Bruce Conner: It’s All True (2016)

“Realist. Surrealist. Hippie. Punk. Bruce Conner (1933-2008) was all of these and more. A pioneer in experimental film, collage, photography, conceptual works, and paintings, he challenged the limitations of medium, genre, and style, constantly breaking new ground. Both of and ahead of his time, Conner continues to exert influence over artists working today. Bruce Conner: It’s All True was the first comprehensive retrospective of this pivotal American artist’s output, bringing together over 250 objects in various media, including film and video, works on paper, assemblages, photographs and photograms, performance, and more. Spanning his five-decade career, the exhibition presents aspects of Conner’s work that have rarely been seen before, from paintings he made in the 1950s to photos from the Bay Area punk scene in the 1970s to video work from the 2000s, as well as numerous works produced in the last decade of his life.”

With texts by Rachel Federman, Laura Hoptman, Kellie Jones, Michelle Barger, Roger Griffith and Megan Randall, Rachel Federman, Kristine Stiles, Rudolf Frieling, Gary Garrels, Diedrich Diederichsen, Stuart Comer, Johanna Gosse, a.o.

Edited by Rudolf Frieling and Gary Garrels
Publisher San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in association with University of California Press, 2016
ISBN 9780520290563, 0520290569
384 pages

Review: Hugo Daniel (Critique d’art, 2017, FR).
Exh. reviews: Roberta Smith (New York Times), Andrea K. Scott (New Yorker), J. Hoberman (New York Review of Books), Matthew Biro (Brooklyn Rail), Maika Pollack (Aperture), Kristin M. Jones (Wall Street Journal), Kimberly Connerton (Aesthetica), Thomas Gladysz (Huff Post).

Exhibition (MoMA)
Exhibition (SFMOMA)
Exhibition (Reina Sofia)
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (35 MB)

Ilya Kabakov: On Art (2018)

“During the 1960s and 1970s, the Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov was a galvanizing figure in Moscow’s underground art community, ultimately gaining international prominence as the “leader” of a band of artists known as the Moscow Conceptual Circle. Throughout this time, he created texts that he would distribute among his friends, and by the late 1990s his written production amounted to hundreds of pages.

Devoted to themes that range from the “cosmism” of pre-Revolutionary Russian modernism to the philosophical implications of Moscow’s garbage, Kabakov’s handmade booklets were typed out on paper, then stapled or sewn together using rough butcher paper for their covers. Among these writings are faux Socialist Realist verses, theoretical explorations, art historical analyses, accompaniments to installation projects, and transcripts of dialogues between the artist and literary theorists, critics, journalists, and other artists.

This volume offers for the first time in English the most significant texts written by Kabakov. The writings have been expressly selected for this English-language volume.”

Edited and with an Introduction by Matthew Jesse Jackson
Translated by Antonina W. Bouis and Cynthia Martin with Matthew Jesse Jackson
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2018
ISBN 9780226384566, 022638456X
432 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF

Andrea Andersson (ed.): Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art (2018)

“One of the most important movements in twenty-first century literature is the emergence of conceptual writing. By knowingly drawing on the histories of art and literature, conceptual writing upended traditional categorical conventions.

Postscript is the first collection of writings on the subject of conceptual writing by a diverse field of scholars in the realms of art, literature, media, as well as the artists themselves. Using new and old technology, and textual and visual modes including appropriation, transcription, translation, redaction, and repetition, the contributors actively challenge the existing scholarship on conceptual art. Rather than segregating the work of visual artists from that of writers we are shown the ways in which conceptual art is, and remains, a mutually supportive interaction between the arts.”

Publisher University of Toronto Press, 2018
ISBN 1442649844, 9781442649842
xii+416 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (26 MB)