Edited by Jorn Schafaff, Barbara Steiner, Essays by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Beatrice von Bismarck.

Jorge Pardo: What Does This Object Do?

Arts & Photography

Pardo, Jorge

Schmidt-Wulffen, Stephan

Von Bismarck, Beatrice

von Bismarck

Individual Artists

Hatje Cantz Publishers

Martha Rosler is one of the most iconoclastic and politically motivated artists of her generation. Most of the encounters that unfold in Rosler's works originate in seemingly ordinary scenes of domestic life or everyday activities such as shopping, watching the news, reading the newspaper or traveling. The photographs gathered here--from the 80s to the present--shed light on the many ways in which our routines are governed by social norms. Included are documentary views of the highways and byways of daily life, including roads, subway tunnels, airports, shopping districts, parking lots and more. This powerful image collection offers critical insight into day-to-day movements within rigidly structured relationships of power.

Martha Rosler: Passionate Signals

Reading Ed Ruscha focuses on California-based artist Ed Ruscha's (born 1937) interests in books, writing and the act of reading--and his particular relationship with artist's books--which he has pursued over the course of five decades. Ruscha created his first word paintings--with oil paint on paper--in Paris in 1961. While words and phrases often function as symbols and motifs in his work, books as objects also make a substantial appearance, and the artist has deployed an astonishing range of visual means to explore the act of reading as a meaning-generating process. The 16 small artist's books Ruscha produced between 1962 and 1978 (Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Various Small Fires, et al.) remain definitive classics of the genre. The texts written especially for Reading Ed Ruscha by Douglas Coupland and W.S. Di Piero explore Ruscha's use of text through the lens of literary and poetic form, while Beatrice von Bismarck, in her essay, examines the book as work, medium of publication and exhibition format. The catalogue's editor, Yilmaz Dziewior, presents an overview of Ruscha's engagement with artist's books and the written word. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, Reading Ed Ruscha includes large-format illustrations of exhibitions and installation views, with 400 images in color.

Ed Ruscha: Reading Ed Ruscha

Coupland, Douglas

Kunsthaus Bregenz

Identity formation and media life &ndash; two dominant and recurring themes in the work of Candice Breitz &ndash; form the leitmotif of the artist's solo exhibition The Scripted Life at the Kunsthaus Bregenz (February &ndash; April 2010), where major existing works will be shown alongside more recent installations. Throughout her early work in photography and collage, and continuing to her sophisticated video installations, the Berlin-based South African artist has consistently examined and dissected mass media and popular culture, role play and gender construction, language and fragmentation, reforming and appropriating them to shape her artistic vocabulary. Essays by Beatrice von Bismarck, Colin Richards and Okwui Enwezor will address various aspects of Breitz'oeuvre to form the scholarly backbone of this catalogue raisonn&eacute; of the artist's film and video works. Each work is introduced individually with a text by Edgar Schmitz, making this catalogue with excellent images and an carefully compiled appendix the most comprehensive publication on the work of Candice Breitz yet. English and German text.

Candice Breitz: The Scripted Life

ENWEZOR, Okwui

Schmitz, Edgar

A group of drawings and photographic works made by Bruce Nauman in the 1960's are collected and examined by Beatrice bon Bismarck as indirect self-portraits of the artist.

Bruce Nauman: True Artist

Review\n"Over decades as a curator, scholar, and theorist, Beatrice von Bismarck has played a central role in defining the field of the curatorial. In this book, she develops a rigorous framework for understanding its structures, conditions, and relations, offering an invaluable resource for navigating this arena of theory and practice. Locating the curatorial firmly in the realm of collectivity and becoming-public, she also provides a conceptual bulwark against the forces of individualization and privatization that have come to dominate so much of the cultural field." 
—Andrea Fraser, artist and professor, University of California, Los Angeles\n"We have long needed a book that both brings together the many explorative activities of artists, curators, and theorists and provides us with an array of conceptual tools of analysis and encounter. Finally, we have it. Lucid, generous, and expansively illustrated, The Curatorial Condition takes the greatly expanded field of the curatorial as one of diverse knowledge production." 
—Irit Rogoff, writer, curator, and professor of visual cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London\nAn analyses of the relations created by the curatorial—relations that also constitute it. 
In spite of the heightened interest in the curatorial since the late twentieth century, the structural conditions and potentials underpinning its special sociocultural status have yet to be defined. Taking this as a starting point, in this book, Beatrice von Bismarck outlines the curatorial—that field of cultural activity and knowledge which relates to the becoming-public of art and culture—as a domain of practice and meaning with its own structures, conditions, rules, and procedures. 
Von Bismarck focuses on the relations created by the curatorial—relations that also constitute it. By concentrating on the dynamic fabric of relations between human and nonhuman participants, she carries out a shift within the discourse on the curatorial: rather than foregrounding partial definitions of the activity of curating, the subjectivization of the curator, and the presentation format of the exhibition, she emphasizes the interplay of all these factors. She proposes a conceptual framework geared toward highlighting the activity, the subject position, and the resulting product as always already dynamically interrelated in its genesis, articulation, and function. Not least, this situates the curatorial condition in the context of key parameters of societal developments over the last half century.

The Curatorial Condition

History & Criticism

Sternberg Press

Video art, the Internet, globalization, nomadism, itinerant curators and biennale artists, Installation and Process art, PowerPoint presentations, multiculturalism, design, magazines, fashion, lounges, the DJ, VJ and house culture, blockbuster exhibitions in art galleries, social works of art and socially engaged artists… The art of the past 15 years has moved into these new territories rapidly--so rapidly that more artwork than theoretical reflection or historical contextualization has been generated. During the 1960s, artists and critics were fiercely engaged in naming each new trend--Op Art, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism. Movements were mapped as they happened. In the 1990s, however, the art itself, and the experience it provided, became enough. Focusing on themes such as The Body, Interactivity, Engagement, Documentary Strategies, Money and Curating, Right About Now provides a map for this work, from the 1990s to the present.

Right About Now: Art and Theory Since the 1990s

FOSTER, HAL

Velthuis, Olav

BOURRIAUD, NICOLAS

Bishop, Claire

Allen,Jennifer

Cherry, Deborah

Berrebi, Sophie

Bleeker, Maaike

Boomgaard, Jeroen

Havránek, Vit

Spiegler, Marc

Zijlmans, Kitty

Valiz

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