Mladen Stilinović: 1+2 ≡ (2015) [English/Spanish]

Catalogue for an exhibition held from 5 September 2015 – 3 January 2016 at MUAC in Mexico City. The show comprising work dating from the 1970s up to the first decade of the 21st century included video, painting, collage, documentation of actions and installations, and aimed to demonstrate how Mladen Stilinović (1947-2016) questioned the aesthetic and social legacy of the avant-garde.

“His work comprises exercises that are frequently tautological, with citations that range from the aesthetic of the street to that of the Russian avant-garde, but always based on a dual axis that combines the formal simplicity with the deconstructive power of the absurd. The practice of this Croatian artist is governed by a specific question: ‘how to manipulate that which manipulates you’. Though he is considered a conceptual artist, the work of Stilinović is never cold nor rational, but moves in a register of humor and irony whose simple gestures appeal to the emotions and produce experiences that insist on personal responsibility. All his artistic strategies, starting with his auctioning off the color red, exchanging the definition of all the words in the dictionary for the word pain, or selling self-censorship, are connected—in the artist’s own words—with respecting the anarchy in himself and proposes the absurd as an antidote to ideology—whichever ideology is waiting for us around the next corner.”

Contains three texts by Mladen Stilinović, an interview by Branka Stipančić, essays by Alejandra Labastida and Boris Groys, and reproductions of selected works.

Publisher Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico City, 2015
Folio MUAC series, 35
ISBN 607025175X, 9786070251757
95 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (2 MB)

David Elliott (ed.): Alexander Rodchenko (1979)

The first English-language monograph on the constructivist and productivist artist and designer Alexander Rodchenko.

With essays by Alexander Lavrentiev, John Milner, Andrei Nakov, Szymon Bojko, Gail Harrison, Galina Chichagova, Zakhar Bykov, Hubertus Gassner, and historical writings by Rodchenko, Osip Brik, and Varvara Stepanova.

Published to coincide with the first retrospective exhibition of Rodchenko’s work shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 10 Feb 79 to 25 Mar 79; Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 11 May 79 to 17 Jun 79; Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal, 26 Jul 79 to 2 Sep 79.

Edited and with an Introduction by David Elliott
Designed by David King
Publisher Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1979
ISBN 0905836138, 9780905836133
136 pages
via Bint Bint

WorldCat

PDF (10 MB)

Asger Jorn: Pour la forme. Ébauche d’une méthodologie des arts (1957/2001) [French, English]

Pour la forme was one of the first projects of the newly formed Situationist International. The publication collected texts of Asger Jorn from the immediately preceding period. As Jorn explained in his introductory “Notice,” the texts collected in that book reflected the evolution of his experiments and encounters among radical avant-garde currents following the dissolution of the Cobra group (1948-1951) and leading up to the formation of the SI in 1957.

Contents:
Guy Debord: Dix années d’art expérimental: Jorn et son rôle dans l’invention théoretique, 7
Avertissement, 10-11
Image et forme, 11-24
Contre le functionalisme, 25-33
Forme et structure, 34-47
Misère et merveille, 48-56
Structure et changement, 57-70
Charme et mécanique, 71-92
Les Situationnistes et l’automation, 93-95
Mouvement et forme, 96-114
Forme et signification, 115-138
Sortie, 142-157

Four texts (plus “Notice”) from the book were translated from the French by Ken Knabb for a comprehensive English-language collection of Jorn’s writings: Fraternité Avant Tout: Asger Jorn’s Writings on Art and Architecture, 1938-1958 (010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2011, edited by Ruth Baumeister).

First published by Internationale situationniste, Paris, 1957.

This edition
Preface by Guy Debord
Publisher Allia, Paris, 2001
ISBN 2844850723
157 pages
via x

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (29 MB)
4 + 1 texts in English (trans. Ken Knabb, 2011, HTML)