageous and ultimately doomed Manhattan milieu commemorated in her early work. Other works include an interview with film critic J. Hoberman and a poem by James Fenton. This is not a scholarly analysis of Goldin’s work but rather an emotionally charged look at her life and times and an extraordinary catalogue of her photographs unburdened by academic analysis.

Di Suvero’s strong, protean outdoor steel sculptures are a commanding presence, as documented in this vibrantly illustrated catalogue of an exhibit at the Storm King sculpture park, located 55 miles north of Manhattan. Monumental constructions such as Beppe and Johnny Appleseed combine thrusting beams and large found objects (steam shovels, machine tools, etc.) to create diverse spaces, earthbound or soaring. Smaller pieces composed of fanciful shapes sometimes resemble abstract calligraphy and often include kinetic elements. Rough-hewn, expressionistic, found-wood-and-steel sculptures call to mind Franz Kline’s muscular abstract paintings. Born in Shanghai, China, to Italian antifascist parents in 1933, Di Suvero, who settled with his family in San Francisco in 1941, absorbed the lessons of David Smith, Alexander Calder and Russian constructivists, fusing industrial techniques, lyric imagination and geometry. State University of New York art history professor Sandler contributes a lively, informative essay augmented by 95 color photographs.

“Since its introduction in 1932, the Whitney Biennial–the Museum’s signature exhibition and a highly anticipated event in the art world–has charted new developments in contemporary art. Inaugurated by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932, these biennialexhibitions have demonstrated the museum’s commitment to supporting the development of 20th- and 21st-century American art.The 2012 Biennial features works by approximately 50 artists working in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, dance, and performance. Elisabeth Sussman (co-organizer of the influential, politically provocative 1993 Whitney Biennial) and Jay Sanders provide an insightful joint essay, and a group of art historians and critics contribute entries oncommon themes and ideas from the represented artists’ techniques and influences. In addition, a significant portion of the catalogue is devoted to original contributions from each of the participating artists, in a unique effort to provide a more experiential understanding of the exhibition.

This book is the first complete presentation of Robert Gober’s sculptures and installations from 1979 to 2007. Approximately 250 pieces are catalogued with full-page illustrations, technical details and information on how they were created, as well as work-specific comments by the artist. The book also contains an introductory essay by Elisabeth Sussman, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.