Monographs

The revealing/concealing nature of self-portraiture. 

A modestly sized but nonetheless ambitious blend of catalog, monograph, and artist’s project, the book accompanies a touring exhibition of the same name which opened at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, in March 2016.

The artist Josiah McElheny has published two books that display his collaboration with artists, scholars, scientists and creative writers, offering a multitude of voices, speculations, fictions, and facts.

Seth Price’s Folklore U.S. documents a series of installations and exhibitions stemming from his dOCUMENTA (13) contribution, which included the Folklore U.S. SS12 fashion show (with collaborator Tim Hamilton), an exhibition at Hauptbahnhof, and a series of shop windows and garments for sale at SinnLeffers.

Imagine an alternate universe—a dimension not only of sight and sound but also of mind: a Q-tip stuck beneath the tongue of the Wonder Wart-Hog provides necessary evidence.

In the New York of a decade ago, the square inches of blue eye shadow, lip-disappearing moustaches, and ludicrously suggestive grapefruits dotting the pages of Soul Jazz Record Publishing’s history of disco record covers were still easily plucked from dollar bins and discarded curbside stacks.

Chan is not an artist who also writes; he’s an artist and a writer.

The primary challenge of any William Kentridge monograph might seem to be getting images on the page to represent the South African artist’s oeuvre, which spans performance by puppets and opera singers, immersive film installations, stereoscopic and anamorphic drawings, crank-activated kinetic sculptures that play music (recently on view at Marian Goodman in New York), and virtuosic charcoal-on-paper animations. 

Susan Richmond’s new book about Lynda Benglis, Beyond Process, examines the work and critical reception of the artist, who moved from Louisiana to New York in 1964. It is not an exhaustive assessment, but in 150 citation-packed pages, Richmond thoughtfully examines the artist’s motives and methods during the past five decades.

On New Year’s Eve 1980, I watched the new-wave band Human Sexual Response perform at the now defunct Boston Phoenix. I was 14 and my sister and her classmates from the Massachusetts College of Art snuck me past security.

Gordon Monahan’s book, Seeing Sound, is a trilingual, experimental text which presents his catalog of work dating from 1978 to 2011.

Meiselas speaks with fellow photographer Lyon on the occasion of his recent survey exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston.

John Reed takes notes (and footnotes) on the career of art animus Stuart Sherman, using the new catalog Beginningless Thought/Endless Seeing as a jumping-off point.

John Reed examines our cultural fascination with the Joker through the quirky, armless lens of Don Porcaro’s art.

Zoe Leonard: You see I am here after all (2008) documents the artist’s two-and-a-half year Dia installation while expanding upon the art of mechanical reproduction.

Michael Schmelling made a book called Atlanta, a photo book about the Atlanta hip-hop scene. Then Richard Maxwell wrote a review of it.

In the summer of 1977, Suzanne Lacy traveled the great monuments of Europe and Latin America with a paint-by-numbers picture of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which she gradually colored en route. 

K.O.S., the Kids of Survival, coalesced around Tim Rollins in the early 1980s, a time of inclusion and shifting autonomy.

From the destruction of King George’s likeness at Bowling Green, to the paving over of Native American earthworks, to the debasement of Penn Station and the ongoing disappearing acts of ballparks and churches, it’s becoming more and more clear that American architecture is an architecture of impermanence.