JRP Ringier – förlag

A history of the last 50 years of curating told through Hans Ulrich Obrist's interviews with legendary curators Anne D'Harnoncourt, Werner Hoffman, Jean Leering, Franz Meyer, Seth Siegelaub, Walter Zanini, Johannes Cladders, Lucy Lippard, Walter Hopps, Pontus Hulten, and Harald Szeemann

Part of JRP|Ringer's innovative Documents series, published with Les Presses du Réel and dedicated to critical writings, this publication comprises a unique collection of interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist mapping the development of the curatorial field--from early independent curators in the 1960s and 70s and the experimental institutional programs developed in Europe and the U.S. through the inception of Documenta and the various biennales and fairs--with pioneering curators Anne D'Harnoncourt, Werner Hoffman, Jean Leering, Franz Meyer, Seth Siegelaub, Walter Zanini, Johannes Cladders, Lucy Lippard, Walter Hopps, Pontus Hulten and Harald Szeemann. Speaking of Szeemann on the occasion of this legendary curator's death in 2005, critic Aaron Schuster summed up, "the image we have of the curator today: the curator-as-artist, a roaming, freelance designer of exhibitions, or in his own witty formulation, a 'spiritual guest worker'... If artists since Marcel Duchamp have affirmed selection and arrangement as legitimate artistic strategies, was it not simply a matter of time before curatorial practice--itself defined by selection and arrangement--would come to be seen as an art that operates on the field of art itself?"

This publication presents photographs shot during the making of Rebel Dabble Babble, a collaboration between Paul McCarthy and his son Damon McCarthy. Rebel Dabble Babble is an installation and video projection work inspired by both Nicholas Ray’s 1955 classic Hollywood film Rebel without a Cause and the rumors attending the off-set relationships between its director and his stars James Dean, Nathalie Wood and Sal Mineo. This densely layered opus expands beyond its references to the 1955 movie to offer a meditation on the archetypes and Oedipal tensions that define family dynamics. In the film, McCarthy and his actors (including Hollywood star James Franco) play hybrids both of Ray’s cinematic characters and the actors who played them. With this mind-bending series of doubles, binaries and inversions, Rebel Dabble Babble presents perversions of interchangeable roles and fetish relationships.

In August 1946, Marcel Duchamp spent five weeks in Switzerland, and stayed at the Hotel Bellevue (today, Le Baron Tavernier) near Chexbres, on Lake Geneva. It was here that he discovered the Forestay waterfall, which was to become the starting point for (and ultimately the landscape of) his enigmatic and final masterpiece, "Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau, 2° le gaz d'éclairage" ("Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas"). Now, for the first time, the full significance of the choice of this waterfall is explored. Among the contributors to this volume are Caroline Bachmann, Stefan Banz, Etienne Barilier, Lars Blunck, Ecke Bonk, Paul B. Franklin, Antje von Graevenitz, Dalia Judovitz, Michael Lüthy, Bernard Marcadé, Herbert Molderings, Adeena Mey, Stanislaus von Moos, Francis M. Naumann, Mark Nelson, Molly Nesbit, Dominique Radrizzani, Roman Signer, Michael R. Taylor, Hans Maria de Wolf and Philip Ursprung.

The mixed-media collages of Kirstine Roepstorff (born 1972) spill over with messy glee. Over the past decade, Roepstorff has built up a large body of collage work that stages and dismantles the imagery of our times, drawing out themes of disinformation, media theory and feminism. She often coheres her collage narratives through archetypal characters, which come to the fore in her new mechanical theater installation, "Stille Teater" ("Quiet Theater"), documented here alongside essays and an interview with the artist.

Using well-used genres like figurative painting, travel photography and landscape, John Miller has, since the 1970s, challenged the function of the author and the concomitant loss of aura for the artwork. He has regularly shifted his practice, actively resisting the reduction of his work to any critical tag. This volume remaps Miller's oeuvre.

Philippe Parreno (born 1964) undermines the notion of the discrete, ownable, copyrighted artwork through collaborations with artists such as Douglas Gordon and Pierre Huyghe, performances, dialogue and the cultivation of exhibitions as real-time encounters. This superbly produced monograph, designed by M/M, offers the first substantial inventory of Parreno's work since the late 1980s, covering his multifarious production from film (such as the famous Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait, made with Douglas Gordon, 2006) to spectacle (Il Tempo del Postino, with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2007). It also includes critical and fictional texts by Maria Lind, Charles Arsène-Henry, Enrique Juncosa and Simon Critchley, as well as an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

A prominent figure in Glasgow's vibrant art scene, Luke Fowler's cinematic collages break down conventional approaches to biographical and documentary filmmaking. Fowler's films have often been linked to the British Free Cinema of the 1950s, and Fowler likewise avoids didactic voice-over and narrative continuity in favor of impressionistic sound and editing. However, Fowler moves beyond simply referencing the work of his predecessors. Mercurially applying the logic, aesthetics and politics of his subjects—who include the composers/musicians Cornelius Cardew and L. Voag, and the psychologist R.D. Laing—to the film he is making about them, he creates atmospheric, sampled histories that reverberate with the vitality of the people he studies. This is the first major publication on Luke Fowler. It provides a comprehensive overview of his artistic production, with color illustrations, an in-depth discussion between Stuart Comer and the artist, and an essay by Will Bradley.

In her photography, videos and installations, Josephine Meckseper (born 1964) sets images of political activism—photographs of demonstrations, newspaper cuttings—against twinkling consumer goods and advertising motifs. This publication concentrates on a new series of works, such as the installation “Ten High” (2007) in which silver mannequins bear anti-war slogans

Polish painter Jakub Julian Ziolkowski (born 1980) mixes elements of the carnivalesque, the decorative and the fantastical in his wild cosmos of mutant humans, lumpy forms and strange circulatory systems—as though Paul Thek had used the hand and eye of Philip Guston to paint his sculptures. Ziolkowski belongs to a generation of Polish artists who have erected their own personal universes as a bulwark against realisms.

Surveying some 20 years of Swiss video art, this book includes works by Alexander Hahn, Klara Kuchta, Eric Lanz, Jean Otth, Pipilotti Rist, Alex Silber and Hannes Vogel, it reviews discussion surrounding the exhibiting of video art and the problems associated with long-term conservation.

“Today,” declares svengali-at-large Malcolm McLaren, “there are two words that sum up the culture: ‘authenticity' is one, and the other… ‘karaoke'! Many artists spend their entire life trying to authenticate, make true, a karaoke culture—but you have to be a magician to make that happen.” This book, like the exhibition from which it stems, is built around McLaren's Shallow, a series of 21 “musical paintings” made from a “grab bag of pop culture's debris over the past 50 years.” The project, curated by Bernd Wurlitzer, brought together music-related works by Delia Brown, Wolfgang Flad, Rodney Graham, Gregor Hildebrandt, Damien Hirst, Alicja Kwade, Jim Lambie, Jack Pierson, Rob Pruitt, Michael Queenland, Anselm Reyle, Michael Sailstorfer and Andreas Schulze. McLaren has proven to be a visionary of pop culture and a pop cultural icon for more than 30 years; with Shallow, he formally announces his identity as an artist.

The works of young American artists Cory Arcangel, Shana Moulton, Jessica Ciocci & Jacob Ciocci of Paper Rad, and Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch are all characterized by an overwhelming color-charged aesthetic, unhinged narratives and a deluge of content that pitches itself against the excesses of consumer culture. Brought together for this publication, their works define a new idiom of energetic critique.

This monograph reviews Xavier Veilhan's monumental sculptures of the past ten years, works that include a buggy distorted as if seen through a rippling pool and a Cubist-style stainless-steel shark. Drawing on references ranging from classical statuary to Futurism and Op art, Veilhan has been compared to artists such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

Neither authentic nor kitsch, readymade nor traditional craft, the works of Swiss artist Valentin Carron (born 1975) play with material ambiguity--fake wood, fake concrete, fake bronze--to unpack the iconography of power and authority. Learning from Martigny offers photographic source material intertwined with images of his sculptures and paintings.

Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed (born 1971) expands the parameters of his studio into the city streets. He has filmed wild boars loose in Paris and a stray cat devouring a mouse in Berlin. Of these public "acts," a term he prefers for its political implications, he has said: "I use passion and rage. Nothing else. I don't do illusions."

John Baldessari (born 1931) is a luminary in the realms of Conceptual art and book art, and one of the most important figures in contemporary art of the last 40 years. Since his sensational Cremation Project of 1970, for which he incinerated every single painting he had made between 1953 and 1966, Baldessari's work has mined the tensions between language, image and sign-making. Baldessari unpicks the very mechanisms of media representation, and even the idea of artistic subject matter itself, using painting, photography, film/video, collage and reliefs, integrating images and text from advertising and movies into his works. Since 1980, Baldessari has worked mostly without text in serial photographs and pictures, and strategies such as overpainting, visual omissions and withheld information have increasingly taken on the earlier function of language. For this superbly designed book, Baldessari has designed a sequence of enigmatically fragmentary and geometrically emphatic images, arranged rhythmically across the volume's landscape format, that slowly accrete narrative as the reader-viewer moves through the book. These fragments, derived largely from B-movie stills, lead into a second chapter that reproduces the complete pictures. Juggling these themes of composition, information, omission and rhythm, Parse consolidates Baldessari's signature concerns into a great work of book art.

Scott King moves fluidly back and forth between art and design. As Art Director of i-D and Creative Director of Sleazenation magazines (for which he was awarded Best Cover and Best Designed Feature of the Year prizes), King's design work is already well-known around the world. As an artist, King plays fast and loose with twentieth-century icons: in "Brian," for example, a viewer recognizes at a glance Lenin's familiar visage, with the face turned sternly to the side, the moustache plumping his marblesque upper lip, but the face on this white bust bears eye makeup and a hint of blush, and feathers sprout from the neck on either side. ("Lenin as Brian Eno in his early Roxy Music days," King explains.) Often, King's art seems virtually indistinguishable from his design work, as in his maps whose cheerfully colored Marimekko-ish dots represent domestic murders. This monograph is dedicated to the many hats of Scott King, whose work has been exhibited widely in London, New York and European galleries including KW Berlin, Portikus, White Columns, Kunstverein Munich and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In Time Action Vision, Christian Höller, of the interdisciplinary Critical Curatorial Cybermedia program at the University of Art and Design in Geneva, conducts 12 conversations on the topics of cultural studies, postcolonialism, globalization, activism and cultural participation. His interlocutors are some of the most respected theoreticians and activists working today: groundbreaking Black Atlantic author Paul Gilroy, Birmingham School founder Stuart Hall (Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain), prolific author Tariq Ali (The Clash of Fundamentalisms), former Weather Underground member (and famed Obama associate) Bill Ayers, Marxist geography scholar David Harvey (Social Justice and the City), London-based art theorist and critic Irit Rogoff, Israeli-born scholar of postcolonialism and transnationalism Ella Shohat, South African postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe, French filmmaker (and Godard collaborator) Jean-Pierre Gorin, cultural studies scholar Lawrence Grossberg, Australian cultural studies scholar Meaghan Morris and Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.

Düsseldorf-based artist Mischa Kuball (born 1959) spent over a year photographing and interviewing 100 immigrants from 100 different nations in Germany's Ruhr region. Together, the individual stories of these immigrants offer a cross-generational perspective on the area and the cultural and industrial transformations that are helping to define Western Germany as the “New Pott” or new melting pot.

French conceptual artist Bruno Serralongue (born 1968) travels to the sites of breaking news, such as the retrocession of Hong Kong to China, working independently alongside photojournalists or on commissions for daily newspapers. In the fashion of early Conceptual art, Serralongue examines the conditions under which information is produced and disseminated in such circumstances.

Subodh Gupta (born 1964) agglomerates everyday Indian household objects such as cooking utensils into monumental entities such as mushroom clouds or skulls, often sabotaging the fiction of intrinsic value through witty inversion and conjunction. Among the fruits of his methods are sculptural works such as bronze mangos, Hindu-swastika ceiling fans and worn-out sandals placed alongside three-dimensional Mona Lisas. Gupta's mostly found materials, which range in texture from aluminum, bronze and stainless steel to fiberglass and neon, identify themselves as Indian in origin, but are recomposed into sculptural meanings accessible to all nationalities (one implication of the title's "common man"). This monograph is published on the occasion of Gupta's first solo exhibition in London; alongside full-color reproductions, it includes an interview between Gupta and Hans Ulrich Obrist and an essay on the artist's work by Martin Herbert.

Artist, publisher and antiquarian bookseller Ben Kinmont (born 1963) blurs the boundaries between artistic production, archiving and curatorial practices, in projects composed for various private and public locations. Prospectus 1988-2010 collects Kinmont's project descriptions written over a 22-year period, and is printed in letter press with special color printing.

It is unsurprising that French photographer Valérie Belin (born 1964) should so plainly declare: “I come from painting.” Although she uses a photographer's equipment, her images are far removed from realism. Whether responding to a still life by Édouard Manet or exploring societal constructions of female beauty, Belin emphasizes textural artifice and molded color, even when working in black and white.

A bricoleur of uniquely American utopian/dystopian cosmologies, Jim Shaw (born 1952) weds themes from American religious history with motifs from 1960s and 70s counterculture, often coining rubrics--such as his invented religion of O--or series under which to unify these narratives. My Mirage is Shaw's earliest sequence of this kind. Conceived between 1986 and 1991, arranged in chapters and constituted of nearly 170 works--drawn, silk-screened, photographed, sculpted, filmed or painted in a different style--My Mirage recounts the wanderings of Billy, a white, middle-class American sucked into the whirlwind of the 1960s and 70s counterculture. An anxious and withdrawn youth consumed by psychotic hallucinations, Billy joins a psychedelic pagan cult, eventually and inevitably returning to the religion of his youth, “reborn” as a fundamentalist Christian. Shaw's broad iconography for this visual bildungsroman ranges from children's books to contemporary art, religious literature and psychedelic poster art, all juxtaposed en face--one image per page--to relay an associative narrative progression. From the start, the project was intended for the book format as its ideal incarnation, and this edition was therefore created in close collaboration with the artist. My Mirage offers one of Shaw's most concise statements on vernacular culture and the wild polarities of religious life in postwar America.

This first volume of JRP|Ringier’s complete John Baldessari writings project traces the genesis and development of the artist’s understanding of art in the early 1960s. More Than You Wanted to Know About John Baldessari presents Baldessari as storyteller, moralist, teacher and occasional gadfly, always concerned to accomplish what he describes as the central task of art making: to communicate in a way that people can understand. These writings address everything from matters of color in sculpture, to the dilemmas of art students in need of ideas, to the art world’s ever-conflicted relationship with money, while always returning to Baldessari’s love of language and his longstanding investigation into the tensions of word and image. With numerous never-before-published texts and facsimiles of original documents, this long-anticipated collection will prove essential reading for anyone involved in contemporary art.