Too Much World: The Films of Hito Steyerl (2014)

“Hito Steyerl is considered one of the most exciting artists working today who speculates on the impact of the Internet and digitization on the fabric of our everyday lives. Her films and writings offer an astute, provocative, and often funny analysis of the dizzying speed with which images and data are reconfigured, altered, and dispersed, many times over, accelerating into infinity or crashing into oblivion.

Published to accompany the artist’s survey exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Too Much World gathers a series of essays and close readings of Steyerl’s films from 2004-2014. Newly commissioned texts by Sven Lütticken, Karen Archey, Ana Teixeira Pinto, and Nick Aikens, alongside writings by Thomas Elsaesser, Pablo Lafuente, David Riff, and Steyerl, are spliced with over one hundred pages of color stills.”

Edited by Nick Aikens
Publisher Sternberg Press, Berlin; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2014
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License
ISBN 9783956790577
247 pages

Exh. reviews: Amelia Groom (2014), Paula Albuquerque (Necsus 2015), Dylan Rainforth (LEAP 2015), Kate Woodcroft (Artlink 2015), Scott Redford (Ran Dian 2015).

Exhibition (Van Abbemuseum)
Exhibition (IMA)
Publisher (Sternberg)
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (single pages, 4 MB)
PDF, PDF (spreads, 4 MB)

Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Cubism and Abstract Art: Painting, Sculpture, Constructions, Photography, Architecture, Industrial Art, Theatre, Films, Posters, Typography (1936)

The catalogue of the first MoMA’s retrospective of modernism, held 2 March-19 April 1936, laid the theoretical foundation of the museum. Its jacket contains a notorious chart of modernist art history, the Diagram of Stylistic Evolution from 1890 until 1935.

“The catalogue remains an important historical document (as does that for Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism). It set abstraction within a formalist framework that—ignoring the intellectual byways of French symbolism, German idealism, and Russian Marxism of the previous thirty years—was shaped by the scientific climate that had started a century before. … The exhibition together with the widespread dissemination of its influential catalogue, established Cubism as the central issue of early modernism, abstraction as the goal.” (Sybil Gordon Kantor, 2003)

The exhibition later traveled to another 7 cities: San Francisco, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Baltimore, Providence, and Grand Rapids.

Publisher Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936
249 pages
via MoMA

Commentary: Meyer Schapiro (Marxist Quarterly, 1937), Susan Noyes Platt (Art Journal, 1988), Astrit Schmidt Burkhardt (Word & Image, 2000).

Publisher (incl. master checklist and press releases)
WorldCat

PDF (47 MB)

Michael Snow: The Collected Writings of Michael Snow (1994)

“Writing, for Michael Snow, is as much a form of “art-making” as the broad range of visual art activities for which he is renowned, including the “Walking Woman” series and the film Wavelength. Conversely, many of the texts included in this anthology are as significant visually as they are at the level of content — they are meant to be looked at as well as read. Situated somewhere between a repository of contemporary thought by one of our leading Canadian artists and a history book as it brings to light some important moments in the cultural life of Canada since the 1950s, these texts tell their own story, marking the passage of time, ideas and attitudes.

The works included here, ranging from essays and interviews and record album cover notes to filmscripts and speeches (which, in Snow’s hands, often fall into the category of performance art), are not only “built for browsing,” they offer insights into both the professional and the private Snow. Together, they expand the context of Snow’s work and show the evolution of a great Canadian artist, beginning with his early attempts at defining art, to his emergence and recognition on the international art scene.

This book is one of four books that are part of the Michael Snow Project. Initiated by the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Power Plant Gallery, the project also includes four exhibitions of his visual art and music.”

Included texts: The Real “New Jazz,” 1950; Poem, 1957; Something You Might Try, 1958; Title or Heading, 1961; A Lot of Near Mrs., 1962-63; Around about New York Eye and Ear Control, 1966; Statements/18 Canadian Artists, 1967; First to Last, 1967; Crafts, 1967; On Wavelength, 1968; Abitibi, 1969; Tap, 1969; Ten Questions to Michael Snow, 1969; La Région Centrale, 1969; Converging on La Région Centrale: Michael Snow in Conversation with Charlotte Townsend, 1971; Michael Snow: A Filmography by Max Knowles, 1971; Passage (Dairy), 1971.

With a Foreword by Louise Dompierre
Publisher Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario, 1994
ISBN 0889202435, 9780889202436
viii+295 pages
via KD

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (29 MB)
ARG