Few artists have contributed seminal works to as many genres as Bruce Conner (1933-2008). An assemblage artist famed for his use of nylon stockings, he also pioneered the use of found footage and the high-speed film editing now familiar to us from MTV, and was one of the earliest filmmakers to use pop and soul music on his soundtracks. In the 1960s, Conner collaborated with Toni Basil (of "Mickey" fame) on his dance film Breakaway, and in the 1970s with Devo, David Byrne and Brian Eno on music videos. This survey examines the formal parallels between Conner's works as an artist and filmmaker, and looks at drawings, oil and acrylic paintings, lithographs, prints, photograms and photographs alongside three of Conner's best-known films: Breakaway (1966), Crossroads (1976), and Marilyn Times Five (1968-1973).

Bruce Conner: The 70s: Painting, Drawing, Film

Arts & Photography

Turvey, Malcolm

Mießgang, Thomas

Matt, Gerald

Blickle, Ursula

Silva, Michelle

Steffen, Barbara

Individual Artists

Moderne Kunst Nürnberg

Describing himself as "an analogue artist in the digital era," Clifton Childree makes comic films and installations that celebrate the tawdry glitter and honky-tonk of cheap illusory worlds--both the decor of silent movie theatres and the silent movies themselves. This attractively designed volume looks at his dilapidated installations and the gloriously eccentric films he screens inside them.

Clifton Childree: Fuck that Chicken from Popeyes

Genzmer, Synne

Terra incognito? Heart of darkness? How about "stylish continent," as one magazine once wrote? The gigantic landmass that is Africa, over which a colonial shadow still looms, is a territory of projections and misunderstandings. The West African photographers presented in Flash Afrique!, including Philip Kwame Apagya, Dorris Haron Kasco, Seydou Keita, Boubacar Touré Mandémory, Bouna Medoune Seye and Malick Sidibé, tell stories about the tension between dreams and reality. Elaborately arranged studio portraits reveal how Africa sees itself. Documentary images comment on the sheer craziness of overpopulated cities, and conversations with the photographers open up an art scene only recently begun to emerge from the shadows.

Flash Afrique! Photography from West Africa

Oguibe, Olu

Kouoh, Koyo

Njami, Simon

Photography & Video

Steidl

Over the past intensely productive decade, Louise Bourgeois's drawings have been dominated by diary-like work in which text and sign often mix. This extensive compendium of that work and its antecedents shares a series design with her recent book of sculpture, and the dialogue between mediums is lively in both titles, which also share a determination to put Bourgeois's current work in the context of her oeuvre, not just her work in other mediums but her work of other eras. Long denied due recognition, Bourgeois became an avant-garde superstar late in life, and is today, at 94, considered "a great figure of the postmodern" (Peter Weiermair). Since the 1980s, her work has followed the prevalent notion of art that rejects universal style and formal understanding in favor of a personal approach. Her central concern lies in establishing an intense, open discussion on the dialectics of thoughts and feelings, on the internal conflict wrought by external relationships. Here, some 150 works are grouped thematically around motifs such as "rivers," "spiders" and "proverbs/aper¡us." A separate retrospective section of older works allows the rest of the book to shift toward the present, which is full of dark and dervish-like activity. Of her prominence, Bourgeois has said, "My luck was that I became famous so late that fame could not destroy me." On the contrary, readers will agree that fame--or is it time?--has invigorated and animated Bourgeois to an exceptional degree.

Louise Bourgeois: Aller-Retour

Bourgeois, Louise

Assume vivid astro focus (avaf for short) is an artists' collective whose members prefer not to let the public know their names. Their multiple authorship both comments on and evades the cult of personality--it is ostensibly designed to set their art squarely in the public eye, without gossipy biographical distractions, but it has received a lot of attention itself. The avaf works collected here are largely site-specific and in multiple media, including spatial interventions, projections, music programs, drawings and installations, stickers, masks and T-shirts. Motifs of diverse provenance are sampled and mixed, and sources range from Tibetan prayer rugs to softcore porn. Among bits of pop culture and everyday aesthetics, historical and spiritual art, an aesthetic of appropriation and collage emerges. Alice in Wonderland-esque environments, naked people, drag queens, flowers, butterflies and birds of paradise lead to a sensory overload that seems to explode the limits of perception. avaf has recently shown at Tate Liverpool, and was a standout at the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

Assume Vivid Astro Focus: Open Call

History & Criticism

Verlag Fur Moderne Kunst Nurnberg

Designed to mimic the look of dimestore crime novels, Elevator to the Gallows juxtaposes works by Banks Violette, Miles Davis, John Huston and Weegee with an essay by Luc Sante.

Elevator to the Gallows: Banks Violette and Gerald Matt present Banks Violette, Miles Davis, Dashiell Hammett, John Huston, Weegee

Hartel, Gaby

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Surfaces, Depths is a representative selection of Thomas Ruff's works, over a period that already spans about 25 years, with projects ranging from portraits and interiors to telescope and space probe pictures and "nightsight" photography. Ruff incorporates an extremely wide range of everyday subjects into his experiments--people, architecture, planets, the Internet--and subjects them to all forms of camera technology, so that his work often seems to embody the history of the art as it develops. Ruff has a particular fascination with photographic techniques that appear to erase or leave out the artist's hand, techniques often designed for military or scientific purposes. In a recent series titled Zycles, for example, Ruff constructs his images with the help of mathematical formulas and computer technology, twisting two-dimensional surfaces into the three-dimensional space of vector graphics. Surfaces and Depths focuses on ten of Ruff's total of 18 projects to address this particular ongoing preoccupation with artistic detachment, and the polarities of surface and depth vision in the construction of images. In doing so, it makes the broadest assessment to date of the oeuvre of this tireless innovator.

Thomas Ruff: Surfaces, Depths

Fogle, Douglas

Hug, Cathérine

Forster, Kurt

Verlag für moderne Kunst

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Books by Matt, Gerald