Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (Whitney Museum of American Art)

Arts & Photography

Rothkopf, Scott

History & Criticism

Whitney Museum of American Art

Mel Bochner (b. 1940) is considered a pioneer of the Post-Minimal and Conceptual art movements. Perhaps best known for his paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Bochner became deeply involved with photography in the mid- to late 1960s, although most of these works have only recently been exhibited. This significant book provides the first critical look at a virtually unknown body of Bochner’s extremely varied photographs dating from 1966–1969. Some 75 of his photographs are presented, many in color and most published for the first time. Also included are a number of Bochner’s drawings that directly informed his photographic works. Scott Rothkopf explores the crucial role of photography in Bochner’s artistic development as well as key issues in the relation of photography to Minimal and Conceptual art. In Bochner’s photography, Rothkopf argues, a clear arc can be traced from his grappling with Minimalism toward a more rigorous and nuanced articulation of Conceptual art. Examining this shift, the author compares Bochner’s work with that of other artists who were engaged with photography during this period, among them Robert Smithson, Sol LeWitt, and Bruce Nauman. For Bochner and others, Rothkopf concludes, photography was used as a response to the limits of minimal sculpture and helped make possible the birth of Conceptual art. The book also features an essay by Elisabeth Sussman on the relevance of Bochner’s 1966 film experiments to his later photographic projects.

Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966-1969

Harvard Art Museums

American artist Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is best known for his landmark body of text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, which draw on the writings and speech of diverse figures including Jean Genet, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesse Jackson, and Richard Pryor. Throughout his career, Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across a body of work that builds critically on the legacies of modern painting and more recent conceptual art. His subject matter ranges widely from the Million Man March and the aftermath of slavery to 1970s coloring books and the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe—all treated within artworks that are both politically provocative and beautiful to behold.
Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, created in close collaboration with the artist, surveys twenty-five years of Ligon’s art, including paintings, sculptural installations, prints, and drawings. Essays examine his working methods in depth and situate his output within a broad cultural context, while lavish new photography highlights the formal subtlety of his art. This first comprehensive survey of Ligon’s career will greatly advance our appreciation of his pioneering oeuvre.

Glenn Ligon: AMERICA

The Whitney Museum of American Art

During the past decade, Wade Guyton (b. 1972) has emerged as one of the most innovative and influential artists of his generation by using common technology to reinvent abstraction and question the ways in which images function and circulate. His works range from "drawings" made by printing letters and shapes on found book pages using word-processing software to "paintings" executed by running sheets of primed canvas through a large-format printer. The misuse of these machines results in accidents that create subtle painterly incident while gesturing to a world of technological failure and possibility. Guyton's works are often deployed in dramatic architectural installations; drawings fill dozens of vitrines and multi-panel paintings stretch fifty feet wide or more than twenty feet high. This book illuminates Guyton's unconventional working methods and the development of his techniques, showcasing the visual flair and conceptual provocation inherent in his art.

Wade Guyton OS

A fresh and engaging look at the controversial work of Jeff Koons, with insightful analyses and illustrations of all of his iconic pieces alongside preparatory works and historical photographs Examining the breadth and depth of thirty-five years of work by Jeff Koons (b. 1955), one of the most influential and controversial artists of the 20th century, this highly anticipated volume features all of his most famous pieces. In an engaging overview essay, Scott Rothkopf carefully examines the evolution of Koons’ work and his development over the past thirty-five years, offering a fresh scholarly perspective on the artist’s multi-faceted career. In addition, short essays by a wide range of interdisciplinary contributors—from academics to novelists—probe provocative topics such as celebrity and media, markets and money, and technology and fabrication. Also included are preparatory sketches and plans for sculptures and paintings as well as installation photographs that shed light on Koons’ artistic process and trace the development of his work throughout his landmark career. Koons has risen to international fame making art that reimagines and recontextualizes images and objects from popular culture such as vacuum cleaners, basketballs, and balloon animals. Created with painstaking attention to detail by a team of fabricators, these objects raise questions about taste and popular culture, and position Koons as one of the most lauded and criticized artists working today.

A richly illustrated, expansive mid-career survey of the stand-out American artist’s pioneering and influential work, with each copy featuring a unique silk-screen cover printed in Owens's studio Since the early 1990s, Laura Owens (b. 1970) has challenged traditional assumptions about figuration and abstraction in her pioneering approach to painting. Created in close collaboration with the artist on the occasion of her mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, this inventive and comprehensive book features an incisive introduction by Scott Rothkopf, critical essays, literary texts, and short commentaries on a variety of subjects related to Owens’s broad interests, which range from folk art and needlework to comics and wallpaper. Reflections by more than twenty of Owens’s fellow artists, collaborators, assistants, dealers, family members, and friends offer an array of perspectives on her work at different periods in her life, beginning with her high school years in Ohio and ending with her current exhibition. A rich trove of more than a thousand images, drawn from the artist’s personal archive and largely unpublished before now, includes personal correspondence, journals, academic transcripts, handwritten notes, source material, exhibition announcements, clippings, and installation photographs. Strikingly, each copy also features a unique silk-screen cover printed in Owens’s studio, giving readers the opportunity to own an original work of art. Together, all of these elements provide a rare and intimate look at how an artist might make her way in the world as well as how art gets made, movements take hold, and relationships evolve over time.

Owens, Laura

A richly illustrated, expansive mid-career survey of the stand-out American artist’s pioneering and influential work Published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art that travels to Dallas and Los Angeles, this book on the work of Laura Owens (b. 1970) features an incisive introduction by Scott Rothkopf, critical essays, literary texts, and short commentaries on a variety of subjects related to the artist’s broad interests, which range from folk art and needlework to comics and wallpaper. Reflections by more than twenty of Owens’s fellow artists, collaborators, assistants, dealers, family members, and friends offer an array of perspectives on her work at different periods in her life, beginning with her high school years in Ohio and ending with her current exhibition. A rich trove of more than a thousand images, drawn from the artist’s personal archive and largely unpublished before now, includes personal correspondence, journals, academic transcripts, handwritten notes, source material, exhibition announcements, clippings, and installation photographs. Together, all of these elements provide a rare and intimate look at how an artist might make her way in the world as well as how art gets made, movements take hold, and relationships evolve over time. Each book includes a specially designed set of stickers that readers can use to customize their own cover.

Product Description \nAn innovative retrospective look at the work of one of America’s most iconic artists, utilizing the concepts of mirroring and doubling, which have long preoccupied Johns\nJasper Johns (b. 1930) is arguably the most influential artist living today. Over the past 65 years, he has produced a radical and varied body of work marked by constant reinvention. Inspired by the artist’s long-standing fascination with mirroring and doubles, this book provides an original and exciting perspective on Johns’s work and its continued relevance. \nA diverse group of curators, academics, artists, and writers offer a series of essays—including many paired texts—that consider aspects of the artist’s work, such as recurring motifs, explorations of place, and use of a wide array of media. These include Carroll Dunham on nightmares, Ruth Fine on monotypes and working proofs, Michio Hayashi on Japan, Terrance Hayes on flags, and Colm Toíbín on dreams, among many others. The various themes are further explored in a series of in-depth plate sections that combine prints, drawings, paintings, and sculptures to draw new connections in Johns’s vast output. Accompanying “mirroring” exhibitions held simultaneously at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this lavishly illustrated volume features a selection of rarely published works along with never-before-published archival content and is full of revelations that allow us to engage with and understand the artist’s rich and varied body of work in new and meaningful ways.\nAbout the Author \nCarlos Basualdo is Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 
Scott Rothkopf is senior deputy director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror

Basualdo, Carlos

The definitive survey of Jeff Koons’s Hulk Elvis paintings, including an extensive interview with the artist in his studio. From the outset of his controversial career, Jeff Koons turned the traditional notion of the work of art and its context inside out. Focusing on unexpected yet banal objects as models for his work, he eschewed typical standards of "good taste" in art, instead embracing what he perceives as conventional middle-class values in order to expose the vulnerabilities of aesthetic hierarchies and value systems. Koons’s declared strategies are to make art beautiful, to strive for objectivity, to give back the familiar, and to reflect, and thus empower, the viewer. The works of Koons’s series Hulk Elvis burst with energy and precision yet mystify with their complex permutations and combinations of figurative and abstract elements. A charged mix of inflatable monkeys, geishas, birds, the Incredible Hulk, and the Liberty Bell jostle against realistically rendered landscapes, gestural paintings, steam engines and horse-drawn carriages, negative silhouettes, and underlying dot screens.

Jeff Koons: Hulk Elvis

Gagosian / Rizzoli

Karen Kilimnik

Published on the occasion of the first major museum survey of Karen Kilimnik's work, a traveling exhibition with stops in Philadelphia, Miami, Aspen and Chicago, this chic but scholarly catalogue is the most substantial on the artist to date. It highlights an important American artist whose work objectifies mass-cultural desire with glittering poignancy and includes a nuanced selection of 15 years worth of collage-based activity in the realms of painting, drawing, photography, sculptural installation and object-making, as well as new work. Fully illustrated at 180 pages, it features an essay by exhibition curator Ingrid Schaffner which analyzes the development of the artist's work and its historic contexts as well as four contributions from authors who address a theme or image within the work. Thus, cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum addresses gossip; dance historian Joel Lobenthal writes on ballet; Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Dominic Molon, focuses on influence; and Artforum Senior Editor Scott Rothkopf considers Kilimnik's titles. Includes a complete bibliography and an illustrated exhibition chronology. Called "sharp and witty" and "long overdue" for major recognition by The New York Times' Holland Cotter, Kilimnik is an important international artist with an extensive publication and exhibition history. Born in Philadelphia in 1955, she studied architecture at Temple University and continues to live in the region. Since 1991, her work has been represented by 303 Gallery in New York. She has had recent solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Ireland, and White Cube, London. In 1992, ICA Philadelphia presented Kilimnik's first museum show as part of its "Investigations" series.

Koestenbaum, Wayne

Lobenthal, Joel

Molon, Dominic

Schaffner, Ingrid

Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania

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Books by Rothkopf, Scott

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rothkopf, Scott. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (Whitney Museum of American Art)

Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966-1969

Glenn Ligon: AMERICA

Wade Guyton OS

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (Whitney Museum of American Art)

Owens, Laura

Owens, Laura

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror

Jeff Koons: Hulk Elvis

Karen Kilimnik