Since constructing his own studio in 1999, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has designed or collaborated with other architects on a wide range of architectural projects. These collaborations were the subject of Ai Weiwei: Art/Architecture, a 2011 exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, which this catalogue accompanies. A highlight of this overview is the widely celebrated “Bird’s Nest” Beijing National Stadium, a collaboration between Ai and the Swiss architecture firm Herzog &amp; de Meuron that was constructed for the 2008 Olympic Games. Another feature is a new work based on a project titled “Ordos 10” for which Ai invited 100 young architectural firms worldwide to design single-family houses for Ordos City in Inner Mongolia. An essay in the catalogue examines the role of architecture in relation to Ai’s political activities, an issue of particular relevance since his arrest and conditional release in 2011.

Ai Weiwei: Art, Architecture

Arts & Photography

Geiser, Reto

Lepik, Andres

History & Criticism

Kunsthaus Bregenz

Whether tattooing a garder-belt onto her thigh before a live audience or wedging her body into the recesses of urban architecture, Valie Export has combated patriarchal structures and cast off inhibitions throughout a career that has consistently refused to conform to any one genre. Perhaps best known for her early experimentations in expanded cinema and her performances of feminist Media Aktionism, Export has amassed a vast oeuvre spanning feature film, digital photography, sculpture and installation. Archive amasses all of this material and more, excavating Export’s own collection of documentation, preparatory drawings, scripts, posters, Polaroids, newspaper clippings and correspondence to provide an unprecedented overview. Each step of the creation process for iconic pieces such as “Tap and Touch Cinema,” “Action Pants: Genital Panic” and “BODY SIGN ACTION” are explored along with never-before-seen art objects and brand new pieces, making this volume the definitive Valie Export anthology.

Valie Export: Archiv

Dziewior, Yilmaz

Wege, Astrid

Thaler, Jürgen

Individual Artists

Premiered in St. Petersburg in 1913, and written in “zaum”--a Russian Futurist nonsense language--Victory over the Sun was a vastly ambitious opera, a collaboration between the poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh, the composer and painter Mikhail Matyushin and the painter Kazimir Malevich (who made his legendary “Black Square” painting for the work). Anfang Gut. Alles Gut. documents a longterm project by an ever-expanding group of artists, musicians, architects and writers who, since 2008, have worked with the opera’s historical documentation and reception history to translate this mythic gesamtkunstwerk into the present. Katrin Bahrs, Thomas Baldischwyler, Tschilp, Nine Budde, Natalie Czech, Jean-Pascal Flavien, Kirsten Forkert, Emma Hedditch and Elizabeth Orr, Fox Hysen and Susanne M. Winterling, Heiko Karn and Katrin Mayer, Nicholas Matranga, Ruth May and Michaela Melián are among the many artists contributing to the book.

Anfang Gut, Alles Gut: Actualizations of the Futurist Opera Victory Over the Sun 1913

Fore, Devin

Behrens, Roger

Reading Ed Ruscha focuses on California-based artist Ed Ruscha's (born 1937) interests in books, writing and the act of reading--and his particular relationship with artist's books--which he has pursued over the course of five decades. Ruscha created his first word paintings--with oil paint on paper--in Paris in 1961. While words and phrases often function as symbols and motifs in his work, books as objects also make a substantial appearance, and the artist has deployed an astonishing range of visual means to explore the act of reading as a meaning-generating process. The 16 small artist's books Ruscha produced between 1962 and 1978 (Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Various Small Fires, et al.) remain definitive classics of the genre. The texts written especially for Reading Ed Ruscha by Douglas Coupland and W.S. Di Piero explore Ruscha's use of text through the lens of literary and poetic form, while Beatrice von Bismarck, in her essay, examines the book as work, medium of publication and exhibition format. The catalogue's editor, Yilmaz Dziewior, presents an overview of Ruscha's engagement with artist's books and the written word. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, Reading Ed Ruscha includes large-format illustrations of exhibitions and installation views, with 400 images in color.

Ed Ruscha: Reading Ed Ruscha

Coupland, Douglas

Von Bismarck, Beatrice

Viennese artist Florian Pumhösl (born 1971) makes paintings, films and architectural installations inspired by historical avant-gardes, and uses the site of the exhibition in itself as a medium. This publication presents all of Pumhösl’s installations since 1993, with illustrations and explanatory texts.

Florian Pumhösl: Works in Exhibitions 1993-2012

Carson, Juli

Rottmann, André

Founded in 2004, Guyton\Walker--the artist duo of Wade Guyton (born 1972) and Kelley Walker (born 1969)--is a partnership that has remained virtually without parallel in contemporary art, in that both artists work and exhibit individually. This volume examines all facets of their output, both singly and together. Essays by Sam Pulitzer and Quinn Latimer discuss individual authorship and joint techniques, while Jack Bankowsky’s text examines Guyton\Walker within a broad art-historical context. Yilmaz Dziewior’s introductory essay outlines the distinctive concept of the Kunsthaus Bregenz exhibition this book accompanies, and addresses the relationship between individual and joint artistic practices. Each section on the three artistic positions features photographs of the installation in Kunsthaus Bregenz.

Wade Guyton, GuytonWalker, Kelley Walker

Bankowsky, Jack

Latimer, Quinn

Pulitzer, Sam

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Natural Motion brings together well-known works by Gabriel Orozco (born 1962), such as Dark Wave (an enormous suspended and decorated whale skeleton), alongside examples of more recent work, such as carved river stones, plus a comprehensive presentation of his ongoing work in terracotta.

Gabriel Orozco: Natural Motion

Frost, Pablo

Minera, María

Barbara Kruger (born 1945) fuses picture- and word-based art to engage issues of power, pleasure, money, love and death. Her photographs, large-scale installations and immersive, multichannel video rooms address the viewer through an intensely spatialized visual display. Though Kruger’s art often imitates advertising, it is the overwhelming disparity between her work and the commercial forms she imitates that compels us to consider her work: instead of the advertisement we are conditioned to expect, we are instead confronted with problematic social attitudes, issues and stereotypes. In this volume, her oeuvre is examined from various perspectives in an in-depth conversation between Kruger, Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley. Designed in close cooperation with the artist, this catalogue documents the Belief &amp; Doubt installation at Kunsthaus Bregenz, demonstrating the enormous social currency of Kruger’s artistic statements and her powerful forms of address.

Barbara Kruger: Believe & Doubt

Richard Prince's (born 1949) pieces in It's a Free Concert demonstrate the artist's extraordinary range of media usage. This publication focuses on Prince's series of appropriations, while also serving as an overview of the renowned contemporary artist's oeuvre to date.

Richard Prince: It's a Free Concert

Stakemeier, Kerstin

Black, Paul

PRINCE, Richard

"Lots of painters are obsessed with inventing something," American painter Joan Mitchell (1925–92) said in 1986. "When I was young, it never occurred to me to invent. All I wanted to do was paint." Throughout her life Mitchell remained committed to totally autonomous abstract painting, always driven by this fundamental love for the craft and technique of painting. In a career spanning more than four decades, Mitchell's painting style married the dynamic gesture of the Abstract Expressionists, her generational peers, to a keen sensitivity to natural phenomena such as light and water. Characterized by an intense color palette and fresh gestural energy, often applied on a very large scale, Mitchell’s paintings both sensually seduce and intellectually stimulate viewers. Published to accompany a large-scale survey of Mitchell's painting, Joan Mitchell: Retrospective draws from Mitchell's entire oeuvre, from her early work of the 1950s to her late, multipart works painted in her last years. Both catalogue and exhibition insist on the importance of biography to any retrospective account of Mitchell’s work, and a large part of the exhibition is dedicated to the first extensive public presentation of archival materials from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Photographs, correspondence and ephemera from the archives are reproduced here, along with an illustrated timeline that relates Mitchell's life to her work. Born in Chicago in 1925, Joan Mitchell studied at Smith College before training at The Art Institute of Chicago. After a fellowship in Paris, Mitchell lived in New York, where she became part of the community of Abstract Expressionist painters. She spent increasing amounts of time in France, eventually moving to Paris in 1959, and remaining there until her death in 1992.

Joan Mitchell: Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings

Morris, Laura

Graw, Isabelle

Okiishi, Ken

Koether, Jutta

Michaud, Yves

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