A pioneer of Conceptual art in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and 1970s, the painter, installation artist and theater director William Leavitt (born 1941) is above all an artist of narrative devices. Since 1969, his works in all the above media have employed abrupt fragments of popular and vernacular culture and depictions of modernist architecture to construct elusive narratives of cityscapes and environments. The culture and atmosphere of Los Angeles has played a significant role in Leavitt’s handling of these themes; classic southern Californian motifs of ever-present artifice and almost washed-out brightness recur throughout his work. Surveying the artist’s 40-year career, this volume includes sculptural tableaux, paintings, works on paper, photographs and performances from the late 1960s to the present. Leavitt has created a remarkable oeuvre that has influenced generations of artists, and this volume is both long overdue and highly anticipated.

Preface by Karola Grässlin.

Essays
The Great Persuader by Astrid Wege; How Far We’ve Come From The River, a conversation between Bennett Simpson and Stephen Prina.

Describing Conceptual artist and musician Stephen Prina’s work in 2004, the Harvard Gazette wrote, “Prina’s artwork is full of unsuspected surprises, secret compartments that pop open to release compressed bundles of meaning or coiling strands of narrative.” His work at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, for example, was conceived as “a traveling spectacle — a mini-Broadway-musical-on-the-road or circus,” according to the artist. This concise retrospective volume presents work from 1979 to 2008, as well as installation views of Prina’s recent one-person exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in Germany.

In Anders Edstrom’s Safari photographs, for instance, a slow, deliberate looking, a looking focused on a singular subject, a looking that by all appearances holds the outside world at bay, nonetheless reveals an image of openness one might better expect from street or landscape photography, genres bent by time, context, event, and change. But what changes in these Safari pictures? Do they have time or context? What is their world?

—Bennett Simpson

Calling for a reassessment of the function of art in late capitalist society, Corporate Mentality focuses on the complex and ambiguous ways artistic production inhabits corporate processes, abandoning the autonomy of the artwork in order to elaborate resistant approaches to a world increasingly determined by commercial strategies and market concerns.

Based on an archive (1995–2001) maintained by Aleksandra Mir, it presents a diverse spectrum of artists who take on business as site, as material, and as subject of their work. As Will Bradley writes in frieze, “The book focuses on … an essential area of interest as artists wake up to the reality of the Clinton-era fantasy of ethical corporatism. The plan came out of Mir and Kelsey’s realization that the publicity industry wasn’t stealing artists’ ideas, but simply employing artists, like Mir herself, who needed a day job. ‘Radical’ aesthetics that had taken at least six months to travel (we’re in New York here) from downtown to uptown were now transferred almost instantaneously, causing artists to reassess their methods.”