Nothing Up My Sleeve: An Exhibition Based on the Work of Stuart Sherman, is a curator’s book co-published with the New York not-for-profit space, Participant Inc. The exhibition, curated by Jonathan Berger, took place at Participant Inc. in the winter of 2010.

Berger paired the work of Stuart Sherman, a brilliant performance artist who died in 2001, with other performers and artists whose work, while not directly affected by Sherman, shares a similar spirit and exploration of authenticity. The book is an extension of the exhibition, composed of entries from each performer/artist included in the show: Matthew Brannon, Carol Bove, James Lee Byars, Vaginal Davis, Harry Houdini, Andy Kaufman, and several others. Reprinted in the book, with new commentary, are two early critical texts about Stuart Sherman’s spectacle works, by John Matturri (written in 1978), and Berenice Reynaud (published in issue eight of October art journal, 1979). There are also texts by Lia Gangitano, Jonathan Berger, Molly McGarry, and Mark Bradford.

Artists have always used their imaginations to see beyond visible matter — to posit other physics, other energies, new ways of conceiving the visible and new models for art — but the past century has seen an explosion of such investigations. In the fashion of a Wunderkammer, The Quick and the Dead takes stock of the 1960s and 70s legacy of experimental, or “research” art by pioneers like George Brecht, who posited objects as motionless events and asked us to consider “an art verging on the non-existent, dissolving into other dimensions,” and Lygia Clark, whose foldable sculptures sought to dissolve the boundary between inside and outside, each “a static moment within the cosmological dynamics from which we came and to which we are going.” In a series of encounters with art made strange by its expansions, contractions, inversions and implosions in time and space, The Quick and the Dead surveys more than 80 works by a global, multigenerational group of 50 artists, scientists and musicians — among them James Lee Byars, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Harold Edgerton, Ceal Floyer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierre Huyghe, The Institute for Figuring, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Stephen Kaltenbach, On Kawara, Christine Kozlov, David Lamelas, Louise Lawler, Paul Etienne Lincoln, Mark Manders, Kris Martin, Steve McQueen, Helen Mirra, Catherine Murphy, Bruce Nauman, Rivane Neuenschwander, Claes Oldenburg, Roman Ondák, Adrian Piper, Roman Signer and Shomei Tomatsu, among many others. Includes reprints of texts by diverse luminaries such as John McPhee, Jalal Toufic, Oliver Sacks, Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson.