Isa Genzken's sculpture is concerned with what surrounds us and shapes our everyday existence, from design, advertising, and the media to her most enduring subject, architecture and the urban environment. The artist is interested in the ways in which aesthetic styles - the unadorned angularity of modernist architecture for example -embody and enforce political and social ideologies. Urlaub constitutes Genzken's multilayered inquiry into the meaning of work and leisure. "Artists never take vacations," Genzken says, "but the entire art system urgently needs a vacation."Vanessa Joan M ller examines how Genzken's recent work establishes a critical discourse about architecture and design as exposed sites of aesthetic and cultural formation. Discussing the artist's "beach house" series, small architectural models with playfully defined interiors/exteriors, the author writes that one can read them "as a pointed commentary on postmodern architecture, as a subtle attack on the predominant taste of the times. When Genzken gets involved with the miniaturization of this kind of architecture - which could be realized in principle - turning it into small-format sculpture, the procedure emphasizes the ambiguity of the subject toward a particular 'resort-style beach life'. The aspect of playing with form and material should therefore not deceive: the beach house is a status symbol that can only be found on the exclusive beaches of this world, and hence it is simultaneously the object of envy and a hallmark of distinction."This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition "Urlaub" at Frankfurter Kunstverein, May 27 - August 6, 2000.

Isa Genzken: Urlaub (Sternberg Press) (German and English Edition)

Arts & Photography

Vanessa Joan Muller

Individual Artists

Sternber Pr

Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World is the most recent essay by French writer and curator Nicolas Bourriaud. The author discusses how, since the early nineties, an ever increasing number of artworks have been created on the basis of preexisting works; more and more artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others or available cultural products.
This art of postproduction seems to respond to the proliferating chaos of global culture in the information age, which is characterized by an increase in the supply of works and the art world's annexation of forms ignored or disdained until now.

Postproduction

BOURRIAUD, NICOLAS

History & Criticism

Trajectories and Destinations (Sternberg Press) (English and Spanish Edition)

Gréaud, Loris

Jean-luc Blanc: Opera Rock (English and French Edition)

Seepage

Raqs Media Collective

The alienation between modern high culture and its public is a fundamental conflict of art. This book develops a theory of contemporary art in response to our moment, when artists and critics must respond to art's unprecedented popularity. Close readings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Rancière, Theodor W. Adorno, Clement Greenberg, Benjamin Buchloh, and Boris Groys provide the theoretical framework to comprehend a dialectic of art propelled by tension between the enduring history of art and the domineering presence of mass culture. 
“In dialogue with some of the most interesting modern and contemporary philosophical figures, Bettina Funcke traces the divisions and alternations in twentieth-century art between high and low engagements with popular forms. She reveals fascinatingly how twentieth-century artists not only seek to engage the people but also problematize 'the people' as a political and cultural construct.” ― Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire and Multitude
“In this far-ranging, muscular book, Bettina Funcke persuasively argues for a renewed attention to the dialectical relationship between high culture and mass culture. Against the notion that the two domains have become wholly indistinguishable, Funcke posits a stubborn, even agonistic sphere still discernable between them; in her account, it is the praxis of 'contemporary art' that both embodies and reflects upon this condition. Skillfully delivering a complex history of the longstanding, slippery debates around hierarchical and repressive structures of culture, Funcke moves through two centuries of philosophical and art historical discourse. Tending to canonical―and often contradictory―premises by authors including Buchloh, Derrida, Foucault, and Greenberg and to still-ambiguous and heavily debated artistic practices like those of Beuys and Warhol, Funcke's analysis extends, with great implication, into the philosophical and artistic details of our own moment. In Pop or Populus, Funcke delivers a cohesive, suggestive narrative that takes up the central issues of contemporary culture and refuses to consider any history a closed case.” ―Johanna Burton, art historian and critic, Associate Director and Senior Faculty, Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, New York
Bettina Funcke studied philosophy, art history, and media theory at the Hochschule für Gestaltung/ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, and has lectured at Bard College, Columbia University, Yale University, and the ZKM. Her writings have been published widely, both in artist monographs and magazines including Afterall, Artforum, Bookforum, Public, and Texte zur Kunst. A co-founder of The Leopard Press and the Continuous Project group, Funcke has worked as an editor at Dia Art Foundation and recently as Senior Editor U.S., Parkett.
Translated from the German by Warren Niesluchowski

Pop or Populus: Art Between High and Low (Sternberg Press)

Funcke, Bettina

Solution 196–213: United States of Palestine-Israel is an anthology of texts proposing a doable solution for the region. With contributors based in Ramallah and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Beirut and Jerusalem, New York and Bethlehem, Nazareth and Warsaw, the book offers solutions that will make life better, and proposes ways to do it. 
“Solution” is a tricky term especially in relation to the ongoing newspeak of the last two decades in Palestine-Israel. In their contributions for this book, Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, and Eyal Weizman suggest revisiting the term “decolonization,” “in order to maintain a distance from the current political terms of a 'solution' to the Palestinian conflict and its respective borders. The one-, two- and now three-state solutions seem equally entrapped in a 'topdown' perspective, each with its own self-referential logic.”
Unlike previous books in the Solution series, this book invited several writers from the region to suggest specific and doable solutions for today. This is mainly since it seems absurd to present a one-man master plan for Palestine-Israel. In many senses, such master plans (whether they take a colonial, Zionist or other meta-narrative lead) have been the mold of the problem in the region for at least the last 150 years.
The idea is therefore to rethink the different antagonisms that structure our ways of resistance and compliance: to rethink Semitism and 1948, rethink identity and territory, rethink resistance and memory, rethink democracy and state, rethink Zionism and decolonization, rethink refugee and property, rethink religion and solution.
Solution Series edited by Ingo Niermann
Contributors Tal Adler/Osama Zatar, Asma Agbarieh-Zahalka, Maayan Amir/Ruti Sela, Ariella Azoulay, Yael Bartana/Sebastian Cichocki, Raji Bathish, Itzhak Benyamini, Sari Hanafi, Sandi Hilal/Alessandro Petti/Eyal Weizman, Yazan Khalili, Ohad Meromi/Joshua Simon, Norma Musih, Ingo Niermann, Noam Yuran

United States of Palestine-Israel (Solution)

Sandi Hilal

Eyal Weizman

Alessandro Petti

Joshua Simon

Itzhak Benyamini

In his drawings, texts, objects, photographs, and videos, German artist Friedrich Kunath deals with such themes as longing, melancholy, loneliness, wanderlust, and wistfulness from a subjective viewpoint that finds expression in titles like Homesick, I am a stranger here or I may not always love you. He combines personal life experiences with literary, musical, or art historical references into visual, ironic commentaries in various media. The installative total context of his exhibitions forms narrative contexts between the individual pieces that lead to the viewer to a fantastic world of associations. Kunath regularly references ideas of the Romantic period. And so he betakes himself to the shore and glances off into the distant horizon in an approximation of Caspar David Friedrich complete with his own bed. By employing re-combinations, size differences, omissions, remodelings, overpaintings, and reflections, he creates pictures that are as melancholic as they are hopeful, as absurd as they are humorous. Friedrich Kunath makes use of the grotesque and exaggerations in his works without clinging to superficial humor. The images and scenes portrayed as sculptures, paintings, or detailed drawings and caricatures are not harmless jokes, but rather ambiguous metaphors for the present. He encounters the question regarding self-positioning in the framework of various cultural influences with knowing irony. His pieces undercut ingrained pictorial traditions and conventions and link seemingly incompatible approaches such as humor and melancholy, narration and abstraction or fiction and reality. This catalogue is published on the occasion of Kunath's solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Hannover, November 28, 2009-January 24, 2010. Contributors Douglas Fogle, Matthew Thompson, René Zechlin

Friedrich Kunath: Home Wasn't Built in a Day (English and German Edition)

In order to remain autonomous, at some point art began to copy everything that is not autonomous. There was no lack of supply and demand since power, as we know, can only be held over the production of truth or else it does not function. –Peter Friedl 
Since the early 1980s, Friedl has written on a variety of subjects. The book Secret Modernity: Selected Writings and Interviews 1981–2009 compiles for the first time a representative selection of his (partly unpublished) texts, along with a series of interviews. As in his artworks, Friedl's writings quote from and rework multiple genres. He offers reviews and portraits of George Sand and Clarice Lispector, of Alighiero Boetti and Jean-Luc Godard; articles and documents contributing to theater and film history, which examine the work of, among others, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, or Glauber Rocha; as well as comments and reflections on his own projects. Alongside these are essays delving deep into the past, exploring mainly colonial history and its paradoxical traces in the present: narratives about Haiti, South Africa, and Italy's repressed colonial rule in Africa.
Peter Friedl (b. 1960) lives in Berlin. He has participated in documenta X and 12 (1997, 2007); the 48th Venice Biennale (1999); the 3rd Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2004); the 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Seville (2006); Manifesta 7, Trento (2008); the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008); the 28th Bienal de São Paulo (2008), and the Tirana International Contemporary Art Biennial (2009). His solo exhibitions include “Blow Job” at Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen (2008); “Working” at Kunsthalle Basel (2008); the retrospective survey “Work 1964–2006” at Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Miami Art Central, and Musée d'Art Contemporain, Marseille (2006–07); and “Out of the Shadows” at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2004). Since the 1980s, he has published numerous essays and books, including Four or Five Roses (Lukas &amp; Sternberg, 2004) and Working at Copan (Sternberg Press, 2007). 
Co-published with Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen

Secret Modernity: Selected Writings and Interviews 1981-2009

Friedl, Peter

Keren Cytter has rapidly established herself internationally as one of the most interesting and unique artists on the contemporary art scene. At the mere age of 33 (born 1977 in Tel Aviv, currently living and working in Berlin), in the last eight years she has produced more than 50 video works, written three novels and an opera libretto, started the dance and theatre company D.I.E. Now, won awards and is the darling of the art press. Last summer, she exhibited at the New Museum's group show “Younger Than Jesus” and participated in the Venice Biennale. Cytter says: “I studied art because I wanted to go to New York and wash dishes.”
Keren Cytter's topics often include love stories, violence, sex and murder. She applies a non-linear narrative, the stories often shot with a hand-held camera. The actors―amateurs and friends of the artist, but more recently professional actors―switch roles with each other, or read their stage directions out loud. Scenes are repeated, but with a different course of events, with voiceovers or alternative dialogues. The films are usually set in simply-furnished apartments, especially the kitchen regions, suggesting a connection to kitchen sink realism. The literary tone of the dialogue, however, is far from realistic, writes Magnus af Petersens in the catalogue, adding: “Instead the films are deliberate hybrids between seemingly incompatible genres, between home videos and auteur films in the spirit of the French nouvelle vague, between Dogme and docu-soap or sitcom. But her films are above all existential dramas about the human condition, about love and hate in our thoroughly medialised age."
This catalogue provides the reader with the opportunity to read six of Keren Cytter's scripts for films that are being shown in the exhibition at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, May 8 – August 15, 2010. 
Copublished with Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Keren Cytter (English and Swedish Edition)

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