Xanti Schawinsky: Head Drawings and Faces of War (2014)

This catalogue offers “a look at first generation Bauhaus artist Alexander ‘Xanti’ Schawinsky’s oeuvre, which encompasses a range of social and political investigations. Schawinsky played a key role in the school’s vital social life and was a member of the Bauhaus Band. He studied graphic design and experimental photography and was also deeply engaged in the Bauhaus’s theater workshop as an actor, set and costume designer, creator of performances, and teacher.

The exhibition catalogue focuses on two bodies of work Schawinsky made between 1941 and 1946, Faces of War and the Head Drawings. The former are man-machine hybrids that could represent either an aggressive enemy or a powerful avenger—or perhaps an identity that encompasses both. The Faces of War break from the utopian optimism of the early Bauhaus and reveal the existential struggle of an artist coping with identity and the devastation of war. The Head Drawings allowed Schawinsky to literally remake his own “portrait” out of such detritus of the natural world as thread, crystals, rope, and rocks.”

Introduction by Brett Littman
Essays by Michael Bracewell and Juliet Koss
Publisher The Drawing Center, New York, 2014
Drawing Papers series, 119
ISBN 9780942324891
120 pages

Publisher

PDF (13 MB)
Issuu

Max Neuhaus: Sound Works, 3 vols. (1994)

“Neuhaus’s oeuvre is diverse, ranging from works in the plastic arts, drawings, music, sound walks, communal sound signals, aural spaces composed of communication networks, sound topographies in water, to inventions of sound-producing and dispersing systems and sound applied to problems of urban and personal design. The structure of separate volumes was chosen to clarify: to encompass the oeuvre, while allowing each of its diverse parts to remain distinct on its own ground.

The first volume projects an overview with many voices, including his own. The second articulates some of the issues surrounding his drawings which are unusual partly because of their invisible subject: sound. The third volume contains the works which use sound to transform space into place.” (from the Preface, edited)

Volume I contains texts by Calvin Tomkins, Jean-Christophe Ammann, Carter Ratcliff, John Rockwell, Joan La Barbara, Tom Johnson, Arthur Danto, Wulf Herzogenrath, Harald Szeemann, Alain Cueff, Franz Kaiser, Susanne Weingarten, Denys Zacharopoulos, Doris van Drathen, Germano Celant, interviews with Neuhaus by William Duckworth and Ulrich Loock, and texts and lectures by Neuhaus.

Publisher Cantz, Ostfildern, 1994
ISBN 3893225323
144 & 55 & 79 pages
via Charles

Volume I: Inscriptions (29 MB)
Volume II: Drawings (8 MB)
Volume III: Place (6 MB)

See also Max Neuhaus, Evocare l’udibile / Évoquer l’auditif, 1995.

Max Neuhaus: Evocare l’udibile / Évoquer l’auditif (1995) [IT/FR, EN]

Catalogue for the exhibition held at Villa Arson, Nice (FR), and Castello di Rivoli, Turin (IT), in 1995. With texts by Stuart Morgan, Yehuda Safran, a.o.

“The Drawing After

After finishing a sound work, if time allows, I wait several months before listening to it again. This is the first time I can stand outside the work and see what it is that I have made. It is only at this point after experiencing the work with distance that I make its circumscription drawing.

This drawing, two panels, a visual image and a handwritten text, integrates two traditional forms of communication to circumscribe something both invisible and indescribable. The image is not the drawing nor is the text: the drawing is what they synthesize together. When read in parallel, they evoke a central idea of the sound work, a point of departure and a reference, for reflection.” (Max Neuhaus, source [includes also an English version of a text by Yehuda Safran included in the catalogue])

Publisher Charta, Milan, 1995
ISBN 8881580462, 9788881580460
129 pages
via Charles

WorldCat

PDF (41 MB)
Transcriptions of descriptions of the featured works (in English, TXT)
Web version of the exhibition (at Max-Neuhaus.info)

See also Max Neuhaus, Sound Works, 3 vols., 1994.