Presenting unique and in-depth collaborations and editions with leading international artists, Parkett No. 60 features Chuck Close, Diana Thater, and Luc Tuymans, three artists from very different backgrounds whose works have all moved towards painting’s basic elements of light and dark. Contributing writers include Francine Prose and Richard Shiff on Close; Sara Arrhenius, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and Regina Hasslinger on Thater; and Laura Hoptman, Gerardo Mosquera and Hans Rudolf Reust on Tuymans. This issue also contains essays on David Bunn, Jeremy Deller, and Paul Etienne Lincoln, as well as a conversation between Chuck Close and Elizabeth Peyton and an interview with Close by Bice Curiger.

Artists from Matthew Buckingham to Diana Thater address the rich legacy of Robert Smithson’s films, sculptures and Spiral Jetty

This is the fifth volume in a series that builds upon Dia Art Foundation’s Artists on Artists lectures. The contributors to Artists on Robert Smithson engage with Smithson’s work in myriad ways: Matthew Buckingham’s essay highlights Smithson’s preoccupation with the ways that histories of the earth are constructed and contested; Abraham Cruzvillegas considers Smithson’s work with broken glass and architecture; Mark Dion’s didactic approach to the life and work of the artist recounts the conceptual and evolutionary conditions that led to his birth and development; Teresita Fernández confronts the limitations of dominant histories of place, art and the monumental; Trevor Paglen considers Smithson’s iconic spiral and his fascination with natural history; Rayyane Tabet weaves together a history of basalt that reveals themes of colonialism, surveillance and strife; and finally, engaging with the science fiction canon and its cinematic conventions, Diana Thater provides a close reading of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty film.

Artists include Stan Brakhage, Stan Douglas, Ken Jacobs, Mike Kelley, Catherine Opie, Gabriel Orozco, Cindy Sherman, Diana Thater, Jeff Wall and others. This is the catalogue of an exhibition in 1995 at the Whitney Museum, New York, of developments in contemporary American art, film and video. It focuses on the 80 artists in the exhibition, all of whom emphasize metaphor, allegory, and/or symbol in their art. Articles include Nobel Prize winner Gerald Edelman on visual art and the brain, John G. Hanhardt on film and video, etc. Illustrated throughout.

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.

Animals’ was a group exhibition that included artworks by seventeen acclaimed international contemporary artists from Europe and America from 24 Jun – 11 Sep 2004. The works in the exhibition all explore the issue of how the otherness of animals opens up new ways of thinking. Most of the works were new or previously unseen in the UK, with a number made especially for this exhibition. Artists exhibiting include Lothar Baumgarten, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Katharina Fritsch, Ellen Gallagher, John Isaacs, Marina Kappos, Mike Kelley, Oswaldo Macià, Jean-Luc Mylayne, Bruce Nauman, João Onofre, Marjetica Potr, Bojan arevi, Kiki Smith, Diana Thater, Rosemarie Trockel and Bill Viola. The works in the exhibition questioned the common ways we understand animals, and rather than objectifying or anthropomorphising them, present them as beings in their own right, often incomprehensible and mysterious. In Marina Kappos’s video, ‘Beast’, a domestic cat is shown larger than life-size in close-up from below, snarling at some unseen threat. Drawing attention to the similarities and differences between humans and animals the viewers’ everyday notions of human identity are challenged. Looking at animals in this way also encourages the viewer to acknowledge different ways of perceiving the world. Complex use of language differentiates humans from animals, and these works bring a focus to other methods of communication that have tended to be neglected.

At this point in art time, new media work needs no longer be prefixed by “new.” With a firm place in institutional and private collections, with an ever-burgeoning range of practitioners, media art can safely be considered a part of the contemporary canon. And hence Fast Forward, a hefty, thorough reference guide, a virtual catalogue raisonné of the medium, from works found in the Goetz Collection. Over 180 film and video works by almost 80 international artists are represented, including: Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken, Chantal Akerman, Francis Alÿs, Emmanuelle Antille, Kutlug Ataman, Matthew Barney, Andrea Bowers, Janet Cardiff / George Bures Miller, Tacita Dean, Rineke Dijkstra, Stan Douglas, Tracey Emin, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Douglas Gordon, Rodney Graham, Mona Hatoum, Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler, Pierre Huyghe, Annika Larsson, Sharon Lockhart, Steve McQueen, Bjørn Melhus, Arnout Mik, Tracey Moffatt, Sarah Morris, Gabriel Orozco, Tony Oursler, Paul Pfeiffer, Jeroen de Rijke / Willem de Rooij, Pipilotti Rist, Santiago Sierra, Beat Streuli, Sam Taylor-Wood, Diana Thater, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel, and Gilian Wearing. The book is rounded off with introductory essays by Peter Weibel, Stephan Urbaschek, Mark Nash, and Sabine Himmelsbach, plus short essays on individual artists, and bibliographic and technical information.

L.A.-ex Performances, a new entry in the Reihe Cantz series of small paperback art titles, documents several spectacular performances by a group of Los Angeles artists including Diana Thater, T. Kelly Mason, Meg Cranston, Raymond Pettibon, and others.

From his early brief dramas for television depicting uncanny David Lynch-like encounters, to his spectacular split-screen film installation Der Sandmann, Stan Douglas’ (b.1960) work is layered with the artist’s observations on social and racial alienation and psychological states. The artist is a master at selecting images that evoke entire social and political moments. Examples include a reconstructed 1960s Paris TV broadcast of free-jazz that suggests the May 1968 generation and its connections with African-American musical freedom; and landscape studies of Nootka Sound in Canada that stir memories of the European conquests of Native Americans. Featured in such major exhibitions as Documenta and the Venice Biennale and nominated for the Hugo Boss/Guggenheim prize in 1997, Douglas has emerged as an international figure. This is the first major publication on his work. Canadian curator and writer Scott Watson surveys the artist’s work in relation to late twentieth-century aesthetics, politics and psychoanalysis, while American artist Diana Thater conducts an in-depth interview on the sources behind Douglas’s work. Carol J. Clover, an expert on film and Nordic mythology, focusses on the fusion in film, psychoanalysis and fable in Der Sandman. The Artist’s Choice text is by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze from his 1967 essay ‘Humour, Irony and the Law’, which reflects on the issues of power and powerlessness also central to Douglas’s art. The histories and ideas behind the artist’s works are explained through project descriptions, notes and scripts in the Artist’s Writings section, alongside an essay on the teleplays of Samuel Becket and an interview with curator and critic Lynne Cooke.