A Forest of Signs documents a major exhibition of critical art in the last decade, one that marks a change in the art world, perhaps even in the broader culture. The thread of representation ties together the work of the 30 artists included in the book, encompassing such issues as allegory, appropriation, and commodification, the role of the artist, and the functions of authorship and originality in vesting meaning in art. Much of the work is provocative, challenging the way we look at art, the way we talk about it, where we see it, and how we buy it. The development of these issues and their role in shifting the focus of much recent art from insistence on the art as object, to a host of representations is addressed in four essays and a section of "artists' pages." In the first essay, exhibition co-organizer Ann Goldstein discusses the individual artists and points to key issues and methods in their art. The artists themselves are represented by a 60 page portfolio of their works. Designed by the artists, these pages include personal statements, the remarks of others, works made specifically for the book and works using the tools of mechanical reproduction. In the three essays that follow, Anne Rorimer, former Curator of 20th Century Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, traces the roots of recent American art to the development of international conceptualism in the 1960s and early 1970s; Mary Jane Jacob, exhibition co-organizer and MOCA Chief Curator, places the artists within the current trends of European as well as American art; and editor and critic Howard Singerman examines the relationship of recent art to its circle of critics and to the emergence of critical theory. Copublished with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The Artists Richard Baim, Thomas Lawson, Judith Barry, Sherrie Levine, Ericka Beckman, Robert Longo, Gretchen Bender, Allan McCollum, Dara Birnbaum, Matt Mullican, Barbara Bloom, Peter Nagy, Troy Brauntuch, Stephen Prina, Sarah Charlesworth, Richard Prince, Jack Goldstein, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Laurie Simmons, Larry Johnson, Haim Steinbach, Ronald Jones, Mitchell Syrop, Mike Kelley, James Welling, Jeff Koons, Christopher Williams, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler

A Forest Of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation

Arts & Photography

Jacob, Mary Jane

Goldstein, Ann

History & Criticism

Mit Pr

Reconsidering the Object of Art examines a generally underexposed (and therefore often misunderstood) period in contemporary art and highlights artists whose practices have inspired much of the most significant art being produced today. It illustrates and discusses many crucial, ground-breaking works that have not been seen within their proper historical context, if they have been individually seen at all. By 1969 such artists as Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Marcel Broodthaers, Dan Graham, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner and others had begun to create works using a variety of media that sought to reevaluate certain fundamental premises about the formal, material, and contextual definitions of art. This first comprehensive overview of Conceptual art in English documents the work of fifty-five artists, work that marked a significant rupture with traditional forms and concepts of painting, sculpture, photography, and film. Also included are essays that elucidate the significant aesthetic issues that gave rise, in both America and Europe, to the highly individual, but related, modes of Conceptual art. Lucy Lippard (art historian) writes on the broader sociopolitical milieu in which this work was made; Stephen Melville (Professor of Art History, Ohio State University) probes the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of Conceptual art; and Jeff Wall (artist) discusses the relationship between Conceptual art and photography. Anne Rorimer and Ann Goldstein (curators of the exhibition the book accompanies) respectively take up the role of language in this work, and discuss each of the artists. Copublished with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975

Rorimer, Anne

Lo's Diary

Literature & Fiction

Pera, Pia

Contemporary

Foxrock

An unprecedented exodus that brought millions of Italians to the New World, the Great Migration has been studied until now mainly in its historical, social, and ethnographical dimensions. Scholars of literature, on the contrary, have neglected this field, despite the rich and varied literary fabric to be found in the teeming Little Italies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What is presented here is thus the first detailed history of that forgotten territory.

Voices of Italian America: A History of Early Italian American Literature with a Critical Anthology

Marazzi, Martino

United States

UNKNO

Barbara Kruger

Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, Calif.)

Kruger, Barbara

Deutsche, Rosalyn

Whitney Museum of American Art

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Museum of Contemporary Art

"Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy have a history of collaboration that dates back to 1987. From this perfect artistic marriage comes three major installations, five videos, two series of photographs, the design of their catalog for the installation ""Sod and Sodie Sock"", along with a double CD of their performances in Tokyo with Japanese noise musician Violent Onsen Geisha! For the first time these numerous collaborations have been chronologically documented and discussed with essays from curator Philip Monk, Ann Goldstein, Timothy Martin and Martin Prinzhorn."

Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy: Collaborative Works

Prinzhorn, Martin

MARTIN, TIM

Monk, Philip

Individual Artists

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Featuring the work of more than 150 exemplary international artists, this first comprehensive catalogue of the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, is published to accompany the museum's major 2008 permanent collection exhibition Collecting Collections. With short texts on each artist, as well as essays by Chief Curator Paul Schimmel and Senior Curator Ann Goldstein, it is a major milestone in the museum's publishing history. Featured artists include historical figures like Ad Reinhardt, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Diane Arbus, Alberto Giacometti, Morris Louis, Mark Rothko, Garry Winogrand, Barnett Newman, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning and Piet Mondrian; contemporary Los Angeles artists like Doug Aitken, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Vija Celmins, Mike Kelley, Catherine Opie, Nancy Rubins, Paul McCarthy, Lari Pittman, Diana Thater, James Welling, Laura Owens, Bill Owens, Charles Ray, Raymond Pettibon, Jason Rhoades and Edward Ruscha; New York artists like Vito Acconci, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Brice Marden, David Salle, Claes Oldenburg, Julian Schnabel, Cady Noland, Richard Prince, Kara Walker, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith; and international artists like Francis Alÿs, Maurizio Cattelan, Thomas Demand, Rineke Dijkstra, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Olafur Eliasson, Rodney Graham, Andreas Gursky, Mona Hatoum, William Kentridge, Anselm Kiefer, Chris Ofili, Gabriel Orozco, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Rirkrit Tiravanija. The title This Is Not To Be Looked At is derived from a work in the collection by John Baldessari, dated 1966-68, which reproduces an Artforum cover that features a Frank Stella painting also owned by MOCA, titled "Union III" from the Irregular Polygon series (1966).

This Is Not To Be Looked At: Highlights from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

SCHIMMEL, PAUL

Morse, Rebecca

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

A pioneer of Conceptual art in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and 1970s, the painter, installation artist and theater director William Leavitt (born 1941) is above all an artist of narrative devices. Since 1969, his works in all the above media have employed abrupt fragments of popular and vernacular culture and depictions of modernist architecture to construct elusive narratives of cityscapes and environments. The culture and atmosphere of Los Angeles has played a significant role in Leavitt's handling of these themes; classic southern Californian motifs of ever-present artifice and almost washed-out brightness recur throughout his work. Surveying the artist's 40-year career, this volume includes sculptural tableaux, paintings, works on paper, photographs and performances from the late 1960s to the present. Leavitt has created a remarkable oeuvre that has influenced generations of artists, and this volume is both long overdue and highly anticipated.

William Leavitt: Theater Objects

Lawson, Thomas

Simpson, Bennett

Leddy, Annette

Exploring Christopher Wool's meanings and messages in a comprehensive monographIn-your-face, achingly simple, deceptively frank, the work of Christopher Wool is so very New York. Though he owes a debt to abstract expressionism and pop art, he completely transcends—even demolishes—these genres. Whether it’s a text-based painting or an abstract spray-painted piece, his work is immediately engaging. Wool questions painting, like many other artists in his generation, but he doesn’t provide any easy answers. “The harder you look the harder you look,” he puts it in one of his word paintings, and that is an excellent example of how he states the obvious whilst provoking us to think deeper about what seems obvious. Christopher Wool became known in the mid-1980s through allover paintings produced with rubber rollers commonly used to simulate decorative wallpaper patterns on walls. By 1988 he had hit stride with his dry, dead-pan word paintings (“Trbl,” “Riot,” “Sell the House, Sell the Car, Sell the Kids”), while continuing to explore the possibilities of pattern painting. Since the 1990s, he has incorporated a widening variety of media in his work, including photography, silkscreen, and, in the new millennium, also the computer. In over 400 pages, all of Wool's work phases are covered in large-scale reproductions, accompanied by production Polaroids and installation photos by Wool himself. Essays and analyses by Glenn O’Brien, Jim Lewis, Ann Goldstein, Anne Pontégnie, Richard Hell, and Eric Banks make this book a great read as well as a definitive study of the artist's oeuvre so far. This is the unlimited trade edition

Christopher Wool

Hell, Richard

Banks, Eric

Lewis,Jim

Taschen America, LLC

Burning his early paintings and producing his 1970 Cremation Project, John Baldessari embarked on a new quest to explore the relationships between painting and language, images and text, originality and authorship. This overview of his works up to the early 1980s, encompassing film, photography, and painting, show him rooting around with characteristic humor and poignancy.

John Baldessari: A Different Kind Of Order

WILLIAMS, CHRISTOPHER

de Brugerolle, Marie

Hoffer, Klaus

Pauleit, Winfried

Fuchs, Rainer

Walther König, Köln

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