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Idea Books

New Titles in Art, Essays and Performance

5 June 2023

Yael Davids - I am Going to be Your Last Teacher - Workbook

Isbn 9789464460315
Publisher Roma Publications
Idea code 23330
€ 35.00

This publication by Yael Davids unfolded as a workbook along two different exhibitions: A Daily Practice at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2020) and One Is Always a Plural at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2021). In Eindhoven the exhibition emerged from a three year research cycle facilitated by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Within the Van Abbemuseum she set up an educational structure, initially afterschool care for children, which evolved into weekly Feldenkrais classes. In Zurich, taking up these ideas in connection with a collection show, which had not been done for some time, was a fruitful challenge.

198 p, ills colour & bw, 23 x 30 cm, pb, English

Jurriaan Benschop - Why Paintings Work

Isbn 9789527222171
Publisher Garret Publications
Idea code 23231
€ 26.00

In ‘Why Paintings Work’, Jurriaan Benschop navigates the diverse landscape of contemporary painting. He introduces the work of dozens of painters and asks: Why do these paintings work? In what ways do they speak to the viewer? He considers both the visible aspects of painting such as the depicted motif and the application of paint and the concepts, beliefs, and motivations that underlie the canvas. ‘Why Paintings Work’ is not just about how we look at paintings, but also about finding a language that suits the art and viewing experience of today.

284 p, ills colour & bw, 14 x 20 cm, pb, English

Oscar Tuazon - Building

Isbn 9780991180479
Publisher Dope Press
Idea code 23254
€ 37.65

'Oscar Tuazon: Building' collects works spanning more than twenty years, presented as a visual essay on experimental space-making that culminates in the two major exhibitions of the artists' work planned for 2023. Balanced on the fulcrum between sculpture and architecture, the work of Oscar Tuazon uses processes of modeling and construction to transform the spaces of exhibition into a field for performative, improvisatory forms of building. Tracing a trajectory of sculptural interruptions in the utilitarian-built environment, the career survey at Kunst Museum Winterthur frames the progression of Tuazon's work through a series of objects. The project at Bergen Kunsthall concentrates on the scale model as a propositional device for imagining other spaces, as well as a means of temporary occupation of the exhibition space, culminating in a 1:1 scale model of the artist's current work Water School. The catalogue has a contribution by art historian Jessica Horton, poems by Cedar Sigo, and a conversation between the artist and curators Benedikt Fahrnschon, Lynn Kost, Christina Végh, and Axel Wieder.

184 p, ills colour & bw, 21 x 27 cm, pb, English

Nathalie Du Pasquier - Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing

Isbn 9782902565535
Publisher Fotokino
Idea code 23266
€ 17.20

Nathalie Du Pasquier constructed this book as she constructs her paintings: blocks of colour are assembled, supported, and opposed, forming chromatic architectures to accompany a new series of pencil drawings. As if placed on a table or a shelf, they evoke everyday objects (vases, books, boxes) and urban landscapes. Entirely conceived by Du Pasquier, this publication is part of an evolution of her work that, from her beginnings in the Memphis group to her most recent output, has slowly shifted her practice from design to painting, from object to abstraction. Today, after 40 years of creation, she deliberately plays with all these registers to create a language that belongs to her alone.

24 p, ills colour & bw, 21 x 30 cm, pb, English

Thus Waves Come in Pairs - Thinking with the Mediterraneans A conversation between Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal

Isbn 9781915609229
Publisher Sternberg Press
Idea code 23270
€ 18.00

In 2021, Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal recorded an intimate conversation about the Mediterranean at their Parisian home: “There are many Mediterraneans: the geographical, the historical, the philosophical... the personal, the one we swim, and we have swum in. It's an experience to swim, it is something you can't explain to somebody who never swam. This feeling of being held up by this water.” The third cycle of TBA21–Academy’s curatorial fellowship program The Current, spanning 2021–2023, focused on the Mediterraneans in a programme entitled 'Thus Waves Come in Pairs' after a line from Adnan’s poem 'Sea and Fog'. It pointed to the necessity of thinking of, and thinking with, the Mediterraneans as plural – plural as their interconnected cultures, and bodies of sweet and salty water, and possibilities of narrating their current transformations.

144 p, ills colour & bw, 11 x 18 cm, pb, English

Tainted Love

Isbn 9783956796586
Publisher Sternberg Press
Idea code 23274
€ 16.00

Titled after Soft Cell's version of the original 1965 Gloria Jones track, Tainted Love is the first book-length inquiry into the subject of the twisted romantic ballad, giving a sense of both its history and contemporary currency. Sometimes extreme, this twist to the conventional romantic ballad spans across gender and generational boundaries to subvert our understanding of both the genre's function and its behavior. Each chapter of Tainted Love explores a single twisted ballad in depth, examining both its inner workings—lyrics, melody, and vocal approach—and its broader cultural resonance. The analysis developed in the chapters turns on the question: what compels songwriters to compose—and us to listen to—these warped songs?

96 p, ills bw, 12 x 18 cm, pb, English

Trinh T. Minh-ha - Traveling in the Dark

Isbn 9788867495627
Publisher Mousse Publishing
Idea code 23255
€ 32.25

Traveling in the Dark is an exhibition and a publication by the world-renowned film director, poet, writer, music composer, literary critic, and art theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha. The book is a fully fledged artistic project conceived by Trinh from the script and visuals of her film What about China? and expanded with her writings, poems, and aphorisms as well as various interviews that investigate "a relationship to infinity," "memory of the mirror," and the "in-between." The book offers an experience with many possible entries, words, voices, thoughts, images, and pauses. As a visual, poetic, and philosophical experience, Traveling in the Dark invites us to rethink and experience "reality" differently from an approach mainly based on knowledge and re-presentation that we already possess or that is imposed on us. In other words: How can we learn to see our world without a priori seeing and knowing? In a time when the "all-seen" and "all-told" invade and control our daily lives, our private spheres and urban spaces, where are the areas of invisibility and shadows that leave us autonomy to see and to think, to say and to represent, to remember and to imagine? Traveling in the Dark engages the visitor and reader in an open montage of visual, sonic, and poetic textures, whose resonances, vibrations, recollections, exchanges, brushes, reflections, and passages undermine any pretense of fixed identity, historical truth, or prescribed territory.

288 p, ills colour & bw, 17 x 23 cm, hb, English

Dora Garcia – Inserts in Real Time: Performance Work 2000–2023

Isbn 9783947858538
Publisher K. Verlag
Idea code 23353
€ 30.80

'Inserts in Real Time' is the first monograph on the performance work developed by artist Dora García over the past twenty years. The book contains a conversation between the artist and curator Joanna Zielińska; a selection of her performance scripts; her performances to date, listed, illustrated, described, and contextualized; and three newly commissioned texts – by art historian Sven Lütticken, performance theorist Bojana Cvejić, and Dora García. The publication is co-published with M HKA, Antwerp, and accompanies Dora García’s exhibition 'She Has Many Names'.

328 p, ills colour, 22 x 26 cm, pb, English

Philippe Weisbecker - Oxymores

Isbn 9782902565528
Publisher Fotokino
Idea code 23335
€ 17.20

Oxymores brings together 16 diptychs recently created by Philippe Weisbecker. Drawings with abstract or sometimes identifiable forms, painted with precision or thrown on the paper, presented opposite each other, in a play of masses and colors which pushes even further the purity towards which the artist constantly strives. His work is a search for the essence of the subjects he draws: his line reduces the form to its obviousness, the representation is almost schematic. Yet this simplicity vibrates and, far from being cold and distant, his gaze is, on the contrary, as close as possible to the objects represented. One perceives an attention, a humility, and a pleasure in honestly retranscribing the most ordinary reality, that of one’s kitchen, anonymous streets or the shelves of the local hardware store.

28 p, ills colour & bw, 21 x 27 cm, pb, English

Laurent Millet - À Peu près Euclide

Isbn 9782902565511
Publisher Fotokino
Idea code 23291
€ 17.20

Laurent Millet offers a graphic and chromatic exploration of the language of Oliver Byrne, author of an 1850 treatise celebrating the marriage of art and science. From making models to creating photographic prints with gum bichromate, which gives them a graphic quality that is difficult to parse, Millet summons the vocabularies of both the 20th-century avant-gardes and the Memphis movement. Observations, architectures, measuring devices, tools, and models are recurrent in his work, contributing to the construction of what the artist calls a “measured reverie”. The book is an unbound portfolio whose pages, slipped into a pocket, adapt to the format of the 21 photographs.

20 p, ills colour & bw, 22 x 27 cm, pb, English

Alex Silber - Heading into Time works 1971-2021

Isbn 9783907112618
Publisher Vexer Verlag
Idea code 23337
€ 50.05

Alex Silber belongs to the first generation of Swiss artists to work with multiple media, installations, and performances. Since the beginning of his artistic practice, he has been fascinated by the medial aspect of images and texts. What is it that makes an image come to life? In a world marked by both an intoxication with images and iconoclasm, Silber has shaped his reflective approach to visual information into a distinctive voice of the contemporary world. The German title of this book, ‘In die Zeit gefallen’, does not imply that his oeuvre has taken a tumble down the rabbit hole of time. Rather, it is work on time, in time. It is the not-yet-fully-arrived, and that which is on its way.

290 p, ills colour & bw, 24 x 31 cm, pb, German/English

Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage?

Isbn 9783956796593
Publisher Sternberg Press
Idea code 23302
€ 12.00

Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? is the fourth book in the annual series A Series of Open Questions published by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press.This fourth issue is informed by themes found in the work of Lorraine O'Grady, including diaspora, Black female subjectivity, racial hybridity, translation, intersectional feminism, institutional critique, Black representation in the art world, archives, music, Conceptualism, and performance art.

224 p, ills bw, 11 x 18 cm, pb, English

The Failed Painter

Isbn 9789083318820
Publisher Set Margins'
Idea code 23294
€ 17.00

The Failed Painter is a personal book about material anxiety in the creative work of graphic design. It speaks of fascination for singular and multiple production processes, perfectibility, and imperfectability in times of virtual surfaces and hungering for authenticity. Writing from the ‘Failed Painter’ persona, the collection of essays on design and art spans culture, race, nation, and sheer vandalism. From the author of 'The Impossibility of Silence: Writing for Designers, Artists & Photographers'. Within this highly curated, yet varied assortment of approachable writing on aesthetics: space exploration, mercenaries, puberty, instant nostalgia, precarious labor, and of course, zombies.

220 p, ills bw, 10 x 17 cm, pb, English

Remaking the Crust of the Earth

Isbn 9789083318837
Publisher Set Margins'
Idea code 23296
€ 13.00

Idealism and imagination, dreams and reality, all come into play when we consider glass: from an elemental, ritual and decorative material of mysterious origins, to a functional, technological, mass-produced commodity. 'Remaking the Crust of the Earth' presents a layered, intertextual, cultural history which examines the ways in which glass has transformed society — how humans situate themselves within the environment, and how we view the world. Through the unlikely accident of its discovery to its present day ubiquity, it considers glass in its myriad guises: from the modular prefabrication of Joseph Paxton’s ‘Crystal Palace’ to the optimism of Paul Scheerbart’s Glasarchitektur.

56 p, ills colour & bw, 20 x 25 cm, pb, English

Enfleshed - Ecologies of Entities and Beings

Isbn 9789493148949
Publisher Stichting Onomatopee
Idea code 23293
€ 22.50

Enfleshed: Ecologies of Entities and Beings brings together practitioners, thinkers, and artists from across Eurasia to collectively explore multispecies ecologies. The volume reflects anthrodecentric and embodied approaches to collaboration and knowledge production––processes that are always interwoven with a multitude of entities and actors. In this book, the contributions flow like a river across the Eurasian continent, branching out into all directions. The contributors engage in an exploration of experimental epistemic alliances, which operate as a way to learn and make new dialogic relations. The conflicts generated by ecological disaster, war, the global economy, identity politics, and the power structures of knowledge production and science here intertwine with shamanisms, rituals, magic, speculation, politics, and poetics. How do we imagine an active and implicated role of the human as one being among other beings? What might this entail, and what might this generate?

176 p, ills bw, 17 x 24 cm, pb, English

Hélio Oiticica - Parangolé – Between Revolt and Poetry

Isbn 9788867495658
Publisher Mousse Publishing
Idea code 23284
€ 29.05

The tension generated between euro-centric and peripheral conceptualisms is put into question, in order to insert the work of Oiticica in the international Neo-Avantgarde logic, where life transits into art, and art into life. The research carried out by Delmari Romero Keith and Marc Pottier validates the idea that vindicates art's power as a social denunciation vehicle and a poetic-politic complaint. This proposal re-dimensions Oiticica's work and positions it beyond conceptual and performative trends. Parangolés rekindle the postmodern allegorical impulse that activates fragments which manifest structures of cancelled imaginary. They are manifestations of atavistic referents, ancestral rituals, and residual memory—appropriated from the Brazilian favelas and the carnival—and links between the rhythms of the body and those of nature. Performative action, which covers the sensorial aspects of a human being—a radical elaboration of Neoconcretism connected to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. Hélio Oiticica's Parangolés are a manifestation of canons different to the euro-centric ones. In them, we find the crossing between the cult and the vernacular, a strategy of artistic renovation. They incorporate a multi-disciplinary proposal—dance, movement, contortions, music, rhythm, poetry and, above all, exuberant colors—to stage the displacement of a fluid and hybrid identity that harasses, agitates, and protests against social inequalities. Hélio Oiticica's Parangolé devours autochthonous customs and mainstream aesthetic influences. This genre hybridization, this anthropophagic awakening, revealed the centripetal force of the movement that, in the end, meant a criticism of the time's statu quo.

204 p, ills colour & bw, 16 x 23 cm, pb, English/Spanish/French

David Horvitz - წვიმა Rain

Isbn 9783945900581
Publisher Edition Taube
Idea code 23289
€ 10.20

There are 64 different words for rain in the Georgian language. Artist David Horvitz worked with Tbilisi-based curator Elene Abashidze to collect these words. This resulted in a glossary that describes the subtle differences in how water can fall from the sky. The wealth of expressions for a single natural phenomenon also makes visible what we will lose through the effects of the climate crisis, when the variety of expressions for rain no longer apply.

64 p, ills colour, 10 x 16 cm, pb, English

Blind Date with the Future

Isbn 9789492852731
Publisher Jap Sam Books
Idea code 23304
€ 39.95

German duo Haubitz + Zoche were among the first artists in Germany to address climate crisis in their work. The book 'Blind Date with the Future' gives a comprehensive overview of the artistic projects on ecological issues such as sea level rise or dwindling resources that they have realised between 2006 and 2022. In the context of current climate debates their oeuvre is becoming increasingly relevant. An art-historical essay by Ann-Katrin Günzel and an interview between Franziska Kunze and Stefanie Zoche provide background information on the artworks.

240 p, ills colour & bw, 22 x 27 cm, pb, English

Ana Prvački - Flowering Under Stress

Isbn 9781915609267
Publisher Sternberg Press
Idea code 23275
€ 22.00

'Flowering Under Stress' presents a wide selection of works from Ana Prvački’s daily watercolor practice that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. It guides us through the inner and outer landscapes of our recent years, as we grappled the complex emotions of a world turned upside down. A therapeutic visual journey that reveals Prvački's signature playful wit, the watercolors address current conversations on history, ecology, sexuality, technology, self care and mental health. Offering an imaginative and improvisational approach to the world, Flowering Under Stress encourages us to recognize our shared humanity and to look for hope and possibility in unlikely places.

160 p, ills colour & bw, 17 x 24 cm, pb, English

Richard Phoenix - Do Your Own Thing

Isbn 9781914236310
Publisher Rough Trade Books
Idea code 23164
€ 15.80

'Do Your Own Thing' is a work of non-fiction from artist and musician Richard Phoenix detailing his experiences of the best underground arts scene you’ve never heard of—Do Your Own Thing, a project run by learning disability arts organisation Heart n Soul. Looking at the transformative potential of working to support creative young people make the music and art they want to, this book contributes essential new voices, reflections and considerations to the established ideas of ‘Do It Yourself’ culture. Phoenix’s book, written with a disarming and idiosyncratic voice, asks what our often reductive understanding of DIY aesthetics might mean in light of questions about access, support and who gives permission to whom to make art, guiding us through the kind of project only spoken about in funding reports and transforming it into a polyphonic, collaborative and joyful work of art.

168 p, no ills, 13 x 17 cm, pb, English

Cybernetic Serendipity - a walk around the exhibition

Isbn 9781948764018
Publisher Waterlily Press
Idea code 23245
€ 48.00

This publication is about the exhibition, Cybernetic Serendipity, how it began and what it looked like. The material presented here, words and images, was initially used in a lecture for ZKM, Karlsruhe, in 2005. It shows and describes a walk around the exhibition. The exhibition was designed by Franciszka Themerson with students of the Bath Academy of Art. The walk around it consists of images of the works displayed with short descriptive texts. Work on the exhibition started in January 1966 and it opened in August 1968. The walk around the exhibition is followed by an article, 'Cybernetic Serendipity - getting rid of preconceptions', published in Studio International, November 1968.

168 p, ills colour, 14 x 22 cm, pb, English

Passivity - Between Resignation and Pacifism

Isbn 9789493246225
Publisher Valiz
Idea code 23250
€ 9.50

"A pacifist is a rare beast in a bomb shelter." The war in Ukraine challenged our idea of pacifism. Should Europe take up arms or not? Can it ease its conscience only with humanitarian aid? Isn’t Europe's attitude towards the war mainly driven by economic motives? In 'Passivity', Ukrainian art curator Alexandra Tryanova and Belgian sociologist Pascal Gielen engage in a dialogue about this. In doing so, they not only talk about the current political situation, but also look at themselves; at their own fears and privileges. What is passivity in our own daily doings? When does pacifism turn into resignation? How do our surrounding media and culture contribute to such an attitude? Passivity does not provide unifying answers to these questions. Rather, it looks for ways to find peace with our own mixed feelings.

96 p, ills bw, 11 x 16 cm, pb, English

Kathrin Böhm - Art on the Scale of Life

Isbn 9783956796265
Publisher Sternberg Press
Idea code 23241
€ 25.00

This edited volume critically profiles, contextualizes, and theoretically elaborates the unique practice of the UK-based German artist Kathrin Böhm. Combining visual and textual material, the book offers an overview of Böhm’s exceptional modus operandi that is rooted in a highly original artistic synthesis of a range of practices. Connecting life and art, formal and informal, thinking and making, local and international, rural and urban, this book presents a comprehensive overview of artist Kathrin Böhm’s multifaceted, deeply collaborative and durational practice and networks.

360 p, ills colour & bw, 21 x 30 cm, pb, English

H(a)untings / Heim Suchungen

Isbn 9781915609120
Publisher Sternberg Press
Idea code
€ 18.00

To challenge hegemonic archives, and with them the representations of Blackness inhabiting these very spaces, is to struggle for connection, voice, language, not least for images. Even more so in a time and space in which the stickiness of a colonial past is dismissed. Dealing with the hauntings and echoes of Austria's colonial past, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński—visual artist, writer, and recipient of the Camera Austria Prize 2021—sets the stage for the what-if, while confronting viewers with the violence of the Western gaze. Introducing readers to a multiplicity of voices—artists, thinkers, and scholars with whom she is in conversation and communion—the artist's catalogue opens a space for Black diasporan artistic practices. Here, the reverberating echoes and residues of a past ongoing become visible as effects in what we have come to call “the present”.

160 p, ills colour & bw, 17 x 22 cm, pb, English

The Good Life

Isbn 9782940695102
Publisher Label Rapace
Idea code 23227
€ 34.85

In his vibrant exploration of a total art which in turn defies categorisation, Swiss artist Augustin Rebetez collaborates with numerous artists, punks, models, musicians, and friends to produce a multifaceted oeuvre. More than 200 charcoal drawings make up 'The Good Life', an ironic manual of life and what essentially amounts to a compendium of bad advice in broken English. These satirical phrases, sometimes funny, sometimes accurate, aim to make us live the good life. A guide that is basic, simple, elementary, but also terribly humorous and refreshing. With book design by Zurich-based graphic designers NORM and an essay contribution by Bassma El Adisey.

220 p, ills colour & bw, 17 x 24 cm, pb, English

Raffaella Crispino and Hans Demeulenaere - Incomplete Neighbor

Isbn 9789493148932
Publisher Onomatopee
Idea code 23233
€ 36.00

Like neighbors behind walls, who are not seen but whose actions are well heard, artists Raffaella Crispino and Hans Demeulenaere initiated a dialogue with musicians. The interaction between them took on different forms, which led to the creation of the featured works in the publication ‘Incomplete Neighbor’. When Raffaella Crispino moved to Brussels in 2011, she experienced difficulties creating visual works, and instead taught herself to play the Omnichord. She adopted a daily practice of composing songs, which were named after the date of their creation. The result was a vinyl album, Ogni Giorno (It. every day), which is a musical diary. Demeulenaere's point of departure for deciphering the relationship between the visual medium and the musical medium is a study of the playing environment and of the patterns that accompany the musicians, such as the chairs they find comfortable, the endpin stoppers used to keep the musical instrument (cello) in place, the points in the museum space where the music is heard best. One of the works featured in ’Incomplete Neighbor’ is Prototypes where Demeulenaere explored the chairs preferred by the musicians, and the created chairs in collaboration with art students inspired by iconic designers, such as Le Corbusier, Enzo Mari, Gerrit Rietveld, and Donald Judd.

130 p, ills colour & bw, 21 x 30 cm, pb, English

Territories of performance: processes and practices in Italy (1967-1982)

Isbn 9788822920676
Publisher Quodlibet / Maxxi
Idea code 23301
€ 17.20

Part of the Focus Series by MAXXI Arte Collection, this volume presents the mapping carried out by Lara Conte and Francesca Gallo of performative practices in Italy between 1967 and 1982. At the same moment, it is a historical survey that renders the territorial and geographical developments of this until now non-existent and fluid archive of performances legible and consultable on various levels. From politics to anthropology, and from myth to art history, it provides a topographical and argumentative reading through photographs, drawings, images, videos, and oral accounts as pure narrative tools. An exploration of both collective memory and archival documentation.

128 p, ills colour & bw, 17 x 24 cm, pb, Italian/English

Hans Andersson

Isbn 9789198672121
Publisher Art and Theory Publishing
Idea code 23341
€ 40.85

Hans Andersson is a Swedish artist best known for his tactile and intricate collages. He incorporates a diverse array of materials in his work, such as textile scraps, dyed paper, painted sheets, magazine fragments, shellac, coffee grounds, and more. This book presents a collection of his striking collages and showcases some photographs of Andersson at work. It also includes a conversation between curator and writer Silvana Lagos and the artist himself, as well as a text on the nature of zero, or nothing. Combining traditional craftsmanship with Nordic sensibilities, Andersson has received various art grants and has exhibited his work internationally.

144 p, ills colour & bw, 17 x 22 cm, pb, English


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