Throughout history, the excitements, surprises and discoveries of travel have inspired many. Great travelers, of course, are often great ambassadors of knowledge and ideas, but while the exchanges between disparate cultures have enchanted--and sometimes puzzled--both the visitors and the visited, they have also historically been the cause of conflict and strife. Christopher Columbus's fourth long voyage from Spain to America has been chosen as a metaphor for P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center's exhibition The Real Royal Trip. The “artist-travelers” featured in this historic exhibition reveal through their work a potent creative energy and illuminate the flow of new ideas, images, and approaches emerging from Spain's unique contemporary cultural climate. Breaking down barriers established by nations, the exhibition reaches across the Atlantic Ocean to include work by artists from Cuba and Puerto Rico, pursuing the pioneering voices of contemporary Latin America. (The inclusion of Ernesto Neto ensures that the great South American dream is also represented.) With the language of Spain--and not its national borders--as a common currency, this international panorama of art-making proposes a new kind of Spanish identity, one that is intricately linked to U.S. and Latin American culture.

The Real Royal Trip/El Real Viaje Real

Szeemann, Harald

History

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

Born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1933, Harald Szeemann was a crucial force in identifying, exhibiting, and writing about the important new movements in postwar contemporary art. This collection of seventy-four texts from the curator’s vast body of written work—which includes essays, lectures, studio notes, reviews, interviews, correspondence, and transcripts—introduces the depth of his method, insight, and inclusive artistic interests. The pieces have been translated from German and French and collected in an informed, authoritative edition, making this the first time Szeemann’s work is accessible in English. The first two sections of this volume republish Szeemann’s anthologies Museum der Obsessionen (1981) and Individuelle Mythologien (1985). The final part assembles important writings from 1986 until his death in 2005 to represent the later years of his career and round out a record of his contribution to and dialogue with later twentieth- century art and artists. The book’s publication coincides with the opening of the Getty Research Institute’s exhibition Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions and complements its catalogue, as well as a contemporaneous satellite show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, that focuses on Szeemann’s Grandfather exhibition (1974).

Harald Szeemann: Selected Writings

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Getty Research Institute

Texts and words are of crucial importance to Annette Messager's work--for her, "words are images." And so words--at once autonomous from, parallel to, and the sources of her visual creativity--are woven throughout her production. She has looked directly at our diverse relationships to language in forms ranging from the early scrapbooks of the 1970s to the large sculpted words of the late 1990s, and others including personal diaries, letters, calligraphy, alphabets and primers. She works with the repeated, drawn, framed and sculpted word; newsprint, collage and montage of texts and photographs; and handwritten texts. Plays on words and palindromes turn up in her exhibition titles and, more recently, in her children's books. All of these uses of language stem as much from Dada and Surrealism as from the aesthetics of the banal and the everyday, and they give rise to unclassifiable texts, which call somewhere between a literature of the news item or photo-essay and poetic maxims for personal use. Messager's frequent recourse to copying down and to repetition then serves as a kind of exorcism: in those cases, writing is something like sewing, with a soothing function. The first section of Word for Word focuses on writing in Annette Messager's artworks. The second includes numerous texts published in magazines or catalogues, as well as unpublished notes on her work and personal reflections on art and life. All of her interviews from 1974 to the present are also included.

Annette Messager: Word for Word

STORR, Robert

Individual Artists

D.A.P./Les Presses du Reel

In 1971, Harald Szeemann invited the American sculptor and installation pioneer Paul Thek to contribute to Documenta 5. Szeemann had named one section of the Documenta “Individual Mythologies,” describing a new kind of art structured around a mythology invented by individual artists, rather than by a culture. Thek’s contribution--the now legendary “Pyramid” installation--came to be seen as the supreme example of Individual Mythology, and is one of Thek’s best known works (Documenta 5 is likewise among the most famous of all Documentas to date). Paul Thek in Process stems from an unrealized publication that Thek had hoped to produce for Documenta 5, which would enlarge upon the occasion and the mythology of his “Pyramid.” It comprises a trove of previously unpublished photographs recording the installation at Moderna Museet in 1971–72, all of the surviving correspondence between Thek and the museum, work-related ephemera and press coverage of the work.

Paul Thek in Process

JRP|Ringier

Artwork by Wolfgang Laib. Edited by Klaus Ottman. Text by Harald Szeemann, Margit Rowell.

Wolfgang Laib: A Retrospective

Rowell, Margit

Hatje Cantz Publishers

One of the most original artists of his generation, Neo Rauch's paintings appear disturbingly detached and yet familiar, their figures, objects, and mood seemingly borrowed from old advertising posters, dusty book jackets, and forgotten comics. Rauch's formulistic visual symbols suggest a more profound meaning, yet it is difficult to decipher their message. The tension lurking under their almost frozen surfaces, washed with dusky, sinister colors, is fueled by paradox: as vivid as the structure of the work comes across, the impression is rigid; as powerful as the strokes of broken colors are, they appear faded, from bygone times.

Neo Rauch

Cooke, Lynne

Birnbaum, Daniel

The history that African artist Georges Adaagbo "rewrites" is plural and nonhierarchical, a history that is constantly shifting and being shifted, in which seemingly valid parameters are being subverted, and from which diverse readings emerge. In installations that juxtapose books, magazines, record sleeves, and photographs from Africa with objects and texts from the country in which he is working, Adeagbo elucidates and reinterprets the processes that have led to the development, replacement, and breakup of territories and political and philosophical systems. This first monograph documents 13 of the artist's installations from the last 10 years, including "The Story of the Lion," which won a prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999, and provides a thorough exploration of an important figure in contemporary African art.

Archaeology of Motivations - Rewriting History

ENWEZOR, Okwui

Harney, Elizabeth

Kohler, Stephan

Adeagbo, Georges

Shows examples of paintings, drawings, and sculpture by Twombly, and offers critical assessments of his work

Cy Twombly: Paintings, Works on Paper, Sculpture

TWOMBLY, Cy

Prestel Pub

Egon Schiele und seine Zeit: Österreichische Malerei und Zeichnung von 1900 bis 1930 aus der Sammlung Leopold (German Edition)

Reference

SCHIELE, Egon

Leopold, Rudolf

Schröder, Klaus Albrecht

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Prestel-Verlag

After studying at the Academy of Arts in Prague, Miroslav Tichy, born in 1926 in the former Czechoslovakia, withdrew to a life of isolation in his hometown of Kyjov. In the late 1950s, he stopped painting and, during his daily walks, began to take photographs of women with cameras he made by hand. He mounted his prints on handmade frames and added finishing touches in pencil, shifting from photography to drawing. Disregarding the rules of photography, for four decades Tichy created a large oeuvre of poetic, dreamlike views of female beauty. A former neighbor, Roman Buxbaum, discovered Tichy's hidden work in the 1980s and has been documenting and collecting it ever since. In 2004, the esteemed international curator Harald Szeemann mounted the first solo exhibition of the nearly 80-year-old artist. That same year, Tichy was given the Rencontres d'Arles Photographie Discovery Award and the Kunsthaus Zurich organized a large retrospective. Solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art (MMK) Frankfurt followed in 2008. Tichy does not see his exhibitions, for he no longer leaves his house. This beautifully produced, thorough volume collects the work--perfectly.

Miroslav Tichy: Dedicated to The Women of Kyjov

Walther König, Köln

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