Vision Machines

Gabriel Abrantes has been making a career in cinema; with numerous international exhibitions, he's been keeping prolific, with video installations, drawing, painting, and now also VR. This book, published by maat and Mousse, attests exactly this. A book that is predominantly visual and clearly structured, efficient in transposing a certain formal and conceptual attitude that runs through Abrantes's work into the book's aesthetic approach, expressing humour and irony visually within a relatively classical framework.

"The juxtaposition of references to art and cultural history with personal and socio-political commentary is a guiding thread throughout Programmed Melancholy." writes Emily Butler, in one of the essays included in this book (other texts are an interview with the artist and short essay by Rosa Lleó). Butler continues: "His works engage with our emotions, with a range of personal feelings, often humorous, potentially rousing ethical and political beliefs. Unstable, multi-faced, polysexual, his characters waver between expressing personal emotions and wider social, environmental and political concerns."

An analysis of Mike Kelley's work as a position in materialist philosophy, which appears as the feature that is most at stake in his artistic practice, focusing on the pieces he produced around the issue of memory––his leitmotiv from 1995 onward.

Mike Kelley is best known as one of the most influential visual artists of his generation. But he was also an insightful theorist who wrote profusely about his work as well as on aesthetics in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, an epoch marked, in his view, by victim culture and the pop psychology phenomenon known as repressed memory syndrome. Mike Kelley: Materialist Aesthetics and Memory Illusions presents the artist in a new light, almost as an empirical philosopher delivering his position through art as well as writing. In a meticulous and transdisciplinary approach, Laura López Paniagua presents Kelley's oeuvre as a stance in materialist aesthetics and weaves thoughtful relations between the artist's critique, statements, and comments and the theories of thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. López Paniagua focuses on Kelley's artistic production between 1995 and his death in 2012, analyzing these works vis-à-vis the concept of memory, one of the artist's obsessions and leitmotivs throughout his career.

Essay by Laura López Paniagua; introduction by John Miller.

A journey through the artist's work and life.

William Anastasi is the author of a prolific body of work. A major figure in conceptualism and in many respects one of its initiators, his trajectory cannot be solely confined to this chapter in the history of contemporary art. The book revisits, through the prism of multiple voices, the various aspects of an approach that unfolded with the use of complementary mediums. Drawing coexists with photography and "new" technologies, alongside objects, paintings, and installations. Within this corpus to be (re)discovered, sounds, images, and language, as well as artifacts, protocols, and processes, convey inquiries related to space and time, representation, and perception. With contributions from Dove Bradshaw, Chiara Costa, Béatrice Gross, Valérie Mavridorakis, Hélène Meisel, Sébastien Pluot, Julia Robinson, Robert Storr, and Erik Verhagen.

Edited by Erik Verhagen.
Texts by Dove Bradshaw, Chiara Costa, Béatrice Gross, Valérie Mavridorakis, Hélène Meisel, Sébastien Pluot, Julia Robinson, Robert Storr, Erik Verhagen.

The first monograph on Christiane Blattmann takes its title from her solo show Un-Break My Walls at Kunsthalle Münster in 2019. Blattmann intricately interweaves, intermeshes, combines, compounds, merges, and processes in her work not only materials but also structures, things, stories, characters. The volume includes extensive illustrations of exhibitions, projects, and works, and a great number of black-and-white images capture the artist’s studio practice. The interactions of materials, along with theoretical and literary references, serve as important points of departure, and the emblematic outcomes involve text and texture as material structure and patterned surface; vivid condensation and entanglement; and invitations to exploration and reflection. The book compiles different elements designed on a series of shifting layers. Texts by Merle Radtke and Chloe Stead and a conversation between Christiane Blattmann and Than Hussein Clark provide insight into Blattmann’s art, complemented by a piece of fiction by Huw Lemmey.

Texts by Merle Radtke, Huw Lemmey, and Chloe Stead, and a conversation between Christiane Blattmann and Than Hussein Clark

A literary tribute to Sarah Lucas, at once an adroit art-historical study and a poetic travelogue.

“Distance is far, nobody said. (Somebody, surely.)” So begins Quinn Latimer's strange, elliptical account of an exhibition and a body of work by Sarah Lucas that the poet and critic has never seen, made and installed in a city she had not yet visited. In the spring of 2012 the renowned English artist's exhibition “NUDs” was mounted in Mexico City at Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli, the famed pyramid-like museum built by the muralist and architect Juan O'Gorman to house Rivera's approximately 50,000 Mesoamerican artifacts and objects. In the summer of 2012 Latimer found herself in Elba, the island of Napoleon's exile, where she embarked on this small, charged book. In four interconnected essays, the writer limns the myriad impressions, ideas, objects, personages, and histories relevant to Lucas's fantastically transparent yet complicated “NUDs,” and their storied making and installation in Mexico. Exploring shame, passivity, palindromes and fertility statuary, as well as notables including Antonin Artaud, Napoleon, Susan Sontag and Mary Wollstonecraft, Describe This Distance is at once an adroit art-historical study and a poetic travelogue, once or twice removed.

The publication is the first institutional monograph on the multimedia practice of artist and director Ali Cherri. It aims to highlight the constellation of ideas, themes, and formal concerns running through his most recent, highly significant projects.

Edited by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi, with Bianca Stoppani, this book provides an overview of the artist's output over the past three years, teasing out both new strands for interpretation and formal links between his films, videos, sculptures, drawings, and installations.

Texts by: Cecilia Alemani, Erika Balsom, Étienne Bernard, Leonardo Bigazzi, Ali Cherri, Lorenzo Giusti, Stefanie Hessler, Priyesh Mistry, Alessandro Rabottini, Stefan Tarnowski.

Video and visual artist Ali Cherri (born 1976 in Beirut, lives and works in Paris and Beirut) received a BA in graphic design from the American University in Beirut in 2000, and an MA in performing arts from DasArts, Amsterdam, in 2005. His current project looks at the place of the archaeological object in the construction of historical narratives.

Ten shots of the sky, each ten minutes long. That’s all it takes to describe James Benning’s film from 2004. And yet, this simplicity conceals a rich and absorbing drama, one of the great works of the American avant-garde. Scholar and critic Erika Balsom unfolds its hidden intricacies of meaning, extending its lessons with crystalline prose, a comparable sense of depths, and an exhilarating, maximalist intimation of what criticism can do and become. She brings you from the film itself into the mind of the artist, through philosophical musings and art historical scholarship. The book is part of a Decadent Editions series of 10 books about 10 films.

DWOSKINO. The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin is the culmination of a three year research project, The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin, at the University of Reading where his archive is housed. The book is a unique visual distillation of Dwoskin’s life and times, with hundreds of never-seen-before images taken from his archive, and texts by among others Laura Mulvey, Raymond Bellour, Raymond Durgnat, and Dwoskin himself.

Stephen Dwoskin (1939–2012) began his filmmaking career in the New York underground scene of the early 1960s, then moved to London in 1964, where he became a leading figure in avant-garde film, and was one of the founders of the London Filmmakers Co-operative (now LUX). His early works, such as Dyn Amo (1972), are synonymous with the male gaze. Laura Mulvey wrote that he ‘opened a completely new perspective for me on cinematic voyeurism’ and his work was a major influence on her influential work on the male gaze in cinema. From the mid-1970s, he focused his camera upon his own body, afflicted by polio during childhood, in such films as Behindert (1974) and Outside In (1981).