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Tell Me what You Want, what You Really, Really Want
This first compilation of writings by art critic Jan Verwoert galvanizescentral themes he has been developing in pursuit of a language todescribe art's transformative potential in conceptual, performative andemotional terms. He analyzes the power of public gestures toconstitute communities as well as the pressure to perform that governsthe sphere of creative labor, in order to show how particular artistsperform gestures and invoke community differently. Exploring theemotional power games that shape social relations, Verwoert looks foran alternative ethos of action and feeling, asking: How can a modernistapproach to artistic form as a means of social critique be expandedto fully avow its subliminal affective undercurrents, and produce apleasurably crooked form of criticality in art and writing?
Bas Jan Ader
An illustrated investigation into the critical motives behind the last, unfinished work that has defined the romantic legacy of conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader. In 1975 Bas Jan Ader disappeared at sea while trying to sail from the East Coast of the United States to Europe as part of a project titled In Search of the Miraculous. Ader's considerable influence on later conceptual artists stems from the way in which he used the cool analytic and antisubjective aesthetics of conceptual art to explore experiences that would seem definitively subjective—the emotional intensity of tragedy and the romantic quest for the sublime. In Search of the Miraculous was conceived as a three-part project: a lo...
Cookie!
If we don’t merely reduce art to clever code play in the arenas of representation, how do we speak about what is at stake? In response to this question, Verwoert addresses the forces at the heart of the tragicomedy that making, showing, and critiquing art implicates us in. He honors the basic joys of turning one thing into another, and the miracles of rhythm and rhyme that characterize the residual level of mimetic magic in art. In this key, the unverifiable is practiced daily: bodies are remade, feelings transfigured. As Alina Szapocznikow wrote, the mouth chews and out comes sculpture. Verwoert’s 'COOKIE!' renders visible the endless emotional labor of setting the stage (for others), poses the thorny question of whether there could ever be a labor union for con-artists (like us), and gestures toward an ethics of disappointment to battle false expectations and as a way to come to terms with the fact that, no matter how you look at it, criticism hurts.
No New Kind of Duck
No New Kind of Duck' seeks to coin concepts for what we get to know by doing art and being among people. The book is the outcome of an exchange between editor Jan Verwoert and the participants of the Graduate School at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), the artists Alex Martinis Roe, Jeremiah Day, Azin Feizabadi, Lizza May David and Ralf Baecker as well as composers Nuria Nuñez Hierro and Björn Erlach. 'No New Kind of Duck' features an introductory essay by editor Jan Verwoert on the politics of artistic knowledge production. It comprises a series of discussions in which the contributing artists and composers name the stakes of practicing their art today. In parallel, the book presents a careful selection of original artistic contributions. The book won't use words to justify works. It understands the coining of concepts and making of art as two closely related yet distinct material practices. We speak. We act. We put both together in a book. 'No New Kind of Duck' is born out of the spirit of Berlin as a polis, a place where people live to make art and, at the end of the day, get together to talk concepts and politics.
Wolfgang Tillmans
Few artists have changed the manner in which photographic images are made, read, and received over the past two decades as dramatically as German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968). One of the most important and distinctive artists to emerge in the 1990s, Tillmans’s work is internationally recognized for its powerful reflections on the often overlooked objects and moments in everyday life. With images culled from the entirety of Tillmans’s career, this generously illustrated book accompanies the artist’s first retrospective exhibition in the United States and features the potent effects of his portraits, abstractions, and structural and sculptural motifs. Essays by leading schola...
Animal Spirits
In March 2008 the artist Michael Stevenson self-published a slender document entitled Fables to accompany his project Lender of Last Resort at the Kroller-Muller Museum in the Netherlands. It was a series of some nine texts in fable form, and each suggested further allegorical readings on a tableau the artist assembled in the museum. All were co-written by Stevenson and the art critic Jan Verwoert. The project itself was developed around the notion of the bilateral loan contract, both in the financial sense, but also regarding the museological. The publication was only available in the space itself and has long since been out of print. Animal Spirits: Fables in the Parlance of Our Times is a...
Romantic conceptualism
Featuring work by 23 international artists including Bas Jan Ader, Tacita Dean, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rodney Graham, Louise Lawler, Yoko Ono and Frances Stark, this illustrated reader takes on romantic motifs (desire, melancholia) and methods (fragmentation, ephemerality, process) in Conceptualism, thwarting the conventional opposition between romantic inwardness and conceptual rationalism.
Tomma Abts
The first major monograph dedicated to the work of the internationally acclaimed abstract painter.
What Is Contemporary Art?
This book began as a two-part issue of e-flux journal devoted to the question: What is contemporary art? First, and most obviously: why is this question not asked? That is to say, why do we simply leave it to hover in the shadow of attempts at critical summation in the grand tradition of twentieth-century artistic movements? A single hegemonic “ism” has replaced clearly distinguishable movements and grand narratives. But what exactly does it mean to be working under the auspices of this singular ism? “Widespread usage of the term 'contemporary' seems so self-evident that to further demand a definition of 'contemporary art' may be taken as an anachronistic exercise in cataloguing or sel...
Self-organised
"Exploring one of the most influential methods of contemporary cultural production, Self-Organised takes a broad view on the matter. Artists, curators and critics discuss empirical and theoretical approaches from Europe, Africa and South and North America to how self-organisation today oscillates between the self and the group, self-imposed bureaucratisation and flexibilism, aestheticisation and activism. The contributors identify now as a crucial moment to propose ways forward for parallel initiatives and institutions alike: from de-organisation and waiting, to rupture and coexistence of aesthetics and politics. However, what they all seem to share is a refreshing search for critical platforms of citizenship, harnessing self-determination in the wake of neo-liberal mainstreaming and right-wing populism alike." --> z ov.
