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This month: Silvia Kolbowski, Walid Raad, Mark Dion, Charles Merewether, Karen Kilimnik, Cameron Jamie, John Currin

As the populous weighs in on the current war in Iraq, the New Museum, as always, turns to hear what artists have to say on the subjects of war, art and history. Hot off the A.R.T Press is a new title in their series of artist conversations, Between Artists. In this title, A.R.T Press has paired renowned artist and former editor of October (MIT Press) Silvia Kolbowski and the brilliant Walid Raad to discuss the politics of war and art. Raad is the founder of the Atlas Group, an archive of both real and fictitious ephemera from the Lebanese war. Using these materials Raad captures the futility of war via his clinical documentation of its factual minutiae. Paired with Kolbowski, the two engage in a compelling discussion on the complexity of addressing war in artistic practice.

We have also uncovered a gem of a title by Mark Dion, another artist who is a master of using methods of documentation and exhibition to examine the notions of "objective" science and "subjective" art. Cabinet of Curiosities documents Dion's project of the same name at the University of Minnesota's Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, where he arranged objects from the university's archives under Renaissance-era categories such as the Underworld, the Sea, Humankind, and the Library. The title includes 128 pages, 46 halftones, 44 color photos, an interview with the artist and several essays that explore the history of curiosity cabinets and museums. Mark Dion has exhibited at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Kunsthalle Zürich, De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn Vancouver Art Gallery, Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

For further reading on these subjects a must have is the Archive, a new title in MIT's Documents of Contemporary Art series, edited by art historian and curator Charles Merewether. A definitive primer, this 208 page book interweaves canonical theoretical texts alongside documentation from and interviews with modern and contemporary artists. The impressive roster includes: Giorgio Agamben, the Atlas Group, Walter Benjamin, Christian Boltanski, Marcel Broodthaers, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska, Jacques Derrida, Eugenio Dittborn, Hal Foster, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Renee Green, Susan Hiller, Thomas Hirschhorn, Illya Kabakov, Dragan Kujundzic, Patricia Levin and Jeanne Perreault, Charles Merewether, Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Raqs Media Collective, Paul Ricoeur, Jayce Salloum, Allan Sekula, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, subREAL, Margarita Tupitsyn, Andy Warhol, and Akram Zaatari.

Two monographic firsts have made it onto the hotlist this month as well. Karen Kilimnik's comprehensive (160 page) monograph offers a complete panorama of Kilimnik's career production and allows readers to see beyond the distinctions between her paintings, drawings and set-like installations. It includes essays by Dominic Molon and Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith, and 120 full color pages of her work, such as her acclaimed portraits of celebrities and her fanciful portrayals of ballet dancers, fairy tales, and myths. Kilimnik has had recent shows at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (Oct 2006) and 303 Gallery, New York (Oct 2006). In 2007, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia will present a mid-career retrospective of Kilimnik's work that will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Aspen Museum of Art, CO.

Cameron Jamie started drawing attention in 2000 with BB, a documentary about the backyard wrestling phenomenon in Southern California. His short films track down extreme phenomena in society and present them to us in a mirror. This monograph include 277 illustrations and references his film Kranky Klaus, a hit at the Whitney Biennial, documenting the bizarre yearly winter ritual of Krampus in the Bad Gastein Valley in Austria. Other works explored are his project JO, tackling the myth of Joan of Arc, Spook House which explores the macabre at Halloween in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, and a hotdog eating contest in Coney Island. This book includes essays by Gary Indiana, Mike Kelley and Ralph Rugoff.

Last month we featured the career survey Desire/Despair for artist Jack Pierson from the publisher Rizzoli. This month, Rizzoli has again produced a beautiful, fine, large scale art book for John Currin. Currin, whose figurative painting resurged interest in the tradition in the early 1990s, cartoonishly depicts subjects ranging from fifteenth century Italy to 70s pin ups to ageing divorcees. His retrospective recently traveled from The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, to The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and The Serpentine Gallery in London. This 448 page monster, compiled by Gagosian Gallery, is a stunning example of what a contemporary art monograph could and should be.

CHECK OUT THE FULL LIST FOR JANUARY

Between Artists - Silvia Kolboski and Walid Raad

Inadvertently situated during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, this epistolary dialogue between the two artists traces one artist's evacuation from Lebanon, and one artist's experience of the war through texts and images. Interwoven are discussions about aesthetic methodology, representations of war and its aftermath, and the psychical stakes of the politics of war and art.
Part of the Between Artists series.

Art Resources Transfer, 2006, 5 x 7.5 inches, 88pp, 14 color reproduction, Softcover, ISBN: 0-923183-40-X

$13.95

The richly illustrated essays in Cabinet of Curiosities records the creative processes behind an installation designed by contemporary artist Mark Dion at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, a collaboration of museum staff, students, and collection curators. Drawing from university collections, Dion and the curators chose seven hundred objects representative of the state’s history, ranging from a Bierstadt painting of Minnehaha Falls to Hubert Humphrey memorabilia, as well as objects that would have fascinated Renaissance viewers—such as mirrors and the world’s smallest plant—and arranged them into categories typical of Renaissance inquiry, such as the Underworld, the Sea, Humankind, and the Library. Together, the cabinets represented the university in miniature, just as their Renaissance precursors had attempted to represent microcosms of the world. Cabinet of Curiosities offers commentary on the ways in which collecting has undergirded the creation of knowledge within universities and in Western society.

University of Minnesota Press, 2006, 8 x 10", 128 pages, 46 halftones, 44 color photos, ISBN: 0-8166-4470-5

$29.95

In the modern era, the archive--official or personal--has become the most significant means by which historical knowledge and memory are collected, stored, and recovered. The archive has thus emerged as a key site of inquiry in such fields as anthropology, critical theory, history, and, especially, recent art. Traces and testimonies of such events as World War II and ensuing conflicts, the emergence of the postcolonial era, and the fall of communism have each provoked a reconsideration of the authority given the archive--no longer viewed as a neutral, transparent site of record but as a contested subject and medium in itself. This volume surveys the full diversity of our transformed theoretical and critical notions of the archive--as idea and as physical presence--from Freud's "mystic writing pad" to Derrida's "archive fever"; from Christian Boltanski's first autobiographical explorations of archival material in the 1960s to the practice of artists as various as Susan Hiller, Ilya Kabakov, Thomas Hirshhorn, Renée Green, and The Atlas Group in the present.

MIT Press/Whitechapel, November 2006, 208 pages, ISBN-10: 0262633388

$22.95

In the 1980s, critics compared Karen Kilimnik’s narrative and jumbled installations to the previous decade’s "scatter art," they have since become cult favorites of a new generation of artists and curators. Her drawings and paintings from the early 1990s targeted then-current discussions on art and glamour, and the emergence of women artists whose sensibility was not that of feminist theory. A portrait of Hugh Grant, post-arrest, was likened to Degas, Warhol and Jim Shaw's Thrift Store Paintings. More recently she’s taken up fairy-tale themes, with dashing barons, tinkling chandeliers, wolves and sleighs--a magical world in which history, myth and reality coexist. The diversity of Kilimnik’s work, which has continued to evolve, can veil the internal coherence of a practice in which the most recent pieces attest to continuous links through all previous media and subject matter. This comprehensive monograph offers a complete picture of her career, and allows readers to see beyond the distinctions between her paintings, drawings and installations.

JRP/Ringier, 2006, Paperback, 9.5 x 11.25 in., 160 pgs, 120 color, ISBN: 3905701235

$45.00

Essays by Gary Indiana, Mike Kelley and Ralph Rugoff.

Cameron Jamie’s calling is tracking down extreme social phenomena and presenting them in short documentary films. His best known film, BB, documents “backyard wrestling” among working-class kids in his native San Fernando Valley. In Spook Houses, he explores a suburban Chicago community that takes a little too much pleasure in the macabre at Halloween, transforming front lawns into cemeteries and kitchens into mausoleums. And in Kranky Claus, a film about Krampus rituals in Austria, he accompanies those legendary demons on their nightmarish pre-Christmas tour, thrashing frightened children. As Jamie says of his subjects and as he proves to his audiences, “The creepiest things in the world are always the things that are considered to be the most ‘normal.’”

Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2006, Hardcover, 200 pgs, 8.5 x 10.75 in., 200 color, ISBN: 3775717269

$35.00

John Currin The Complete Works

Already world-renowned, John Currin's retrospective has traveled from The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, to The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and The Serpentine Gallery in London. John Currin burst onto the art world in the early 1990s when figurative painting was on the margins of the contemporary art scene. An astute observer of human nature, Currin creates painterly portraits that oscillate from the flatly realistic to the thickly cartoonish. He is best known for his portraits (real and fictitious) of strangely blank-faced women with dark expressionless eyes. Both commonplace and fantastic, his paintings cull subjects from a range of sources, from fifteenth-century Italian art to girlie magazines of the sixties and have earned the artist comparisons with the likes of Breugel and Norman Rockwell.

Rizzoli International Publications, Dec 2006, 448 pages, 10 x 13 inches, ISBN: 0847828654

$150.00