Ugo Rondinone: Hell, Yes

Written and drawn in Indian ink, Ugo Rondinone's Diaries have played an important role in the Swiss artist's oeuvre since the early 1990s. The Diaries are conceived as notations covering an entire year, and titled 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 etc.--yet both the contents and the titles of the works are completely fictitious. In his sheets, formally inspired by underground comics, Rondinone blends fiction with the mimesis of authenticity, leading readers in and out of intimate--and lonely--spaces and times. These works constitute a kind of report about subjective experience sounding out, bearing, manipulating, and stylizing the borders of collective experience, testing the limits of boredom, rapture, love, failure, and excess. The artist's book Hell, Yes newly regroups various elements of Rondinone's oeuvre--he translates the illustrations and text of his Diaries into photography and printed text, combining his photographic series In the Sweet Years Remaining with the 1998 Diary into a filmic whole. Also included here is an appendix that features, for the first time, all of Rondinone's diary texts in English.