by Ann Philbin (Author), Christopher Miles (Author), James Elaine (Author), Lauren Bonn (Author)

Features Miranda Lichtenstein and Ryan Trecartin

Since 1999, the Hammer Museum's Hammer Projects series has furnished international and local artists with a laboratory-like environment to create new work or to present existing work in a new context. Published to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the series, this volume compiles all 80 of the projects featured so far--by artists including Amy Adler, Edgar Arceneaux, Fikret Atay, Walead Beshty, Paul Chan, Aaron Curry, Tara Donovan, Nathalie Djurberg, Tony Feher, Mark Grotjahn, Mark Handforth, Arturo Herrera, Elliott Hundley, Jim Isermann, Runa Islam, Jesper Just, Emma Kay, Margaret Kilgallen, Barry McGee, Paul Morrison, Paul Pfeiffer, Hiraki Sawa, Simon Starling, Kaari Upson, Kara Walker, Phoebe Washburn, Pae White and Sun Xun--alongside texts by Hilton Als, Regine Basha, Aaron Betsky, Nayland Blake, Alex Farquharson, Russell Ferguson, Malik Gaines, Tim Griffin, Massimiliano Gioni, Dave Hickey, Vasif Kortun, Libby Lumpkin, Midori Matsui, Linda Norden, Raphael Rubinstein, Laurie Simmons, Dean Sobel, Ali Subotnick and Steven Vincent.

by Bob Nickas (Author)

Features Philippe Decrauzat

In recent years, abstract painting has developed a rich complexity that, now more than ever, rewards intensive viewing; this authoritative book guides the reader through the key issues in the field. Painting Abstraction profiles 80 of today?s most vital contemporary abstract painters, such as Mark Grotjahn and Amy Sillman, featuring large full-color reproductions of their work and incisive texts by author and curator Bob Nickas. The product of years of research and countless studio visits, Painting Abstraction is a major statement on the last five years of this exciting new wave of creativity in painting.

by Lucas Dietrich (Editor)

Features Josephine Meckseper

A celebration of sixty innovators in art, design, fashion and other creative fields. Artists, photographers, architects, fashion designers, product designers, street artists, graphic designers: all are helping to redefine our aesthetics, values, and ideas about the future.

Here, a group of international experts from twelve contemporary fields of creative practice—from fine art and photography to graphic design, architecture, and ecology—have each selected five people who are making significant contributions to the way we experience everyday life and visual culture. The resulting compendium contains hundreds of the most exciting projects and concepts being produced today.

Each section features an introduction by the editor and richly illustrated profiles of the five innovators. The featured artists and designers include Jonathan Harris and Ben Fry (Graphic Design); Swoon and Space Invader (Street Art); Taryn Simon and Christopher Williams (Photography); Miuccia Prada and Tom Ford (Fashion); and Wendy Seltzer and Natalie Jeremijenko (New Media).

by Nicole Schweizer (Editor), Nora Alter (Author), Diedrich Diederichsen (Author), Renée Green (Author), Kobena Mercer (Author), Catherine Quéloz (Author), Juliane Rebentisch (Author), Gloria Sutton (Author), Elvan Zabunyan (Author)

by Raphael Gygax (Editor / Author), Thomas Beard (Author), Ed Halter (Author)

Features Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch

American artists Cory Arcangel, Jessica Ciocci & Jacob Ciocci/Paper Rad, Shana Moulton, and Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch, have been brought together in this publication. In their works the artists create an overwhelming, color-charged aesthetic with an excessive density of content, reacting to the consumer-oriented condition of Western society. In their image-spaces the four collaborations address a culture of excess, constructing their critique via a form of appropriation, which simultaneously releases a veritable deluge of images. In the tradition of experimental film and Scatter art they probe potential unconventional narrative patterns and test for the disintegration of stereotypes. As a result, the video works are often shown in sculptural settings, in which fragments of pop culture and handcrafted forms are amalgamated into an multimedia Gesamtkunstwerk.

Published with the migros museum für gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

by Lauren Cornell (Author), Massimiliano Gioni (Author), Laura Hoptman (Author)

Features Ryan Trecartin

by Rachel Hooper (Editor / Author), Gail Kirkpatrick (Editor), Heike Munder (Editor / Author), Sylvère Lotringer (Author)

In her photography, videos, and installations Josephine Meckseper (born in Lilienthal, 1964, lives and works in New York) engages with the interaction between politics and glamour. Thus, in her works, images of political activism—whether photographs of demonstrations or newspaper cuttings—are set against sparkling consumer goods and advertising motifs, evoking a paradoxical effect. On the one hand, the pop-political vocabulary of forms appears absurd in its opposing ideological effect; on the other, the artist discloses references by interpolating them seamlessly in a decorative and apparently elegant display. Meckseper has pursued the capitalist-critique approach of recent years, with subject areas agitating around the war in Iraq and the oil industry, with all their inherent economic and socio-political implications, in particular those concerning the automobile industry. The publication concentrates on a new series of works developed from this context. Hence in the installation "Ten High" (2007) numerous silver shop display dummies converge on a mirror smooth platform holding in their hands objects such as signs, bearing anti-war slogans like "No War in Iran" or the notorious recession signal "Going Out of Business/Sale," a whisky bottle or a bible and other classical American "icons." Meckseper's object arrangements recall the window displays of department stores and expensive boutiques, re-contextualising the exhibited objects: the shibboleths are ascribed a new significance—from now on a consumerist lifestyle posture.

Published with the migros museum für gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston; and Ausstellungshalle zeitgenössische Kunst Münster.

Features Josephine Meckseper and Mika Tajima

"Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation" is an up-to-the-minute survey of current global developments in contemporary sculpture and its close relative, installation. This vast medium of sculpture continues to be a central pillar of artistic practice, and "Vitamin 3-D" presents the outstanding artists who are engaging with and pushing the boundaries of the medium. "Vitamin 3-D" follows the success of "Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting", "Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing" and "Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography", presenting a cross-generational survey of contemporary artists from 27 countries. Chosen from more than 500 nominations by significant international critics, curators, art historians and creative writers, "Vitamin 3-D"'s 117 established and emerging artists were selected on the basis that they have made a significant contribution to sculpture and installation (in their broadest sense) in the last five years. "Vitamin 3-D" allows the reader to look at the medium in detail, to study sculpture's unique properties in relation to itself, in relation to contemporary art and in relation to the world at large. An ongoing fascination with the key issues of modern sculpture, from the readymade to the specific object, today drives many artists to return to those issues again and again, with fresh and often surprising results. In her evocative introductory essay for "Vitamin 3-D", Anne Ellegood uses Rosalind Krauss' landmark 1978 essay "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" as the basis to explore the wildly inclusive breadth and depth of work that the term 'sculpture' can now be applied to within contemporary practice - and the key historical moments that serve as the precedents for what we now understand as both sculpture and installation. Sculpture continues to strike out into new territory, harnessing the medium to confront today's commodity world in its own materials or conjuring visionary new objects and environments like nothing seen before. "Vitamin 3-D" contributes to these international debates on contemporary sculpture and installation while providing an accessible overview and a concise reference book in an innovative design that embodies the materiality of its subject

by Glenn Phillips (Author), Meg Cranston (Author), Rita Gonzalez (Author), Kathy Rae Huffmann (Author), Robert Riley (Author), Steve Seid (Author), Bruce Yonemoto (Author)

Published to accompany a landmark exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from March 15 through June 18, 2008, California Video presents the first comprehensive survey of the history of video art in California. Since the late 1960s, California artists have been at the forefront of an
international movement that has expanded video into the realm of fine art. Whether designing complex video installations, devising lush projections, experimenting with electronic psychedelia, creating conceptual and performance art, generating guerilla video, or producing works that promote feminism
and other social issues, these artists have utilized video technology to express revolutionary ideas.

This illustrated volume focuses on fifty-eight artists, from early video pioneers such as John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, and William Wegman, to Martha Rosler, Diana Thater, Bill Viola, and other established and emerging talents. Thirty-five recent interviews shed new light on these artists--their
influences, creative processes, and impact. Together with commissioned essays, rare reprints, and unpublished video transcripts, California Video chronicles a distinctly West Coast aesthetic located within the broader history of video art.

Edited by Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin

Features Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn and Mika Tajima / New Humans

Presenting the latest work by emerging and established artists, Whitney Biennial 2008 accompanies the seventy-fourth in a series of Annual and Biennial exhibitions, inaugurated in 1932 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This edition is organized by Whitney curators Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin and features more than eighty artists and collaborative teams, including recognized artists as well as those whose work has never before been seen in a major museum.

270 pages. 285 illustrations. Paper.

by Bob Nickas (Author), Julien Fronsacq (Author), Katia Garcia-Anton (Author), Philippe Decrauzat (Author), Lionel Bovier (Editor), Bice Curiger (Introduction)

Though his works evoke 60s Op art, Swiss-born artist Philippe Decrauzat's first reference is more likely to be the film Tron than Bridget Riley. Decrauzat works in a variety of media--wall painting, shaped canvases, sculpture, installations and works on paper, all of which evidence flat chromatics and complex geometric compositions. Stating, "I am not trying to build up a new theory about ideological issues regarding the historical content of abstraction. I am strongly involved in investigating the status of the image, in other words, indebted to practices trying to outline the critical tools developed by Conceptual and Op art," Decrauzat clues us in to how his seemingly simple mix of appropriated imagery and techniques works. This is Decrauzat's first monograph and includes an essay by critic and curator Bob Nickas.

by New Humans 

2008
CD / SEMI 011

New Humans fourth release, aka, presents two full live recordings from a series of New Humans collaborations with Vito Acconci and C. Spencer Yeh performed during their three-month exhibition “Disassociate” at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, in Spring 2007.

1. You in the background
During this improvised performance with New Humans and C. Spencer Yeh, Acconci read permutations of text from a set of seminal audio works he chose -- recombining lines and phrases on the move against a shifting, acute, and deadpan sonic progression. Text include V.D. Lives/ TV Must Die (1978), Now Do You Believe The Dirty Dogs Are Dead (1978), An Idea Of Storage At A Small Gallery In Downtown Chicago (1979), Cry, Baby! (1977).

2. Double Negative
C. Spencer Yeh’s violin tears into the track without hesitation creating a searing arc over the sheets of analog fuzz delivered by New Humans’s obliterated guitar, drums, and bass. Double Negative also documents the live destruction of a glass sculpture as it was crushed by a pile of contact microphoned chairs that Mika Tajima dragged across the room and then toppled into the tower of glass. The amplified dragging and the eventual cascading crash of glass was sampled in real time, becoming an underlying rhythmic pattern as New Humans returned for a final assault with Yeh.

by Mami Kataoka (Author), Simon Critchley (Contributor)

Features Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn

What is the role of laughter and humor in contemporary art? In a time of increasing globalization, this book questions whether humor can only be appreciated by people with similar cultural, political or historical backgrounds and memories, or whether laughter can act as a catalyst for understanding that which is not familiar. Do laughter and humor transcend difference and language, or are they dependent on inside knowledge and shared experience? Featuring illustrations of more than 70 video, photographic and installation works, this volume includes many artists who have relocated from their home countries, leading them to exploit the humor that arises out of everyday gaps in translation, or even to use humor to fill those gaps. Artists include Makoto Aida, Candice Breitz, Olaf Bruening, Marcus Coates, Cao Fei, Ghazel, Matthew Griffin, Taiyo Kimura, Peter Land, Julian Rosefledt, Shimabuku, Nedko Solakov, Roi Vaara, Martin Walde and others.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Laughing in a Foreign Language, The Hayward, London, UK, 25 January - 13 April, 2008.

by Sylvia Martin (Editor and Author), Johannes Buchner (Author), Antje von Graevenitz (Author), Thomas Janzen (Author), Sophia Vyzoviti (Author)

Features Gareth James

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Falling Right into Place. The Fold in Contemporary Art / Der Grosse Wurf. Faltungen in der Gegenwartskunst, Kunstmuseen Krefeld / Museum Haus Lange and Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, Germany, 2 March - 25 May, 2008.

by Okwui Enwezor (Author), Marion Ackermann (Author), Christian Holler (Author), Josephine Meckseper (Author), Simone Schimpf (Contributor)

The work of the New York-based German conceptualist, Josephine Meckseper, deals with themes of consumerism and commodity fetishism in modern society. For example, her shop window installations, Shelves, juxtapose fashion accessories with regalia, such as Palesetinian kaffiyeh, taken from left wing protest movements. The connection between consumerism and politics was initially sparked by the confluence of luxury advertising and political news, but Meckseper also does straight politics--she has filmed anti-Bush demonstrations and Berlin protest marches. The resulting work is held in the Saatchi Collection among others, and appeared in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. This monograph, which also features contributions from Okwui Enwezor, Christian Holler and Simone Schimpf, presents a concise overview of Meckseper's visual worlds, in a wide range of video, collage, painting, sculpture and installation. Born in 1964, Meckseper was deemed one of the top ten artists to watch by New York magazine in 1996.

by Dominic Molon (Author), Diedrich Diederichsen (Author), Anthony Elms (Author), Dan Graham (Author), Richard Hell (Author), Matthew Higgs (Author), Mike Kelley (Author), Jutta Koether (Author), Bob Nickas (Author), Jan Tumlir (Author)

Features Mika Tajima

The dynamic relationship between rock music and visual art crosses continents, generations, and cultures. Beginning with Andy Warhol’s involvement with The Velvet Underground in 1967, artists have maintained a strong connection to rock. Artists such as Slater Bradley, Mike Kelley, and Raymond Pettibon have created album covers and music videos for rock bands, while rock musicians such as Bryan Ferry, John Lennon, and Peter Townsend have emerged from art schools, and punk and new wave bands such as Talking Heads and Sonic Youth have shared the same social and artistic milieu as artists including Robert Longo and Richard Prince.

Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 looks at the intimate and inspired relationship between the visual arts and rock-and-roll culture, charting their intersection through works of art, album covers, music videos, and other materials. Organized regionally by cultural centers including London, New York, Los Angeles, and Cologne, the essays examine rock and roll’s style, celebrity, and identity politics in art; the experience, energy, and sense of devotion rock music inspires; and the dual role that many individuals play in both the sonic and visual realms.

Presenting work that defies a more literal interpretation of the theme and instead suggests the style, energy, and attitude that has come to be associated with rock and roll, this fascinating volume is essential for admirers of contemporary art and culture.

Text by Doryun Chong & Yasmil Raymond

Features Josephine Meckseper

Addressing contemporary international art beyond glib expressions of globalism, Brave New Worlds assesses the current state of political consciousness and its multivalent artistic manifestations in an era characterized by the unraveling of a unified world order. Guided by the questions "How do we know?," "How do we experience?" and "How do we dream about the world?," 24 artists from Southeastern Europe to South America, from the Middle East to East Asia and from North Africa to North America propose their own answers in paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations and videos. The catalogue includes several brief "correspondent" essays, inspired by newspaper reports and penned by an international cast of young art historians, critics and curators, including Max Andrews and Mariana Canepa Luna (Spain), Cecilia Brunson (Chile), Hu Fang (China), Tone Hansen (Norway), Mihnea Mircan (Romania) and Jose Roca (Colombia). Recent texts by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, celebrated author and activist Arundhati Roy and award-winning foreign correspondent Janine di Giovanni provide additional perspectives on global affairs of the past decade. In addition, Brave New Worlds features an artist insert by Lia Perjovschi of Romania, entitled "Subjective Art History from Modernism to Today," and entries on each individual artist.

by Shaheen Merali (Editor).

Features Josephine Meckseper.

New York: States of Mind addresses the current state of art and film as explored by artists living and/or working in New York. This vivid collection of artists' interviews, film synopses, and essays investigates the relevance of postwar artworks to contemporary artistic statements. The films about New York range from the silent era through investigations of post-9/11 realities, spanning mainstream and avant-garde practice. Key works by artists and filmmakers-from Marcel Duchamp to Fred Wilson, from Martin Scorsese to Mira Nair-are interwoven to present a coherent picture of the New York contemporary art world.

by Louis Nègre (Author), Bruno Boidron (Author), Frédéric Delpech (Author), Vittorio Santoro (Author), Collectif (Author)

Features Meredyth Sparks 

Features Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn

Published to accompany the Hammer Museum's Summer 2007 exhibition, Eden's Edge, this exploration of art made in Los Angeles during the past decade crosses generations, mediums, and materials to link 15 artists of singular personal vision, whether internationally established or not-yet-discovered. The artists--who include Ginny Bishton, Mark Bradford, Liz Craft, Sharon Ellis, Matt Greene, Elliott Hundley, Stanya Kahn and Harry Dodge, Monica Majoli, Rebecca Morales, Matthew Monahan, Lari Pittman, Ken Price, Jason Rhodes, Anna Sew Hoy and Jim Shaw--all track, via their work and vision, a persistent consciousness of change and contradiction. The works collected here are intensely crafted and conjure richly imagistic worlds in which landscape and figure fracture and metamorphose. Together, they establish a generational continuum, integrating newly emerging artists with their more established peers. This clothbound volume includes a critical essay by curator Gary Garrels that contextualizes both the exhibition and the artists' work within the art and culture of southern California, the international art scene, and the trends of the last decade. It includes an entry, a biography, a selected exhibition history and a bibliography for each of the 15 artists.

The Triennale di Milano organisied and produced the TIMER contemporary art project

Features Ryan Trecartin

Timer investigates the inner self in the new social context that has arisen in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers. Consequently, it also looks at the relationship with transcendence, considered on both the individual and social level. The first edition, comprising more than eighty artists from around the world, highlights the emotional trauma in the West following 9/11 and the critical factors that have radically changed the individual’s relationship to society. This transformation in social relations manifests itself in subtle ways in artistic language and themes, which have nonetheless been deeply affected by this watershed event for the World Order.

by New Humans

2007
Circuit 004

Color vinyl 12" Undercover produced with artist Philippe Decrauzat through Switzerland's Circuit. Featuring New Humans soundtrack for Decrauzat's 16mm film, "A change of speed, a change of style. A change of scene; Part II". Includes solo beat track on reverse side. Jacket design collaboration by Decrauzat and Mika Tajima, and special poster insert. Brutal and concise.

Also available signed/numbered edition of 50 by New Humans/Philippe Decrauzat.

by Sylvere Lontringer (Author)

Produced by Elizabeth Dee Gallery this fully illustrated, artist-designed catalogue features the most recent work of New York-based Josephine Meckseper, including her work for the 2006 Whitney Biennial. The artist suggests that our desire for luxury goods and fashion is induced by media-driven ruling regimes, and comes to the conclusion that partisan politics are just another status symbol. Radicalism quickly morphs into radical chic, which is just one more object to be fetishized and sold in a museum-gallery-boutique that samples utopian dreams ranging from the communists to the hippies.

Features Ryan Trecartin and Josephine Meckseper

The 2006 Whitney Biennial catalogue, with 800 pages and more than 200 images, uses an innovative book format in order to present a remarkable artists’ section, "Draw Me a Sheep." Borrowing its title from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, the section is a collection of individual artist pages done as a series of four-panel “poster” foldouts. By inviting each artist to create a page for the book, "Draw Me a Sheep" presents an image from the artist's world and explores how each artist deals with representation in his or her own time.

Introduction and a conversation between the curators, Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne and the art historian Toni Burlap; foreword by Whitney director Adam D. Weinberg; and contributions by critic and teacher Johanna Burton; Bradley Eros, an artist, experimental filmmaker, curator, writer, performer, and researcher, whose work was shown in the 2004 Whitney Biennial; Lia Gangitano, founder and director of Participant Inc. and former curator of The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and Thread Waxing Space, New York; Bruce Hainley, a contributing editor of Artforum and Associate Director of Graduate Studies in Criticism & Theory at Art Center College of Design; Molly Nesbit, a professor of Art at Vassar College and a contributing editor of Artforum; cultural historian and media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan; and writer and cultural commentator Neville Wakefield. In addition the book includes excerpts from a series of articles by the writer and noted French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy

by Sebastian Preuss (Author), Niels Werber (Author), MARTa Herford (Editor), Esther Ruelfs (Editor)

Erik Schmidt has hunting fever. This, his latest work, focuses on the sport as used in the aristocracy to stage-manage social image. Hunting is a social game, a fixed convention--and so the artist lay in wait, observed the codes, apparel and gestures, and was allowed to slip into character. The resulting works in film and painting pick up on the sport's classic visual theme, but Schmidt's plan of attack is conceptual: In taking on the role of the hunter, he reimagines the dialectic between hunter and hunted, perpetrator and victim. Hunting Grounds not only elucidates the sport's social and symbolic consequences and explores ideas of masculinity, but also reveals and engages our enduring fascination with this archaic, male-dominated world.

by New Humans

2006
Avant/Savant 001

A line drawn in space gradually separates into countless pieces leaving a ghost of its former self. On New Human's second release, Disassociate, each track undergoes geometric growth and decay.   With over 25 names for each track, the recording opens with a drone monolith later destabilizing into undulating segments and then finally shattering into a series of interlocking parts. In its transformations, each momentary form gives way to the next creating incidental tangents with minimalist drone, early synth music, extreme noise, and Miami trunk bass.

Disassociate is available on vinyl and CDR as a limited edition release of 300 with hand silk-screened jackets with custom insert. Vinyl edition features glow-in-the dark design and oversized poster.   Recorded and engineered by Sean Maffucci at Junkyard Audio Salvage in Brooklyn and mastered by Paul Gold. Released on Avant/Savant (Mexico City, New York).

For best results play recording at high volume in continuous sequence with subwoofer or substantial low frequency sound system.

Make Your Own Life: Artists In and Out of Cologne looks at the mythic and art historical significance of the Cologne art scene, one of the most important centers for contemporary art during the 1980s and 1990s. Includes essays by Guest Curator Bennett Simpson, Associate Curator at ICA, Boston, Joseph Strau, and artist roundtable excerpts.

Features by Gareth James

By Emma Dexter

Vitamin D is comprised of 109 Artists

Featues Gareth James

Drawing has recently experienced a renewal of importance in the art world; in fact, it has rarely been as widely represented in the biennials, art fairs, and exhibitions as it is now. Similar in concept, scope and structure to Phaidon's successful volume Vitamin P, Vitamin D presents, in A to Z order, the work of 109 artists who have emerged internationally since 1990 using the medium of drawing. Whether representational or abstract, small or large in scale, using only one line or rich in colors and pattern, drawings have a highly descriptive and meticulously detailed quality that is being explored by an increasing number of contemporary artists. Extending beyond the traditional image associated with this medium, Vitamin D hopes to illustrate the complexity, variety, and relevance of the practice of drawing today.

by Nicolas Bourriaud, Jérôme Sans

Features Josephine Meckseper 

By Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin and Debra Singer

Features Virgil Marti

The Whitney Museum of American Art's 2004 Biennial Exhibition brings together 108 artists and collaborative teams from three generations who reflect a number of overlapping tendencies--diverse approaches to process, narrative, materiality, abstraction, conceptual strategies, technology, and history. The catalogue includes thought-provoking essays by the Whitney curators who organized the exhibition--Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer--as well as related texts by writers as diverse as Joge Luis Borges and Susan Buck-Morss, entries on each of the artists represented, and a comprehensive list of works in the Biennial. In addition, each artist has contributed an original project to the catalogue, in formats ranging from posters and postcards to zines and bumper stickers, packaged in an enclosed box. 272 pages, 154 Illustrations, including 136 in full color, Cloth.