five or six contains texts selected from more than 100 reviews, articles, and catalogue essays published by Liam Gillick since 1989. The book includes some of the formal, social, and ideological concerns that have merged in Gillick's “What if? Scenario.”
“What's the scenario? A constantly mutating sequence of possibilities. Add a morsel of difference and the results slip out of control, shift the location for action and everything is different. There is a fundamental gap between societies that base their development on scenarios and those that base their development on planning. It could be argued that the great Cold War divide in socio-economic structuring was rooted in the different kinds of results that you get if you apply either one or the other technique to working out how things might end up in the future. And it is claimed that scenario thinking won. Our vision of the future is dominated by the 'What If? Scenario' rather than the 'When do we Need More Tractors? Plan.'” Liam Gillick 
This book has been published on the occasion of the exhibition “David,” Frankfurter Kunstverein, September 17 – November 21, 1999. 
Contributors Nicolaus Schafhausen, Frankfurter Kunstverein, and Caroline Schneider

Five or Six (Sternberg Press) (English and German Edition)

Arts & Photography

Gillick, Liam

History & Criticism

Sternberg Press

Irish artist Gerard Byrne (1969) focuses on the way photography and film have influenced visual culture in the twentieth century. Byrne's conceptually-based photos and videos explore the genealogies underlying each picture, the different frames which guide its perception, as well as the references in which a mediated image evolves. Demonstrating a wide-ranging engagement with quotation and citation, the work seizes upon mass-media forms that were never intended to serve as ''models,'' but now have become such. ----------- George Baker has written a theoretical essay where he links Byrne's work to theater and notes that the presence of avant-garde dramatist Bertolt Brecht has never been less discussed, but more widely explored, than in the last decade of artistic practice. The author traces ''a set of provisional conjectures about the 'underground connection' of ... contemporary art to the present forms of capitalist crisis. They are new forms on both sides--the crises and transformatio

Gerard Byrne: Books, Magazines, and Newspapers (Pocket-Book, 9)

GEORGE BAKER

Baker, George

Individual Artists

So far, the work of Austrian artist Peter Friedl (*1960) has managed to elude stylistic classification. Investigating the social, political, and cultural realities at work in institutionalized practice, his projects have been called "conceptual, aesthetic acts"--usually they are subtle forays into institutional criticism with political insight.Four or Five Roses continues Friedl's exploration of the stereotypical language of the monologue genre. The book contains some 45 children's "monologues," edited by the artist from numerous interviews and conversations recorded on playgrounds in South Africa. Faithfully transcribed and translated into English from different South African languages (Afrikaans, Northern and Southern Suthu, Zulu, Xhosa...), the "edited monologue" then becomes a hybrid genre, both fictionalised speech and serious counter-voice. What is ultimately at stake is how discursive strategies operate as a political tool, endlessly reshaped and manipulated for the sake of persuasion. The texts are accompanied by color illustrations of the actual South African playgrounds.

Four or Five Roses (Sternberg Press)

Friedl, Peter

"I had to come up with a "title", and I thought: 'Oh, God. Where do you begin?' The set of references becomes like an endless chain. In this very Klossowskian way there is this notion of the dematerialisation of the proper noun."--Cerith Wyn EvansThe Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans (*1958) eludes easy categorization: in the mid-eighties, he worked as an assistant to the film director Derek Jarman, making both experimental films and music videos for pop bands such as The Smiths and The Fall; he also was a tutor for six years at the Architectural Association. During the 1990s, he consolidated an international reputation as an artist unafraid to embrace highly complex conceptual issues of communication and perception, with dense textual references invariably spliced with a poetically tongue- in-cheek dandyism, whether the writings of William Blake flashed in Morse code off a disco ball; a homage to Pasolini written in fireworks or the cultivation of hybrid orchids in a Parisian gallery, nourished by the artist's own urine. "Cerith Wyn Evans" accompanied the artist's solo show at the Frankfurter Kunstverein and provides a comprehensive overview of the artist's body of work.Contributors Juliane Rebentisch, Andreas Spiegl, Jan Verwoert, interview by Manfred Hermes

Cerith Wyn Evans (Sternberg Press) (German and English Edition)

The films, photos, installations, and graphic artworks of Austrian artist Markus Schinwald create a highly charged aesthetic collection of curios in which the human being stands in the focal point of observation. Physical extensions, prostheses, and mechanical apparatuses transform human beings into marionette-like dolls and simultaneously give mechanical automatons a mystical habitat all their own. In his latest film entitled "Children's Crusade," the artist links motifs from children's crusades of the High Middle Ages with legends of the Pied Piper, which arose at nearly the same time. The rat-catching piper appears as a doll or mannequin, i.e. an idea that has come to life from a perverted sort of Christendom. Conceived as an artist's book, Markus Schinwald presents the entire spectrum of the artist's wideranging oeuvre. The book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Tableau Twain, September 1 - October 24, 2004, a cooperative project of Frankfurter Kunstverein and Siemens Arts Program. Contributors Vanessa Joan M ller, interview by Markus Heinzelmann

Markus Schinwald (English and German Edition)

Twenty-five artists who engage with the legacies of Orientalist figuration, modernist abstraction, monumental public art, conceptual art, and postmodern media theory in a postindependence context. Artists who belong to Algeria are caught between a national mythology that does not represent them and a historical space blanked out by state-sanctioned amnesia on both sides of the Mediterranean. This book presents the work of twenty-five such artists. They offer diverse representations of everyday life and are rigorously critical in their engagement with the legacies of Orientalist figuration, modernist abstraction, monumental public art, Conceptual art, and postmodern media theory after 1962, in a postindependence context. Contributors Alexander Alberro, Madeleine Dobie, Daho Djerbal, Emilie Goudal, Fanny Gillet-Ouhenia, Nadira Laggoune-Aklouche, Natasha Marie Llorens, Nawel Louerrad, Samira Negrouche, Zahia Rahmini, Wassellya Tamzali Artwork by Louisa Babari, Fayçal Baghriche, Bardi, Mouna Bennamani, Adel Bentounsi, Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Halida Boughriet, Fatima Chafaa, EL Meya, Hakima El Djoudi, Karim Ghelloussi, Mounir Gouri, Mourad Krinah, Nawel Louerrad, Amina Menia, Sonia Merabet, Yazid Oulab, Lydia Ourahmane, Sadek Rahim, Dania Reymond, Sara Sadik, Fethi Sahraoui, Massinissa Selmani, Fella Tamzali Tahari, Djamel Tatah, Sofiane Zouggar The book is published in conjunction with the exhibition Waiting for Omar Gatlato, curated by Natasha Marie Llorens and organized by the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, October 26, 2019-March 15, 2020.

Waiting for Omar Gatlato: A Survey of Contemporary Art from Algeria and Its Diaspora (Sternberg Press)

British philosopher, inventor, mathematician, astronomer and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg is the inspiration behind the London based Swedenborg Society. In this intriguing collection of essays and documentary material from the society s achives, artist/poet Brian Catling and writer/filmmaker Iain Sinclair reveal a secret history of Swedenborg: madman or messiah, you choose. The author performers reconstruct and reflect on the extraordinary events surrounding an exhibition and performance held at the Swedenborg House on February 17, 2010. Catling is known for his teaching at Oxford and exhibitions at the Serpentine and the ICA and Sinclair for his publications and films including Ghost  Milk:  Calling  Time  on  the  Grand  Project (2011): they join forces to create this peculiar but seductively engaging journey into the psycho geography of religious ritual.

Several Clouds Colliding (Co-Series)

Brian Catling

A massive value shift for existing buildings, infrastructure, materials, unbuilt land, earth, and the labor that holds our world together. To build is to destroy, writes Charlotte Malterre-Barthes. From steel bolts to concrete blocks to wood flooring to polyester insulation panels, every single component of the built environment is the product of extractive processes. Driven by greedy economies, the global enterprise of space production expands, impacting climate, earth, water, humans, and non-humans everywhere. However housing is both a human right and the mandate of design disciplines: How to navigate the need for housing versus the destructive practice of construction?&nbsp; To pause new construction--even if momentarily, creates a radical thinking framework for alternatives to the current regime of space production and its suspect growth imperative. Engaging with unsettling questions, A Moratorium on New Construction envisions a massive value shift for our existing stock. From housing redistribution to reinviting value generation, from anti-extractive measures to profound structural changes, from curricula reforms to purging the exploitative culture of the office, an entire rewiring of design processes and construction lays ahead. Somewhere between a thought experiment and a call for action, A Moratorium on New Construction is a leap of faith to envision a less extractive future, made of what we have: Not demolishing, not building new, but building less, building with what exists, inhabiting it differently, and caring for it.

A Moratorium on New Construction (Sternberg Press / Critical Spatial Practice)

Malterre-Barthes, Charlotte

Architecture

How architecture powered European energy politics in the postwar era and paved the way for today's dependency on coal, steel, and nuclear power. In this volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series, Dennis Pohl locates the origin of Europe's dependency on carbon and nuclear power in the postwar architectural designs and energy policies of the European Community. Since the 1950s, architects have proposed territorial, regional, and urban development plans that served the European political project. They collaborated with the European Coal and Steel Community in an effort to render the steel building industry as efficient as the car industry; they incorporated the ideas of infinite nuclear energy, as promoted by the European Atomic Energy Community, into their designs. This book demonstrates how architecture served the political economy of postwar Europe as a means of turning coal, steel, and radioactivity into tools of European governance. Architectural design enabled EU institutions to support social policies and worker housing within the coal and steel industry as well as to promote a new pan-European lifestyle based on nuclear energy. In other words, architecture powered Europe's larger infrastructural, economic, and cultural network. Pohl's work not only sheds light on how architecture has contributed to the carbonization of Europe, it also highlights the environmental issue, which challenges both architectural criticism and historiography in the era of the Anthropocene. Design by Zak Group Featuring artwork by Armin Linke and Giulia Bruno

Building Carbon Europe (Sternberg Press / Critical Spatial Practice)

Pohl, Dennis

A long-distance correspondence reflecting on the infravoice of a blue whale and other so-called "silent" subjects. An experiment in listening to frequencies beyond human sensorial range, Silent Whale Letters is a long-distance correspondence intimately attuned to the infravoice of a blue whale, a document held silent in the sound archive, and other so-called "silent" subjects. As part of an ongoing collaboration between Ella Finer and Vibeke Mascini the letters consider how the silent document shifts the logic of the archive, figuring listening as a practice of preservation. As the letters attune to the ocean loud with communications across time and space, the authors write about the movement of matter, of energies, wavelengths, currents and how the ocean preserves as it disperses what it carries. How does working with what we cannot see, or even hear within range, shift the parameters of attention? How does the energetic archival space of the ocean agitate and disrupt claims to knowledge, history, and power? Moving through three years of call and response the book unfolds through "a joint meditation on the transformative potential of a note, a voice, carried from saltwater into the archive" (Rebecca Giggs). They chart a process that is equally conceptual and intimate, theoretical and deeply personal, moving through discussions of (amniotic) undercurrents, call-and-response mechanisms, energetic wavelengths, oceanic and archival memory, mysterious scales, and the watery acoustic commons. Contributors Kate Briggs, Emma McCormick Goodhart Copublished with TBA21

Silent Whale Letters: A Long-Distance Correspondence, on All Frequencies

Literature & Fiction

Mascini, Vibeke

Finer, Ella

Essays & Correspondence

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