<p>For writer, critic and artist John Miller, the issue of the production-reception of a work of art is a genuine dialectic. He argues that the artist has no choice but to address the sociopolitical questions and the ideological apparatuses linked to the production of cultural "artefacts." Hence, his witty title, drawing attention to art as commodity. From polemical pieces to extensive theoretical essays to studies of Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, Richard Artschwager and John Baldessari, the texts collected here respond to the ongoing collision of aesthetics and exchange value. Throughout, Miller draws upon his seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of art history, theory and popular culture. As critic Bruce Hainley has written in <i>Artforum</i>, "Miller's essays are a pungent intervention into the ideologies of beauty, representation and looking."</p>

John Miller: The Price Club: Selected Writings 1977-1998 (Positions Book)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

JRP|Ringier

Urs Fischer's sculptures, drawings and installations, says curator Beatrix Ruf, strike the viewer “as if an Internet search engine had generated a massive number of hits leading to technical and mental breakdown.” This book has been conceived by the artist as a cross-reading of his process-related and “style-less” work through the arrangement of more than 200 images, including reproductions of works, installation views, studio shots and special features. Using a multitude of ordinary materials, Fischer creates non-hierarchical collages of objects and thoughts, high and low aesthetics, mundane and artistic memories, and personal and political interrogations. Laid out as a studio journal, the publication also includes musical scores from the London-based composer, engineer and consultant Garrick Jones, who wrote eight compositions inspired by Fischer's work. The scores are reproduced over 200 pages of the book, and recordings of them are available separately on CD or as downloads.

Urs Fischer: Good Smell Make-Up Tree

Jones, Garrick

Individual Artists

Full-bleed black and white images, a lack of captions, extreme body close-ups, boys and boys and more boys: these are the trademarks of Walter Pfeiffer's now out-of-print 1980 cult classic. As an autodidact, Pfeiffer started taking photographs without any technical ambition, but with the will to provide a new visual vocabulary for beauty, eroticism and freedom of life. The images depict the 1970-1980 Zurich scene: some feature Pfeiffer's friends hanging out in the studio, nearly all explore the sexuality of the everyday. Organized in stunning visual sequences, the book brought the public's attention to Pfeiffer's polaroids and established him as a sort of underground icon. This faithful reprint of the original visually demonstrates how the documented decade of Pfeiffer's work flirted with gay subculture, and later became a template for today's magazine imagery.

Walter Pfeiffer: 1970-1980

For the past quarter century, the work of Albert Oehlen, thick with both imagery and paint and awash in deliberate messiness, has constantly questioned the very notion of what painting is. This retrospective catalogue, with some 80 images, reveals the scope of Oehlen's his investigations, as well as a bravura slipperiness.

Albert Oehlen: Paintings/Pinturas 1980-2004

STRINDBERG, AUGUST

Beil, Ralf

The heterogeneous punk spirit of Urs Fischer is in full threat in this catalogue from his recent retrospective exhibition (including many new works) at Kunsthaus Zrich. All materials were considered fair game, and Fischer took every possible liberty in the museum space. He cut huge walk-through holes in the gallery walls and leaned the removed pieces on their edges in the rooms. He made burning wax sculptures, put obstacles on the ground, and hung a DANGEr sign above it all. As curator Mirjam Varadinis says, "the familiarity of everyday motifs is undermined in a process of metamorphosis that renders [the work] uncanny and even threatening." Of course, a dose of humor, drawing upon the grotesque, informs the work as well. You can try to name influences, inspirations, and related artists--Thek, Nauman, Barney, Fischli & Weiss--but Fischer is sui generis.

Urs Fischer: Kir Royal

Hainley, Bruce

Heiser, Jörg

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (b. 1965) made a name for herself in the 1990s with melancholy installations she called "chambers," transforming galleries to reflect inner mental states. She's since moved on to larger public spaces, making over Paris's "Bonne Nouvelle" metro station as a cinematic dreamworld. Tropicalisation! documents 10 large-scale interventions at Antwerp's Museum de Singel.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: Tropicalisation!

Since the early 1990s, Sean Landers has made some of the most fascinating and repeatedly irritating art in circulation. The polar opposites of tormented self-doubt and endless self-aggrandizement run like threads through the artist's practice, as do several masks of failure that Landers uses as a strategy to preserve himself from impending loser-status. As the artist puts it, "My original idea was to make conceptual art entertaining, sloppy, emotional, human, and funny. Over the years I got so far out on this conceptual limb that I went around full circle until I was a traditional artist again. I tried to be ironic about it but eventually became sincere. Now I'm a happy victim of my own charade." This monograph presents an overview of Lander's oeuvre and includes works from 1992 to the present.

Sean Landers (English and German Edition)

Barry Le Va is back. After more than ten years without a major exhibition in the United States, a mini-blockbuster of a retrospective at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Contemporary Art in early 2005 rescattered Le Va's felt, reimbedded his cleavers in a wall and rebroke his sheets of plate glass--to extraordinary critical acclaim. Now, to complement that exhibition and for insight into a mind that has remained consistently true to a renegade vision for some 35 years, we have a collection of writings, studies, notes, drawings, sketches and more, from a cult artist who has influenced a younger generation that includes Jason Rhoades, Cady Noland, Karen Kilimnik and Rirkrit Tiravanija. The book brings together for the first time in one place three major early interviews, and adds a new one with Christophe Cherix.

Barry Le Va: Fictional Excerpts, Notes, Interviews, Scrapbooks: 1969-2003

Richard Prince presents in Man his subversive and ironic choices of images of men and masculinity. Spanning the entire spectrum of artistic media, Prince creates paintings, object art, drawing, photographs, and collages. Materials from literary texts as well as cartoons and often crude, sexually- and male-oriented jokes ("What's the difference between a penis and a bonus?" asks one text excerpt from Untitledfind their way into his art, thus further allowing the artist to cross conventional borders. Within this book we see Prince's American cowboy photographs (one of his preferred motifs in which the text is often altered) , his self-portraits, his paintings of jokes and texts, his altered ads, and his sketches (such as the one of Snow White and the seven dwarfs in compromising positions]. This well-designed and reproduced publication featuring nearly 90 color images, is a true artist's book, conceived by Prince himself.

Richard Prince: Man

This richly illustrated catalogue of the international festival of artists' films highlights three major artists and filmmakers: Michel Auder of France, Stan Brakhage of the United States and Raul Ruiz of Chile. It also offers a panorama of recent works from young and established artists, and a celebration of the Biennial's twentieth anniversary.

11th Biennial of Moving Images

Ruiz, Raul

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