Barbara Schroeder – författare

Technological evolution and obsolescence on Earth and in outer space, in a new project by artist Julia ChristensenThis volume documents an ongoing investigation by artist Julia Christensen (born 1976) into how our relentless "upgrade culture"—the perceived notion that we need to constantly upgrade our electronics to remain relevant—fundamentally impacts our experience of time. In a personal narrative interspersed with related interdisciplinary artwork and conversations with experts from different fields (other artists, archivists, academics), Christensen takes readers along a path from the international "e-waste" industry to institutional archives, eventually leading her to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).At JPL, Christensen began a dialog with a group of exo-planetary scientists, engineers and machine learning experts to develop long-lived space mission concepts that include an update of the Voyager spacecrafts’ 1977 "Golden Record," to be embedded on a hypothetical future interstellar spacecraft. She and the scientists are designing an artwork generated by an extraterrestrial system that tells a distinctly new story of life on Earth. In taking on this challenge, Christensen—a female pioneer redefining the intersection of art, technology, and outer space—must envision an artwork for an evolving, autonomously-upgrading spaceship headed toward a potentially habitable planet in another star system. Her years-long investigation into upgrade culture leads to design concepts that potentially transcend technological obsolescence altogether.

Previously uncollected dance writings from the legendary art critic who defined the Pictures Generation, in a handsome clothbound editionPioneering AIDS activist, art critic, educator and curator Douglas Crimp is known for the fluidity and acuity of his writing on an array of passions. His book AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (1987) deconstructed the art world's complicated and mostly disheartening responses to the AIDS crisis; On the Museum's Ruins (1993) explored postmodernist art practices in relation to the politics of institutions; and Before Pictures (2016), a brilliant combination of memoir and criticism, chronicled Crimp's first decade in 1970s New York. This new book collects the critic's incisive pieces on dance (a lifelong interest) and dance on film, which, according to Artforum, "galvanized the field and synthesized histories of ballet, modern dance and postmodern performance." Written from 2006 to 2010, these in-depth essays are devoted to choreographers and filmmakers such as Charles Atlas, Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, Tacita Dean, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Yvonne Rainer. Before his death in July 2019, Crimp penned a new essay specifically for this book that probes the idea and definition of the "dance film." This beautifully designed clothbound volume, which shows Crimp as an outstanding and ever-evolving writer, includes an introduction by curator Lynne Cooke, who co-curated Crimp's landmark 2010 show at the Museo Reina Sofia, Mixed Use, Manhattan. Douglas Crimp (1944-2019) is famed for his scholarly contributions to the fields of postmodern theory and art, institutional critique, dance, film, queer theory and feminist theory. His writings are marked by his desire to merge the often disjunctive worlds of politics, art and academia. From 1977 to 1990, he was the managing editor of the journal October. Before his death, Crimp was Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York.

A long-overdue appreciation of the influential sculpture of Liz Larner and its radically adventurous formal and conceptual vocabularyLos Angeles–based sculptor and installation artist Liz Larner (born 1960) was originally a photographer: in some of her earliest projects, she documented the volatility of bacterial cultures in petri dishes. However, she soon realized that she was more compelled by the dishes themselves and how they presented questions about what an art object can entail. Since then, she has continued to pursue her interest in formal unpredictability through a focus on sculpture and architectural space. Composed of a diverse variety of materials, her sculptures frequently function as optical illusions that seem to bend the space around them. Sometimes rigidly technical in their geometry and at other times soft-edged and amorphous, Larner’s sculptures are striking both for their fluctuation of form and for their representation of spatial politics.Repositioning her enduring formal and material concerns alongside her relationship to a feminist sculptural position, this monograph offers an opportunity to consider Larner’s artistic project within today’s expanded discourses of embodiment, gender and posthumanism, and to recalibrate our understanding of it in relation to male-dominated Postminimalism and installation art, which have often underpinned Larner’s critical reception. Poet Ariana Reines, cultural critic and theorist Catherine Liu, and curators Connie Butler and Mary Ceruti consider the physical properties and sociopolitical implications of the materials present in Larner’s work, which range from ceramic to steel chain to surgical gauze to human hair.

Documentation and testimony from Da Corte's 2020 reinvention of a classic 1960s happeningIn early March 2020, on the cusp of the COVID-19 shutdown, an audience gathered to witness a reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s happening, Chicken, by Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte (born 1980). Performed at the site of Kaprow’s original—the Gershman Y at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia—Da Corte’s first live performance reimagined Kaprow’s chaotic event, which had been orchestrated in 1962 under the auspices of the first Pop art exhibition on the East Coast. While the focus of activity for the performers of Kaprow’s Chicken involved the hawking of live and boiled chickens and their eggs, Da Corte’s performers frantically peddled exquisite yellow orbs made from a variety of materials that represented the moon.Including sketches and reproductions of the objects and costumes constructed for Da Corte’s revision, as well as performance images, scripts, essays and personal accounts reflecting on the event’s impact and significance over the ensuing year, this publication becomes a living document of a moment in time.

A long-form collaborative exploration of images and their enduring traces on the American landscapeIn 2012, Leslie Hewitt (born 1977) and Bradford Young (born 1977) produced Untitled (Structures), a series of silent, nonlinear film vignettes that grew out of an invitation from the Menil Collection, Houston, to consider the museum’s civil rights–era photograph collection. The invitation, which inspired years of research into the aftereffects of the Great Migration, the civil rights movement and the ongoing struggle for human rights, prompted Hewitt and Young to shoot new work in Chicago, Memphis and Arkansas in an array of important sites, found and not found in the museum’s photographs. Exposing the tensions between still photography and moving images, Hewitt and Young’s project interrogates the ways in which history is embedded in contemporary topographic, corporeal and psychological landscapes. Taking the film as its point of departure, this publication furthers the artists’ inquiries into the project’s poetic and political themes, including psychogeography, anti-monumentalism and the intersections of image, memory and architecture.

Fifty years of media critique from the leading exponent of feminist video artThroughout her five-decade career, New York–based artist Dara Birnbaum (born 1946) has relentlessly dissected the process of watching and has argued against the passive absorption of mass media, information and ideology, through various techniques—many of which can be described as subversive reactions or reversals. As media itself has evolved over the years, from the monolithic nature of TV broadcast networks to the Internet’s decentralization of information, Birnbaum’s work has remained consistently prescient and vital, incorporating new technologies and providing a touchstone for generations of younger artists.Including original scholarship by leading critics and curators of moving image and media art, this book examines Birnbaum's key works and concepts to illustrate how much her practice has to teach in a technology and media laden culture that demands constant participation and response.

An exploration of the nature of visibility through a series of camera obscuras paired with silver gelatin prints of the sunIn the two related bodies of work that form this volume’s centerpiece, New York–based photographer Zoe Leonard (born 1961) poses fundamental questions about the medium of photography and the nature of sight. In a series of large-scale installations, the artist employed the principle of the camera obscura, pairing it with gelatin silver photographs of the sun. The image in Leonard’s room-size camera obscuras is immersive and continuous, shifting constantly in response to the fleeting light of the outside world and unraveling in the surrounding space to come into its full vibrancy.Leonard’s camera obscuras have been sited in cities in Europe and the United States, from Venice and London to New York and Marfa. This title explores this body of work through photographs that document these installations in five international cities.

Chronicling an epic multimedia project 10 years in the making, A.K. Burns’ first monograph grapples with climate change, community and sociopolitical agencyDeploying science fiction, material feminism, eco-anarchism, queer theory and technoscience, New York–based artist A.K. Burns (born 1975) explores the fraught relationships between humanity and nature in an epic multimedia work, Negative Space (2015–23). This nonlinear allegory provokes questions about marginalized bodies, environmental fragility and technology. Developed as a cycle of four video installations, Negative Space imagines new relationships to the spaces we occupy and the impact of our bodies in these spaces through imagery, research and critical and creative writings. Set in a speculative present, the tetralogy envisions a new materialist cosmology wherein hierarchical relations are transformed.

Leaving fingerprints and tool marks behind, a São Paulo artist evokes the cycles of the cosmosThis volume takes an expansive view of the bold and influential practice of Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti (born 1971), surveying more than 60 pieces made over the past 15 years. In Verzutti’s art, moons recur as symbols of renewal and the multiple phases that a person or entity can pass through. Her work presents novel modes of perception by orbiting outside set systems of being—zooming out, in a telescopic sense, to the point where the relations we take so seriously here on Earth can be rethought. Vibrant illustrations of individual works and installation views of New Moons, the artist’s first US museum survey, highlight how her approaches to display and presentation reveal such relationships. Presenting original scholarship on the art historical and theoretical aspects of Verzutti’s practice as well as the artist’s own writing, this book offers insights on the inspiration and multifaceted ideas at play across her work.

Exploring the decades-long working relationship between Fred Sandback and Dia Art Foundation, which served as a venue for his “situational” sculptureIn 1968, sculptor Fred Sandback (1943–2003) mounted his first solo exhibition at Heiner Friedrich’s Munich gallery, displaying works made from elastic cord or acrylic yarn that traced planes and volumes in space. Thus began a long-term relationship that extended to Dia Art Foundation, the institution cofounded by Friedrich in 1974. Until now, there has been little published on Sandback’s extraordinary alliance with Dia. Essayists Julian M. Rose, Corinna Thierolf and Edward A. Vazquez, as well as conversation partners Matilde Guidelli-Guidi and Curtis Harvey, unearth and explore archival documents, sketches and photographs to reveal how the institution offered Sandback both space and time to meticulously hone his sculptural interventions in the architectural environments of Dia, including the Fred Sandback Museum in Winchendon, Massachusetts, and Dia Beacon, New York.

Himid invites readers into her process through an intimate view of two new bodies of work that engage themes of power and memoryPublished with The Contemporary Austin and The FLAG Art Foundation, New York.Best known for her paintings that excavate the legacy of colonialism and expand the possibilities of Black representation, Lubaina Himid (born 1954) played a pivotal role in the British Black Arts Movement in the 1980s and became the first Black woman to win the Turner Prize in 2017. Published on the occasion of Himid’s most recent solo exhibition for The Contemporary Austin’s 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, Make Do and Mend provides readers with a rare behind-the-scenes look into Himid’s process for two new bodies of work: a suite of 10 Strategy Paintings depicting Black men and women seated around tables invested in problem-solving the dynamics of power, and 64 sculptural plank paintings, entitled Aunties, that formally evoke East African funerary objects and Postminimalism, as they pay tribute to the relationships between women.

Douglas' first US survey charts his global influence and innovation across 40 works and reimagines D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915)Published with Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.Since the 1980s, Canadian artist Stan Douglas (born 1960) has created films, installations, photographs and other multidisciplinary projects that address moments of rupture where "history could go one way or the other." Across formats, his images recall things that haunt: unresolved moments, political tumult and violent turning points; plots that retain a hold, however imperceptible, on the present. His work operates within the genres of cinema, photography and theater to present a point of view that is always staged. Douglas' rigorous explorations of these charged histories show us how to "think historically in the present" and frame contemporary crises in a longer timeline.

In Carroll’s civic-oriented conceptual art, humor and provocation sit alongside rigorous research and ethical commitmentPublished with Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.Working across performance, publishing, urban intervention and long-term social engagement, New York–based artist Mary Ellen Carroll (born 1961) uses conversation, contracts, zoning codes and bureaucratic processes as the key components of their conceptual language. Their practice unfolds through law, architecture and lived systems rather than discrete objects. The artist often operates in real time and in public view, embracing uncertainty, risk and contradiction as generative conditions. How To Talk Dirty and Influence People offers a comprehensive overview of Carroll’s work since the 1980s. Bringing together performance documentation, new critical essays, commissioned fiction and poetry and conversations with the artist, this publication presents the oeuvre of an artist whose work insists that speech, negotiation and persistence are powerful tools for reshaping social reality.

Since 1992, the Dia Center for the Arts has presented the Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art—an example of Dia's ongoing commitment to cross-disciplinary critical discourse. This fourth volume of collected theoretical and critical essays focuses on Dia's exhibitions from 2001 through 2002, with contributions by Alexander Alberro, Jan Avgikos, Colin Gardner, Dave Hickey, Rosalind Krauss, Miwon Kwon, Ulrich Loock, Richard Shiff and Dirk Snauwaert. These writers analyze the work of internationally recognized artists such as Roni Horn, Alfred Jensen, Bruce Nauman, Max Neuhaus, Panamarenko, Jorge Pardo, Gerhard Richter, Bridget Riley, Diana Thater and Gilberto Zorio.