This volume presents an overview of the Canadian collective oeuvre — an oeuvre still haunted by Miss General Idea, a fictive character who was at once muse and object, image and concept. Founded in Toronto in 1969 by Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal — both disappeared in 1994 — and AA Bronson, the trio adopted a generic identity that “freed it from the tyranny of individual genius.” Their complex intermingling of reality and fiction took the form of a transgressive and often parodic take on art and society. Treating the image as a virus infiltrating every aspect of the real world, General Idea set out to colonize it, modify its content and so come up with an alternative version of reality.

Paintings, installations, sculptures, photographs, videos, magazines, and TV programs: General Idea’s is an authentically multimedia oeuvre, that has lost nothing of its freshness and can now be seen as anticipating certain aspects of a current art scene undergoing radical transformation. The book covers the collective’s main areas of concern and themes, such as the artist and the creative process, glamour as a creative tool, art’s links with the media and mass culture, architecture and archaeology, sexuality and AIDS, etc. Including newly commissioned essays and republished texts, it is richly illustrated with documents and reproductions of the most important projects realized by General Idea from 1969 to 1994.

Los Angeles conceptualist Christopher Williams, born in 1956, studies the conditions of presentation and representation in order to call into question spoon-fed perceptions, “realistic” reproductions, communication mechanisms and aesthetic conventions that influence our perception and understanding of reality. This volume presents works from 2003-2007.

Conceived by the artist, this book gathers together the raw material to his “Joke Paintings” for the first time: unpublished manuscripts, well-known as well as unshown works from his personal collection, cartoons, and jokes. The project comments as much on the perception of his own work through the filter of a devaluated form of humor, as on the popular material appropriated through it.

“Jokes and cartoons are part of any mainstream magazine. Especially magazines like the New Yorker or Playboy. They’re right up there with the editorial and advertisements and table of contents and letters to the editors. They’re part of the layout, part of the “sights” and “gags.” Sometimes they’re political, sometimes they just make fun of everyday life. Once in awhile they drive people to protest and storm foreign embassies and kill people.”

— Richard Prince

Piero Golia founded in 2005, with his long-time friend Eric Wesley, the Mountain School of Arts, an educational structure that rapidly became a new spot on the cultural map of the city of Los Angeles.

This book, composed of discussions between artists, presents a kind of report on this unique “institution:” teaching methods, academic syllabus, and students’ selection are here explained with metaphors, compared with artistic interaction, and equaled to performances. Not unlike Golia’s work itself, the development of the school and its program follow a poetic of the gesture, of the instant, and of actions recalling Fluxus, Gino de Dominicis’ or Paul McCarthy’s works.

As a career’s start, Piero Golia successfully convinced a woman to have his portrait and the words “Piero My Idol” tattooed on her back (tattoo, 2001); soon after, following an invitation to the Tirana Biennale, he rowed across the Adriatic Sea in the opposite direction to migratory movement to reach Albania (”Going to Tirana,” 2000). And, on January 14, 2005, Golia vanished from New York City leaving no documented proof of his whereabouts; he traveled from a place to another, crossing borders without a trace, for resurfacing only on the morning of February 7 at the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen for a unique lecture about his adventurous trip. He now lives in Los Angeles, a place that blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, making it the perfect setting for his exploration into the process of myth-making and his ironic outlook on contemporary society.

An unequal pair from the ranks of philosophy and contemporary art were brought to the table for debate. The celebrated Russian philosopher Boris Groys, and the young international artist from Georgia Andro Wekua, discussed their shared experiences in the Soviet system, the conditions governing production in contemporary art today, and the sensitivities of a generation of artists born in the 1970s, taking Wekua’s two large installations Wait to Wait and Get Out of My Room as examples.

Phenomena such as loneliness, doubles, repetitions, mirror images, and waiting are the central themes of this conversation, illustrated by pictures of the two installations and several collages by Wekua.

We owe our idea of the contemporary exhibition to Harald Szeemann — the first of the jet-setting international curators. From 1961 to 1969, he was Curator of the Kunsthalle Bern, where in 1968 he had the foresight to give Christo and Jeanne-Claude the opportunity to wrap the entire museum building. Szeemann’s groundbreaking 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form, also at the Kunsthalle, introduced European audiences to artists like Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Lawrence Weiner. It also introduced the now-commonplace practice of curating an exhibition around a theme. Since Szeemann’s death in 2005, there has been research underway at his archive in Tessin, Switzerland. An invaluable resource, this volume provides access to previously unpublished plans, documents and photographs from the archive, along with important essays by Hal Foster and Jean-Marc Poinsot. There is also an informative interview with Tobia Bezzola — curator at the Kunsthauz Zurich and Szeemann’s collaborator for many years. Two of Szeemann’s most ambitious exhibitions are presented as case studies: Documenta V (1972) and L’Autre, the 4th Lyon Biennial (1997). A biography, an illustrated chronology of Szeemann’s exhibitions and a selection of his writings complete this exhaustive survey.

Art & Language is the name of a group of English artists who choose to work collectively, and the title of a magazine that they founded in 1968. Proposing a critical analysis of the relations between art, society, and politics, Art & Language marks, even in its name, the importance of the “textual turning point” in the 1960s.

Since 1976, Art & Language’s project has continued, through Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin, with the literary and theoretical collaboration of Charles Harrison. Working with very varied mediums, from painting to rock, these co-founders of Conceptual art remain, even today, attached to observing the consequences of what they themselves call the “depressing collapse of modernism.”

This publication is built around an important installation “Homes from Homes 2″ (2000–2001), which simultaneously references the development of Art & Languages’s work over the decades and the collection of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, in which it is now included. Each element of the installation is described, annotated, and put in the context of aesthetic, theoretical, and political problematics through extended captions and essays by the artists.

This publication is a reprint of the first book realized by Wolfgang Tillmans in 1995. A very atmospheric, if measured, compilation of black and white images, it combines portraits of youth culture with landscape, city scenes with slogans, clippings from newspapers, and book illustrations. Released now into a different context from its first appearance, the book is emblematic of the new approach and the energy Tillmans has developed since the end of the 1980s to the present in terms of genres, quality, and the status of photography as a medium.

Through paintings, sculpture, video, and media work, Seth Price underlines the production strategies, dissemination modes, and valuation patterns of art. His appropriationist work, which he rather calls a “redistribution” of (often) pirated materials, disrupts the operations of commodity culture. Among his formats and tactics one should mention the recycling of iconic illustrations, reduplication (from digital to vacuum-formed techniques), the reenactment of projects, and the collaborative actions with Continuous Project (formed in 2003 with Bettina Funcke, Wade Guyton, and Joseph Logan) or other artists.

The first monograph dedicated to the artist, this book includes an essay by Michael Newman as well as Price’s own critical take on his practice, given in the form of a videotaped conference that structures the presentation of his works.

Contemporary culture is witnessing one of the most significant shifts of recent times. The old dividing lines between artists and designers appear to be dissolving into one another. Indeed the breadth and range of investigation and inspiration they share is possibly the widest to date. This publication Wouldn’t it be nice hopes to present a series of projects emerging from these lines of dissolution, which reflect the current spirit of cultural production internationally.

The publication includes interviews with Jurgen Bey, Bless, Dexter Sinister, Dunne & Raby and Michael Anastassiades, Alicia Framis, Martino Gamper, Ryan Gander, Martí Guixé, Tobias Rehberger, and Superflex. Fully illustrated, the book presents a number of projects that have been specially commissioned for the exhibition. Quoting the aesthetic of the glossy magazine, the publication is designed by London-based group Graphic Thought Facility, and has attached to each cover a Bless N°14–2000, Shopping Supports Stickerbags self-adhesive purse/multiple.