Since the late 1980s, Jean-Luc Moulène (b. 1955) has developed a body of work informed by a critical investigation of artistic authorship, addressing such issues as autonomy, immanence, and anarchic politics. Although he is best known for his enigmatic and seductive large-format photographs, Moulène has maintained a parallel exploration of materials and objects—manufactured and found, industrial and organic, intimate and imposing—that he has collectively titled Opus. This book, the first critical study of Moulène's work, brings together leading scholars to examine the artist's diverse aesthetic strategies and interests in the relationships between social and political arenas and systems and orders, including geometry, mathematics, social sciences, and human behavior. Featured essays also examine Moulène's theoretical and playful inquiries into the plasticity of materials and the ways we see and understand both still and moving images.

Jean-Luc Moulène: Opus + One

Arts & Photography

Vergne, Philippe

Raymond, Yasmil

Individual Artists

Dia Art Foundation

A major retrospective catalogue on the career of minimalist sculptor and poet Carl AndreCarl Andre (b. 1935) redefined the parameters of abstract sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a highly influential voice in the American minimalist movement, recognized for his ordered linear and grid formats. In the early 1960s, Andre’s creative focus shifted to writing poetry when he took a job as a freight brakeman and conductor for the Pennsylvania Railroad. His poems echoed and extended the themes in his sculptural work, and his experience with the railroad significantly influenced his choice of materials in later years. In this stunning catalogue, which accompanies the first retrospective of Andre’s work since 1970, the artist’s legacy is examined in eleven essays by international scholars. The book presents a broad range of sculpture made over the past fifty years, including Andre’s emblematic floor and corner pieces, highlighting his radical use of standardized units of industrial material such as timber planks, concrete blocks, and metal plates. A vast selection of Andre’s previously unpublished concrete poems, together with letters, postcards, ephemera, and documentation of important installations, further complements our understanding of an essential figure in the history of contemporary art.

Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010 (Dia Art Foundation, New York - Exhibition Catalogues)

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

A key underground figure of Los Angeles' midcentury counterculture, Cameron (1922–95) created a body of visionary painting and drawing that won her equal esteem among the Californian assemblage artists and the occult world of that time. Her powerful personality led to a number of roles in key underground movies such as Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, and her features adorn the cover of the first issue of Wallace Berman's Semina. Today, her delicate melding of Surrealism and mysticism has been rediscovered by a younger generation of artists. This volume, published for an exhibition at MOCA LA, includes pieces formerly thought lost, ranging from early paintings to drawings, sketchbooks and poetry, as well as ephemera, collaborations and correspondence with individuals such as her husband, Jack Parsons (the rocket pioneer, cofounder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and acolyte of Aleister Crowley), and mythologist Joseph Campbell.

Cameron: Songs for the Witch Woman

Lipschutz, Yael

Daniel Johnston only ever dreamt of two things: he wanted to be a rock star and he wanted to be a famous artist. Amazingly enough, he succeeded at both. Today he is an acclaimed indie music star whose charmingly twisted songs have been covered by the likes of Beck, Yo La Tengo, and TV on The Radio. His artwork appears in galleries throughout the world and was featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Johnston’s pen and colored marker drawings contain a range of characters, some benign or heroic, and others quite disturbing. In his complex world, good battles evil attended to by an assortment of playful characters. Johnston’s world is also informed by his conservative Christian upbringing, and filled with depictions of biblical vengeance and salvation. Looking at his work, we are reminded of Heironymous Bosch as much as DC Comics. Daniel Johnston contains over 150 full color illustrations, many taken from the artist’s private archives and never seen before. There is also commentary and analysis by the Walker Art Center’s Philippe Vergne, alt-rock luminary Jad Fair, and underground comic legend, Harvey Pekar. "I see him as an artist on the periphery of the art world, but not an outsider artist . . . It’s impressive when you see the consistency of the work."—Philippe Vergne

Daniel Johnston

Pekar, Harvey

Fair, Jad

Rizzoli

A Whitney Museum of American Art Publication Featuring the latest work by emerging and established American artists, Whitney Biennial 2006 accompanies the Whitney Museum of American Art's signature survey. The 73rd in a series of exhibitions inaugurated in 1932, this edition is organized by two internationally renowned curators: Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne. More than 100 artists and collaborative teams are included-recognized artists as well as those whose work has never before been seen in a major museum. The Biennial has become a measure of the state of contemporary art in America today; as always, it will garner international attention.

Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night

Iles, Chrissie

Whitney Museum of American Art

The rise of globalism has created tremendous challenges to old economic, political, and cultural paradigms, changes that are increasingly reflected in diverse artistic practices across the planet. If disciplinary boundaries are now crossed as easily as geographic ones, how does the new internationalism that we are facing affect aesthetics and artistic production? Is there a link, for example, between the rise of video works and the global availability of digital media? Does the global information age facilitate an international language of art and an alternative reading of history, from art history toward art histories? From the perspective of a museum of modern and contemporary art--a purely European construct--the art institution has to overcome a major contradiction, one that exists between its mission of permanence and its mission of change. How can cultural institutions contribute to the revamping of their own structures now that the hegemony of Western modernity is being challenged? How can museums connect with new audiences through different practices, different scholarships, and different interpretive strategies that grow out of the sedimentation of their own history? To invite and encourage such dialogue, How Latitudes Become Forms looks at current scholarship on globalism and changing curatorial practices, and identifies critical models provided by artists themselves, featuring thought-provoking essays and conversations by curators, critics, and cultural programmers from across the world, as well as multidisciplinary artworks by more than 40 artists from Brazil, China, India, Japan, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States. Edited by Philippe Vergne.Essays by Paulo Herkenhoff, Hidenaga Otori,and Hou Hanru. Introduction by Kathy Halbreich. Conversations with Cuauhtemoc Medina & Vasif Kortun, Kathy Halbreich & Vishakha Desai, Steve Dietz & Raqs Media Collective, Philip Bither, Baraka Sele and Philippe Vergne. Paperback, 9 x 11 in., 336 pages, 250 color & 16 b/w illustrations

How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in the Global Age

Halbreich, Kathy

Herkenhoff, Paulo

Hou Hanru

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Walker Art Center

Kara Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained international recognition for her room-sized tableaux, which depict historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence and subjugation and are made using the paradoxically genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the antebellum American South, Walker's compositions play off of stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters, mistresses and slave men, women and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation. Over the years, the artist has used drawing, painting, colored-light projections, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales of romance, sadism, oppression and liberation. Her scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Deploying an acidic sense of humor, Walker examines the dialectics of pleasure and danger, guilt and fulfillment, desire and fear, race and class. This landmark publication, which is sure to win international design awards, accompanies Walker's first major American museum survey. It features critical essays by Philippe Vergne, Sander L. Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr and Kevin Young, as well as an illustrated lexicon of recurring themes and motifs in the artist's most influential installations by Yasmil Raymond, more than 200 full-color images, an extensive exhibition history and bibliography, and a 36-page insert by the artist.

Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (WALKER ART CENT)

Young, Kevin

Gilman, Sander

MCEVILLEY, Thomas

STORR, Robert

Cameron Jamie's work--a blend of video, sound, performance, photography and drawing--confronts the dysfunction of European and American society. His critical gaze often focuses on ritualistic practices in popular culture, such as hot dog eating contests and backyard wrestling. Taking suburban phenomena of this sort as his primary material, Jamie explores the dark underbelly of the American dream in drawings, film and performance. This artist-designed exhibition catalogue features more than 60 works in various media, illuminating the artist's process with selections from his personal archive of clippings and ephemera, as well as raw sketches for his projects. An essay by exhibition curator Philippe Vergne, a foreword by Walker director Kathy Halbreich and a reprint of a poem by Charles Bukowski selected by the artist provide context for this first large-scale, museum presentation of Jamie's work.

Cameron Jamie

One of the last century's most influential artists, Yves Klein (1928–1962) took the European art scene by storm in a prolific career that lasted only from 1954 to 1962, when he suffered a heart attack at the age of 34. Klein was an innovator who embraced painting, sculpture, performance, photography, music, theater, film, architecture and theoretical writing. Self-identified as “the painter of space,” Klein sought to achieve immaterial spirituality through pure color (primarily an ultramarine blue of his own invention―International Klein Blue) and even went so far as to present white galleries emptied of all artworks for his renowned 1958 exhibition of “the Void.” His diverse oeuvre represents a pivotal transition from modern art's concern with the material object to contemporary notions of the conceptual nature of art. Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers is published to accompany the first major retrospective of the artist's work in the United States in nearly 30 years. It includes examples from all of Klein's major series, including his Anthropometries, Cosmogonies, fire paintings, planetary reliefs and blue monochromes, as well as selections of his lesser-known gold and pink monochromes, body and sponge reliefs, “air architecture” and immaterial works. Essays by curators Kerry Brougher and Philippe Vergne, Klein scholar Klaus Ottmann, art historian Kaira M. Cabañas and curatorial fellow Andria Hickey, as well as archival materials and translations of Klein's published and unpublished writings, offer insights into the artist's endeavors and process. Born in Nice, France, in 1928, Yves Klein created what he considered his first artwork when he signed the sky above Nice in 1947, making his earliest attempt to capture the immaterial. The artist carved out new aesthetic and theoretical territory based on his study of the mystical sect Rosicrucianism, philosophical and poetic investigations of space and science, and the practice of Judo, which he described as “the discovery of the human body in a spiritual space.”

Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers

Brougher, Kerry

Ottmann, Klaus

Cabañas, Kaira

Hickey, Andria

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden/Walker Art Center

Cameron Jamie (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Rugoff, Ralph

Filipovic, Elena

Joseph, Branden W.

Humor & Entertainment

Phaidon Press

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Books by Vergne, Philippe