Massimiliano Gioni – författare

A timely exploration of artists’ enduring preoccupation with what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological changeNew Humans traces a diagonal history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the work of more than 150 artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers, highlighting key moments when dramatic technological and social changes spurred new conceptions of humanity and new visions for its possible futures.The book – and its accompanying exhibition that will inaugurate the New Museum’s expanded building designed by OMA/Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu – connects the age of automatons to the burgeoning era of generative AI and brings together a cavalcade of humans becoming machines and machines becoming human.Features new and recent works by: Sophia Al-Maria, Lucy Beech, Cyprien Gaillard, Pierre Huyghe, Tau Lewis, Daria Martin, Wangechi Mutu, Precious Okoyomon, Berenice Olmedo, Philippe Parreno, Hito Steyerl, Jamian Juliano-Villani, and Anicka Yi in the context of works by twentieth-century artists and cultural figures including Francis Bacon, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Salvador Dalí, Ibrahim El-Salahi, H.R. Giger, Kiki Kogelnik, Hannah Höch, Tatsuo Ikeda, Gyula Kosice, El Lissitzky, Lennart Nilsson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Carlo Rambaldi, Germaine Richier, and Elsa von Freytag-LoringhovenEssays by: Aaron Betsky, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Erin Christovale, Meghan Forbes, Hal Foster, Sophie Lewis, Eric Michaud, Katy Siegel, McKenzie Wark, and Gary Zhexi ZhangFeaturing a flipbook built into the book’s cover

Definitive monograph on America's most challenging and influential artistLos-Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy (b.1945) creates Disneyesque installations, sculptures of animal/vegetable/human hybrids and slapstick performances in a purge of a national subconscious. The psycho-sexual desires and anxieties induced by the media and the built environment of contemporary America emerge in his collisions of plastic prosthetic limbs and condiments that stand in for bodily fluids.These works have been variously deployed: through live actions, often documented on video, and more recently in outsized figures and artificial rural environments, combined in overtly sexual ways. McCarthy's work echoes that of European artists such as Joseph Beuys or the Viennese Aktionistes, but gives 'action art' a postmodern twist.This new revised and expanded edition includes contributions by luminaries such as Kristine Stiles, Ralph Rugoff, Massimiliano Gioni and Robert Storr.

The most comprehensive monograph to date on the groundbreaking Swiss artist and international art star, Pipilotti RistA pioneer of experimental video art, Pipilotti Rist is celebrated for her expansive installations that bridge the spaces between fine art and popular culture, the natural world and the technological sublime. Through vivid colors, audaciously sensuous imagery, and playful sexuality, Rist's art—which ranges from single-channel videos to multilayered environments—absorbs viewers in a hyperfeminine aesthetic interlaced with deeper themes of pain, innocence, and transformation.

The most comprehensive monograph in print on this provocative artist, who has helped to redefine contemporary artThis thorough, multifaceted assessment of Raymond Pettibon's entire career to date includes nearly 700 images, contributions from important figures in the art-historical and cultural fields, and a recent interview with the artist. Beginning with childhood drawings, the book moves through to his mature work, which embraces both high and low culture.

The work of a pioneering artist, whose explorations of mass culture, consumerism, and politics remain highly relevant todayThis richly illustrated monograph brings together Bayrle's paintings, sculptures, drawings, wallpapers, installations, and prints from the past years to showcase his lasting influence and continued relevance. Bayrle, along with Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, is considered a pivotal figure of the German Pop movement, and his early adoption of computer-aided art production anticipated today's digital aesthetics. This remarkable book highlights the full breadth and complexity of Bayrle's career to date.

The first book to explore two of the biggest names in modern and contemporary art side by side, Marcel Duchamp and Jeff KoonsIn the first half of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp redefined what we consider art and what it means to be an artist. Many of his ideas return, transformed, in the work of Jeff Koons, born when Duchamp was 68 years old and whose own career lit up the art world of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This is the first book to explore the affinities between these two highly influential artists, whose creative universes similarly question the function of objects and the allure of commodities. International art historians, writers, and curators contribute their expertise on topics such as each artist's persona, as well as reflecting on the influence of technology and sexuality on their work. The publication of this intriguing book coincides with an exhibition at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, opening in May 2019.

A critical examination of the work of one of the most significant and original sculptors and installation artists living todayJamaican-born Nari Ward is best known for his large-scale sculptures and installations, many of which are created from unexpected materials collected around his urban neighborhood. His incisive works frequently comment on issues surrounding race, poverty, consumerism, and diasporic identity in American culture. This book accompanies a major retrospective at the New Museum, highlighting his work from the early 1990s – including Amazing Grace (1993).

A monograph surveying the storied career of German artist Hans Haacke, on the occasion of a major retrospective exhibitionBorn in Germany in 1936, Hans Haacke is known for his intellectual and politically engaged art that has long shed light on systems of power. A pioneer of institutional critique, conceptual art, and environmental art, Haacke creates incisive, often site-specific works that call upon the viewer to engage or participate and thereby question invisible structural dynamics at play in society. This book offers an opportunity to revisit the artist’s thought-provoking career in light of contemporary culture.

The work of seminal contemporary artist Chris Burden, insightfully contextualized around major themes, illuminates a practice that is as unique as it is influential. For four decades, Chris Burden’s work has redefined the boundaries of the sculptural field. Whether subjecting himself to extremes of physical suffering or reconfiguring forgotten urban objects and toy models to create potent signifiers of a time and place, the brute force of Burden’s work in the physical realm reverberates through the psychic one. On the occasion of the New Museum’s focused survey of Burden’s work, this book provides new perspectives on his art. Organized around themes like the Myth of the American West, the Institution, Gender Roles, and Model Making, the book reexamines preoccupations that span the artist’s long career.

Over the past thirty years, Jim Shaw has become one of America's most visionary artists, moving between painting, sculpture, and drawings, while building connections between his own psyche and the larger political, social, and spiritual history of America. Shaw's imagery is mined from comic books, record covers, conspiracy magazines, obscure religious pamphlets, and other cultural refuse to produce a portrait of the American subconscious out of his personal obsessions. Shaw, along with fellow Michigan native Mike Kelley, moved to California in the 1970s to attend Cal Arts and was one of a number of notable artists to emerge from the school in the early 1980s. Shaw's work is distinguished by rigorous formal and structural analyses of neglected forms of vernacular culture. Accompanying a major exhibition, this is the first major monograph devoted to the entirety of the artist's unique, multifaceted career.

Menesunda Reloaded marks the first-ever presentation outside of Argentina of the legendary work, La Menesunda, first envisioned by Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín in 1965. Over the past 60 years, Minujin (born 1943), a pioneering Argentinian artist, has developed happenings, performances, installations and video works that have greatly influenced generations of contemporary artists in Latin America and beyond.The catalog features a text by Zanna Gilbert of the Getty Research Institute that focuses on La Menesunda in the context of Argentinian and international art of the 1960s. Also included in the catalog are a new interview with Minujín and Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neelson Artistic Director of the New Museum, and Helga Christoffersen, New Museum Associate Curator; and a contribution from environmental artist Christo.Menesunda Reloaded is part of an ongoing series of solo exhibitions that provide a focused exploration of artists’ practices and continues the New Museum’s history of bringing first-ever presentations of major works to New York.

Published for Jordan Casteel’s major New Museum show, Within Reach surveys her paintings exploring the nuances of Black subjectivityIn her large-scale oil paintings, New York-based artist Jordan Casteel (born 1989) takes up questions of Black subjectivity and representation by examining the gestures, spaces and forms of nonverbal communication that underpin portraiture. “There is a certain amount of mindfulness that it requires ... to be present with someone in a moment.” she explains. “I’ve always had an inclination towards seeing people who might be easily be unseen.”Published for Casteel’s first solo museum exhibition in New York, this volume brings together 40 large-scale paintings from throughout her career, including works from the celebrated series Visible Man (2013-14) and Nights in Harlem (2017), along with recent cropped “subway paintings” and portraits of her students at Rutgers University-Newark. Whether depicting former classmates from Yale, nude and in serene repose; street vendors near her home in Harlem; anonymous New Yorkers huddled on the subway; or her own students, posed largely in domestic interiors among their personal belongings, she explores how both public and private spheres can serve as frames for an inner life.This generously illustrated, oversized publication honors the larger-than-life scale of the artist's work. It is the first comprehensive monographic publication on Casteel’s work and includes texts by Dawoud Bey, Amanda Hunt and Lauren Haynes, and conversations conducted with the artist by Massimiliano Gioni and Thelma Golden.

Art as anthropology: uncovering and upending regimes of visibilityOver the past decade, Canadian-born, Paris-based artist Kapwani Kiwanga (born 1978) has created complex installations, sculptures, performance lectures and films that consider marginalized histories and colonial economies. Drawing from her training in anthropology and the social sciences, Kiwanga’s ethereal environments bring attention to the backstories of systems of authority and their embodied effects.Accompanying the exhibition at the New Museum, this catalog provides one of the most complete overviews of Kiwanga's work in sculpture and installation. Inspired by the early 18th-century New York legal codes known as “lantern laws”—ordinances that required all Black, Indigenous or mixed-race individuals over 14 to carry lanterns or lit candles after dark if not accompanied by a white person—her new commission for the New Museum weaves together different layers of opacity and transparency through the use of large-scale curtains and mirrored surfaces, playing with natural light and darkness.

A career-spanning survey of the celebrated and resonant work of Arthur JafaAcross his career, Arthur Jafa has sought to find new visual forms to capture the rhythm and realities of Black life in America. Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony is the most comprehensive survey of his work to date, spanning over four decades of his career and more than twenty-five acclaimed works.Richly illustrated with 165 images representing the full breadth of the artist’s practice, including his films, videos, installations, photographs, and sculptures, this expansive publication includes Jafa’s most acclaimed works, such as the resounding Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) and the Golden Lion–winning The White Album (2018), as well as other impactful large-scale video and film installations and a range of sculptural and photographic objects.In his early work as a cinematographer through his more recent video installations, Jafa has been gradually building a filmic language whose syncopations and textures match the aspirations of Black popular music. As part of this task, Jafa has built a staggering visual archive of images that cuts across histories and arenas of culture. This material is cut, collaged, montaged, and rearranged into 'affective proximities' that illuminate and unsettle the ways that race is communicated and experienced through contemporary media today.Confrontational and deeply affecting, Jafa’s work turns an unflinching eye toward the darkness of the past while embodying and mirroring our contemporary obsession with mass images and 'content.' Through prolonged and thoughtful engagement with social media, internet culture, cinematic history, and popular music, Jafa wields an arsenal of images across his various working mediums, communicating both the realities and appearances of contemporary Black life, along with its mass consumption, through film, video, sculpture, photography, and large-scale installations. His acclaimed and resonant films have captured the collective imagination and experience of America amidst the nation’s growing awareness of the long history of institutional violence directed toward the Black community, placing this awakening against a backdrop of the century-long ascension of Black culture, music, and entertainment to the forefront of our national identity.Accompanying a major solo exhibition at the New Museum in New York, the book includes an interview with Jafa by Massimiliano Gioni;  a roundtable discussion with Gary Carrion-Murayari, Ekow Eshun, Martine Syms, and Hamza Walker; and new contributions from preeminent scholars and writers, including Judith Butler, Mark Godfrey, J. Hoberman, Kara Keeling, Lawrence Rinder, and Simone White. Together, the exhibition and accompanying book will constitute the most comprehensive presentation, to date, of one of the most important and influential artists of this generation.

A comprehensive survey of one of the most innovative, boundary-breaking artists working today Theaster Gates's work in the areas of social practice, interdisciplinary performance, archival investigation, and multi-faceted object making have made him one of the most compelling artists of the twenty-first century. Accompanying a major mid-career retrospective at the New Museum, New York, opening in November 2022, this book covers the full range of Gates's artistic activities over the past twenty years, capturing his expansive conception of art as a social sculptor, organizer, improviser, and preservationist.

The most comprehensive survey to date of the legendary feminist artist Judy ChicagoOne of the most important contemporary American artists, Judy Chicago is known for multimedia works that embrace an explicitly feminist methodology. Accompanying a major retrospective at the New Museum, this book showcases Chicago’s tremendous impact on American art and presents the full breadth of her career across installation, sculpture, drawing, textiles, photography, stained glass, and printmaking. Featuring an extensive selection curated by Chicago of works by women artists across history, the book also highlights her critical role as an activist and cultural historian who has reshaped the canon. This dedicated section features Chicago’s ‘personal museum’ of women artists and historical figures whom she has placed within her own alternative canon, including Hilma af Klint, Simone de Beauvoir, Leonora Carrington, Elizabeth Catlett, Emily Dickinson, Barbara Hepworth, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, Virginia Woolf, and many others. The book presents works from across her sixty-year career, from her experiments with Minimalism to her revolutionary feminist artworks and her later works on themes of social inequity, environmentalism, and the construction of masculinity.

For Los Angeles–based sculptor, painter, filmmaker and installation artist Kaari Upson (born 1972), possessions are the gateway into the human psyche.Contained within them are all the hopes, dreams, fears and desires of their owners. Like a shaman, Upson creates her own gateways, using unorthodox techniques to imbue everyday objects such as mattresses and bags with an arcane magic. The result is auratic works that act as powerful symbols of absence, failed aspirations and loneliness.Part of the 2000 Words series conceived by Massimiliano Gioni and published by DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, this monograph contains an essay by Ali Subotnick that examines Upson’s pseudoscientific approach to her art that allows her to create confounding work that is simultaneously familiar and foreign.

Nathalie Djurberg (*1978) and Hans Berg (*1978) create animated worlds with objects, music and moving images – dreamlike realms where we might lose ourselves. Their playfully told fables hold both humour and darkness, putting any moral laws of gravity out of action. Djurberg’s vibrant stop-motion animations and sculpture groups accompanied by Berg’s electronic music form scenic installations in a surrealist vein. These intense chamber pieces enact fragments of memories repressed between innocence and shame, or feverish daydreams of role play and desire. The shadowy landscapes, sealed rooms and harshly-lit scenes of their films are inhabited by a group of possessed figures seemingly set on devouring one another. The exhibition and fully illustrated catalog describe an inner voyage, an attempt to make existence more understandable in a flow of impulses and impressions.Exhibitions: Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 16.6.–9.9.2018Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART), Rovereto, 5.10.2018–13.1.2019Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt, 28.2.–26.5.2019

Imbued with the collective memories of Romanian culture, Andra Ursuta's (born 1979) work uses her grim past to tackle our harsh present. This book includes an essay by Ali Subotnik on Ursuta's stark recreations of cultural turmoil.

Through painting, performance, sculpture and design, New York–based artist Kerstin Brätsch (born 1979) depicts the mutation of images over time, and the volatility of data consumption. This book includes an essay by Massimiliano Gioni on her engagement with the social lives of images.

A monograph exploring Smith’s fascination with the human body and its ability to project emotional vulnerabilityThe art of Kiki Smith (born 1954) confronts what it means to be human. Her sculptures are often feminine figures that become personifications of sexuality, trauma and abjection. This monograph contains an essay by Margot Norton examining Smith’s fascination with the human body and its ability to project emotional vulnerability.

Jeff Koons (born 1955) became prominent in the mid 1980s by targeting the meaning of art and spectacle in a media-saturated era. Since his first solo exhibition which consisted of small-scale assemblages of toys and found objects, his later works evolved into the now iconic monumental pieces which can be found permanently installed at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. His methodical inquiry into the ways in which everyday items become works of art by reflecting our desires draws attention to the continuity of images as they pass through time, combining art historical references with colloquial imagery.This monograph, part of the 2000 Words series published by DESTE, features an essay by Massimiliano Gioni and Natalie Bell, which examines Koons' parallels to Duchamp and the function of readymades over the course of his career. Koons has created a prophecy fueled by the ecstasy of materialism, where the image or object becomes its own ouroboros consuming itself.

A concise introduction to the subversive career of contemporary art’s great tricksterNew York– and Milan-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960) has provoked controversy and admiration alike with his subversive sculptures, installations and publications. His playful, satirical body of work—which includes Comedian (2019), a banana duct-taped to the wall at ArtBasel Miami Beach, and America (2016), the 18-karat gold toilet he later installed in the Guggenheim’s restroom—reflects a pointed critique of institutional and cultural norms in the art world and society at large.Part of the 2000 Words series conceived by Massimiliano Gioni and published by DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, this monograph contains an essay by Gioni that excerpts his previous writings on Cattelan, his close friend and collaborator.

Documenting Koons’ multisensory homage to the sun god, a timeless dialogue with ancient historyThe definitive record of Jeff Koons’ (born 1955) Apollo Wind Spinner, his transcendent offering to Apollo, this volume brings together lush plates of the eponymous 2022 DESTE exhibition alongside an essay by Daniel Birnbaum and an extensive interview with the artist by Dakis Joannou. Koons’ multisensory installation shone a light on the interwoven history of Greek myth, readymade sculpture and contemporary art to wide acclaim—so much so that the inhabitants of Hydra voted unanimously to have the work remain permanently installed on the roof of the DESTE Slaughterhouse building.The many threads of this particular story are explicated here through a detailed "glossary of terms," tracing references from Plato to Duchamp and enlightening the reader on one of Koons’ most distinctive works of the last decade.