Interviews Volume I

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interviews Volume I
Softcover, 968 pp., offset 1/1, 140 x 205 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN 9788881584314
Published by Charta

$59.00 · add to cart

It is not an exaggeration to write that Hans Ulrich Obrist is everywhere, has curated everything and has interviewed everyone. If “peripatetic” is the word most overused to describe him, it is not inappropriate. The Swiss-born, everywhere-based curator and head of the Programme Migrateurs at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris has an unstoppable wanderlust and a related symptom: his penchant for interviewing anyone and everyone who piques his curiosity, be they artist, scientist, writer, curator, composer, architect, thinker, etc. Since 1993, Obrist has conducted more than 300 interviews, 75 of which are collected here in a selection that respects the cultural and professional diversity of the interviewees. Each interview is introduced by a short text outlining the biography of the interviewee and giving some contextual information on the recording of the interview.

Art, Brian Eno, Charta, Daniel Buren, DAP, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gerhard Richter, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interviews, Jonas Mekas, Lawrence Weiner, Mario Merz, Matthew Barney, Maurizio Cattelan, Olafur Eliasson, Rem Koolhaas, Vito Acconci, Walter Hopps, Yoko Ono, Zaha Hadid

Bicycles

Michael Kim, Bicycles
Softcover, 48 pp., offset 1/1, 4 x 5.75 inches
Edition of 500
Published by Tramnesia

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After Modern History is a report on world events that re-edits the news of the day by linking together images according to a totally idiosyncratic perspective of pattern recognitions and typologies. After Modern History lifts photos from daily newspapers and re-organizes disparate, often atomized subjects into newly imagined affinities. For most people caught on the hard end of luck, the newspaper can be a lonely place. But in this second draft of history, bad news is no longer so isolated. There is no dateline.

Bicycles is a collection of newspaper clippings where bicycles appear incidentally to the photograph subject.

After Modern History, Art, Culture, Distribution, Graphics, Michael Kim, Photography, Tramnesia

Three Acts

John Divola, Three Acts
Hardcover, 144 pp., offset 4/duotone, 11 x 9.25 inches
Edition of 2000
ISBN 9781931788953
Published by Aperture

$50.00 · add to cart

In 1973, California artist John Divola began the first of three highly ambitious and original bodies of work that form Three Acts, the first book dedicated to them. His Vandalism series comprises black-and-white photographs of interiors of abandoned houses. Entering illegally, Divola spray-painted markings that referenced action painting as readily as the graffiti that was then becoming a cultural phenomenon. For the following year’s Los Angeles International Airport Noise Abatement series, he photographed a condemned neighborhood bought out to serve as a noise buffer for new runways, focusing on evidence of previous unsanctioned entries by other vandals. His final work, Zuma, documents the destruction of an abandoned beachfront property by the artist and others, as it deteriorates frame by frame and eventually burns. Divola has much in common with artists such as Bruce Nauman and Robert Smithson who have used photography to investigate other topics. He describes his innovative practice succinctly: “My acts, my painting, my photographing, my considering, are part of, not separate from, this process of evolution and change. My participation was not so much one of intellectual consideration as one of visceral involvement.”

Aperture, Art, DAP, David Campany, Francesca Richer, Jan Tumlir, John Divola, Michael Famighetti, Photography

The Coming Insurrection

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection
Softcover, 136 pp., offset 1/1, 4.5 x 7 inches
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-1-58435-080-4
Published by Semiotext(e)

$13.00 · add to cart

Thirty years of “crisis,” mass unemployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy…We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It’s not that there’s not enough work, it’s that there is too much of it.
—from The Coming Insurrection

The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord — and with comparable elegance — it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as “the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality.” The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine to “spread anarchy and live communism.”

Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the “war on terror.”

Hot-wired to the movement of ‘77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized forms-of-life. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those — in France, in the United States, and elsewhere — who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.

Reviews
“…without a doubt the most thought-provoking radical text to be published in the past ten years. It deserves to be read and discussed.”
—Daniel Miller, New Statesman

“Any book indirectly responsible for massive raids involving helicopters and anti-terrorist police, a splenetic Fox News broadcast and an impromptu book-reading at a Barnes & Noble bookshop in New York (also attended by the police) must have something going for it. And so it is with The Coming Insurrection, the kind of political pamphlet last fashionable in the 17th century (and perhaps for a period in the 1960s and ‘70s).”
—Nina Power, Frieze Magazine

“I am not calling for a ban on this book. It’s important that you read this book. [...] And let me tell you something: Don’t dismiss these people. Don’t dismiss them.”
—Glenn Beck, Fox News/Glenn Beck Program

Criticism, MIT Press, Semiotexte, The Invisible Committee, Theory

The Conversation Series 15

Hans Ulrich Obrist and Enzo Mari, The Conversation Series 15
Softcover, 88 pp., offset 4/1, 135 x 210 mm
Edition of 5000
ISBN 9783865604019
Published by Walther König

$25.00 · add to cart

Volume 15 of The Conversation Series features a riveting dialogue between series editor and cultural catalyst Hans Ulrich Obrist and the renowned Italian designer Enzo Mari. More concerned with theoretical issues in design than commercial success, Mari is one of the most thoughtful and intellectually provocative designers of the late twentieth century. His work as a product and furniture designer, as well as a writer, teacher and artist, has proved influential both to his peers and to younger generations. In this volume, Mari discusses his iconic designs for cutting-edge production houses Danese, Olivetti and Castelli, his experience of the contradictory aspects of postwar Italy and his unique take on the design trends of the 1960s and 1970s.

Enzo Mari was born in 1932 in Novara, Italy. He has most recently completed a series of tubular aluminum chairs for Vienna’s Gebrüder Thonet and a collection for the Japanese home store Muji.

Art, Criticism, DAP, Enzo Mari, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Walther König

Negative Space

Mungo Thomson, Negative Space
Softcover, 160 pp., offset 4/4, 175 x 255 mm
Edition of 5000
ISBN 978-3-905770-27-8
Published by JRP|Ringier, CK editions

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The Negative Space project is a book made of photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and inverted. As “color negatives” of outer space (stars, solar systems, galaxies, nebulae, black holes, and exotic cosmic phenomena) it maps our universe in a book form. The book had been conceived by the artist in collaboration with graphic designer Conny Purtill, on the occasion of Thomson’s exhibition at GAMEC, Bergamo.

This publication is part of the series of artists projects edited by Christoph Keller. Personally selected by Keller, for Textfield, as one of his top five from the series.

Alessandro Rabottini, Art, Christoph Keller, CK editions, DAP, JRP|Ringier, Mungo Thomson, Photography

Celebration at Persepolis

Michael Stevenson, Celebration at Persepolis
Hardcover, 64 pp., offset 4/1, 125 x 160 mm
Edition of 5000
ISBN 978-3-905829-48-8
Published by JRP|Ringier/Arnolfini

$19.00 · add to cart

Described as an “anthropologist of the avant-garde,” Michael Stevenson investigates the mythology that surrounds renowned and controversial events which have been significant in the spheres of both art and politics.

Stevenson revisits the site of an infamous week-long party held in 1971 by the Shah of Iran among the ruins of the ancient Persian city of Persepolis. Reconstructing part of the temporary architecture built for the celebrations (itself now a ruin), Stevenson looks at this pivotal moment in Iranian history which led toward the subsequent cultural revolution.

This publication is part of the series of artists projects edited by Christoph Keller. Personally selected by Keller, for Textfield, as one of his top five from the series.

Arnolfini, Art, Christoph Keller, CK editions, Criticism, Culture, DAP, Elisa Kay, JRP|Ringier, Martin Clark, Michael Stevenson, Nav Haq

Zeitung

Peter Piller, Zeitung
Hardcover, 384 pp., offset 4/1, 280 x 280 mm
Edition of 5000
ISBN 978-3-905829-10-5
Published by JRP|Ringier, CK editions

$95.00 · add to cart

From 1994 to 2005 Peter Piller earned his living as Head of Documentation in a big Hamburg media agency, responsible for the day-to-day analysis and archiving of over 150 regional newspapers. This activity was the springboard for his artistic work, the Peter Piller Archive. The newspaper photographs were classified according to a subjective methodology involving some 80 collection categories and assigned to a typology of picture journalism that graphically manages the grotesque mundaneness of our news culture and its visual archetypes.

This publication is the most complete compilation to date of Peter Piller’s collection of found images. More than 2000 illustrations chosen from newspapers are organized in such categories as “Touching Cars,” “Sad, Hopeless, Despair, Tristesse,” “Girls Firing Arms,” “Stand-in, Protests,” or “Man and Fire.” An improbable typology of press photography of the last decades.

This publication is part of the series of artists projects edited by Christoph Keller. Personally selected by Keller, for Textfield, as one of his top five from the series.

Art, Christoph Keller, CK editions, DAP, JRP|Ringier, Peter Piller, Photography

Cloud, the, 3

Helen Mirra, Cloud, the, 3
Hardcover, 304 pp., offset 4/1, 140 x 195 mm
Edition of 5000
ISBN 978-3-905770-17-9
Published by JRP|Ringier, CK editions

$45.00 · add to cart

For the past few years Helen Mirra’s writing has been in the form of the index. Dislocated from a source text, the entries point out into the world at large. This volume relies upon John Dewey’s “Reconstruction in Philosophy” (1920). While Dewey’s book is largely about the conceptualization of ideas, Mirra’s project is a materialization of conceptualization, under the auspices of a spare poetics.

This publication is part of the series of artists projects edited by Christoph Keller. Personally selected by Keller, for Textfield, as one of his top five from the series.

Art, Christoph Keller, CK editions, DAP, Helen Mirra, JRP|Ringier, Lyn Hejinian, Theory

Appendix Appendix

Stuart Bailey and Ryan Gander, Appendix Appendix
Softcover, 192 pp., offset 4/1, 215 x 280 mm
Edition of 5000
ISBN 978-3-905770-19-3
Published by JRP|Ringier, CK editions

$29.00 · add to cart

Appendix Appendix is conceived as the sequel to Ryan Gander and Stuart Bailey’s 2003 book “Appendix.” Like its predecessor, it attempts “a translation of practice” based on Ryan Gander’s recent body of work. Neither straight
documentation, nor an “artist’s book,” it pushes for a third way, editing and presenting each individual piece of work in a manner appropriate to its specific nature. In the years since “Appendix,” Gander’s work has increasingly encompassed sound and the moving image in addition to the earlier objects and installations. This shift will directly affect the form of Appendix Appendix.

Born in 1976, Ryan Gander lives and works in London and Amsterdam. His photographs, films, installations and sculptures draw on multiple layers of facts and fiction. He has exhibited in the USA and throughout England and Europe.

The English-born Stuart Bailey (*1973) has forged a formidible creative base for himself in Amsterdam where he has benefited greatly from Dutch design tradition. Since his arrival in the Netherlands, he has become a steady contributor to the art and design culture as a writer, critic, editor, and graphic designer.

This publication is part of the series of artists projects edited by Christoph Keller. Personally selected by Keller, for Textfield, as one of his top five from the series.

Art, CK editions, DAP, Design, Dexter Sinister, Film, Graphics, JRP|Ringier, Ryan Gander, Stuart Bailey, Theory

Weeping

Michael Kim, Weeping
Softcover, 48 pp., risograph 2/1, 4 x 5.75 inches
Edition of 300
Published by Tramnesia

$7.00 · add to cart

Weeping is a collection of newspaper clippings from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal of people crying.

After Modern History, Art, Culture, Distribution, Graphics, Michael Kim, Photography, Tramnesia