In January and February of 2007, the Los Angeles-based video artist Doug Aitken projected a new work, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art and the New York arts institution Creative Time, onto seven facades on and around MoMA's fabled West Fifty-third Street building. Sleepwalkers was both inspired by, and offered in opposition to, the densely built midtown environment; it integrated itself onto the surfaces on which it was projected, and it challenged viewers' perceptions of architecture and public space. The piece, which follows the trajectories of five characters as they make their way through nocturnal New York, explores Aitken's key recurring themes: broken and recombined narratives, the rhythm and flow of information and images, and the relationship of individuals to their environment. The viewer, as a pedestrian, a participant and a vital component of New York's energetic system, becomes part of the work, and of the interactive personal landscape that Aitken creates in and among the hard-edged concrete and glass language of Manhattan's architecture. In addition to documentation of Sleepwalkers, this publication contains an overview of the artist's work to date, with special emphasis on works since 2001. It also contains conversations between Aitken and a variety of artists, architects, writers and performers about different elements of city life, from the lit signage of Times Square to a taxi driver's eye view of the streets.

Doug Aitken: Sleepwalkers

Eleey, Peter

BIESENBACH, KLAUS

Reference

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Commissioned to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Central Park, Cai's Light Cycle fireworks display lit the New York sky with a circle of explosions on a September night in 2003. This 24-page accordion book documents it all from planning to performance, executed by the famous Grucci fireworks family. Separating the book's hardbound cloth covers reveals a continuous folded sheet with reproductions of Cai's gunpowder drawings (made by burning scant gunpowder on paper) on one side and photographs of the event and text on the other. In an interview, the artist compares his drawings to “love-making” and explains some technical aspects of his displays, such as a computer chip in each explosive shell.

Cai Guo-Qiang: Light Cycle: Explosion Project for Central Park (ASIA SOCIETY/CR)

Arts & Photography

GARRELS, Gary

Pasternak, Anne

Desai, Vishakha

History & Criticism

Asia Society/Creative Time

Artists have always used their imaginations to see beyond visible matter--to posit other physics, other energies, new ways of conceiving the visible and new models for art--but the past century has seen an explosion of such investigations. In the fashion of a Wunderkammer, The Quick and the Dead takes stock of the 1960s and 70s legacy of experimental, or "research" art by pioneers like George Brecht, who posited objects as motionless events and asked us to consider "an art verging on the non-existent, dissolving into other dimensions," and Lygia Clark, whose foldable sculptures sought to dissolve the boundary between inside and outside, each "a static moment within the cosmological dynamics from which we came and to which we are going." In a series of encounters with art made strange by its expansions, contractions, inversions and implosions in time and space, The Quick and the Dead surveys more than 80 works by a global, multigenerational group of 50 artists, scientists and musicians--among them James Lee Byars, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Harold Edgerton, Ceal Floyer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierre Huyghe, The Institute for Figuring, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Stephen Kaltenbach, On Kawara, Christine Kozlov, David Lamelas, Louise Lawler, Paul Etienne Lincoln, Mark Manders, Kris Martin, Steve McQueen, Helen Mirra, Catherine Murphy, Bruce Nauman, Rivane Neuenschwander, Claes Oldenburg, Roman Ondák, Adrian Piper, Roman Signer and Shomei Tomatsu, among many others. Includes reprints of texts by diverse luminaries such as John McPhee, Jalal Toufic, Oliver Sacks, Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson.

The Quick and the Dead

Blom, Ina

Osborne, Peter

Blanke, Olaf

Wertheim, Margaret and Christine

Walker Art Center

How artists have examined the legacies of American-led military engagement in Iraq
The 1991 Gulf War marked the start of a lengthy period of American-led military involvement in Iraq that led to more than a decade of sanctions, the 2003 Iraq War, and ongoing repercussions throughout the region. Though the Iraq War officially ended in 2011, artists have continued to examine these conflicts and their impacts. Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011 charts the effects of these wars on cultural production in Iraq and throughout its diasporas, as well as responses to the wars in the West, revealing how this period was defined by unsettling intersections of spectacularized violence and new imperialisms. The exhibition features more than 80 artists and collectives, including Afifa Aleiby, Dia al-Azzawi, Thuraya al-Baqsami, Paul Chan, Harun Farocki, Guerrilla Girls, Thomas Hirschhorn, Hiwa K, Hanaa Malallah, Monira Al Qadiri, Nuha al-Radi and Ala Younis. This catalog features newly commissioned essays by Zainab Bahrani, Rijin Sahakian, Nada Shabout and McKenzie Wark alongside texts by exhibition co-curators Peter Eleey and Ruba Katrib. Excerpts from period journals by artist Nuha Al-Radi and anonymous blogger Riverbend detail life in Iraq over two decades of war, sanctions and occupation. Reprinted essays from Jean Baudrillard and Serge Daney provide additional context, delving into the effects of the conflict upon media and visual culture.

Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011

Wark, McKenzie

BAUDRILLARD, Jean

Riverbend

Bahrani, Zainab

Daney, Serge

Al-Radi, Nuha

Sahakian, Rijin

Shabout, Nada

Katrib, Ruba

MoMA PS1

Famous for his performances “The Death of James Lee Byars” and “The Perfect Smile,” and for sculptural works that have been described as “austere and rococo, understated and flamboyant,” James Lee Byars (1932–1997) was a legend in his lifetime and an enduringly influential artist since his death at the age of 65. His preferred materials were characterized by strong colors--black, red, gold, pink--and by a sensuous luxuriance, as in his use of folded Japanese paper or silk. This second volume of the two-volume catalogue accompanying the first major posthumous survey on Byars in the US constitutes the catalogue “proper” (the first volume being conceived as a sourcebook), and includes images of works well beyond the scope of the show. Through a selection of more than 125 sculptures, costumes, performable paper works, films, ink paintings, correspondence, ephemera, live performances and documents, the catalogue represents the full scope of the artist’s work. It focuses on the ephemeral and intangible nature of much of Byars’ art, and features several critical texts, including curatorial texts by Peter Eleey and Magalí Arriola; an essay on Byars’ early performances by Ana Janevski from the Department of Media and Performance at MoMA; an essay focusing on his “costume” and performable fabric works by art historian, Pan Wendt; and curator Shinobu Sakagami on Byars’ time in Japan.

James Lee Byars: 1/2 an Autobiography, Exhibition Catalogue

Arriola, Magalí

Janevski, Ana

Wendt, Pan

Sakagami, Shinobu

Individual Artists

Walther König, Köln/MoMA PS1/Museo Jumex

Gehend

Argobooks

Walead Beshty (born 1976) has long used photography as a tool to explore social conditions. In 2001, the artist began documenting the abandoned embassy of the defunct Iraqi Diplomatic Mission in the former East Berlin. This publication focuses on three related bodies of work that continue Beshty's engagement with the invisible territories of globalization.

Walead Beshty: Selected Correspondences 2001-2010

SMITH, JASON

Schwab, Eric

Photography & Video

Damiani

It has become almost obligatory to introduce a book on curating by noting the plethora of recent publications on the subject. How, in just a few short years, did we reach this point of saturation? What questions, exactly, do all these books address? Many attempt to offer an overview of the curatorial field as it exists today, or attempt to map its historical trajectory. Others propose a series of case studies under a common curatorial theme. All are hoping to contribute to this relatively new discipline and its accompanying canon. Edited by Jens Hoffmann, Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating offers a real critique of existing publications and modes of thinking by explicitly asking the questions that others have missed, ignored or deemed already answered: What is a curator? What is the public? What is art? What about collecting? What is an exhibition? Why mediate art? What to do with the contemporary? What about responsibility? What is the process? How about pleasure? Here, Peter Eleey, Elena Filipovic, Juan A. Gaitán, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Maria Lind, Chus Martínez, Jessica Morgan, Adriano Pedrosa, João Ribas and Dieter Roelstraete each propose and then address one question. Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating takes a back-to-basics approach--a return to a kind of zero-degree state--at a time when a recalibration of what a curator is and does seems both necessary and urgent.

Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating

Roelstraete, Dieter

Morgan, Jessica

Pedrosa, Adriano

Filipovic, Elena

Gaitán, Juan

Chong Cuy, Sofía Hernández

Lind, Maria

Martinez, Chús

Ribas, João

Mousse Publishing

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