This new volume brings together a selection of Jan Verwoert’s most recent writings. COOKIE! is a sequel to Verwoert’s Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want (edited by Vanessa Ohlraun, 2010), and third in a series of books published with the Piet Zwart Institute.

Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want brings together a selection of recent writings by art critic Jan Verwoert for the first time. The book galvanizes central themes Verwoert has been developing in pursuit of a language to describe art’s transformative potential in conceptual, performative, and emotional terms.

Faint on stage? Umm Kulthum never did. It was the people who swooned when she sang. What if, overcome by the power of her song, the singer herself had passed out? What would have ensued during the sudden silence? Umm Kulthum faints on stage is the title Polys Peslikas coined for one of the paintings in his exhibition “The future of colour” at the Cyprus Pavilion during the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.

This volume investigates the cut-up as a contemporary mode of creativity and important global model of cultural production. The term cut-up thereby serves as an open container for a long list of terms and actions that describe the combination and reassembly of existing motifs, fragments, images and ideas from diverse and disconnected origins into newly synthesized entities.

The publication, like the exhibition itself, presents a variety of approaches that, through specific events and historical contexts, survey the theories and practices of radical leftist politics of the 1960s and 1970s and the relationship between politics and aesthetics.

It is often said that we no longer have an addressee for our political demands. But that’s not true. We have each other. What we can no longer get from the state, the party, the union, the boss, we ask for from one another. And we provide. Let’s see how need and care and desire and admiration have been cross-examined, called as witness, put on parole, and made the subject of caring inquiry by e-flux journal authors since 2009.

This publication examines the impact of Oskar Hansen within contemporary visual culture and the redefined role of the viewer since the 1960s. The book includes in-depth interviews with some of the most important protagonists of experimental art in Poland, who investigate the historical impact of the open form.

Once described as “Italy gone Marxist,” Georgia, located in both an advantageous and vulnerable geopolitical position between the Black Sea, Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, enjoys a Mediterranean climate and viniculture in combination with a community-oriented and self-determined spirit. This guidebook maps the social, urban, and art discourses of the country’s post-Soviet years as seen from its hilly capital of Tbilisi.

Conceived while in residency at the library of the Goethe-Institut New York, this issue of Bulletins of The Serving Library used the context of the hosting institution as a thematic starting point. Germany, and often the author’s specific relationship to the German language, is the unifying thread that unites these diverse pieces.

This publication explores themes of the exhibition through its terms—not, however, to confine into isolated conceptual categories, but to interconnect. These terms characterize exhibiting, and emphasize a “between-ness.” Examining a term lays bare its ruptures, shifts, or recreations, as well as social, societal, and cultural changes that have the power to structure through historical conjecture.

Gelatin’s exhibition “Loch,” and the week-long performance that preceded it, form the basis for this book. The catalogue comprehensively documents the Austrian art collective’s elaborate site-specific performance at the 21er Haus in Vienna (June 5–September 29, 2013).

Monday Begins on Saturday is the title of a fantasy novel from the 1960s about a magical research institute in the Soviet Union, written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It is also the title of the first edition of Bergen Assembly, a new triennial of contemporary art.

Devised by Stuart Bailey, Lars Bang Larsen, Angie Keefer, and David Reinfurt, this bulletin is based on Larsen’s just-completed PhD dissertation at the University of Copenhagen, A History of Irritated Material: Psychedelic Concepts in Neo-Avantgarde Art. The idea was to contrive a popular version of his academic thesis by editing it psychedelically.

The second issue of Bulletins of The Serving Library includes contributions by Dimmi Davidoff, Július Koller, David Fischli & Peter Weiss, Rob Giampietro, Anthony Huberman, Junior Aspirin Records, Perri MacKenzie, David Senior, and Jan Verwoert.

Against the historical backdrop of expansions of the notion of sculpture, one could think that the sculptural discipline has become defined by its near arbitrary malleability, since practically anything can be construed as sculpture. Yet there seems to be a revived interest in the history of sculpture, especially traditional techniques, which often appear appealing, even radical, in the age of the Internet and social media.

This book centers around two exhibitions which took place at the Grazer Kunstverein, “Die Blaue Blume” (2007) and “Idealismusstudio” (2008).

The publication includes a series of interviews with artists who exhibited at Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp, over a two-year period, along with a collection of secondary and parallel material produced in collaboration with each artist. Ranging from the humorous to the pseudo-scientific, the artists discuss the methods by which their research is transformed into practice.

New York Conversations is a text film. Shot in a Chinatown storefront converted for this occasion into an improvised kitchen/restaurant, the film documents three days of public conversations between artists, critics, curators, and a free floating public.

What Is Contemporary Art? puts the apparent simplicity and self-evident term into doubt, asking critics, curators, artists, and writers to contemplate the nature of this catchall or default category.

This book presents a study that conceptualizes, tests, and practically applies the spatial strategy for the European Kunsthalle. The investigation is the result of the activities incorporated into a two-year work practice from 2005 to 2007, an iterative “applied research” informed by resonances between theory and practice.

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.

The catalogue Unknown Unknown documents recent work by Polish artist and curator Agniezka Kurant and was published on the occasion of Kurant’s presentation at Frieze Projects 2008.

Documentary practices make up one of the most significant and complex tendencies within art during the last two decades. This anthology seeks to overcome the existing dispersion of texts on these practices and offer new perspectives on this crucial theme.

With its 100 questions and answers from major practitioners of the art world and beyond, this book helps to examine the various parameters for a new institutional model.

1,2,3… Avant-Gardes is dedicated to the ongoing history of the experiment in film and art. This book describes and analyses the works of filmmakers and artists, defining two decades of experiments in Polish avant-garde film, and juxtaposes their work with contributions by international artists, who started to work during the last fifteen years.

“Cerith Wyn Evans” provides a comprehensive overview of the artist’s body of work.

Neue Kunstkritik (New Art Criticism) documents a symposium held at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in September 1999.