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The first critical reader on the artist’s work.

With essays by Peio Aguirre, Johanna Burton, Nikolaus Hirsch, John Kelsey, Maurizio Lazzarato, Maria Lind, Sven Lütticken, Benoît Maire, Chantal Mouffe, Barbara Steiner and Marcus Verhagen.

Liam Gillick (b. 1964) is a New York and London-based artist who emerged in the 1990s in the midst of paradigmatic political and cultural change. In the past two decades, he has developed a highly influential artistic practice around a discursive model that complicates object production and raises key social questions. This reader brings together diverse theorists, critics, historians, curators and artists to address Gillick’s work and its contexts.

Questions of discourse dominate the first four contributions to the book. Peio Aguirre develops his thinking around the “poetics of social forms,” drawing dialectical relations between Gillick’s screen structures, designs, collaborations and the social imaginary of his writings, treating the artist’s praxis as a “whole,” albeit a necessarily elusive one. Sven Lütticken also attends to elusiveness – Gillick’s as well as artist-writers’ such as Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, Marcel Broodthaers and Donald Judd – but stresses two conflicting impulses at play in (not) making sense: a critical strategy and an economic imperative. Marcus Verhagen focuses on Gillick’s collection of critical writing, Proxemics: Selected Writings (1988-2006), and develops key distinctions: between Gillick’s discourse and that of Nicolas Bourriaud; and between these two sometime collaborators and the art historian and critic Claire Bishop, who took up Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s notion of “antagonism” to critique Bourriaud’s notion of “relational aesthetics” alongside the art of Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravanija. John Kelsey combines Foucault’s use of the Ancient Greek term parrhesia — a public speaking of truth, even in the face of death — with Deleuze’s notion of “indirect discourse,” to question the political underpinnings and truth claims in Gillick’s “Volvo” fiction.

At their core of the next three essays lie the political and ideological problems of defining difference — which Gillick repeatedly nominates as a key concern – and of practicing differentiation. Barbara Steiner distinguishes corruption, corruptibility, and complicity with market forces and institutional powers. Chantal Mouffe reviews her notion of radical democracy and antagonism drawing nuanced connections and distinctions between Gillick’s praxis and the theories she has developed (also with Ernesto Laclau). Johanna Burton’s essay notes a lack of specificity with regard to Gillick’s deployment of the term “difference” and goes on to develop an instance of feminist difference rooted in enthusiasm.

Maria Lind considers kitchens. She takes up this ubiquitous feature of every modern home as a historical nexus, both of the post-World War II ideological battles over planning and speculation, and of several gender-coded modes of production. Further questioning the grounds of practice, Nikolaus Hirsch, considers the changing status of the architectural model as a thought-paradigm and as a thing for forging politics.

The last two essays tarry with the operative abstractions of temporality and historical consciousness. Maurizio Lazzarato, whose theorization of immaterial labor has been especially influential for Gillick, contributes notes on the current economic crisis. He focuses on how the logic of debt within neoliberal capitalism, where tomorrow’s earnings are consumed in today’s purchases, becomes a tool to block possibilities of thinking alternative futures. Benoît Maire’s links the free floating time found in Gillick’s fictional writings to developments in continental philosophy, using a complex notion of the screen as a device for mediating social relations in a post-historical time.

Meaning Liam Gillick is published by the partners organizing the ongoing survey exhibition: Liam Gillick: Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario.

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 19.01.08 – 24.03.08
Kunsthalle Zürich, 26.01.08 – 30.03.08
Kunstverein München, 27.09.08 –16.11.08
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 10.10.09 – 10.01.10

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May 31, 2009, 11am – 4pm

Come celebrate the centennial of Esphyr Slobodkina – a founder of the influential American Abstract Artists group and author of Caps for Sale – with the release of Rediscovering Slobodkina: A Pioneer of American Abstraction, published by Hudson Hills Press. This 180-page book features 4 scholarly essays and nearly 100 full color reproductions.

The event will take place at Esphyr Slobodkina’s last home in Glen Head, New York where visitors can view hundreds of original artworks, antique jewelry, unique clothing designs, and Russian artifacts. There will be guided art tours, children’s programs, and food prepared from the recipe section of Slobodkina’s autobiography. Everything is free and great for all ages.

Location:
Slobodkina Foundation
32 William Street, Glen Head, NY

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This is such a great publication, the only comprehensive book on the furniture, textiles and the other works of two of the most important and influential artists of the twentieth century. Features innovative objects that the couple designed for their homes while teaching at the Bauhaus in Germany and following their move to the United States in 1933. Includes specially commissioned photographs of important but little-known works. Illuminating essays celebrate the Alberses’ endless creativity and set their ground-breaking work in the context of international Modernism.

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In this first book-length study of Robert Ryman, Suzanne Hudson traces the artist’s production from his first paintings in the early 1950s, many of which have never been exhibited or reproduced, to his more recent gallery shows. Ryman’s largely white-on-white paintings represent his careful working over of painting’s conventions at their most radically reduced. Through close readings of the work, Hudson casts Ryman as a painter for whom painting was conducted as a continuous personal investigation. Ryman’s method—an act of “learning by doing”—as well as his conception of painting as “used paint” set him apart from second-generation abstract expressionists, minimalists, or conceptualists.

Ryman (born in 1930) is a self-taught artist who began to paint in earnest while working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1950s. Hudson argues that Ryman’s approach to painting developed from quotidian contact with the story of modern painting as assembled by MoMA director and curator Alfred Barr and rendered widely accessible by director of the education department Victor D’Amico and colleagues. Ryman’s introduction to artistic practice within the (white) walls of MoMA, Hudson contends, was shaped by an institutional ethos of experiential learning. (Others who worked at MoMA during these years include Lucy Lippard, who married Ryman in 1961; Dan Flavin, another guard; and Sol LeWitt, a desk assistant.)

Hudson’s chapters—”Primer,” “Paint,” “Support,” “Edge,” and “Wall,” named after the most basic elements of the artist’s work—eloquently explore Ryman’s ongoing experiment in what makes a painting a painting. Ryman’s work, Hudson argues, tests the medium’s material and conceptual possibilities. It neither signals the end of painting nor guarantees its continued longevity but keeps the prospect of painting an open question, answerable only through the production of new paintings.

An October Book.

About the Author
Suzanne P. Hudson is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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This book recently came to our attention. By no means exhaustive, this labour of love attempts to catalogue the multitudinous editions of Lucio Fontana. Divided into 13 different sections, examining everything from handmade multiple editions and lithographs to jewelry and printed works, each edition is clearly presented one to a page and accompanied by production details. Nearly 200 color and b+w illustrations.

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Since it was founded in 1976, Art Monthly magazine has consistently published interviews with leading contemporary artists. The interviews collected in this book offer unique insights into the thought processes and working practices of artists. From Russian Constructivists of the 1920s to Turner Prize winners, this collection of interviews constitutes an entertaining and alternative history of 20th-century art written in the first person.

Contributors include: Naum Gabo, Clement Greenberg, Victor Pasmore, Robert Motherwell, Agnes Martin, Anthony Caro, Brice Marden, Alan Charlton, Frank Stella, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, John Baldessari, Hanne Darboven, Hans Haacke, Richard Serra, Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, Michael Snow, Gilbert & George, David Tremlett, Jasper Johns, George Segal, Claes Oldenburg, Mark Boyle, Gustav Metzger, Ed Ruscha, Patrick Caulfield, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, RB Kitaj, Ilya Kabakov, Leon Golub, Joseph Beuys, Stephen Willats, Barbara Kruger, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Jeff Wall, Liam Gillick, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Bill Woodrow, Sophie Calle, Gary Hill, Jimmie Durham, Thomas Struth, Willie Doherty, Mark Wallinger, Anya Gallaccio, Steve McQueen, Douglas Gordon, Tacita Dean, Simon Patterson, Angela Bulloch, & Mike Nelson.

Edited by Patricia Bickers and Andrew Wilson
Essay by Iwona Blazwick
Introduction by Patricia Bickers
Publisher: Ram Distribution, 2008

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The Artist’s Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love is a comprehensive handbook that provides the information, tools, and techniques, for developing and sustaining a successful art career. It provides answers to the challenges artists face everyday and includes real-life examples, illustrations, step-by-step exercises, and bulleted lists that allow readers to dive in and begin working immediately.

Author Jackie Battenfield maintains her own career as a visual artist and teaches professional development classes at Columbia University and the Creative Capital Foundation. The Artist’s Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love is scheduled for release in early Spring 2009 and will be published by Da Capo Press.

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Born in Dessau in 1940, Imi Knoebel is a leading figure of 1960s abstraction. He was a student in Joseph Beuys’ master class when he began to seriously question the role of the image in painting, and by 1968 he had formulated the foundation of his practice in the seminal installation “Raum 19,” which has continued to influence his work. Working in between painting and sculpture, Knoebel layers individual elements which are repeatedly juxtaposed in ever-changing variations. Over the course of his nearly five decade-long career, he has continually moved between intuition and calculation, always finding innovative ways to investigate geometric form and color. This precise retrospective volume with comprehensive texts by Dirk Martin, Johannes Stuttgen and Franz-Joachin Verspohl, among others, presents a grouping of works, made between 1966 and 2006, that were chosen by Knoebel for their fundamental importance in his practice.

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As a concrete-abstract painter during the 1950s and 60s, Olle Baetling (1911-1981) developed a personal pictorial universe, while also occupying a firm position among the “Salon des Realites Nouvelles” and Galerie Denise Rene in Paris. His work was highly influential to American Op artists and Minimalists like Donald Judd.

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This book examines a seminal 1964 Dan Flavin exhibition at New York’s influential (though short-lived) Green Gallery, which broke new ground–and marked a turning-point in the artist’s career–with the first series of works composed of colored fluorescent light tubes. The exhibition included seminal works like “the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Robert Rosenblum)” (1963) and “a primary picture” (1964). This volume coincides with Zwirner & Wirth’s recreation of the Green Gallery installation–the first in a series of projects that will explore the presentation and influence of historical gallery shows of the twentieth century. Along with new scholarship by Jeffrey Weiss, former Director of the Dia Art Foundation, this volume contains new color plates, a selection of drawings tracing the development of Flavin’s ideas about these works and their original installation, rare archival photographs, reproductions of exhibition reviews and a selection of recently commissioned statements by artists and critics who saw the exhibition.

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This volume on Tomma Abts (b. 1967) is published in conjuction with the exhibition at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art (April 9 – June 29, 2008). It explores how the artist creates forms that delight the eye and challenge the mind. While working within strict parameters, Abts has reinvented abstraction for the twenty-first century. This is the first monograph on Abts, providing an extensive overview of more than ten years of work. It includes illuminating essays by three top critics, as well as full color reproductions of virtually every painting and drawing made by the artist since 1997.

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This book is new to us, although it’s been out for more than a decade.  We just saw it today at The Morgan Library & Museum bookstore.  About the book: After attending Wake Forest University on an athletic scholarship, J. Donald Nichols played professional baseball with the Baltimore Orioles. From there he went into the real estate development business. He has built more than 175 shopping centers throughout the country, and his company, JDN Realty, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Nichols first began collecting American Impressionist paintings in the 1970s, buying one painting as his personal reward for each shopping center he built. After ten years, he began looking for a new area in which to collect. The J. Donald Nichols Collection is now recognized as perhaps the finest collection of American abstract art of the 1930s and 1940s ever assembled.

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The exhibition catalogue includes essays by James Rondeau; Douglas Druick; Mark Pascale, associate curator, prints and drawings, Art Institute of Chicago; Richard Shiff, Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art, University of Texas-Austin; Barbara Rose, noted Johns scholar; and Kelly Keegan, assistant painting conservator, and Kristin Lister, conservator of paintings, Art Institute of Chicago; as well as an interview with the artist by Nan Rosenthal, senior consultant, Department of 19th-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

This publication explores the re-examination or the redeployment of forms and devices drawn from Minimal art by numerous contemporary artists. Taking into account their present adoption by the cultural and design industries, these artists update the inherent contradiction of the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s—between an aspiration for the autonomy of art, and the heteronomy of the means to achieve this. Looking back on the aporias of such an historical heritage, the practices discussed here start afresh, initiate a new game, which privileges accident rather than essence, ‘non-formalism’ rather than formal resolution, and disfunctionality rather than efficient rationality. Half Square Half Crazy was a major group exhibition curated by Vincent Pécoil, Lili Reynaud Dewar, and Elisabeth Wetterwald. Published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Villa Arson, Nice, in 2007.

Stretching a Point, a new catalog published on the occasion of the show “perplex” with documentation of the shows “ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst” and “inner spaces” and relating to the show “the other sight”.  Edited by MS artist Willi Otremba. Cover image by MINUS SPACE artist Hartmut Böhm.  Hardcover, 144 pages, printed by Kettler, ISBN 978-3-939825-80-7.

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As a concrete-abstract painter during the 1950s and 60s, Olle Bærtling (1911-1981) developed a personal pictorial universe, while also occupying a firm position among the “Salon des Realités Nouvelles” and Galerie Denise René in Paris. His work was highly influential to American Op artists and Minimalists like Donald Judd.  Introduction by Ustvedt Nilsson, John Peter Øystein. Text by David Birnbaum, Daniel Raskin.  Price $40.

Kunstruimte 09 in Groningen, The Netherlands, has recently published two catalogs relating to their four-part exhibition Colour Matters.  You can purchase the catalogs Colour Matters and Colour Matters 2 online at Amazon.de.

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Edited by Ani Boyajian and Mark Rutkoski with essays by William C. Agee and Karen Wilkin, these volumes are the definitive reference on Stuart Davis’ paintings, watercolors, drawings, and published illustrations.

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Colorful and playful kinetic sculptures, experimental objects designed to be catalysts for community building, manifestos calling for joy and the negation of melancholy: these are the elements that have shaped The Geometry of Hope. The title of this richly illustrated, 340-page volume brings together two threads that epitomize postwar abstract art from Latin America: on the one hand, geometry, precision, clarity and reason; on the other, a utopian sense of hope. The book contains new scholarship by an international cast, with examinations of six key cities–Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas and Paris–as well as insightful essays on individual works of art. It comes to us via the Cisneros Graduate Seminar, a collaborative program of the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas, and the renowned Fundacion Cisneros, and covers more than four decades of art-making with works by 52 artists, among them Lygia Clark, Gego, Jesus Rafael Soto and Helio Oiticica.

In his series of lectures, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, Kirk Varnedoe asks tough questions.  Why abstract art?  What is abstract art good for?  These questions, the topic of his six lectures, are familiar.  It seems to me that they are asked, and in a sense answered, every time an artist makes an abstract work.  They are the questions that artists ask as we wrestle with the history of abstraction and as we work to move abstraction forward.  And for artists making abstract work now, Pictures of Nothing is necessary reading.

The 2006 publication of these lectures, given as the National Gallery of Art’s Mellon Lectures in 2003, offers the many of us who could not attend the talks access to his clear, concise, deeply informed and often funny examination of the art of the last fifty years.  The discussion of abstraction begins, after a very brief summary of the early 20th Century, with the 1950s – the Cold War and Abstract Expressionism.  While it progresses to 2003 in a fairly linear chronology, Varnedoe also moves sideways, describing the significance of multiple and seemingly contradictory things happening at once. 

James Turrell, A Frontal Passage, 1994
Light, 12′ 10″ x 22′ 6″ x 34′

Pop Art and Minimalism emerging from the same moment.  Frank Stella making paintings that are equal parts Pollock and Johns.  Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman make quiet, subtle works that appear similar but are worlds apart.  Although Varnedoe is forced, in the interest of time, to omit many artists and works that could have been included, he’s not working in art historical generalities.  He’s looking at specific ideas, moments and relationships.  With regard to this he says, “Epochs do not have essences, history does not work by all-governing unities, and works of art in their quirkiness tend to resist generalities.” 

Frank Stella, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II, 1959
Enamel on canvas, 7′ 6 3/4″ x 11′ 3/4″

As he leads us through de Kooning, Johns, Judd, Kelly, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Hesse, De Maria, Turrell, Halley, Richter, Marden and Serra (and many others), Varnedoe keeps an emphasis on experience and our responses to the very particular details of a piece.  Small differences, he says, make all the difference.  Whether it’s how we experience the work directly or how the work relates to our experiences in the world, he ties the art to our personal encounters.  Through this he builds his argument that abstraction isn’t grounded in something universal.  Rather it’s based on responses that are our own.  Subjective.  Individual. 

It’s this, a culture that coheres because it values independence, that abstraction offers us.  In Varnedoe’s words, “This is why abstract art, and modern art in general, being based on subjective experience and open-ended interpretation, is not universal or the culmination of anything in history but the contingent phenomena of a modern, secular, liberal society.” 

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968
Brass, 22″ x 48 1/4″ x 36″

Varnedoe concludes with a reference to the faith that abstract art requires.  As he describes it, “Not a faith in absolutes, not a religious kind of faith.  A faith in possibility, a faith not that we will know something finally, but a faith in not knowing…”  His faith, his unwavering belief in abstract art is present in every word of these lectures and it’s what makes his insights and arguments so extraordinary.

A modern, secular, liberal society.  That’s something to have faith in.

Lynne Harlow is a New York City-based artist.  She will present a project at MINUS SPACE project space in December 2007.

Kirk Varnedoe. Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock. Foreword by Earl A. Powell III, preface by Adam Gopnik. Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2006.

MINUS SPACE artist Lynne Harlow discusses Kirk Varnedoe’s last book Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, a transcription of his 2003 Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington.  Harlow will present a project at MINUS SPACE project space in December 2007.

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A new edition of an Alber’s classic and long-unavailable publication, featuring 22 line drawings, as well as original poems.

Cover Image by MINUS SPACE artist Don Voisine
Published by The Brooklyn Rail & Black Square Editions, 2006

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Conceived by Renate Wiehager of the DaimlerChrylser Collection, this new publication provides a much needed, more thorough overview of reductive art  practices — in both Europe and the United States — than previously published.  300 works by 150 artists, including MS artists Hartmut Böhm, Sylvan Lionni, Jan van der Ploeg, and Michael Zahn.  Buy this book.