A fascinating history of the explosive convergence of avant-garde art and rock music The dynamic relationship between rock music and visual art crosses continents, generations, and cultures. Beginning with Andy Warhol’s involvement with The Velvet Underground in 1967, artists have maintained a strong connection to rock. Artists such as Slater Bradley, Mike Kelley, and Raymond Pettibon have created album covers and music videos for rock bands, while rock musicians such as Bryan Ferry, John Lennon, and Peter Townsend have emerged from art schools, and punk and new wave bands such as Talking Heads and Sonic Youth have shared the same social and artistic milieu as artists including Robert Longo and Richard Prince.
Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 looks at the intimate and inspired relationship between the visual arts and rock-and-roll culture, charting their intersection through works of art, album covers, music videos, and other materials. Organized regionally by cultural centers including London, New York, Los Angeles, and Cologne, the essays examine rock and roll’s style, celebrity, and identity politics in art; the experience, energy, and sense of devotion rock music inspires; and the dual role that many individuals play in both the sonic and visual realms. Presenting work that defies a more literal interpretation of the theme and instead suggests the style, energy, and attitude that has come to be associated with rock and roll, this fascinating volume is essential for admirers of contemporary art and culture.

Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967

Graham, Dan

Diederichsen, Diedrich

Nickas, Bob

KELLEY, MIKE

Higgs, Matthew

Hell, Richard

Molon, Dominic

Tumlir, Jan

Koether, Jutta

Elms, Anthony

History

Yale University Press

Isa Genzken is one of Germany's most prominent sculptors. This book offers a rare glimpse into the thoughts and personality which help to shape her enigmatic works.

Isa Genzken (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Arts & Photography

Breitwieser, Sabine

Farquharson, Alex

History & Criticism

Phaidon Press

The first-ever monograph on Reynaud-Dewar, one of today's most celebrated multimedia artists French artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar creates environments and situations in which she uses her own body to examine the dual experience of vulnerability and empowerment that results from acts of exposing oneself to the world. Evolving through a range of media such as performance, video, installation, sound, and literature, her work considers the fluid border between public and private space, challenging conventions related to the body, sexuality, power relations, and institutional spaces. This is the first book to document her remarkable career.

Lili Reynaud-Dewar (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Lebovici, Élisabeth

Szewczyk, Monika

Individual Artists

One of Canada's most humorous conceptual artists--as witty as he is smart--Rodney Graham gets his first North American museum retrospective and accompanying catalogue. Rodney Graham: A Little Thought tracks the career of a brilliant, idiosyncratic artist whose work spans a range of media including photography, film, book works, installation and pop music. In this volume, amply illustrated with many never-before-seen images from early in his career as well as new photography of his most recent works, scholarly essays provide a broad context for viewing: Cornelia Butler looks at Graham's relationship to landscape and Canadian identity, Lynne Cooke examines the construction of the artist's persona in works such as City Self/ Country Self (2001), and Shep Steiner discusses the joke as a conceptual strategy for Graham. Diedrich Diederichsen considers the artist's oeuvre within the context of musical structure, and Sara Krajewski describes how Graham's video works unfold. Finally, Grant Arnold offers an in-depth illustrated chronology, tracing the range of activities that have occupied Graham since his early days on the Vancouver scene.

Rodney Graham: A Little Thought

Butler, Connie

Cooke, Lynne

Arnold, Grant

Bradley, Jessica

Steiner, Shepherd

Krajewski, Sara

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

The book titled "Kai Kein Respect" accompanies the first major survey exhibition of Kai Althoff, one of the most compelling and original voices in Contemporary Art. Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the exhibition documents the most important aspects of the artist's work over the past fifteen years. Co-published by Bridge House Publishing and the ICA, Boston, the book offers full-color illustrations of Althoff's drawings, watercolors, collages, paintings, photographs, performances and installations presinting a comprehensive overview of his complex and varied oeuvre. 
Nicholas Baume, Chief Curator, ICA Boston, states "Kai Althoff's work deals explicitly with powerful feelings. The works often evoke or invent narratives, where characters inhabit imaginary worlds that provide allegories of real human experience and emotion." Althoff draws on a multitude of sources in his art, from Germanic folk traditions to recent popular culture and from medieval and gothic religious imagery to early modern expressionism. 
Kai Althoff, who also founded the band "Workshop", was born in 1966 in Cologne, Germany, where he currently lives and works. He has had solo exhibitions at galleries in Berlin, Cologne, London, New York, Vienna and Hamburg. Althoff has also been featured in numerous international group exhibitions including the 1993 and 2003 Venice Biennales, "Chere Paintre, Leibe Maler, Dear Painter" at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2002), and "Drawing Now-8 Propositions" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2002)

Kai Kein Respekt (Kai no Respect)

Baume, Nicholas

Bonami, Francesco

Karnik, Olaf

Kai Althoff

Bridge House Publishing

Matters of value and judgment are the subject of recently intensified debate within art criticism. Has art criticism suffered a collective failure of nerve as names and styles boom and bust with increasing rapidity? Conversely, does a discourse that traffics in value judgments risk being coopted into serving--or perhaps even serve outright--as a consumer guide to a bloated contemporary art market in which commerce and critical discourse frequently seem to be at odds with each other? Growing out of a forum that was held in Vancouver, Canada, Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism includes transcripts of the forum's discussions, an extensive bibliography on art criticism, as well as newly commissioned texts by Jeff Derksen, Diedrich Diederichsen, James Elkins, Maria Fusco, Sven Lütticken, Tom Morton, Kristina Lee Podesva, William Wood and Tirdad Zolghadr.

Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism: Folio Series: A

Zolghadr, Tirdad

Fusco, Maria

Fillip Editions/Artspeak

Aesthetics of Pop Music (Theory Redux)

Music

Polity

In this short book, the leading German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen puts forward a fresh and original account of pop music. He argues that pop music is not so much a form of music as a constellation of different media channels, social spaces and behavioural systems, of which music is only a part. Its own logic of attraction is based less on compositions and the expression of subjectivity and more on indexicality, real or pseudo-involuntary effects as recorded by sound technologies, and on studio discipline and staging, and hence on performance. By elaborating his innovative account of pop music as a constellation, Diederichsen develops a theory that distinguishes itself from sociology, cultural studies, media studies and ethnography, while at the same time drawing on and encompassing them all.

In the words of Peter Schjeldahl, writing recently in The New Yorker about the exhibition No Problem: Cologne/New York 1984–1989 at David Zwirner in New York, "the show's cast of artists amounts to a retrospective shopping list of what would matter and endure in art of the era." Canonizing that moment, this seminal publication examines the latter half of the 1980s through the lens of the art scenes in Cologne―arguably the European center of the contemporary art world at that time―and New York. While a number of established Cologne-based gallerists, including Karsten Greve, Paul Maenz, Rolf Ricke, Michael Werner and Rudolf Zwirner, had already begun shaping the European reception of American art in the previous decade, the 1980s marked a period during which art being produced in and around Cologne gained international attention. A burgeoning gallery scene supported the emerging work of artists based in the region, with gallerists such as Gisela Capitain, Rafael Jablonka, Max Hetzler and Monika Sprüth showing artists such as Walter Dahn, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Rosemarie Trockel and others. These German artists were exhibited alongside artists such as Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Christopher Wool. Conversely, the work of German artists was presented in New York, with breakout exhibitions at galleries such as Barbara Gladstone, Metro Pictures, Luhring Augustine and other significant venues. Important museum exhibitions that explored work on both sides of the Atlantic also set the tone for this dialogue, among them Europa/Amerika (Museum Ludwig, 1986) and A Distanced View (New Museum, 1986). Big, bold and vibrant, this Pentagram-designed publication revives the conversation, reproducing in full color every one of the over 100 artworks by 22 international artists included in this massive exhibition―one of the largest in David Zwirner's history. The book also features new scholarship by Diedrich Diederichsen and Bob Nickas, an illustrated timeline for both cities and compelling archival material―from documentary photographs from the period and reproductions of Cologne's historic Spex Magazine to reviews of exhibitions from the period. This catalogue encapsulates the energy, heart and "dissonance of styles"―in the words of Schjeldahl―embodied by this fecund moment in global art history.

No Problem: Cologne/New York 1984-1989

David Zwirner Books

This first monograph on the legendary artist, filmmaker and musician Tony Conrad documents his seminal Yellow Movie project of the early 1970s. Published to accompany Conrad's recent one-person exhibition at New York's Greene Naftali Gallery and Galerie Bucholz, Cologne, it includes an introductory note by Conrad, a new text by Diedrich Diederichsen and comprehensive documentation of all the Yellow Movies still in existence. Art in America's David Coggins described the project in 2007: "Yellow Movies, a series of works from the early 1970s by pioneering filmmaker Tony Conrad, initially appears to be nothing more than white squares enclosed by black borders painted on large sheets of paper. Yet these casual paintings, roughly the size of old home-movie screens, are formed by latex house paint that slowly yellows over time, creating what are essentially unhurried photographic exposures. Conrad sought to make abstract films that would last a lifetime, and there's a discreet thrill to knowing that what you're seeing is changing, invisibly, before your eyes."

Tony Conrad: Yellow Movies

Conrad, Tony

Greene Naftali/Galerie Daniel Buchholz

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