While style has all but disappeared from art historical and art critical discourse, artistic practice since the 1960’s onwards has seemed increasingly focused on the stylistics of the life-environment, the way in which everyday life itself is formed, designed or stylized. This development calls for a new reading of the relationship between art and the question of style.

Artist Erik Niedling would like to be buried in Pyramid Mountain, the largest tomb of all time, an artwork conceived by writer Ingo Niermann. To make this goal a reality, Niedling lives one year as though it were his last. The Future of Art: A Diary recounts the joys and horrors of that year.

In 2014, Paul McCarthy installed the massive inflatable sculpture Tree at Place Vendôme in Paris. The sculpture’s shape was at once reminiscent of a sex toy, a Christmas tree, and a Hans Arp artwork. It caused a public outcry, the artist was attacked, and the work vandalized and ultimately removed. This book brings together conversations with scholars, artists, curators, and writers, which reflect on McCarthy’s work.

Anton Vidokle is an artist who captures the attention of 70,000 people each day through e-flux, as well as unitednationsplaza, Martha Rosler Library, and other projects. The essays and interview in this book highlight how two threads in Vidokle’s practice—unobtrusiveness and the freedom of self-sufficiency—are often interwoven, and are at the center of an intellectual proposal that undermines common assumptions about making art.

For the last decade, Markus Weisbeck has been redefining the prevailing client-designer relationship and subsequently challenging what constitutes a graphic design practice today. This pocket book presents a selection of seminal graphic design projects developed by Weisbeck and his firm, Surface, over the last ten years.

Composed of official committee members and illicit “agents,” the INS harks back to early twentieth-century avant-gardes, producing declarations, reports, public hearings, broadcasts, and research documents, as well as orchestrating more covert media infiltrations, all governed by the objective, set out in the “Founding Manifesto,” of mapping, entering, and occupying the space of death through literature, philosophy, culture, and technology.

Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte is a screenplay that cannot be a film; it is a film that can only be on paper. If the property of a film producer, Bernadette Corporation claims Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte would be left derelict, abandoned to vagabonds and squatters. It is intended as a narrative of messy revenge, ruined by the screenplay form.

Invalid Format is an archive of the widespread publishing activities of Triple Canopy, the editorial collective and online magazine based in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin. The book explores how works produced for the screen might be transposed to the codex in a way that recalls that former context while also fully inhabiting the page.

The Rough Law of Gardens documents Olaf Holzapfel and Nahum Tevet’s eponymous joint exhibition and explores the intergenerational differences between two unique artists. Both artists’ work rejects the global logic of growth and traverses the bounds of sculpture and painting: each of their practices involves ideas to do with materiality, learning, and memory.

This catalogue provides the reader with the opportunity to read six of Keren Cytter’s scripts for films that are being shown in the exhibition at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, May 8 – August 15, 2010.

Lines towards Another is the first anthology on the work of Australian contemporary artist Tom Nicholson. Spanning drawing, sculpture, public actions, sound, installation, video, and performance, Nicholson’s work since the 1990s has engaged with critical questions around history, politics, narrative, and representation.

The 60th Jahresring takes the form of a compilation of artist interviews and offers a snapshot of a highly active art scene that stretches from Berlin, as a new international center for art. Nicolaus Schafhausen put a series of questions to thirty-one art practitioners, less geared toward the artists’ respective praxis and more toward the conditions under which it arises.

The seventh volume in the Fogo Island Arts publication series accompanies the eponymous exhibition curated by Alexandra McIntosh and Nicolaus Schafhausen and presented at the Fogo Island Art Gallery in 2016.

The No-Frills book series was developed in the early 1980s as a translation of the non-branding strategy of supermarket staples to mass-market genre fiction. The result of research into this experimental series, Signature Strengths also includes complete reproductions of its books—Western, Mystery, Science Fiction, and Romance.

For almost fifty years, Lydia Okumura has explored the realm of geometric abstraction. She challenges our perception of space through sculptures, installations, and works on paper that blur distinctions between dimensions.

This publication accompanies Australian multidisciplinary artist Nicholas Mangan’s survey exhibition “Limits to Growth.” The works in the show tackle narratives from his own geographical region—Asia Pacific, in which his home country of Australia plays a colonial role—and weaves them into a bigger picture to take into account the global economy, resource extraction, and the ultimate power of the sun.

Hardly a gray matter of catching the spirit of our present. From the sun-drenched-ness of the Dubaian atmosphere, to the feathery encounter in a secret printing workshop, words and materials are discreetly—spectrally, outspokenly—put forward: a bunch of residents cruising the seas of nine temporary realities, the result of an ongoing swapping of facts and speculations from the earthly realm.

“German entrepreneurs are planning to outstrip the ancient Egyptians by building the world’s largest pyramid on a derelict site in eastern Germany – which they claim will eventually contain the remains of millions of people in concrete burial blocks.”
—The Independent

Solution 168-185: America is the fourth book in the Solution Series. Opting for the United States of America—which the author says is “still the most proficiently colonial place” [he knows]—Tirdad Zolghadr provides a compilation of highly entertaining “solutions” for a nation suspicious of progressive politics yet rich in its history of harboring and cultivating the avant-garde.

The publication Deliquescing accompanies Steve Bishop’s 2018–19 solo exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Both the exhibition and publication reflect a body of research that focuses on the fragility of memory and the potential for its preservation, defying the gradual breakdown of matter through the effects of time.

Olaf Holzapfel explores the interstices between craft and art, and consequently, between orality and literacy. Much of his work presented in this catalogue—framework installations, hay images, and straw images are displayed in this book—was made together with farmers and craftspeople; by transforming age-old handiwork into contemporary art, Holzapfel unsettles the division between nature and culture, and tradition and modernity.

Initiated by Swedish artist Anna Lundh, Visions of the Now is a reconsideration of the 1966 Stockholm festival Visioner av Nuet (Visions of the Present), which aimed to examine the impact of technology on humanity, society, and art; half a century later, we are immersed in the technology that was still “new” in 1966.

As the first significant overview of the work by artist Olivia Plender, this monograph navigates through the evolving attitudes to historical and contemporary forms of communication and education that her research-based practice has explored for the last ten years.

Turning Inward comprises a selection of texts by international artists, critics, and curators, which aims to renegotiate the relationship between centers and peripheries in contemporary art worlds. If we are to turn our attention away from geographical—that is, horizontal—relations, we can conceive of the central and peripheral as vertical phenomena that can coexist spatially in the shapes of social constructions, genealogies, or epistemic formations.

Gonda, a new book by Ursula Mayer and Maria Fusco, experiments in cinematic and linguistic registers through polyphonic monologue. Taking the form of a ciné-roman, the book is based on Mayer’s 16mm film of the same name, with a screenplay written by Maria Fusco and commissioned by Film London.

Jesse Jones’s 2013 film The Other North represents the culmination of her research in South Korea and the Demilitarized Zone. It features Korean actors reenacting The Steel Shutter, a little-known documentary of a “conflict resolution therapy session” held by American psychologist Carl Rogers in the early 1970s with a group of individuals from various political and socioeconomic backgrounds in Northern Ireland.

Templates is a new publication which accompanies Slaattelid’s exhibitions at Bergen Kunsthall (2019) and Kunstnernes Hus (2020). In Kystverket Slaattelid repeatedly depicts a prosaic yet charged motif, consisting of a coastal landscape with a lantern (navigation marker) and—in silhouette against the sky—an operator adjusting the light signal.

Hubs and Fictions, originally a touring forum, invited international curators, writers, and producers to probe how fiction plays out in a globally distributed art-world ecology, and how infrastructures are invented against its background. The book functions as a deliberately discontinuous reader; it juxtaposes documents, negotiations, and reflections from and on these conversations.

“Verbal sculptures” and “strange archaeologies”—Maria Loboda’s recent works expose prior events through sparse details of entangled secrets, material contradictions, and masked collusions. Oh, Wilderness demonstrates the artist’s aesthetic equation between language and materiality as it works the other way around, translating materials expressive of a certain weak semiotics to language.

Mime Radio was performed and written orally by French artist Benjamin Seror at a series of events over a two-year period, then transcribed and edited into a novel. The story revolves around a cast of eccentric characters, who meet at the Tiki Coco, a bar in Los Angeles that holds “Challenging Reality Open Mic” nights for amateur inventors and performers.

Unpayable Debt offers a black feminist reading of the political architecture of the global present. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred, the concept of the unpayable debt relates post-Enlightenment versions of ethical and economic value to colonial and racial subjugation.

In this book, the renowned art historian and writer maps the institutional and quasi-institutional framework for contemporary art that sprawls across the globe. He then delves into a powerful form of curatorial activism rising up in the exhibitionary complex: Open Strike.

What ideas and memories do the oceans hold in their depth and reanimate in response to the trembling of earth’s ecosystems? How to escape the silos of research and inquiry that narrow and fragment the knowledge of the oceans? Asking new questions and using multiple registers of sensing can lead to a revitalization of the ways humans engage with the oceans at this precarious moment and create new pathways for reparative justice.

In response to recent discussions about the value assigned to artworks, art critic and theorist Isabelle Graw introduces the term “value reflection.” Rather than an objective quality, value reflection is the potential for the specific artistic labor expended for artworks to be found in them. This book focuses on the artistic production of writer Francis Ponge and artists Jack Whitten and Banksy, and engages with the different types of value reflection detected in their work.

Training for the Future is a training camp where audiences are turned into trainees to “pre-enact” alternative scenarios and reclaim the means of production of the future. This handbook gathers training manuals, interviews and documentation of the various training camps that took place from 2018 to 2021.

The essays assembled in this volume were all written during the past twenty years or so—a period in which Ina Blom pursued art critical writing alongside more academic work and when the boundaries between the two genres were at times deliberately blurred.

The notion of the handmade has shifted from the margins to center stage. Craft’s value is increasingly recognized across creative, economic, social, cultural, and political contexts. Because of its widespread appropriation, and the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries, the meaning of handicrafts is changing.