A new understanding of Marcel Duchamp and his significance as an artist through an investigation of his non-art activities―archiving, art-dealing, and, most persistently, curating.
This groundbreaking and richly illustrated book tells a new story of the twentieth century's most influential artist, recounted not so much through his artwork as through his “non-art” work. Marcel Duchamp is largely understood in critical and popular discourse in terms of the objects he produced, whether readymade or meticulously fabricated. Elena Filipovic asks us instead to understand Duchamp's art through activities not normally seen as artistic―from exhibition making and art dealing to administrating and publicizing. These were no occasional pursuits; Filipovic argues that for Duchamp, these fugitive tasks were a veritable lifework. Drawing on many rarely seen images, Filipovic traces a variety of practices and projects undertaken by Duchamp from 1913 to 1969, from his invention of the readymade to the release of his last, posthumous work. She examines Duchamp's note writing, archiving, and quasi-photographic activities, which resulted in the Box of 1914 and the Green Box; his art dealing, marketing, and curating that culminated in experimental exhibitions for the Surrealists and his miniature museum, The Boîte-en-valise; and his administrative efforts and clandestine maneuvering in order to posthumously embed his Étant donnés into a museum. Demonstrating how those activities reflect the artist's questioning of reproduction and originality, as well as photography and the exhibition, Filipovic proposes that Duchamp's “non-art” labor, and in particular his curatorial strategies, more than merely accompanied his more famous artworks; in a certain sense, they made them. Through Duchamp's elusive but vital activities he revised the idea of what a modern artist could be. With this fascinating book, Filipovic in turn revises the very idea of Duchamp

The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp

Arts & Photography

Filipovic, Elena

History & Criticism

The MIT Press

Creamier: Contemporary Art in Culture, is the 5th addition to Phaidon?s world renowned Cream series. Every few years, Phaidon brings together 10 illustrious curators to choose 100 of the art world?s best and most important emerging contemporary artists, and what they discover becomes an invaluable resource in an ever-changing art world. As has proven to be the case with those featured in the previous four Cream books, these will be the 100 artists the world is talking about for years to come. Valued by art collectors and art lovers alike as a road map through the ever expanding international art scene of gallery shows, museum exhibitions, biennials, and fairs, the Cream series is a must-have for anyone interested in the art world?s latest news and is an excellent introduction to the dialogue among some of its best minds. The introduction features a conversation between the ten curators discussing one of the art world?s hottest topics ? the recession and how it has impacted the market and artist creativity. Bound on high quality paper, printed to resemble broadsheet newspaper format, Creamier is packed in a custom-made box. The irony of the very latest news contained in a traditional, some would argue vanishing, format is intriguing. Readers are left to question the fluidity of the art world where an artist?s work can be fresh and new for such a short time, but where it never becomes insignificant.

Creamier: Contemporary Art in Culture: 10 Curators, 100 Contemporary Artists, 10 Sources

Fogle, Douglas

Kamiya, Yukie

Phaidon Press

The lush oil paintings of London-based Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (born 1977) embrace many of the conventions of historical European portraiture, but expand on that tradition by engaging fictional subjects who often serve as protagonists of the artist’s short stories as well.
These imagined figures are almost always black, an attribute Yiadom-Boakye sees as both political and autobiographical, given her own West African heritage. Her elegant characters come to life through the artist’s bold brushwork, appearing both cavalier and nonchalant. This catalog accompanying her New Museum exhibition features an interview with the artist by Natalie Bell and Massimiliano Gioni, new reflections on Yiadom-Boakye’s work by artist Chris Ofili, and art historians Elena Fillipovic and Robert Storr.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Under-Song for a Cipher

Ofili, Chris

STORR, Robert

Individual Artists

New Museum/Kunsthalle Basel

Over the past decade, Gabriel Kuri (born 1970) has been ransacking the paradoxes of material consumption, extracting both visual and linguistic value from the tracking systems and trivial marketing mechanisms that fill our daily lives. Kuri's sculptures and collages are often fashioned from the residue of monetary exchanges and consumed goods that the artist collects on a daily basis, but their richness lies in their unusual calibration of manual and conceptual properties: his works reward eye and mind equally. "Model for a Victory Parade," for example, consists of a conveyor belt with a crumpled energy-drink can trapped and perpetually tumbling at one end. The visual appeal of this work quickly opens out into speculations on the ironies of humankind's energy consumption. Nobody Needs to Know the Price of Your Saab is presented in conjunction with Kuri's survey at Blaffer Art Museum.

Gabriel Kuri: Nobody Needs To Know the Price of your Saab

Schmuckli, Claudia

Cruzvillegas, Abraham

Blaffer Art Museum

This richly illustrated volume offers an in-depth look into artist Sadie Benning’s exhibition Shared Eye, presented at the Renaissance Society and the Kunsthalle Basel. The forty mixed-media panels in Shared Eye defy easy categorization: they include collage, painting, photography, and sculpture. The seriality of the installation also nods to the artist’s history with the moving image. Throughout the 1990s, Benning created an extraordinary body of experimental video work, improvising with materials at hand and a toy camera. More than two decades later, in Shared Eye we see the handmade aesthetic, grainy imagery, and durational logic of Benning’s early videos take on different forms to correspond to our current moment. The catalog documents the exhibition in full color, and it features an interview between the artist and Julie Ault, essays by John Corbett and Christine Mehring, and an introduction by the Renaissance Society’s executive director, Solveig Øvstebø, and Elena Filipovic, director of Kunsthalle Basel. These texts provide illuminating framework for the exhibition and key insights into how Benning pushes the limits of abstraction in response to our present political climate.

Sadie Benning: Shared Eye

MEHRING, Christine

Corbett, John

Øvstebø, Solveig

Renaissance Society

Cameron Jamie (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Vergne, Philippe

Rugoff, Ralph

Joseph, Branden W.

Humor & Entertainment

Drawing on unpublished documents and oral histories, an illustrated examination of an iconic artwork of an artist who has made a lifework of tactical evasion.
One wintry day in 1983, alongside other street sellers in the East Village, David Hammons peddled snowballs of various sizes. He had neatly laid them out in graduated rows and spent the day acting as obliging salesman. He called the evanescent and unannounced street action Bliz-aard Ball Sale, thus inscribing it into a body of work that, from the late 1960s to the present, has used a lexicon of ephemeral actions and self-consciously “black" materials to comment on the nature of the artwork, the art world, and race in America. And although Bliz-aard Ball Sale has been frequently cited and is increasingly influential, it has long been known only through a mix of eyewitness rumors and a handful of photographs. Its details were as elusive as the artist himself; even its exact date was unrecorded. Like so much of the artist's work, it wasconceived, it seems, to slip between our fingers―to trouble the grasp of the market, as much as of history and knowability.
In this engaging study, Elena Filipovic collects a vast oral history of the ephemeral action, uncovering rare images and documents, and giving us singular insight into an artist who made an art of making himself difficult to find. And through it, she reveals Bliz-aard Ball Sale to be the backbone of a radical artistic oeuvre that transforms such notions as “art,” “commodity,” “performance,” and even “race” into categories that shift and dissolve, much like slowly melting snowballs.

David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale (Afterall Books / One Work)

Afterall Books

In 2012 Slovakian artist Roman Ondák was honored as the Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year,” an achievement celebrated in this catalogue. One of the world’s most distinguished contemporary conceptual artists, Ondák creates (often participatory) works that elaborate philosophical and political dimensions from everyday experience.

Roman Ondák

Rattemeyer, Christian

Hütte, Friedhelm

Lorch, Catrin

Reference

Hatje Cantz

New York-based sculptor and conceptualist Tobias Putrih, who was born in Slovenia in 1971, created this exhaustive 180-page monograph--his first--between 1999 and 2007. Conceived of as an archive, both visual and textual, the publication illuminates Putrih’s thought processes and methodology. Published with the Neuberger Museum of Art, New York.

Tobias Putrih: 99-07

Guffey, Elizabeth

Collins, Thom

JRP|Ringier

'At the same time that I'm talking about visibility and invisibility and that I am using the concepts of blackness, the figure seems to stay the same. The figure remains essentially black in every circumstance that you see it.' -- Kerry James MarshallKerry James Marshall (b. 1955) gave an important speech at Museum Ludwig on receiving the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2014, which is now being published as a book. He is as much a painters' painter as an astute social critic and an authority on art history.In the text he talks about his life, his interest in Afro-American culture, social injustice, race relations, power dynamics, and ultimately calls for the black subject, so long ignored in art history, to finally be represented -- in reaction to the fact that beauty has been synonymous with being white through almost all of art history.Published on occasion of the recipient speech of the Wolfgang Hahn Prize 2014, Museum Ludwig, Köln.English and German text. Co-published with GS Mod. Kunst Köln.

Kerry James Marshall: Inside Out

Walther König, Köln

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