This slipcased, four-volume set focuses on Christopher Williams’ (born 1956) theatrical work Stage Play, first presented in 2017 at Miller’s Studio in Zürich. It contains the playscript, publicity and research documents, the artist’s series of open letters and an interview with historian Markus Krajewski on the ceramic tile façades of postwar Cologne.

In late 2005, Vienna’s Secession gallery exhibited work by the influential Los Angeles Conceptual artist and master of appropriated commercial imagery, Christopher Williams, alongside work by the Dutch collaborators Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij. The show was documented in two separate catalogues–one for each artist (or artist team)–and this volume presents the work of Williams only. It includes photographs of a model showcasing a shower door, cameras and camera parts, corncobs, car interiors, bicycles and other elements of the urban landscape.

The photographs by Williams present the viewer with a strange beauty. Williams uses this beauty to provoke curiosity, research and thought. One is struck by the odd, even esoteric subject matter in this new work- dance, camera, box, corn and diagram. Why he chose these, or even the relationships between them, is not immediately clear.

Los Angeles conceptualist Christopher Williams, born in 1956, studies the conditions of presentation and representation in order to call into question spoon-fed perceptions, “realistic” reproductions, communication mechanisms and aesthetic conventions that influence our perception and understanding of reality. This volume presents recent works from 2003-2007.

As for many other artists of his generation, a central interest for Christopher Williams is the importance of the image in our media based society. Through his installations, performances and videos, but particularly his photography, he examines the ways that these aesthetic conventions and their mediation affect our understanding of reality. Since the end of the 1980s, Williams has referred back to pre-existing images or motifs and borrowed from culture, advertising or film – preferably from previous decades. Objectively distanced and isolated on neutral backgrounds, these prints of animals, plants, industrial products, modernist architecture and people are realised with great meticulousness. Although Williams places great value in the technical precision of their staging and realisation, in contrast to the technical and aesthetic perfectionism of commercial photography, his images are often blemished with flaws and imperfections.

The first in Valiz’s new vis-à-vis series of accessible introductions to academic subjects in contemporary art, architecture and design, The Shape of Evidence examines the use of the document in contemporary art, focusing on artworks in which the seemingly straightforward document is valued not only as a source of information but also as a distinctive visual and critical form. The author, Amsterdam-based art historian Sophie Berrebi, contends that for artists using filmed, photographic or written sources, the document can offer a way to develop a critical position on issues of representation, knowledge production, art and art history. Touching on several key issues in contemporary art―the trustworthiness of documents, the role of the museum and the archive―the author builds her argument through a close reading of select works of art by Christopher Williams, Fiona Tan, Zoe Leonard, Sven Augustÿnen, Wendelien van Oldenborgh and Jean-Luc Moulène, illustrated throughout the text.

This book presents a selection of snapshots, and accompanying inscriptions, sent by Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Bill Bartman, Susan Cahan, Amada Cruz, David Deitcher, Suzanne Ghez, Ann Goldstein, Claudio González, Jim Hodges, Susan Morgan, Robert Nickas, Mario Nuñez, and Christopher Williams between the years 1991-1995. The snapshots are quick poetic communiqués, a visual report on Felix’s outlook at particular moments in time, small gestures of hope, pleasure, and desire. They give evidence to some of his multiple fascinations: pets, furniture, collectible dolls, politics, art, friendship, beauty, love and optimism.

Throughout his six-decade career, Tony Conrad (1940–2016) forged a unique path through numerous artistic movements and a vast range of cultural forms―from Fluxus to rock music, from structural film to public access television. Published on the occasion of the first large-scale museum survey devoted to works Conrad presented in museum and gallery settings, this richly illustrated catalogue offers an in-depth introduction to Conrad’s life and career.

Including new texts and Conrad’s own writings about selected works dating from 1966 to 2016, Introducing Tony Conrad surveys the artist’s work in painting, sculpture, film, video, performance and installation. It includes the artist’s early structural films; projects in which he treated film as a sculptural and performative material; his series of Invented Acoustical Tools, presented as sculptures themselves; his ambitious films about power relations, set in the military and in prison; and his final sculptures and installations, which evoke and critique what he perceived as an emerging culture of surveillance, control and containment. The list of contributors testifies to Conrad’s wide and lasting influence; this volume includes texts by Constance DeJong, Diedrich Diederichsen, Anthony Elms, Branden W. Joseph, Tony Oursler and Christopher Williams, among many others.

With works by Michael Asher, Artist Placement Group, Can Altay, Conrad Atkinson, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Banu Cennetoglu, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Martin Beck, Cevdet Erek, Andrea Fraser, Buckminster Fuller, Ryan Gander, Ella Gibbs, Frederick Kiesler, Lucy Kimbell, James Langdon, El Lissitzky, Peter Nadin, “The offices of Peter Fend, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Jenny Holzer, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince & Robin Winters,” Gordon Matta-Clark, Antoni Muntadas, Lilly Reich, Support Structure, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lawrence Weiner, Christopher Williams, Carey Young, a.o. Support Structures is a manual for what bears, sustains, and props, for those things that encourage, care for, and assist; for that which advocates, articulates; for what stands behind, frames, and maintains: it is a manual for those things that give support. While the work of supporting might traditionally appear as subsequent, unessential, and lacking value in itself, this manual is an attempt to restore attention to one of the neglected, yet crucial modes through which we apprehend and shape the world. Support Structures is a critical enquiry into what constitutes “support,” and documents the collaborative project “Support Structure” by Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade. While registering and collecting reference projects in a new archive of support structures alongside its ten-phase project, different writers, thinkers, and practitioners were invited from various fields to elaborate on frameworks and work on texts , which form the theoretical backbone of the publication. The collection of contributions offers different possibilities for engaging in this unchartered territory, from propositions to projects, existing systems to ones invented for specific creative processes. Support Structures offers support through potential methodologies, inspirations and activations for practice, and addresses important questions for art and architecture practices on forms of display, organization, articulation, appropriation, autonomy, and temporariness, and the manifestations of blindness towards them.

This artist’s book by the influential but deliberately elusive Dusseldorf conceptual photographer features a series of pictures of a woman putting on her makeup. A peer of Gerhard Richter, Bernd & Hilla Becher and Joseph Beuys, Feldmann helped pave the way for artists like Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine and Christopher Williams.

Since the 1960s, Los Angeles has been a hub for groundbreaking art. This slim volume features work by Bas Jan Ader, Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Douglas Huebler, Larry Johnson, Mike Kelley, William Leavitt, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, Raymond Pettibon, Stephen Prina, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha and Christopher Williams.

Ryan Gander: Catalogue Raisonnable Vol. 1″ was conceived by Åbäke as a “reasonable alternative” to a catalogue raisonné for the artist (i.e. a monograph giving a comprehensive and exhaustive catalogue of artworks by an artist). Documenting over 500 works made during a ten-year period, the “Catalogue Raisonnable” is intended to be navigated freely and illogically, in a non-linear fashion by its reader, echoing the “para-possible thinking” and “associative methodologies” on which much of Gander’s practice is based. For those readers who wish to draw some logic from its content, it is suggested that the book is navigated through its index. The “Catalogue Raisonnable” consists of two sections. The first is a complete index/catalogue of the artist’s practice, while the second is made up from a collage of by-products, off-cuts, transcriptions, scripts, conversations, and material related to the works in the index. The publication includes texts by Douglas Fogle, Dan Fox, Christophe Gallois, Ian Gander, Emily King, Raimundas Malašauskas, Midori Matsui, Hans Ulrich Obrist, François Piron, Dorothea Strauss, and Bedwyr Williams, among others. The publication “Ryan Gander: Catalogue Raisonnable Vol. 1” has been co-published by Westreich/Wagner Publications on the occasion of the exhibition “Ryan Gander—Zurich Art Prize Winner 2009” at Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich.