Between 1990 and 2007, Italian artist Luciano Fabro (1936-2007) created sixteen publicly commissioned works. This book, along with an accompanying dvd, focuses on the life and works of this extraordinary artist, and brings homage to Fabro’s latest realization La Colonna di Genk. This intriguing work commissioned by the city of Genk (B) visibly illustrates Fabro’s way of thinking and creation process. The accompanying dvd reveals biographical elements as well as the making of and the festive inauguration of La Colonna during Labour Day on May the 1st 2008. The inauguration took place on the renewed Genk Stadsplein (B), just ten months prior to Fabro’s death.

This first work on the Belgian artist Benoit Platéus is a monography as well as an artist’s book. It comprises a selection of works created between 1997 and 2011, as well as a text written by the artist and proposing a direct insight into his universe. Platéus work doesn’t neglect any medium — photography, video, drawing or sculpture — in order to search for ambiguities in the most mundane field of visibility. In this way his art often acts as a ‘psychic apparatus’ that plays on, and questions and reflects the viewer’s perception and consciousness.

Published on the occasion of Joseph Kosuth’s installation ‘Neither Appearance Nor Illusion’, an exhibition in the Medieval Louvre. Joseph Kosuth installed on the foundation walls of the original Louvre palace 15 neon text lines he appropriated from an artwork he developed to be read on the Internet, a project for young artists at the Brooklyn Museum. In this context combining a medieval archeological site with a historical art institution the exhibition circuit unfolds the field of potential meanings that always has been the hallmark of Kosuth installations. Entitled ‘Neither Appearance Nor Illusion’ in reference to Nietzsche, it is undoubtedly one of the artist’s most successful and spectacular interventions to date.

Texts by Henri Loyrette, Marie-Laure Bernardac and John Welchman and an interview between Joseph Kosuth and Jacinto Lageira.

Some words on, and images of, hammer. A magazine about common things. Featuring: Lou Nora Langosch, Johannes Willi, Katharina Nill, Pascal Tanner, Rico Scagliola, Michael Meier, Kathrin Eckhardt, Veronique Hoegger, Aleli Leal, Enzo Mari, Nichole Bachmann, Nina Langosch, Moritz Schmid, Maja Trudel, Christian Ratti, Eric Anderson, Søren Berner, Taiyo Onorato, Nico Krebs, Michael Hiltbrunner, Helvetia Leal, Max Heinrich, Paul Watzlawick, et al.

At the core of a platform that includes an exhibition space and an independent publishing house, KALEIDOSCOPE is an international quarterly of contemporary art and culture founded in 2009 in Milan. Distributed worldwide on a seasonal basis, it has gained widespread recognition as a trusted and timely guide to the present (but also to the past and possible futures), unique in its interdisciplinary and unconventional approach.

HIGHLIGHTS
This issue’s opening section features Aleksandra Domanovic, whose videos and sculptures are seen by Pablo Larios as embodiments of the perpetually productive disunion of politics and art; the ambitious public art program of New York’s High Line, described by Piper Marshall as one that confronts artists with many challenges; the record label Tri Angle, whose founder Robin Carolan talks to Ruth Saxelby about how to embody the zeitgeist of electronic music; the Indian duo Desire Machine Collective, who discuss with Sandhini Poddar and Ulrich Baer about mapping an experimental history of colonization; and American painter Sylvia Sleigh, whose elusive politics is contrasted by Joanna Fiduccia to the detailed realism of her portraits.

MAIN THEME
The blend of cybernetics and underground culture realized in the symbolic and mythological repertoire of Cyberpunk continues to inspire sci-fi narratives and permeate the arts, reinforcing its status as a powerful aesthetic. This issue examines the emergence of an art that addresses the processes of mechanization, desexualisation and reification of the human body, and how they relate to questions of identity, morality and fantasy. Featured contributions include Michele D’Aurizio’s overview of the work of a new generation of artists; Karen Archey’s analysis of the work of Canadian artist David Altmejd; a discussion between Brody Condon and Jason Brown coordinated by DIS magazine; and a conversation between young artist Timur Si-Qin and influential philosopher Manuel De Landa.

MONO
Comprising an essay by Alessandro Rabottini, an interview by Matt Keegan and a photographic portrait by Grant Willing, this issue’s MONO is devoted to American artist Frank Benson, whose work rides the dialectic between the space of the photographic image and the space of sculpture. Evoking celebrated artists like Charles Ray, Jeff Koons and Robert Gober, Benson uses the latest technology available and yet imbues the sculptural process with a profound understanding of physical materiality — making works that oscillate between analogue and digital, solidity and suspension, humor and elegance.

REGULARS
Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews the New York-based provocateur Liz Magic Laser; Dorothée Dupuis introduces the hidden life of Marseille; Luca Cerizza analyzes the emotional topography of Alberto Garutti; and Carson Chan meets the DAAD’s visual arts director Ariane Beyn. The edition is enriched by our seasonal tips on following, reading, listening, stopping by, meeting and visiting; as well as by three special inserts — drawings by Ken Price, stickers by Alistair Frost and images by Alistair Frost.

The Mexican Suitcase is the result of more than three years of work by the Mexican-based Argentinian artist, Enrique Santos. This artist book could be, amongst other things, a ‘catalogue’ of an apocryphal exhibition that is not meant to be, one that from its very beginning proposes a reverse path to that already established — first the book, and then? Ever since this basic wink (not to mention that the title itself is an appropriation) Enrique Santo’s work addresses the idea of “robbery”. Using diverse languages and tools (photography, collage, video, sculpture, film, installations) the artist reflects upon the contemporary artistic works in a sociocultural and political environment of violence in which we find ourselves immersed. Robbery as a metaphor of appropriation and “postproduction” — in Bourriaud’s definition of the word — as an element specific of an artistic way of producing, that is loaded with intertextuality, reference, discourse and images that roam our daily lives.

Santos’ work is a way of thinking about how contemporary art is produced, and at the same time it talks about the gaze, the interpretation of he/she who observes, the understanding and production that comes with every look. It reflects upon a single active spectator, who builds a discourse, appropriates all meanings and elaborates on them according to his life story, and his social, cultural and emotional capital. That gaze has a filter through which history is interpreted. It talks about and with the viewer without underestimating his capacity for understanding. From the very beginning, the book presents a relationship of shared complicity, discourse, codes and understandings, but demands a lucid and imaginative perspective.

Retaking film, journalistic, documentary and advertising language, Santos quotes and reinterprets the great thieves of the screen and some real criminals, in order to talk about lies, confusions, myths and misunderstandings, as well as an ever more violent and heartbreaking reality that crawls into our lives through trivialized and shallow images.

— Florencia Magaril

For this project, Amir Zaki carefully reconstructed and reinterpreted, in virtual 3D space, several photographs from a series made in the mid-1980’s by Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Their photographs depict precariously balancing temporary sculptures that they intentionally constructed in a slap-dash manner. Their photographs of these sculptures were casually shot in their studio using unprofessional lighting and equipment. Through these photographs of temporary sculptural constructs made of household detritus, Fischli and Weiss subvert the idea of sculpture as a heroic manifestation of a unique and masterfully constructed object. Their work privileges the document over the sculpture, which Zaki interprets as an ironic inverse of the ubiquitous professional photographic documentation of the ‘serious’ sculpture found in so many art books and journals. In Zaki’s adaptation of their work, there is a re-inversion at play as he privileges the sculpture again, but only as a 3D virtual non-object in order to destabilize their relationship. This has manifested as a series of short photorealistic animation loops and a foldout book based on the eleven different ways that a cube can be unfolded. Working with this methodology allowed Zaki to further interrogate the conventions and limitations of photography by exploring depictions of ‘real’ space, but without the restraints of actual physics or forces such as gravity. Zaki is interested in the perversion of using Fischli and Weiss photographs of quickly made, throw-away sculptures as a source to create an incredibly laborious photorealistic virtual 3D scene that can be explored from all angles, both through photographic and orthographic projections. In this project Zaki has also fetishized the sculptures by making them virtual, stylized and idealized. He has resurrected these sculptures and placed them in a world where they need not ever ‘fall’ (fail). In the animations Zaki has created, the sculptures simply spin, teeter or gyrate indefinitely. In the photographs Zaki has rendered for the book, the sculptures hover in a perfect orthographic projection space, surrounded by a black void.

The book is a complex foldout design that is quite difficult to describe in text. It is ten double-sided square pages. Each page spread unfolds into unique configurations of six squares that represent all sides of a cube. The images on each unfolded page spread depict 3D digital recreations of photographs from the series Equilibres by Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. When fully unfolded, the book opens up to approximately 27 x 36 inches. It is an interactive object, and can be folded and unfolded in multiple ways, creating grids, cubes, and unfolded boxes, each creating a unique experience and juxtaposition of images. It is important to recognize the book in terms of a limited edition or a multiple. It is also more of an object with sculptural qualities and a tactile nature than a ‘book’ in the traditional sense.

Some words on, and images of, glühbrine (light bulb). Featuring: Joseph Beuys, Big Zis, Lorenz Cugini, Vilem Flusser, Robert Gober, Colin Guillemet, Christina Hemauer, Roman Keller, Veronique Hoegger, et al.

In the book project A Narrow Scene of Hypothetical Circumstances we access a visual universe revolving around dismembered pieces of familiar objects. Sketches, pictures and materials are united into a steady flow of everyday examination, in which apparent contradictions — painstaking exactitude and violence, empathy and calculation — bubble away beneath the surface. Rearrangement, representation and repression melt together on the border between construction and collapse, with an elegant sense of seriousness. The works are supplemented with texts by Friedrich Tietjen, Caroline Ugelstad, Leif Magne Tangen and Christopher Muller.

West Coast artist Eric Wesley was born in 1973 in Los Angeles. His work, which can take the form of sculpture, painting, drawing, architectural model or public artwork proposal, often uses decrepit materials and conveys a humorous take on the world and his own identity within it. For the Whitney Biennial, he created scale sets for a faux reality show; his kinetic sculpture Kicking Ass was a mechanized donkey that kicked holes in the gallery wall behind it. This small monograph is the first publication dedicated solely to the artist’s work, and is published on the occasion of his exhibition as part of the MOCA Focus series.