Independent Curators Inc.,U.S. – förlag

Since 1981, Independent Curators International (ICI) has run a series in which prominent New York artists talk about their work to an audience gathered at the artist's studio. The New York Studio Events program has visited some 200 distinguished artists throughout its history, including Janine Antoni, Mel Bochner, Louise Bourgeois, Petah Coyne, Leon Golub, David Levinthal, Mary Lucier, Laurie Simmons, Richard Tuttle, Fred Wilson, Vik Muniz and Andrea Zittel. Inside the Studio shares for the first time the invaluable archive of audio recordings made during these events, excerpting from approximately 75 of the most fascinating to provide an exceptional oral record of these artists' thinking about their working processes, conceptual issues, the current scene and artists whose work they themselves admire. Founded in 1975, ICI's mission is to enhance the understanding and appreciation of contemporary art through traveling exhibitions and other activities that reach a diverse national and international audience. Collaborating with a wide range of eminent curators over the years, ICI has created some 100 exhibitions that collectively have included the work of more than 2,500 artists, presented at over 450 art spaces located throughout the United States, and 20 other countries.

Jess: To and From the Printed Page focuses on the artist simply known as "Jess" (1923-2004), and celebrates his lively and lifelong dialogue with poets, poetry and printed matter. Published to accompany the iCI touring exhibition, it features collages made for publication, the books and magazines in which they were reproduced, as well as many previously unreproduced paintings, drawings and assemblages. The book offers a fresh perspective on Jess's work by specifically addressing the interrelation between his art and the California literary culture of which he was a part. It also explores the intimacy of the collaborations and conversations in which he participated over five decades, and points to his effect on younger artists today--through his use of "pop" materials in collage and paint, his early homoerotic themes and his enjoyment of the book format as a compositional vehicle.

What is contemporary curatorial thought? Current discourse on the topic is heating up with a new cocktail of bold ideas and ethical imperatives. These include: cooperative curating, especially with artists; the reimagination of museums; curating as knowledge production; the historicization of exhibition-making; and commitment to extra-artworld participatory activism. Less obvious, but increasingly of concern, are issues such as rethinking spectatorship, engaging viewers as co-curators and the challenge of curating contemporaneity itself. In these five essays, art historian and theorist Terry Smith surveys the international landscape of current thinking by curators; explores a number of exhibitions that show contemporaneity in recent, present and past art; describes the enormous growth world wide of exhibition infrastructure and the instability that haunts it; re-examines the contribution of artist-curators and questions the rise of curators utilizing artistic strategies; and, finally, assesses a number of key tendencies in curating as responses to contemporary conditions. Thinking Contemporary Curating is the first book to comprehensively chart the variety of practices of curating undertaken today, and to think through, systematically, what is distinctive about contemporary curatorial thought.

EN MAS' is one of the first publications to give serious scholarly attention to contemporary art works considering carnival in the 21st century, filling a gap in two decades of exhibitions of contemporary Caribbean art that did not explicitly address carnival as an artistic practice. A hybrid exhibition catalogue and academic reader with a lively carnivalesque feel, it presents nine newly commissioned artist projects by John Beadle, Charles Campbell, Christophe Chassol, Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Marlon Griffith, Hew Locke, Ebony G. Patterson, Lorraine O'Grady and Cauleen Smith. The book also includes a timeline of diasporic pan-Caribbean carnivals, tracing the influence of Caribbean carnivals and festivals on the theater, dance, and Broadway stages in New York and London, in contemporary art galleries and biennials from São Paulo to Havana to Gwangju, at the Olympics as well as in protest and other movements.

Edited by Dore Ashton, and instigated by Komar & Melamid projects to salvage Russia's remaining monuments to totalitarianism, Monumental Propaganda mixes levity and seriousness, presenting 26 proposals by among others Arman, Ericson & Ziegler, Joseph Kosuth, Valery Aisenberg, Eidia, IRWIN, Ilia Kitup, Komar & Melamid, Alexander Zosimov and Mark Tansey.

Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, and More...On Collecting examines the collecting impulse in its various incarnations, raising fundamental questions about why we collect and why we collect what we collect. Surprising and eccentric, this publication features three utterly different collections: Pictures (and other contemporary art objects) from the renowned Robert Shiffler Foundation in Ohio; Patents, a selection of the Smithsonian's collection of patent models submitted to the US Patent Office in the nineteenth century; and finally Monkeys, from a private New York-based collection of approximately 1,600 sock monkeys toys. Running the gamut from high art to the unmapped inspirational dregs of American culture, Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, and More...On Collecting draws on such diverse talents as Ingrid Schaffner--adjunct curator at ICA Philadelphia--and artist Arne Svenson, whose photographs of the sock monkeys combine the haunting and the beautiful. Also included are such artists as Janine Antoni, Willie Coles, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Christian Marclay, Alan Rath, Jason Rhoades, Kay Rosen, Jessica Stockholder and Lisa Yuskavage, among many others.

Family photographs are a universally familiar genre, and an intimate one, which makes this collection an accessible entry point for its deceptively simple but deeply complex social and representational issues. In turning their cameras on their own households,17 artists including Miguel Calder*n, Ari Markopoulos, Chris Verene and Gillian Wearing consider the family as a dynamic social institution, and confirm, if there was any doubt, that its affairs are never simply personal, but rather are entwined with and illustrative of broader historical, anthropological and economic considerations. Using the languages of snapshots, documentary and staged photography, as well as conceptual and performance art, and focusing on the undercurrents of contemporary domestic life, these artists link the family to class and financial issues, gender and ethnic stereotypes, shifting marital and generational roles, and the impacts of war and immigration. Emotionally incisive and visually inventive, Shoot the Family transforms that most common artifact--the family photograph--into an illuminating investigation of contemporary culture. Essay by Ralph Rugoff and a short story by Lynne Tillman.

Slightly Unbalanced surveys the prevalence of psychological neurosis as a subject in contemporary art. During the past 15 years, inspired by the work of several prominent older artists, a younger generation has expanded the contemporary art vocabulary to encompass a subject that is now well known by the general public. Cumulatively, they make use of psychology as a kind of lingua franca--we all know what the symptoms of neurosis are, if not the particular diagnoses. Beginning with historical work by Louise Bourgeois, Mike Kelley, Bruce Nauman and Cindy Sherman and proceeding to more recent work by artists including Alex Bag, Sophie Calle, Beth Campbell, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Sarah Hobbs, Sean Landers, Cary Leibowitz, Dave McKenzie, Tony Oursler, Danica Phelps, William Pope.L, Ada Ruilova, Ward Shelley and David Shrigley, this exhibition catalogue encompasses the range of media prevalent today: video art, installations, photographs, paintings and drawings.