A leading artist of her generation, Sam Taylor-Wood came to prominence in the mid-1990s as one of the YBAs (Young British Artists), alongside such artists as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, who were quickly propelled to celebrity status for their provocative and sensational works. Taylor-Wood has since become renowned for deftly manipulating the signature media of our age--photography, film and video--into compelling psychological portraits that tap into the ethos of our times. Documenting the artist's first major solo museum exhibition in the United States, this catalogue illustrates and discusses a selection of her most significant works from the mid-1990s to the present. Key pieces include the film "Hysteria" (1997), which portrays a woman's tumultuous descent from exhilaration to psychic disintegration; a selection from the 2002-2004 Crying Men photographs, which depict male film stars in moments of sorrow and introspection; "David" (2004), an hour-long video portrait of soccer icon David Beckham, sleeping; and the 2004 Self Portrait Suspended series. This volume provides an overview of the artist's work of the last 10 years, with commentary on Taylor-Wood's exploration of such themes as the inner psyche, vulnerability--both emotional and physical--suspended states of being and the aspiration to transcend human limits. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Sam Taylor-Wood

Arts & Photography

Millar, Jeremy

Bracewell, Michael

Individual Artists

Steidl

Joseph Beuys created his "Block Beuys" installation in the 1960s out of greatly varied materials and salvaged items that were selected, manipulated, altered and brought together in unusual ways. The objects correspond to one another and, in their unmistakable forms, refer to the artist's work in its entirety. Block Beuys is installed in a series of seven interconnected rooms in the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt. In Leve sieht Beuys, the photographer Manfred Leve has documented "Block Beuys," not only in the variety of its individual pieces, but also with a view of the entire work of art. His black-and-white photos, devoid of any kind of staging, allow a thorough and genuine look at this radiant work.

Joseph Beuys: Leve Sieht Beuys: Block Beuys: Photographs

Blume, Eugen

Reference

In this collaboration with four preeminent artists and writers, Roni Horn presents her latest work: Wonderwater (Alice Offshore). The publication takes the form of four individual books contained in a slipcase, plus an envelope of drawings by Anne Carson. Each volume comprises a text written in response to the same selection of Horn's titles/phrases: 19th C. Water; Cabinet Of; Dead Owl; Gurgles, Sucks, Echoes; Her, Her, Her and Her; Untitled (Yes); Water, Still; You are the Weather.The respondents are sculptor Louise Bourgeois, poet/writer Anne Carson, philosopher/writer Hélène Cixous and film director/artist John Waters. Individually, these booklets embody the voice of each writer. Together they become the content of Wonderwater (Alice Offshore)--further extending the landscape of Roni Horn's art.

Roni Horn: Wonderwater (Alice Offshore)

Carson, Anne

Evolving from a series of road trips along the Mississippi River, Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi captures America's iconic yet oft-neglected "third coast." Soth's richly descriptive, large-format color photographs present an eclectic mix of individuals, landscapes, and interiors. Sensuous in detail and raw in subject, Sleeping by the Mississippi elicits a consistent mood of loneliness, longing, and reverie. "In the book's 46 ruthlessly edited pictures," writes Anne Wilkes Tucker, "Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics, and cheap sex." Like Robert Frank's classic The Americans, Sleeping by the Mississippi merges a documentary style with a poetic sensibility. The Mississippi is less the subject of the book than its organizing structure. Not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, the series is created out of a quintessentially American spirit of wanderlust.

Sleeping by the Mississippi

Travel

“Seeking the innermost self in her photographs, Kuhn achieves a mood of intimacy by photographing up close models she knows well. Her photographs are a product of lasting relationships built on mutual affection. In a sense, the images are based on the memory of shared experiences.” -- Julie Nelson The people in Mona Kuhn's photographs are nude but not naked. Completely relaxed before the camera, they give the impression that nothing could clothe them better than their own skin. With a unique style, Kuhn's intimate photographs of both young and old are sensual compositions of skin and wrinkles, light and shadow, gestures and gazes. She creates taughtly composed images and balance sharply rendered portraits against blurred backgrounds to lure the eye and provoke the imagination.

Mona Kuhn: Photographs

“I Looked into its filmy eyes inquisitively and saw it was the body's fear, not mine, not the soul's, and so it was fear of death. I realized I could distinguish between my inner self and my physical body... An ice-cold surface covered my inner heat.” In this short story a man relates his inner-most thoughts and reflections as he suffers a heart attack on the on the street and is then brought back to life after three and a half minutes. It is a compelling tale of something appalling and yet completely ordinary, of pain and fear and acceptance, whilst walking the thin dividing line between life and death. In contrast to the speed of this near-death experience, the book includes a series of photographs in which the passage of time is hardly apparent. Over the course of a year the author photographed a wild pear tree in his garden at different times of the day and year, recording its changes under the differing light conditions. My Own Death contrasts perceptions of the here and now with the hereafter, and its complex composition alludes to mortal time and passage.

My Own Death

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

For four years, Robert Weingarten photographed Amish communities in Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin. In 80 photographs, Another America captures the beauty and simplicity of a way of religious life that has been sustained for more than three centuries. Descendants of the followers of Jakob Ammann, a Swiss Mennonite bishop of the seventeenth century, the Amish came to America in the early eighteenth century in search of religious freedom. The Amish have their roots in the Mennonite community. Both were part of the early Anabaptist movement in Europe, which took place at the time of the Reformation. The Anabaptists believed that only adults who had confessed their faith should be baptized, and that they should remain separate from the larger society. They uphold basic Bible doctrines, believe strictly in following Christ's example of nonviolence and stress humility, family and community. Many early Anabaptists were put to death as heretics by both Catholics and Protestants, and others fled to the mountains of Switzerland and southern Germany. Here began the Amish tradition of farming and holding worship services in homes rather than churches.

Robert Weingarten: Another America

Sobieszek, Robert

Religion & Spirituality

Guido Mocafico is neither a scientist nor a collector of curiosities, but a photographer and lover of art who partakes of the vocabulary and the colors of nature. He regards jellyfish, snakes, and tarantulas as the creations of an unparalleled artist. A strange sensation emanates from his images, which combine a vision of the unknown with a large dose of mystery--and fear, for these animals secrete a toxic substance that when injected by sting or bite can, in certain cases, cause death. With just the right amount of distance, Mocafico offers a contemporary view of the demiurge, showing us that we live in a world of illusion. In the four books of this compendium, three of images and one of text, we get the full range of his view of this world. In Greek mythology, the Medusa sees with such intensity that whatever crosses her gaze becomes petrified . . . much like the eye of the photographer armed with a camera. The photographs in Medusa reside at the border of geometric abstraction--where is the head? where are the eyes? the sex? Serpens examines the animal that has been demon, divinity, sacred protector, ancestor. Among the 2,700 known species, few snakes are dangerous, let alone lethal, to humans, but prejudices run deep. Aranea explores the fears that scientific rationality should banish: Spiders, small and large, continue to inspire dread in us---the shiver of touching their silky filaments and, above all, feeling their fangs, used for attack and defense and filled with deadly venom.

Guido Mocafico: Venenum

Goy, Jacqueline

Ineich, Ivan

Ephemera captures our curiosity. Through it, we get a glimpse into the personalities, personal moments and ponderings, and sentiments of beloved public figures. Presented here are many such glimpses, along with several longer looks, into the life of legendary photographer, Robert Frank. New York to Nova Scotia was originally published in 1986 to accompany a retrospective exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and has long been out of print. The book is the best source for much of the most absorbing material on the great artist: there are letters from a young Robert Frank to his parents telling them of New York, there is a facsimile of his 1954 proposal (considered a landmark document in the history of photography) to the Guggenheim Foundation that started his legendary journey across America, a letter from an Arkansas State policeman who arrested Frank during his trip to produce the photographs in his masterpiece, The Americans, as well with such other items like an account by Jack Kerouac about the trip he made with Robert Frank to Florida. The theme of this account is the now-classic one of a modern artist's restless peregrinations--travel as a physical and spiritual journey, as search and as self-discovery. The chronology and personal spirit of Frank's complex career as a photographer and filmmaker are evoked through these previously unpublished letters, pictures, reviews and essays, as well as through 18 of his classic photographs. Some of the letters are by Frank; others were written by photographers and contemporaries, such as W. Eugene Smith, Louis Faurer, Keith Smith and Gotthard Schuh, and by legendary curators Hugh Edwards and Robert Delpire. (Frank's writings reveal his lesser-known talents as a literary artist.) Authors of the essays include Walker Evans, Jonas Mekas, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Coles, as well as the exhibition curators, Philip Brookman and Anne Tucker. New York to Nova Scotia also includes still images from Frank's films and pictures of Frank throughout his career.

Robert Frank: New York To Nova Scotia

Located on the Kaipara harbor in New Zealand, 30 miles north of Auckland, Te Tuhirangi Contour is one of Richard Serra's latest site-specific works. The site is a vast open grass pasture with rolling elevations and curvilinear contours. The sculpture, made of hundreds of tons of steel, is located on one continuous contour, at a length of 843 feet. The particular contour was chosen for its location, differentiation, contraction and expansion in relation to the total volume of the landscape, and the elevation of the sculpture is perpendicular to the fall of the land, which generates its lean of 11 degrees. The work was first mocked-up full scale in wood to determine height and length. Serra's monumental sculpture is documented here in Dirk Reinartz's elegant black-and-white photography.

Richard Serra/Dirk Reinartz: Te Tuhirangi Contour

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