Ben F. Laposky: Electronic Abstractions: A New Approach to Design (1953)

“In 1950 American draftsman, graphic artist and mathematician Benjamin F. Laposky of Cherokee, Iowa, first used a cathode ray oscilloscope with sine wave generators and various other electrical and electronic circuits to create abstract art, which he called ‘electrical compositions’. The electrical vibrations shown on the screen of the oscilloscope, which included Lissajous figures, he recorded by still photography. Some of Laposky’s images were published in Scripta Mathematica in 1952.

In 1953 Laposky exhibited fifty images that called ‘Oscillons’ (or oscillogram designs) at the Sanford Museum in Cherokee, Iowa. To record this exhibition Laposky published an exhibition catalogue entitled electronic abstractions. Because of this exhibition Laposky is credited as the earliest pioneer in electronic art, more specifically in the analog vector medium. In later work Laposky also incorporated motorized rotating filters of variable speed to color the patterns. He never programmed computers to create images.

A version of Laposky’s electronic abstractions show was exhibited across the United States, in France at LeMons, and other places by the Cultural Relations Section of the United States from 1953 to 1961.” (source)

Self-published, Cherokee, Iowa
16 pages
via Vasulka Archive

garments inspired by Laposky’s oscillons, designed by Kim Hagelind

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Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford Years 1872–82 (1972)

Catalogue for the exhibition held at Stanford University Museum of Art in 1972.

Edited by Anita Ventura Mozley
Publisher Department of Art, Stanford University, 1972
136 pages
via Archive.org

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Josef Albers: Glass, Color, and Light (1994)

Josef Albers (1888-1976), famous as a master at Germany’s Bauhaus until 1933, and then a professor in American schools such as Yale University, influenced many young artists. His Homage to the Square series of paintings remains an important example of 20th-century art. Yet Albers’s first great works – the glass pictures that he made in Germany beginning in 1921 – remain little known. Starting with found fragments of colored glass, and later employing a sophisticated sandblasting process, Albers created a new art form.

Glass, Color and Light is the first monograph devoted to Albers’s work in this medium. Reproductions, 62 in color, of every extant glass picture are accompanied by full documentation by Brenda Danilowitz of the Josef Albers Foundation. Also illustrated and discussed are Albers’s architectural commissions in glass and those works that were lost or destroyed after the artist fled Nazi Germany. Essays by Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of the Josef Albers Foundation, and Fred Licht, curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, illuminate the many themes suggested by this extraordinary group of works, while a chronology of Albers’s life and professional career places the glass works in the context of his entire oeuvre.

Publisher Guggenheim Museum Publications, New York, 1994
ISBN 0810968649
152 pages
via Archive.org

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Mediascape, catalogue (1996)

Catalog of an exhibition organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in association with ZKM/Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, and held at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, June 14 – September 15, 1996.

Exhibiting artists: Ingo Guenther, Jenny Holzer, Toshio Iwai, Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Bill Seaman, Jeffrey Shaw, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Bill Viola.

With texts by Heinrich Klotz, Ursula Frohne, Oliver Seifert, and Annicka Blunck.

Publisher Guggenheim Museum Publications, New York; with ZKM, Karlsruhe, 1996
ISBN 0892071729
68 pages
via Archive.org

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Gary Garrels (ed.): Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective (2000)

Sol LeWitt, one of the most important American artists of this century, has spent the past four decades creating artworks that explore the potential of ideas for the making of visual forms. LeWitt transforms these ideas into objects of exquisite beauty and elegance, deliberately introducing elements of chance, intuition, or irrationality into the systems that govern the creation of his works. LeWitt’s delicate balancing act between thought and form, between order and disorder, between authorship and anonymity, has exerted an enormous influence on artists of subsequent generations. This book, the first retrospective of LeWitt’s work in more than twenty years, fosters a deeper understanding of the artist’s career and its significance to American art and thought.

Including essays by Gary Garrels, Martin Friedman, Brenda Richardson, and other distinguished curators and art historians, the book charts the evolution of LeWitt’s art from his groundbreaking work in Conceptualism during the early 1960s through his turn toward a more lyrical and sensual form of abstraction around 1980. With more than 350 images, the book provides a stunning visual survey of LeWitt’s oeuvre from 1960 to the present, including sumptuous wall drawings, three-dimensional structures, and works on paper.

Publisher Museum of Modern Art, 2000
ISBN 0300083580, 9780300083583
416 pages

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Allan Sekula: Fish Story (1995/2002)

The Fish Story project focuses on the quest for centers of maritime power past and present and the political interest in the change in the economic infrastructure of industrial ports yielded by late-capitalist rule in its phase of multinational and global expansion. This is the third project of the American photographer and historian Allan Sekula (b. 1951) in his cycle on the imaginary and real geography of the advanced capitalist world.

Working on the assumption that photography remains inevitably tied to ideological and real historical factors, Allan Sekula is continuing the tradition of critical realism. However, far from confining himself to illuminating the subject solely with photographic means, Sekula has been integrating the written word in his creative work since the Seventies. Consequently, Fish Story has been conceived from the outset as a book and as an exhibition. The photographs shown in this publication illustrate working conditions on highly industrialized container ships and in ports, while the texts yield insights masked by the visual, photographic information. The resultant montage of images and texts encourages dialogue with the viewer.

With a text by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.

First published in 1995
Second edition, 2002
Publisher Richter Verlag, Dusseldorf
ISBN 3933807689
206 pages

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Constructivism and Kinetic Art: Exat 51, New Tendencies, catalogue (1995) [English/Croatian]

Catalogue for an exhibition of the works of Exat 51 and New Tendencies from the collection of Gallery of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia.

Curated and edited by Marijan Susovski
With texts by Leonida Kovac, Marijan Susovski
Publisher City Gallery, Zagreb, June 1995
ISBN 9536043033
154 pages
via Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb

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