Washington University, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum – förlag

Artists and architects have long used sketches, notes, and sculptural models to explore or test new ideas and designs. But in the twentieth century, as Western art moved away from straightforward depictions of the natural world, models and prototypes began to evolve from preparatory steps in the creative process to, increasingly, autonomous artworks. "Models and Prototypes", the companion publication to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum exhibition of the same name, draws on the works of modernist pioneers and major contemporary figures alike to explore how artists in a variety of media have redefined artistic practice by expanding the use of the model as a new visual force. Lavishly illustrated with dozens of pieces by such luminaries as Kandinsky, Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Thomas Demand, and Jenny Holzer, "Models and Prototypes" also features a fascinating essay by curator Catharina Manchanda. Ultimately, this first volume in the museum's collection-based "Focus" series illuminates the centrality of models in contemporary art, asking why they remain so compelling as both tools and subjects.

Shaping everyday landscapes from cities to factories, the grid - an arrangement of individual elements along perpendicular lines - has been a basic structure of modern life. The matrix, in contrast, pushes the grid into the digital frontier, freeing it from its confinement to two dimensions. Featuring bold new essays by Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick, curators of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum exhibition that shares its name, "[Grid<>Matrix]" traces the complex relationship of these different yet intertwined methods of organizing the visual world and how we represent it in art. The inaugural volume of the Museum's Screen Arts and New Media Aesthetics series of special exhibitions and publications, "[Grid<>Matrix]" explores the continuities and ruptures between the analog and the digital, and between the organizational principles of older and newer media. It examines the ubiquity of screens in contemporary life and illuminates the impact of the digital on artistic practice and aesthetic experience alike.

Thaddeus Strode's vibrant large-scale paintings are universes unto themselves: wild mash-ups of California surf and skateboard culture, Zen philosophy, rock music, literature, film, and comic books. "Absolutes and Nothings" marks the artist's first major museum show, presented as part of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum's "Contemporary Projects" series.Strode's images draw on a wealth of motifs inspired by a broad range of sources in popular culture, freely combined with the artist's own creations. The strength and visual pleasure of Strode's aesthetic come from his self-reflexive combination of painterly styles and incongruous elements, in which enigmatic texts, phantoms, monsters, and castaways play off one another to produce cryptic - and captivating - fantasies. Including over two dozen full-color images of works from 2001 to the present, as well as essays by Sabine Eckmann, Meredith Malone, and Benjamin Weissman, "Absolutes and Nothings" is a fascinating premier monograph from one of our most vital and exciting contemporary visual artists.

Taking as its impetus a group of important new acquisitions at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, "Precarious Worlds" explores thematic connections between some of the most influential artists working in Germany today. Works by Franz Ackermann, Cosima von Bonin, Charline von Heyl, Thomas Demand, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Isa Genzken, Sergej Jensen, Michel Majerus, Manfred Pernice, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Corinne Wasmuht are examined in light of how they mediate the radical political and societal transformations that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War as well as the worldwide effects of the digital age. Characteristics such as the fragility of objects, the disorientation of visual perception and geographical location, and the instability of both historical memory and notions of the "real" recur throughout these otherwise diverse and unique paintings, photographs, installations, sculptures, and fabric works. This fully illustrated color catalog includes an essay by Sabine Eckmann and extended entries on each work by Svea Braunert.

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break III is the third volume in a series examining the work of acclaimed video artist and photographer Sharon Lockhart. Known for collaborating with remote or marginal communities such as blue-collar workers of the twenty-first century, as she did in Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break I, the artist also blurs the line between photography, video art, and documentary. The results are staged and artificial, yet at the same time intimate and deeply human. Her newest museum installations also incorporate artworks and utilitarian objects made by others, expanding upon earlier forms of institutional critique. This book includes essays by curators and scholars who provide an international perspective on the artist's evolving series. Stunningly illustrated, Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break III serves as a reminder of the power and beauty of Lockhart's art.

We are in the dawn of the drone age, a turning point in history when the United States and other countries are increasingly using unmanned aerial vehicles to monitor behavior, collect data, conduct surveillance, and wage wars. As the ubiquitous vision and remote engagement of drones redefine contemporary policing and warfare, their impact is filtering into art and visual culture, generating new investigations into issues of visibility, technology, and fear. Considering an international array of video, sculpture, installation, photography, and web-based projects, this volume, the catalog for a recent exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, reveals the unique potential of art to further our understanding of, and give visual form to, modern drone warfare and digital surveillance. These essays illuminate how the drone embodies a far-reaching discussion about the rapidly shifting conditions of perception of seeing, and of being seen made possible by advanced technology. What is the relation of machine vision to human vision? And how do visual technologies affect our understanding of the agency of images, and of ourselves?Featuring scholarly essays along with texts by contributing artists Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl, To See Without Being Seen is a perceptive contribution to the emerging literature on contemporary artistic practice, war, surveillance, and technology.

Through the lens of seven scholars, this book examines fine art and commercial design as they both reflected and helped create the vibrant culture of public spectacle in late nineteenth-century Paris. Posters and prints circulated across the city, as the new art form of cinema flourished, all part of a diverse urban climate of leisure that was particularly French. These rich visual materials served to promote the careers and talents of such celebrities as Jane Avril, Loie Fuller, and Sarah Bernhardt. Alphonse Mucha and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec developed the potential of color lithography to meet the demands of these stars, while fine artists ranging from Edgar Degas andedouard Manet to Pablo Picasso andedouard Vuillard focused on such spectacles as the racetrack, ballet, cafe-concert, theater, and opera, asserting them as defining elements of Parisian modernity in this image-saturated milieu.

The first monograph on the work of the American painter Arthur Osver (1912-2006), this publication explores Osver's entire oeuvre, from early urban realism to decades of engagement with abstraction. His long and productive career took him from Chicago to New York to Europe and back, interweaving with the art of his time, and his paintings have been collected and exhibited all over the world. Nevertheless, he remained firmly rooted in the American Midwest, settling in St. Louis to teach and paint from 1960 until his death in 2006. Beautifully designed and printed, this book includes 80 full-color plates of Osver's work throughout his life as well as an illustrated biography and selections from an interview with the artist from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Over the past two decades, the Chinese conceptual artist, activist, and exile Ai Weiwei has created art that addresses complex and sensitive themes of political, ethical, and social urgency. His artworks, which call upon both Western and Chinese cultural traditions, are deeply engaged with the history of art, drawing particularly on conceptualism and minimalism. Informed by the readymade—central to the work of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol—his work questions the status of the work of art itself, blurring the lines between art and non-art, invention and appropriation, structure and openness, even fiction and fact. From the start of his multifaceted career in the late 1970s, Ai has envisioned artistic practice as a deeply human, moral, and political endeavor.This volume—a hybrid between a scholarly study and an exhibition catalog—presents the artist’s work in dialogue with theoretical texts by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt alongside interpretive essays that illuminate the artist’s work on human rights, his engagement with historical Chinese artifacts, and his critical consideration of the effects of globalization. The book includes a new essay on human rights by Ai Weiwei and an interview in which he discusses his artwork and activism. It also features installation photographs of the corresponding exhibition. By exploring Ai Weiwei’s artistic practice in dialogue with philosophies, theories, and concepts that connect human life and political power, this publication offers new insights into one of the most important artists working today.

A critical investigation of Adam Pendleton’s deep engagement with abstraction.  Adam Pendleton’s exploration of abstraction—through painting, drawing, screen printing, sculpture, language, book arts, and film—over the past five years constitutes the core of this study and the exhibition that spawned it. The book features essays by exhibition curator Meredith Malone and senior scholars Hal Foster and Joshua Chambers-Letson along with a conversation between Pendleton and the critic and theorist Isabelle Graw. These texts illuminate the artist’s fundamental understanding of abstraction as a conscious articulation of unimagined alternatives and a mechanism of both resistance and active engagement.  Painting is a central focus of Pendleton’s work, and Isabelle Graw, in her interview with the artist, elucidates painting as a “primary form” for Pendleton, noting how the medium conceptually and theoretically informs how he moves through and operates in other forms as well as how his works address viewers as “cognizant participants.” Hal Foster takes up Pendleton’s engagement with bookmaking as another form of activation, arguing that the artist’s creative compilations of texts and images activate readers and viewers, existing as resources to help us not only survive but flourish. Joshua Chambers-Letson’s close reading of Pendleton’s experimental film What Is Your Name? Kyle Abraham, A Portrait stimulates consideration of how artistic practice can be a means to negotiate with, dance with, and live with grief at the intersection of Black and queer love and loss. Meredith Malone contextualizes Pendleton’s recent work, examining his multifaceted approach to abstraction as a “philosophical disposition” as well as a device to realize a more expansive, chaotic, and fluid space for both artist and viewer.  With more than 1,400 high-quality reproductions and full transcripts of two of the artist’s recent films juxtaposed with extensive stills from each, To Divide By is Adam Pendleton’s most ambitious publication to date. It is published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis in fall 2023.

An examination of the complex connections in St. Louis among modern architecture, urban renewal, and racial and spatial change.Design Agendas: Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s–1970s features essays on the modernist architects Charles E. Fleming, R. Buckminster Fuller, Eric Mendelsohn, and Gyo Obata by contributing scholars Shantel Blakely, John C. Guenther, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, and Winifred Elysse Newman, as well as a memoir by Michael E. Willis, FAIA, NOMA. Editor and architectural historian Eric P. Mumford situates the work of these architects and others within the context of St. Louis urban development against the midcentury backdrop of New Deal planning, the Great Migration, and the civil rights and Great Society eras.Most of the featured architectural works were created in a period of de facto racial segregation, an era that is now known for its often racist and destructive modernist urban planning, such as the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project (1950–56) and the clearance of the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood with its twenty thousand African American residents (1959). These and other urban renewal initiatives were also part of several interlocking design agendas that used modern architecture and planning to propose and express new and then thought to be more liberating, ideas about social organization and forms of architecture and planning.This publication adds to the small but growing number of studies on modern architecture in St. Louis.

Accompanies the first exhibition in the United States to examine the inventive activities of a thriving artistic community in Buenos Aires during a period of national and global conflict.In the years leading up to the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and World War II (1939–45), over 200,000 Europeans fled to Argentina, where many chose to settle permanently. The influx of new arrivals within the Buenos Aires artistic scene set off a flurry of creative partnerships between European exiles and Argentine locals. Buenos Aires Modern, 1935–1950 explores the resulting cultural hybridization, revealing how exiles incorporated Argentine cultural influences into their practices and Porteño (Buenos Aires-born) artists adapted various international modernisms to the cultural context of Argentina.Featuring works of art in a variety of media by well-known figures—including Grete Stern, Horacio Coppola, and Gyula Kosice—as well as numerous artists who are less widely known, the publication features an introductory essay by Dana Ostrander that traces how modernism was not merely adopted but actively transformed in Buenos Aires. Also included are essays by scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan and artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The volume is fully illustrated and features translations of the essays in Spanish.

The first mid-career retrospective of Analia Saban surveys the Argentinian artist's ongoing engagement with fundamental artistic mediums, as well as more recent experiments in textile and computational thinking. Born in Buenos Aires and based in Los Angeles since the early 2000s, Analia Saban is known for her deft handling, dismantling, and exploration of the fundamental materials of art, be they paint, canvas, paper, ink, wood, or marble. Accompanying the artist’s first mid-career survey, the largest presentation of her work to date, this publication examines the breadth of her ingenious artistic output over the last two decades, from her ongoing investigations into the medium of painting to her more recent bodies of work that probe the intersections of environmental concerns, artificial intelligence, and human creativity. Both the exhibition and the catalog focus on three overlapping areas of inquiry—painting, weaving, and computing—showcasing Saban’s unique blend of highly skilled technical processes, poetic sensibility, conceptual depth, wry wit, and unfettered curiosity. In the opening essay, exhibition curator Meredith Malone examines Saban’s investigative approach to art-making, grounded equally in a fascination with the connections between artistic materials and the experience of being alive. Unpacking the logic of painting—approaching it as an ensemble of various technical rules, substances, supports, and human gestures—is for Saban both a means of critically reimagining the medium and exploring human, lived experience. Lynne Cooke considers the influence of weaving and textiles on Saban’s practice, while Gloria Sutton explores the artist’s engagement with digital tools and computational logics as a means of critically examining the production, circulation, and interpretation of images today. In a wide-ranging conversation with Michael Govan, Saban reflects on her practice and the possibilities of art more broadly—what it can do, what it can be, and how shifting material, technological, and social conditions continually reshape its boundaries. A fully illustrated plate section is enriched by nine focused entries on key works and themes, offering deeper insight into the complexity of Saban’s methods and the ways in which she creates intricate compositions that both draw upon and challenge conventional categories of art-making.

Windows both connect and divide interior and exterior, public and private spaces. Interfaces update the function of the window in today's world of omni-present screens and digital information. "Window| Interface", based on a forthcoming exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, explores how artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Cerith Wyn Evans, Monika Fleischmann, Kirsten Geisler, Pierre Huyghe, Richard Long, and others have addressed the role of windows and interfaces as mediums of perception and transport. The book investigates art that explores the limits of the body in relation to the surrounding world and reveals the embodied character of human experience. Lavishly illustrated and accompanied by essays that situate the exhibition in the context of contemporary art, this volume is the second in the Kemper Art Museum's "Screen Arts and New Media Aesthetics" series, inaugurated in 2006.

War and disaster have shaped the first years of the twenty-first century, both in the United States and throughout the world. "On the Margins" brings together a culturally diverse group of international artists whose work engages the platitudes associated with such troubling themes, while addressing contemporary social and political conditions through a wide spectrum of styles and media.The exhibition this catalog accompanies aims in part to underscore the contrast between the realities of disaster and how they are presented - what we see and what we don't see - through the lens of today's media. Created in the past seven years, all of the works included in "On the Margins" consider the ways in which war and conflict around the world affect - or fail to affect - our everyday life. The roster of contributing artists is diverse and talented: Adel Abidin, Laylah Ali, Paolo Canevari, Enrique Chagoya, Willie Cole, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Willie Doherty, Jane Hammond, Martha Rosler, and Do-Ho Suh. The exhibition was curated by Carmon Colangelo, and the catalog features essays by Eleanor Heartney and Paul Krainak as well as an illustrated checklist and full artist biographies.

"Chance Aesthetics" explores how artists used chance in modernist art from the beginning of the twentieth century through the early 1970s. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, this volume brings together a broad range of artistic practices that cede an element of authorial intent. Dropping pieces of cut paper onto a surface and gluing them down where they lay; dripping or flinging paint across a canvas; letting the progressive decay of organic materials determine a composition; and, flipping coins to compose a musical score - these are some of the processes used by artists included in this volume that tap into the creative potential of chance while directing its operation. Though many artists throughout the twentieth century have championed the creative possibilities of chance and indeterminacy in the creation of works of art, both as an attack on reason and logic and as a counterpoint to officially sanctioned aesthetic tastes, artistic subjectivity is never truly sublimated.Including more than sixty artworks by over thirty avant-garde artists from across Europe and America, this volume examines that fundamental tension between chance and choice, between the liberation from artistic agency and the continuous reassertion of authorship - the central paradoxes resting at the heart of the exhibition. Featured artists include Jean Arp, George Brecht, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Max Ernst, Ellsworth Kelly, Francois Morellet, Robert Morris, Jackson Pollock, and Niki de Saint Phalle, among many others. Featuring essays by Susan Laxton, Meredith Malone, and Janine Mileaf that draw connections across media and disciplines while linking the genesis and meaning of artistic production through chance to larger sociocultural, historical, and theoretical contexts, "Chance Aesthetics" also includes extended entries on all works in the exhibition, focusing on the processes employed and the rhetoric used to describe and theorize them.

Contemporary artist Allison Smith's diverse creative practice critically engages with popular forms of historical reenactment through a variety of media, including sculpture, textiles, ceramics, and photography. Focusing on the handmade and performative aspects of history and material culture, Smith re-stages, refigures, and replays the role of traditional crafts in large-scale installations that reconsider the construction of collective memory and identity. For the core of Allison Smith: Needle Work, the artist created contemporary revisions of European and American gas masks from World War I and World War II. Smith used art supplies found at local fabric and craft retail stores to explore a range of masklike forms - from the ghoulish to the foolish - thereby questioning essential notions of camouflage and masquerade. This exhibition catalog, illustrated throughout in color, includes an essay that considers Smith's project in light of Peter Sloterdijk's "Terror from the Air", as well as in-depth interviews with the artist and the curator.

Spanning a decade of its subject's multifaceted career, "Cosima von Bonin: Character Appropriation" features the Cologne-based artist's signature textile paintings, architectural sculptures, and absurdly outsized stuffed animals. In addition to a generous selection of colorful images of Cosima von Bonin's playful yet deeply thoughtful and suggestive work, the book features an essay by exhibition curator Meredith Malone as well as the latest hilariously confounding installment in a series of fictional "conversations" between von Bonin and Daffy Duck: "Up a Chic Creek", written by von Bonin's longtime collaborator Dirk von Lowtzow, a musician and art critic. Arriving at the same time as von Bonin's new Lazy Susan series of exhibitions touring across Europe - with stops in Rotterdam, Bristol, Geneva, and Cologne - "Cosima von Bonin" provides a valuable snapshot of this leading international artist's work.