Emil Dobbelstein and Henry J. Drope are, respectively, Keith Edmier's paternal and maternal grandfathers. Both men served in World War II, but Dobblestein committed suicide while serving at an army airfield in Missouri while Drope was honorably discharged from the army in 1946 after fighting in Europe. He lived until 1995. Emil Dobbelstein and Henry J.Drope, 1944, a personalized version of the traditional figurative war memorial, is comprised of two three-quarter-scale bronze representations of Edmier's grandfathers, and acts as both an investigation of personal history and a sophisticated reflection on eulogy and memorial. The assortment of World War II-era ephemera that Edmier assembled in researching this project--including telegrams, newspaper articles, photographs, death notices, and other personal items--are presented in full in this publication, alongside illustrations of the sculpture itself. A Public Art Fund project, Emil Dobbelstein and Henry Drope, 1944 was on view from March through September of last year as part of the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

Keith Edmier: Emil Dobbelstein And Henry Drope, 1944

Arts & Photography

Eccles, Tom

History & Criticism

Public Art Fund

If a 50-foot-tall stainless-steel tree falls in Central Park, will anybody believe it? Sited among the park's famous American elms, Roxy Paine's Bluff, a 50-foot-tall stainless-steel tree, stood last spring as a gleaming, perennial fake surrounded by a man-made natural setting that changed with the seasons. For Paine, the process of constructing the tree is most significant--the difficulty of painstakingly creating an object that closely resembles an organic one, and the impossibility of quantifying nature by breaking it down into component parts. Through photographic chapters and schematic diagrams that individually illustrate the tree's large branches, small branch systems, fungus, assembly and installation, this volume acts as a how-to manual, illustrating the process Paine undertook to make Bluff. A Public Art Fund project, Bluff was on view from March through May of last year as part of the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

Roxy Paine: Bluff

Individual Artists

On the morning of Sunday, June 23, 2002, 100 participants gathered at The Museum of Modern Art in midtown Manhattan, along with a 12-person Peruvian brass band, and a horse, dogs, and numerous palanquins, atop which sat replicas of three masterpieces from the museum's collection--Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," Duchamp's ready-made "Bicycle Wheel" and a Giacometti--and a living representative of contemporary art, Kiki Smith. Three hours later they ended their procession at the museum's new temporary home, in Queens. Along the way, which ran from 11 West 53 Street, over the Queensboro Bridge, and up Queens Boulevard, the procession absorbed 100 additional participants, and enacted a very public spectacle--part saint's day procession and part secular celebration--of the museum's historic move to MoMA QNS.

Francis Alÿs: The Modern Procession

In early 2003, Governor's island, a former major U.S. army base, was returned to the people of New York for a dollar. The island is beautifully documented here by photographers Lisa Kereszi and Andrew Moore, who show the casual American landscape, express the history of the place--both public and private--and reveal the crossroads at which it stands today.

Governors Island: Photographs By Lisa Kereszi & Andrew Moore

Allison Smith uses American history and traditional crafts as a starting point from which to imagine and create new narratives for the twenty-first century. The Muster documents an open-air public event staged by the Public Art Fund on May 14, 2005, during which Smith appointed herself Mustering Officer and asked the public, "What are you fighting for?" More than 70 volunteers answered her call to arms, creating a temporary "militia" in which each enlistee designed his or her own uniform and created a campsite expressing his or her stated cause, from the political to the whimsical, addressing art history, technology, craft, gender politics, gay rights, democracy and sociology, just to name a few. The Muster is designed with an eye toward utilitarian government-issue printed materials, just as the exhibition brochures and announcements were modeled on Civil War-era broadsheets, circus posters and soldier's diaries. Smith was born in Manassas, Virginia, in 1972. She is represented in New York by Bellwether Gallery.

Allison Smith: The Muster: What Are You Fighting For?

Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto (born 1964) has won legions of fans with his soft, biomorphic sculptural installations that invite viewers to touch and poke them, seducing and activating all of the senses at once. Often using a white stretchy material stuffed with styrofoam pellets and sometimes aromatic spices, Neto aims to provoke an experience of powerful bodily sensuousness in his audience, whom he encounters in a variety of settings, from galleries and museums to outdoor public sites. "Anthropodino" chimes with a number of large shows opening internationally in 2010, and provides a first substantial overview of Neto's career, with a focus on the artist's hugely popular 2009 installation of that name, exhibited at the Park Avenue Armory (where it filled the 55,000 square foot hall). This much-lauded work, which draws upon every element of Neto's practice, and which was memorably characterized by one reviewer as "art that loves you back," serves neatly as a springboard to appraise the full range of the artist's achievements over the past two decades. Published in collaboration with the Brazilian publisher Cobogó.

Ernesto Neto: Anthropodino

Pedrosa, Adriano

Gregory R. Miller & Co.

Rachel Harrison (born 1966) is one of the most exciting artists making sculptures today. Her assemblages of found and constructed objects carry a provisional quality, a wry sense of humor and an all-embracing intelligence. Playing with materials ranging from plinth, pedestal and corrugated cardboard to plastic ketchup bottles, insulated travel mugs and Barbie's wheelchair-bound friend, Harrison creates colorful, canny, thought-provoking constructions that are worthy peers of Rauschenberg's Combines. This volume, the most comprehensive monograph of Harrison's sculpture, video and painting to date, provides documentation of the past 15 years of her work and includes essays by Tom Eccles, David Joselit, Iwona Blazwick and Jack Bankowsky, plus contributions from Paul Chan, John Kelsey, Allan McCollum, Lucy Raven, Amy Sillman and Steven Stern.

Rachel Harrison: Museum With Walls

Joselit, David

Stern, Steven

Kelsey, John

Bankowsky, Jack

Blazwick, Iwona

Chan, Paul

McCollum, Allan

Raven, Lucy

Sillman, Amy

Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College/Whitechapel Gallery/Portikus

Wave UFO believes that human beings as collective living beings shall unify and transcend cultural differences and national borders through positive and creative evolution. --Mariko MoriMariko Mori, the Japanese art superstar known for creating utopian futuristic scenarios that mix elements from Buddhism, Shintoism and Manga culture, here presents her latest and grandest endeavor. Wave UFO is a dynamic sculptural form that hovers on the border between large-scale sculpture and bio-amorphous architecture. A futuristic version of an integral work of art, it offers participants a multi-faceted experience involving physical, mental and aesthetic perception, taking them on a journey to an esoteric cosmos, involving them in the artist's conception of interconnected dream worlds. Inside a capsule that itself rests within a huge architectural sculpture of whale-like proportions, three people can recline in seats for 7 minutes. The images projected on the dome screen above them are generated by an interactive bio-feedback loop that reads the brainwaves of the participants, producing a computer-animated video projection of their own shared spiritual creation. Alluding to the Buddhist vision of Nirvana, Mori's creation of an artistic space for the joining of minds illustrates the concept that all things in this world are interconnected, offering a vision of a "newer" world, a world in which man appears to have overcome all cultural barriers.

Mariko Mori: Wave Ufo

Schneider, Eckhard

Kunsthaus Bregenz

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