The Josephine Meckseper Catalogue

Josephine Meckseper, The Josephine Meckseper Catalogue

Josephine Meckseper, The Josephine Meckseper Catalogue
Softcover, 64 pp., offset 4/4, 240 x 240 mm
English and German
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-1-933128-00-9
Published by Sternberg Press

$24.00 · add to cart

“Politics and aesthetics morph seamlessly in a world where politics confuses itself with representation, where all attention is swallowed in the communication of a message rather than in the intensity of an event. … In Meckseper’s gallery installation, where fashion images share space with protest documentation, where an idea of relational space rubs shoulders with an idea of lifestyle or boutique design, where an idea of the social morphs into an idea of the commodity relation, many of the elements on display also double as mechanisms of display: shelves, rugs, windows, magazine covers, and wallpaper are the products here. Here, display displays itself. Covers and wrappings conceal nothing, they only reveal themselves. And, reappropriating the very mechanisms of commodity transmission in this way, and in particular by conflating politicized symbols with such functions … , by relocating non-art in art and vice versa, by this orgiastic displacement, this diabolical Feng Shui of signifying forms and materials, the artist also goes to work (like the peasant in her field, the posing model) in the production of her anti-world.”

—John Kelsey

Made in USA

Bernadette Corporation, Made in USA

Bernadette Corporation, Made in USA
Softcover, 128 pp., offset 4/1, 7 x 10 inches
Edition of 500
Fall/Winter 1999-2000
Published by Bernadette Corporation

out of print

condition: very good, shelf wear.

Bernadette Corporation: three people in New York City (today, 1999, or 2000) working together on a new fashion magazine called Made In USA and making art. We came from different backgrounds, but we had something in common: we wanted to change the world because we didn’t like the way it was.

The first issue of Made in USA is devoted to how people create their own spaces, spaces that can be invisible or imaginary. You may have heard this trend called DIY (do-it-yourself) or Amateurism. We like to call it the EMPTY WIDE SPACE trend, a place we can all disappear to, instead of being anti-everything and writing the new manifesto, or instead of being pro-everything and buying the latest CD.

Corporate Mentality

Aleksandra Mir, Corporate Mentality

Aleksandra Mir, Corporate Mentality
Softcover, 256 pp., offset 4/1, 230 x 300 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN 0-9711193-1-7
Published by Sternberg Press

$40.00 · add to cart

Calling for a reassessment of the function of art in late capitalist society, Corporate Mentality focuses on the complex and ambiguous ways artistic production inhabits corporate processes, abandoning the autonomy of the artwork in order to elaborate resistant approaches to a world increasingly determined by commercial strategies and market concerns.

Based on an archive (1995–2001) maintained by Aleksandra Mir, it presents a diverse spectrum of artists who take on business as site, as material, and as subject of their work. As Will Bradley writes in frieze, “The book focuses on … an essential area of interest as artists wake up to the reality of the Clinton-era fantasy of ethical corporatism. The plan came out of Mir and Kelsey’s realization that the publicity industry wasn’t stealing artists’ ideas, but simply employing artists, like Mir herself, who needed a day job. ‘Radical’ aesthetics that had taken at least six months to travel (we’re in New York here) from downtown to uptown were now transferred almost instantaneously, causing artists to reassess their methods.”

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