hayward publishing catalogue spring 2014

It’s been an exciting year for Hayward Publishing, with reprints of Light Show and Grayson Perry: The Vanity of Small Differences, and incredible sales from titles ranging from Curiosity to Art of Change: New Directions from China. The coming months also see the arrival of a variety of exciting new titles. Amongst them, Martin Creed: What’s the point of it? is a beautifully realised survey of the work of one of Britain’s most exciting artists; The Human Factor: Uses of the Figure in Contemporary Sculpture offers a long-overdue survey of the re-emergence of the human form in contemporary sculpture; and Jeremy Deller returns to Hayward Publishing to present All that Is Solid Melts into Air, a personal guide through the Industrial Revolution, mapping the ways in which this crucial era continues to shape British life.

The publications on show here illustrate Hayward Publishing’s continuing commitment to working with the most creative minds, to produce truly unique books and catalogues. We hope that it imparts just a little of the huge enthusiasm that we have for our books and that it helps make a fan of you too.

Ben Fergusson, Art Publisher

Martin Creed What’s the point of it?

Foreword by Ralph Rugoff Texts by Paul Morley, Bill Bailey, Joachim Pissarro and Cliff Lauson

Designed by Joe Ewart

ISBN 9781853323201 Hardback 208 pages 28.5×24.5cm January 2014 £30 / $40.00

Martin Creed: What’s the point of it? is a large-format, fully illustrated publication accompanying a major survey of Creed’s work at Hayward Gallery. Encompassing the full range and scale of Creed’s work, this comprehensive monograph spans its most minimal moments to extravagant room-sized installations, neon signs, video projections and performances. Outstanding in scope, design and content, this essential volume features Creed’s key artworks and a number of newly commissioned essays by music journalist Paul Morley, art historian Joachim Pissarro and Hayward Gallery curator Cliff Lauson, and a text by award-winning comedian, writer and broadcaster Bill Bailey.

New Titles

82

of new buildings, zones and spaces not yet designed and defined, than they would be at

mega-festivals, clubs, arenas, award shows, chat shows and theatres, on phones and inside

tablets, which would seem very dull, and ordinary, the status quo, cultural conformity,

endless, shallow self-gratification, all that it once was not.

And the pop star would intend to trigger philosophical reflection about the relationship

between words, ideas and things more than they would be content to merely sell their

wares, plug their presence and generate gossip, acting out set-up visions of glamour that

belonged deep in the previous century. Their works would have an emotional punch that

falls somewhere between sentimental and agonising, between the middle of the road and

the nihilistic, and approach sound and song from the point of view of an artist who believes

that what is real is not the appearance but the idea, the essence of things.

The pop star, then, would be, in the future, between categories, between painting and

music, an avant-child of Warhol and Ono, Cage and time, light and trivia, buffoonery and

requiem, as much as a descendant of the grids of Mondrian, the concision of Webern and

the symbols of Maciunas as the Kinks, the Velvet Underground, Sly, Moroder, Blondie, Eno

and Buzzcocks, finding new ways to generate context for what they do, to express their

feelings through an amalgamation of sound, idea, vision and basic abstract presence, to

move from one state to another, and managing at the same time to change shape and

remain the same.

As an example in prototypical form of this type of pop star, where a soundtrack reports

and responds to the image of a performer inventing ways of explaining the world they find

themselves trapped and mobile inside: Martin Creed.

A model artist who never stops experimenting, he cannot imagine making what he

makes out of paint, film, material, patterns, perceptions and deadlines without including

music and sound, whether it is unorthodox or conventional, noise or hummable song; he

cannot imagine being in a pop group without reflecting his knowledge of art history, an

appropriation and application of minimalism and conceptualisation and montage. This

means that mixed up inside all the approximate, volatile mixed up ways he works there

is a response to glam rock as well as Dada, classical as well as garage, punk as well as

serialism, magic as well as rhythm, primitivism as well as post-punk, free jazz as well as

dream pop.

All his thinking about thinking, about adding new shapes to the world in order

to understand what the shapes that already exist stand for, his piecing together of the

fragments he finds all around that are both puzzle and treasure, is made by someone who

is neither musician or artist, but some fluid, elusive hybrid of the two. His originality is not

so much in the individual numbered works, that installation, that collection of canvases,

that project, doodle, protrusion, expansion or contraction, that change of scale, that

optical illusion, trick of the light, flight of fancy, that spot of slapstick, of self-mockery, that

statement of the bleeding obvious, that questioning of structure, that wound, or wind- up,

that spot of mime, but in the fact that he is not as an operator, as a maker of things, a

Owada

nothing

CD

1997

Chicago

12Ó vinyl

2012

83

provider of atmosphere, one thing or another. The word to be used to describe what he

does, if he is neither artist or musician, or conceptualist or choreographer, even though he

does things that you can connect to art, and music, and dance, and therefore everything

else in the world, could be enthusiast, or melancholic.

Or, the words Ôbut this is ridiculousÕ.

2.

In 2001, Martin Creed was handed the Turner Prize by Madonna for a piece that

superficially involved the turning on and off of some light bulbs. He has a band that

performs as though there is still such a thing as a happening, or music hall, and he releases

singles and albums packaged as ordinary CDs rather than art objects. He professes a love

for Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash, shying away from admitting any interest in John

Cage or Wire. He sees himself as a plain singer of songs. You may wonder if his band is

simply the private amusement of a successful artist who has calculatedly or accidentally

reached the stage of being able to do what he wants and have it called art.

He would be happy not to be called an artist, not least because as soon as he is, he is

expected to fulfil certain standards and responsibilities that might not be what he himself

has in mind. Then again, he can play at being this sort of artist Ð who you will find pleasing

or infuriating according to taste Ð very agreeably. What he does is have thoughts about

various things, like what am I thinking, what am I going to do today, what have I done, what

happens if I place this mark, or sound, or word, or beat, or idea, or body part next to this

one and then he makes a series of decisions, and these thoughts get fixed into place. There

is no actual word to describe what this kind of thinking, and subsequent action, actually is,

because in a way the whole point of this kind of thinking is to avoid rigid, reductive ways

of seeing and being.

Creed is also a self-conscious showman, as well as a more down-to-earth fantasist,

who uses the gallery as a theatre, as a world outside the world, where something or other

must take place. He happens to work as an artist in a world that is quite small and enclosed,

but which gets the sort of coverage that enables him to develop and maintain himself as

a character. This character, possibly ultimately the work of art itself, giving visible and

audible permanence to fleeting, mysterious, sometimes ordinary thoughts, is somewhere

mixed in with being a comedian, philosopher, composer, writer, archivist, entertainer,

craftsman, team leader and fastidious brand manager.

If he came to his art from the position of musician, the art would definitely be largely

dismissed as the unqualified work of a chancer and dilettante. Coming to the music from

the assumed position of artist, thereÕs a different level of tolerance and a little bit of intrigue.

Is he making his na•ve and/or knowing and/or roughly sentimental music just because he

wants to, because he likes music, the idea of being in a band, because it makes him think

in a different way about his other ways of working, because it is something an artist should

do in a world dominated and warped by pop culture, because sound and words are as

important to him as paint and shape? Is he whimsically commenting on other pop music,

YouÕre The One For Me

Single

2012

Madonna and Martin Creed at the

2001 Turner Prize

82

of new buildings, zones and spaces not yet designed and defined, than they would be at

mega-festivals, clubs, arenas, award shows, chat shows and theatres, on phones and inside

tablets, which would seem very dull, and ordinary, the status quo, cultural conformity,

endless, shallow self-gratification, all that it once was not.

And the pop star would intend to trigger philosophical reflection about the relationship

between words, ideas and things more than they would be content to merely sell their

wares, plug their presence and generate gossip, acting out set-up visions of glamour that

belonged deep in the previous century. Their works would have an emotional punch that

falls somewhere between sentimental and agonising, between the middle of the road and

the nihilistic, and approach sound and song from the point of view of an artist who believes

that what is real is not the appearance but the idea, the essence of things.

The pop star, then, would be, in the future, between categories, between painting and

music, an avant-child of Warhol and Ono, Cage and time, light and trivia, buffoonery and

requiem, as much as a descendant of the grids of Mondrian, the concision of Webern and

the symbols of Maciunas as the Kinks, the Velvet Underground, Sly, Moroder, Blondie, Eno

and Buzzcocks, finding new ways to generate context for what they do, to express their

feelings through an amalgamation of sound, idea, vision and basic abstract presence, to

move from one state to another, and managing at the same time to change shape and

remain the same.

As an example in prototypical form of this type of pop star, where a soundtrack reports

and responds to the image of a performer inventing ways of explaining the world they find

themselves trapped and mobile inside: Martin Creed.

A model artist who never stops experimenting, he cannot imagine making what he

makes out of paint, film, material, patterns, perceptions and deadlines without including

music and sound, whether it is unorthodox or conventional, noise or hummable song; he

cannot imagine being in a pop group without reflecting his knowledge of art history, an

appropriation and application of minimalism and conceptualisation and montage. This

means that mixed up inside all the approximate, volatile mixed up ways he works there

is a response to glam rock as well as Dada, classical as well as garage, punk as well as

serialism, magic as well as rhythm, primitivism as well as post-punk, free jazz as well as

dream pop.

All his thinking about thinking, about adding new shapes to the world in order

to understand what the shapes that already exist stand for, his piecing together of the

fragments he finds all around that are both puzzle and treasure, is made by someone who

is neither musician or artist, but some fluid, elusive hybrid of the two. His originality is not

so much in the individual numbered works, that installation, that collection of canvases,

that project, doodle, protrusion, expansion or contraction, that change of scale, that

optical illusion, trick of the light, flight of fancy, that spot of slapstick, of self-mockery, that

statement of the bleeding obvious, that questioning of structure, that wound, or wind- up,

that spot of mime, but in the fact that he is not as an operator, as a maker of things, a

Owada

nothing

CD

1997

Chicago

12Ó vinyl

2012

83

provider of atmosphere, one thing or another. The word to be used to describe what he

does, if he is neither artist or musician, or conceptualist or choreographer, even though he

does things that you can connect to art, and music, and dance, and therefore everything

else in the world, could be enthusiast, or melancholic.

Or, the words Ôbut this is ridiculousÕ.

2.

In 2001, Martin Creed was handed the Turner Prize by Madonna for a piece that

superficially involved the turning on and off of some light bulbs. He has a band that

performs as though there is still such a thing as a happening, or music hall, and he releases

singles and albums packaged as ordinary CDs rather than art objects. He professes a love

for Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash, shying away from admitting any interest in John

Cage or Wire. He sees himself as a plain singer of songs. You may wonder if his band is

simply the private amusement of a successful artist who has calculatedly or accidentally

reached the stage of being able to do what he wants and have it called art.

He would be happy not to be called an artist, not least because as soon as he is, he is

expected to fulfil certain standards and responsibilities that might not be what he himself

has in mind. Then again, he can play at being this sort of artist Ð who you will find pleasing

or infuriating according to taste Ð very agreeably. What he does is have thoughts about

various things, like what am I thinking, what am I going to do today, what have I done, what

happens if I place this mark, or sound, or word, or beat, or idea, or body part next to this

one and then he makes a series of decisions, and these thoughts get fixed into place. There

is no actual word to describe what this kind of thinking, and subsequent action, actually is,

because in a way the whole point of this kind of thinking is to avoid rigid, reductive ways

of seeing and being.

Creed is also a self-conscious showman, as well as a more down-to-earth fantasist,

who uses the gallery as a theatre, as a world outside the world, where something or other

must take place. He happens to work as an artist in a world that is quite small and enclosed,

but which gets the sort of coverage that enables him to develop and maintain himself as

a character. This character, possibly ultimately the work of art itself, giving visible and

audible permanence to fleeting, mysterious, sometimes ordinary thoughts, is somewhere

mixed in with being a comedian, philosopher, composer, writer, archivist, entertainer,

craftsman, team leader and fastidious brand manager.

If he came to his art from the position of musician, the art would definitely be largely

dismissed as the unqualified work of a chancer and dilettante. Coming to the music from

the assumed position of artist, thereÕs a different level of tolerance and a little bit of intrigue.

Is he making his na•ve and/or knowing and/or roughly sentimental music just because he

wants to, because he likes music, the idea of being in a band, because it makes him think

in a different way about his other ways of working, because it is something an artist should

do in a world dominated and warped by pop culture, because sound and words are as

important to him as paint and shape? Is he whimsically commenting on other pop music,

YouÕre The One For Me

Single

2012

Madonna and Martin Creed at the

2001 Turner Prize

Martin Creed What’s the point of it? Special Edition

Foreword by Ralph Rugoff Texts by Paul Morley, Bill Bailey, Joachim Pissarro and Cliff Lauson

Designed by Joe Ewart

ISBN 9781853323232 Hardback 208 pages 28.5×24.5cm January 2014 £60.00

To celebrate the opening of the artist’s first large-scale retrospective, Hayward Publishing is releasing a special edition of 250 copies of its Martin Creed: What’s the point of it? exhibition catalogue.

Each copy will feature a new version of Creed’s iconic torn paper piece, as well as a handwritten ‘certificate’ of authentication, written onto the pages of the book and individually signed by the artist. Embodying the artist’s immediate and irreverent approach, the Martin Creed: What’s the point of it? Special Edition represents a highly affordable opportunity to purchase a singular piece by this world- renowned artist.

9 781853 323232

New Titles

The Human Factor: Uses of the Figure in Contemporary Sculpture

Foreword by Ralph Rugoff Essays by Penelope Curtis, Martin Herbert, Lisa Lee and James Lingwood

Designed by Sonya Dyakova

ISBN 9781853323225 Hardback 240 pages 29.5×23.5 cm June 2014 £35.00 / $45.00

The Human Factor: Uses of the Figure in Contemporary Sculpture brings together the work of over 20 leading international artists, in whose practice the human form plays a central role.

Over the past 25 years, artists have reinvented figurative sculpture by looking back to earlier movements in art history as well as imagery from contemporary culture. Setting up dialogues with modernist as well as classical and archaic models of art, these artists engage and confront the question of how we represent the ‘human’ today.

A unique survey of contemporary figurative sculpture, this highly illustrated volume features works by Paweł Althamer, Frank Benson, Huma Bhabha, Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Katharina Fritsch, Ryan Gander, Isa Genzken, Rachel Harrison, Georg Herold, Thomas Hirschhorn, Martin Honert, Pierre Huyghe, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, John Miller, Cady Noland, Ugo Rondinone, Thomas Schütte, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Paloma Varga Weisz, Rebecca Warren, Andro Wekua and Cathy Wilkes, amongst others.

Upcoming Titles

9 781853 323225

Jeff Koons, B

ear and Policem

an, 1988. © Jeff K

oons

Paw

eł Altham

er, Monika and P

awel, 2002.

© the artist. Im

age courtesy Foksal Gallery Foundation

Rachel H

arrison, Schm

atte with P

resident, 2006. © R

achel Harrison 2014.

Image courtesy of the artist and G

reene Naftali, N

ew York. P

hotograph: Jean Vong

Jeremy Deller: All that Is Solid Melts into Air

Text by Jeremy Deller Afterword by Roger Malbert

Designed by A Practice For Everyday Life

ISBN 9781853323195 Paperback 80 pages 21×16.5cm £14.99 / $20.00

All that Is Solid Melts into Air is a personal journey through the Industrial Revolution, guided by Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller. In this richly illustrated new title, Deller investigates what remains in the present day from this crucial period in British history, from our relationship with technology and the regimentation of time and work, to industrial accidents and the rise of heavy metal music.

New Titles

9 781853 323195

1312

Factories were a new world of moral chaos, extraordinary places, full of danger, where the youth of both sexes were often in heated proximity, deafened by the noise of the machines that shook the buildings and their bodies. Just the kind of experiences sought out and replicated in clubs and warehouse parties – parties that, for a short time in the late 1980s, took place in the same buildings where the machines and workers (possibly ancestors of the party’s attendees) once laboured. The following passage reads like a tabloid editorial for the mid-Victorian era:

‘The contagion of vicious example and impure conversation… compelled to make one of a society which is continually exhaling the miasma of vice… breathing its pollution every moment… The restless motion of the machinery has begun; the continual clack of the several wheels… There reigns in the work-rooms a Babel of confused sounds – the irreverent laugh, the open blasphemy, the licentious conversation… anger is stirred into acts of tyranny… In the heart of the factory – an assemblage of the vile of human beings, a fermenting mass of sin and vice, such as we may well doubt was ever before concentrated in one burning focus. It seems as if the mighty capacities of steam had lent an impetus, not only to the industry and ingenuity of man, but an equal impetus to all his faculties and contrivances of vice.’ — H. Worsley, Juvenile Depravity, 1849

Fig. 11Gavin WatsonSlough Centre, End of the Night1989

A fellow engineer also saw industrial chaos in similarly epic terms:

‘The Black Country is anything but picturesque. The earth seems to have been turned inside out. Its entrails are strewn about; nearly the entire surface of the ground is covered with cinder heaps and mounds of scoriae. The coal, which has been drawn from below ground, is blazing on the surface. The district is crowded with iron furnaces, puddling furnaces and coal pit engine furnaces. By day and by night the country is glowing with fire, and the smoke of the ironworks hovers over it. Workmen covered with smut, and with fierce white eyes, are seen moving about amongst the glowing iron and dull thud of forge-hammers. Amidst these flaming, smoky, clanging works, I beheld the remains of what had once been happy farmhouses, now ruined and deserted. The ground underneath them had sunk by the working out of the coal, and they were falling to pieces. They had in former times been surrounded by clumps of trees but only skeletons of them remained, dilapidated, black and lifeless. The grass had been parched and killed by the vapours of sulphurous acid thrown out by the chimneys; and every herbaceous object was a ghastly grey – the emblem of vegetable death in its saddest aspect. Vulcan had driven out Ceres.’ — James Nasmyth, Engineer, An Autobiography, 1883

Fig. 10G. F. BraggTreforest Tin Works, Glamorganshirec. 1840

Ana Mendieta: Traces

Foreword by Ralph Rugoff Essays by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Adrian Heathfield and Stephanie Rosenthal

Designed by Mues Design

ISBN 9781853323171 Paperback 240 pages 27×22cm £24.99 / $39.95

Encompassing a wealth of drawings, photography and film, Ana Mendieta: Traces provides a comprehensive and illuminating overview of this highly influential artist’s work. This monograph also features a highly illustrated anthology of never-before-seen material, including Mendieta’s own notebooks, exhibition plans and correspondence.

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Ttile Ttile1981 Untitled (Gunpowder Work), 1981 1982 Untitled (Earth-Body Works), 1982

Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, USA Caumsett State Park, Long Island, New York, USA

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really quite remember now. I know it was really rough when I was going through it.

JM: It was isolated then.

AM: Very isolated. And, it really wasn’t until much later, after I learned the language and sort of became adjusted that I really started understanding how different I was from people around me. But not different even in terms of culture, because I think the important thing for me was that at one point I realised that I was a unique person, meaning I was a human being that was different from these other human beings. I don’t remember exactly what the occasion was, but I know that I was in high school, and I was describing an experience I had to a girlfriend. She had a totally different take on it, and that started me thinking [about] two different people, looking at the same thing, with totally different perspectives [...]

JM: Did you ever make paintings?

AM: I started out as a painter. In my last year of high school I discovered art, and the teacher said I should not be an artist because they didn’t think I had enough talent. Meaning I couldn’t do renditions, all of that kind of stuff, but I decided I was going to be an artist anyway [...] Then I went to college, and again I had to fight my way to get in to graduate school at the University of Iowa. I was painting then [...] It’s very similar in some ways to what I’m doing now because they were images in the middle of the canvas. One image always […] They were icon-type things. I was really very interested in Mexican, pre-Columbian art and African art. I was very interested in pre-historic and ancient things. I thought [...] and I still think that they have an incredible power that’s transmitted to the work, and I think it’s because those people’s cultures were in tune with their environment and with nature. Their culture was pretty much a monolithic kind of culture in the sense that their beliefs and their work was charged. It’s pretty amazing that this year they’re making all this big to-do about ‘primitive art’ and showing it in context with twentieth-century art. As if they’d shared any context with twentieth-century art – it’s just outrageous. I mean, it’s so much better. It is absolutely ridiculous that they call it ‘primitive’.

JM: And that’s exactly what emerged from that show. The primitive art was far superior [...]

AM: So, I was a painter doing these images, and I had fought so hard to go to school. It wasn’t that I really felt like I was learning anything from the school because everybody there was putting me down. But I really needed to be in a structure with other artists and discussions. In Iowa, I was so isolated. This was

in 1970, and at that time at the school that I was going to, at the University of Iowa, what was in was conceptual art and very plain [and] I was doing these images – figures, blood. They thought, hey, what is this crap? I was fighting tooth and nail, and I realised all of a sudden that the [paintings] were not real. I mean, I couldn’t get across in the painting what I wanted it to do to people when they saw it, so I gave that up. It really freaked me out, because I had fought so hard to get into school and to be a painter [...] So I started exploring nature, because that’s really where I felt that I could do something, act out certain things. I did, early in 1972 [...] I don’t consider this part of my main work, but I did do it. [A] young woman was killed – raped and killed at Iowa in one of the dorms – and it really freaked me out. So I did several rape performance-type things at that time using my own body. They were tableaux. So I guess that was the first kind of way in which I started using my body and doing something [...] I did something that I believed in and that I felt I had to do. I didn’t know if it was okay, or not, or if it didn’t matter, but that’s what I did. And then from then on I started doing things that I felt related to a culture – my culture – like acting out. For instance, I did a performance. This was a performance in which I took a white cock and killed it. I just held it, and the cock was shaking and it just splattered blood all over me. And I really didn’t want to do it. I mean I’m really not S&M. It really was something that was very weird for me to do. But what I was essentially doing at that time was taking the white cock of Voodoo, a male symbol, and making me the object of it.

JM: You were like a priestess, like that kind of thing?

AM: No. I wanted to de-mystify that kind of thing.

JM: How did you know about Voodoo?

AM: Oh well, it’s just something that is there. My parents certainly didn’t believe in it and thought it was a lower culture kind of belief, but at the same time, the maids [...] believed in it. So I would hear about it.

JM: You would get involved with the cock?

AM: Yeah. And they killed white cocks as sacrifices [...] These are things that I consider as student work, you see. Because it was work, I stand by it. I’m not denying that I did it. They were works that I did that were really designed to search what I wanted to do. I realised that in the painting, I just wasn’t doing that. I really wanted to make works that were powerful and that were charged with the kind of magic that I had seen other artworks charged with. So I had to find my own way of doing it, and I A

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Joan Marter and Ana Mendieta in Conversation (edited excerpt)

AnA MendietA: Once Robert Smithson had defined certain parameters in his work, everyone took it that anyone that made work outdoors had to be defined and looked at in his sense, and this really has angered me tremendously. In attempting to define what I was trying to do, I didn’t feel any connection at all with Robert Smithson or any of those artists.

JoAn MArter: How do you feel about people that do performance? Do you feel connected to them?

AM: No, not at all. Because my works have really been about trying to establish a dialogue between myself and nature [...] It was a way of really learning about myself, placing myself within a cultural structure. It’s been a very connected thing for me that I really had no homeland. To me, [what] nature represented [...] was outside the boundaries of culture. It was a different kind of culture. It was nature-culture with a human connection, not a structure put in place. Okay, it’s getting confusing, because of the word ‘culture’ and what that means, but in the sense of ‘culture’ meaning America, or behaviour patterns in America, or behaviour patterns in Cuba, or behaviour patterns in Mexico. To me, nature was outside of that perimeter, it was just more general, and it was something that I could go to to try to find out who I was. My identity.

JM: People in the past simply made images of themselves when they made a self-portrait, in a very traditional sense. But in the twentieth century, women have tried to find out about themselves in the process of making these self-images [...] I think that’s what you did in your work?

AM: Well, but I think that that is what art making is. I do my work to see it. I get an image in my mind, and then I have to make it to see it.

JM: But it’s not just any image. It’s your image that you’re dealing with over and over again. It’s projecting yourself into nature, or it’s setting up a dialogue between you and nature.

AM: It’s going into it. That’s why a lot of my images are like this, because I was laying down in nature and going into it. To me, nature is our biological inheritance as human beings. That’s what I have, nature, my body. The reason why I’ve never connected with performance [...] is because it was very important that it was just me and nature by ourselves, having this thing together. It was not a performance. I do not want people around me when I’ve done it – doing it has really been a moving thing for me. I really think my work is very straightforward, I’ve never gone for some kind of phony myth-acting and reliving Greek myths, [...] because that has nothing to do with me.

JM: What about the connection with the earth goddess?

AM: Well, I’ve worked with really specific earth. I’ve worked with landscapes that other people would not find attractive in any way. So, I don’t know.

JM: Has there been an evolution in the Silueta series? Are the first ones from 1975?

AM: Well, the very first one – the one with the flowers coming through – was made in the summer of 1973, when I was in Mexico [...] That piece is very important. The thing that really struck me about the Mexican site was the fact that it was overgrown with grass, bushes and things. It seemed to me to be nature’s reclaiming of this site, a ‘taking over’. I wanted to get in touch with my body. So I went out and bought a bunch of flowers in the market and set it up. It was a tableau, but just set up [...]

JM: Was it about birth, death and rebirth – like the cycles of nature?

AM: Actually, the way I really thought about it was of having nature take over the body, in the same way that it had taken over the symbols of past civilizations. It meant nature. It’s really the most powerful thing that there is. Even today with all of this technology, we are still trying to control the limitations of what we can and cannot do […] Meaning energy. Energy is nature too. It all is. And that’s the overwhelming thing for me, the fantastic thing [...] That’s the way I feel when I face nature, that it’s just the most overwhelming thing there is.

JM: When you came to the US, how old were you?

AM: Twelve.

JM: Were you old enough to remember your country then?

AM: Definitely.

JM: And you felt taken from your country, I would imagine, moving to Iowa? I mean, it’s not the same as coming to New York, where you would probably not feel so isolated – or at least there are a lot of different people here. It’s a melting pot of different kinds of people, and I think that makes it easier for everybody […] But in Iowa, that wouldn’t be the case.

AM: Right. Definitely not at that time in Iowa, in 1961. They didn’t even know what avocadoes were. So – different climate, different language and different culture – it was totally different. It was a shock, but then I just reacted in the sense of survival, I don’t

1 February, 1985

Grayson Perry: The Vanity of Small Differences

Foreword by Caroline Douglas Essays by Adam Lowe, Suzanne Moore and Grayson Perry

Designed by Pony Ltd

ISBN 9781853323157 Hardback 120 pages 21.5×25cm £17.99 / $30.00

Telling a story of class and taste, aspiration and identity, The Vanity of Small Differences explores the inspiration behind the tapestry series created by Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry. An in-depth look at Perry’s work, this book is an essential guide to the work of one of Britain’s best-loved artists.

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one of The Victory Tapestries of John churchill at Blenheim palace, oxfordshire, showing John churchill, the 1st Duke of marlborough, accepting the surrender of the french at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704.**captions throughout written by grayson perry, except pp. 102, 104, 106 and 113.

grand – they hang in the vast saloons and bedchambers of ancestral piles, they often depict Classical myths or military victories. A lot of the status associated with tapestries, historically, was due to their huge cost and the enormous amount of skilled labour needed to produce them. The antique examples I encountered in stately homes such as Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, or Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, would have taken teams of workers many months, if not years, to weave.

Tapestries are still expensive to make today but, ironically, one of the attractions of using tapestry now is the relative speed with which I can produce a substantial artwork, compared to other media in which I enjoy working, such as ceramics or etching. Like many historical tapestries, mine were made in Flanders but, in the digital age, I designed them using Photoshop software and they were woven at dazzling speed on a huge computer-controlled loom that can produce a four-by-two-metre tapestry in just five hours. Skilled labour is still involved, but is performed by specialist computer technicians, who converted my drawing into the vast digital file that controlled the loom (see Adam Lowe’s discussion of this process on p. 103).

Because of its large scale and the ease of transportation, tapestry also works well as a public artwork, and I am truly delighted that this series is now able to tour under the auspices of the Arts Council and British Council Collections.

I thought it refreshing to use tapestries – traditionally status symbols of the rich – to depict a commonplace drama (though not as common as it should be): the drama of social mobility. As a working-class, grammar school boy from the tail-end of the ‘baby boomer’ generation, social mobility is a theme close to my heart.

Politicians sometimes talk of a classless society, but I think the class system still thrives, though perhaps in a more hydra-headed form than in the days of flat caps, bowlers and toppers. As recently as twenty years ago, most people would describe themselves as definitely working class. Now, depending on the economic climate, between half and two-thirds define themselves as middle class, and this seems to depend on whether the survey includes the category ‘upper working class’ as an option for those insecure about their status. In the boom times, a plumber who has bought his council house in Manchester, an accountant in a suburban villa in Birmingham and a media executive in a trendy flat in London might all describe themselves as middle class. They may all earn similar, middle-class incomes, but they are still likely to be separated by a gulf of taste.

As we oiks climb the greasy pole, we may pick up a deceptively authentic-looking set of middle-class predilections: a book-lined study, a modest grubby car, a full wine rack and original window frames. All the while, from deep inside our urbane metropolitan exterior, an embarrassing former self wails from his oubliette: ‘I want a gold Porsche’. As we will see, such a primal desire for the gew-gaws of one’s culture of origin lead to the downfall of my hero, Tim Rakewell.

Class is something bred into us like a religious faith. We drink in our aesthetic heritage with our mother’s milk, with our mates at the pub, or on the playing fields of Eton. We learn the texture of our place in the world from the curlicue of a neck tattoo, the clank of a Le Creuset casserole dish, or the scent of a mouldering hunting print. A childhood spent marinating in the material culture of one’s class means taste is soaked right through you. Cut me and, beneath the thick crust of Islington, it still says ‘Essex’ all the way through.

10 11

one of The Victory Tapestries of John churchill at Blenheim palace, oxfordshire, showing John churchill, the 1st Duke of marlborough, accepting the surrender of the french at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704.**captions throughout written by grayson perry, except pp. 102, 104, 106 and 113.

grand – they hang in the vast saloons and bedchambers of ancestral piles, they often depict Classical myths or military victories. A lot of the status associated with tapestries, historically, was due to their huge cost and the enormous amount of skilled labour needed to produce them. The antique examples I encountered in stately homes such as Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, or Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, would have taken teams of workers many months, if not years, to weave.

Tapestries are still expensive to make today but, ironically, one of the attractions of using tapestry now is the relative speed with which I can produce a substantial artwork, compared to other media in which I enjoy working, such as ceramics or etching. Like many historical tapestries, mine were made in Flanders but, in the digital age, I designed them using Photoshop software and they were woven at dazzling speed on a huge computer-controlled loom that can produce a four-by-two-metre tapestry in just five hours. Skilled labour is still involved, but is performed by specialist computer technicians, who converted my drawing into the vast digital file that controlled the loom (see Adam Lowe’s discussion of this process on p. 103).

Because of its large scale and the ease of transportation, tapestry also works well as a public artwork, and I am truly delighted that this series is now able to tour under the auspices of the Arts Council and British Council Collections.

I thought it refreshing to use tapestries – traditionally status symbols of the rich – to depict a commonplace drama (though not as common as it should be): the drama of social mobility. As a working-class, grammar school boy from the tail-end of the ‘baby boomer’ generation, social mobility is a theme close to my heart.

Politicians sometimes talk of a classless society, but I think the class system still thrives, though perhaps in a more hydra-headed form than in the days of flat caps, bowlers and toppers. As recently as twenty years ago, most people would describe themselves as definitely working class. Now, depending on the economic climate, between half and two-thirds define themselves as middle class, and this seems to depend on whether the survey includes the category ‘upper working class’ as an option for those insecure about their status. In the boom times, a plumber who has bought his council house in Manchester, an accountant in a suburban villa in Birmingham and a media executive in a trendy flat in London might all describe themselves as middle class. They may all earn similar, middle-class incomes, but they are still likely to be separated by a gulf of taste.

As we oiks climb the greasy pole, we may pick up a deceptively authentic-looking set of middle-class predilections: a book-lined study, a modest grubby car, a full wine rack and original window frames. All the while, from deep inside our urbane metropolitan exterior, an embarrassing former self wails from his oubliette: ‘I want a gold Porsche’. As we will see, such a primal desire for the gew-gaws of one’s culture of origin lead to the downfall of my hero, Tim Rakewell.

Class is something bred into us like a religious faith. We drink in our aesthetic heritage with our mother’s milk, with our mates at the pub, or on the playing fields of Eton. We learn the texture of our place in the world from the curlicue of a neck tattoo, the clank of a Le Creuset casserole dish, or the scent of a mouldering hunting print. A childhood spent marinating in the material culture of one’s class means taste is soaked right through you. Cut me and, beneath the thick crust of Islington, it still says ‘Essex’ all the way through.

New Titles

Dayanita Singh: Go Away Closer

Foreword by Ralph Rugoff Essay by Geoff Dyer In conversation: Dayanita Singh and Stephanie Rosenthal

Designed by Peep Studio

ISBN 9781853323188 Hardback 128 pages 24×16cm £12.99 / $25.00

This title marks a turning point in the career of this internationally acclaimed artist. For the first time in print, this publication presents a detailed overview of Singh’s Museums – wooden structures that introduce a radical new way of seeing and experiencing Singh’s work and photography in general. Powerful, beautiful and radical, Dayanita Singh: Go Away Closer offers a rare and illuminating insight into a major artist’s career.

New Titles

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and what was expected from Indian photographers and photographs of

India generally. With Dayanita’s work there is a subtle but clear break from

the teeming streets of Raghu Rai and the crowd of colours associated with

Raghubir Singh, in favour of a photography that is quiet, intimate, private,

withdrawn: an art, increasingly, of absence.

In one of the pictures by her mum, the baby Dayanita is barely visible;

in a couple of others she is entirely overlooked in favour of the splendid

surroundings of a hotel room. The grown-up daughter has followed suit:

her pictures are full of empty rooms, empty beds and what Billy Collins calls

‘the chairs that no one sits in’: ‘where no one / is resting a glass or placing

a book facedown’.3 The poet is here thinking of permanently empty –

rather than briefly vacated – chairs, but in photography, of course, even the

momentary becomes permanent. And in photographic terms, these empty

chairs have always been with us. Or at least, as John Szarkowski, former

Director of Photography at MoMA, argues, they did not mean ‘the same

thing before photography as they mean to us now’.4

About half of the pictures in Privacy (Steidl, 2004) are portraits of people in

their opulent homes – spacious rooms crowded with wealth and flesh. The

effect of these is to make the other half, the empty interiors, seem… even

emptier! And then there are the museum rooms of Anand Bhavan (now

Swaraj Bhavan), the former Nehru family residence in Allahabad, where we

get a redoubled, much-multiplied emptiness: unworn clothes hanging on

the unopened doors of empty rooms. The glaring absence in these pictures,

these rooms, is of the present (as symbolised by the stilled ceiling fan). This

is what time looks like after history has moved on and left it for dead.

Referring to his own photographs of empty interiors, Walker Evans once

said, ‘I do like to suggest people sometimes by their absence. I like to make

2 0 2 1

and polished furnishings, in windows and mirrors. (It’s often impossible,

in photographs, to tell the difference between a mirror and a photo. In a

photo, in fact, a mirror is automatically transformed into a photo. A photo,

let’s say, is a mirror with the time taken out it.) The effect of these layers of

self-seeing – inanimate, passive and abiding – is a cumulative laying bare

of essence: the stillness of still photography. That’s one way of seeing and

putting it. Another, by a visitor to the 2007 exhibition of the Go Away

Closer photographs, at the Kriti Gallery in Varanasi, was to copy into the

visitors’ book some lines in Urdu from a ghazal by Faiz Ahmad Faiz called

‘Hum Dekhenge’ (‘We Will See’):

All that will remain is Allah’s name,

He who is absent but present too,

He who is the seer as well as the seen.

Light stares whitely through the windows. These windows reflect on the

interiors – as we have seen – and provide visual access to the world outside.

What happens when we gaze through them? What do we see?

To answer this we first have to re-familiarise ourselves with the terrain – get

an overview of how the documentary impulse in early series such as I Am

As I Am (started in 1999) and Myself Mona Ahmed (1989–2001) gradually

softens to something anchored less directly in place and time. Bear in mind,

also, that the divisions between Dayanita’s projects and books have never

been absolute. A picture from Go Away Closer also appears in Sent a Letter

and again in Privacy, and so on. The piles and shelves of documents in the

recent File Room (Steidl, 2013) are prefigured by the libraries and piled-up

books and lockers of Privacy. Effectively, then, the pictures are all the time

overlooking each other, glancing over each other’s shoulders. You can, in

other words, glance out of the windows of a tower in Devi Garh and gaze

The Alternative Guide to the Universe

Foreword by Ralph Rugoff Essays by Roger Cardinal, Rick Moody, Mark Pilkington, Valérie Rousseau and Margaret Wertheim

Designed by Sara De Bondt Studio


This captivating anthology surveys works from more than 25 self-taught artists, architects and urbanists, photographers, visionary engineers and outsider scientists, guiding us through inventive scenarios, providing a series of bracingly unorthodox perspectives on the world we live in.

Includes work by Morton Bartlett, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Guo Fengyi, Lee Godie, Richard Greaves, Alfred Jensen, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Paul Laffoley, Jean Perdrizet, Rammellzee, A.G. Rizzoli, Marcel Storr, George Widener and Wu Yulu, amongst others.

New Titles

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The universe Th AT Fell To eA rTh

Ralph Rugoff

Imagine that you could live in a different world. What would you want it to be like? You might change the way that we measure time, making it more abundant or more connected to meaningful events of the past. Or you might choose to alter the shapes of our cities, or the finality of death. You could plan sources of inexhaustible, free energy. The possibilities are endless. Experience, however, teaches most of us to be ‘practical’ in our thinking, to put aside the untethered imagination of childhood and to quarantine our fantasies of alternative worlds. When it comes to contemplating the structure of matter, or the future of technology and the built environments we inhabit, or even things closer to home, like the letters of the alphabet and the nature of identity, we are content to leave it to the ‘experts’. But there are some people who choose not to do so – who spend their lives re-imagining the things that we take for granted. This exhibition is dedicated to them.

Artists re-imagine the universe – at least some do. But they are not the only people in our society who take on this role, who risk tossing the reality principle overboard in order to venture into speculative arenas, to conjure scenarios that depart radically from our vision of how things are and how they will change. In addition to artists, the ‘guides’ you will encounter here include unlicensed architects and urbanists, outsider physicists and visionary inventors, all of whom provide bracingly unorthodox perspectives on aspects of the world we live in. Their grand ambitions include reconceptualising our relationships with time and space, language and technology, as well as our notions of self and consciousness. This is a guidebook, in other words, to a landscape that stretches to the far horizons of imaginative experience.

With a few exceptions, the work featured here was made over the course of the past fifty years. Its makers were driven by varied motives, intentions and concerns. They hail from far-flung parts of the world (including both remote rural areas and urban centres) and from wildly dissimilar backgrounds.1 Perhaps the one common back story shared by these

individuals is the fact that each of them developed their core ideas and practices outside of established institutions and disciplines. While some received ‘official’ training in a particular field, their work is far more influenced by the things that they taught themselves. They are autodidacts in the matters that count most – fellow travellers who have journeyed down the rabbit hole and left behind the shared habits of thinking that govern most of our lives.

Besides certain overlapping areas of interest (architecture, technology, philosophies of time, communication systems), their work reveals distinct affinities in approach, if not in style. Much of it involves revisiting and re-imagining larger systems of knowledge. And it generally takes a serial form: rather than making individual, one-off works, these practitioners explore their concerns in related series. They undertake projects, in other words, that embody overarching visions, long-term ambitions, and a deep and abiding commitment. The work they make is often very directly about something: it elaborates ideas or lays out plans in a specific, almost empirical manner. It formulates equations and records observations; it models theories of physics and language, or develops blueprints for urban developments and space stations.

For many of these mavericks, art seems to be a means rather than an end (and it is worth noting that some never considered their activity as art at all). Indeed, many of the works that engage with architecture, science and technology were designed with empirical or functional aspirations. Visionary inventors like Jean Perdrizet and Karl Hans Janke regularly sent their detailed technical drawings to government agencies and industrial firms in the hope that their miraculous machines (which range from flying pipes to atomic Christmas trees) might be realised and manufactured. When Emery Blagdon fabricated his Healing Machine in a barn in Nebraska, he did not think he was making art; while we might marvel at the off-kilter elegance and totemic strangeness of his junkyard bricolage, he viewed his ‘installation’ as a device that could channel electromagnetic energy and help relieve

Karl Hans Janke, Weltall (Universe), 1973 Sheet 6 from Urgeschichite des Weltalls und der Erde (Ur-history of the Universe and the Earth).

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Ralph Rugoff








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Ralph Rugoff








Light Show

Foreword by Ralph Rugoff Essays Philip Ball, Cliff Lauson and Anne Wagner

Designed by Studio Frith

ISBN 9781853323041 Hardback 208 pages 32×25cm £27.99 / Available in the US through MIT press

Featuring over 25 artists, Light Show takes as its starting point the sculptural use of light as a way of altering our perception of space in contemporary art. Includes the work of Fischli and Weiss, Olafur Eliasson, Dan Flavin, Jenny Holzer, Anthony McCall, Philippe Parreno, Katie Paterson, James Turrell, and many others.

New Titles

41

There has never been a time when the nature of light has not been at the leading edge of science, technology and art. We ‘play’ with it for so many reasons – to encode information, to bedazzle the senses, to probe the universe, to evoke the presence of the divine. These are not, as they might seem, separate issues, which is one reason why the scientific study and use of light comes laden with cultural and symbolic signification. At the same time, that same science – both fundamental and applied – has prescribed the boundaries of light as an artistic medium. As our ability to produce and manipulate light has evolved, artists have embraced the possibilities on offer, so that light art is, among other things, always a conversation with technology.

Sacred Light

The theological virtues of light pervaded its early scientific study. Early Christianity was imbued with a metaphysics of light stemming from the tradition of Neoplatonism, according to which radiance was a symbol of God’s presence. When men spoke truth, they were ‘lucid’; when they understood it, they were ‘illuminated’. This reverence for light motivated the thirteenth-century proto-scientists Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, and his disciple Roger Bacon to study optics at the University of Oxford. ‘Physical light is the best, the most delectable, the most beautiful of all the bodies that exist,’ wrote Grosseteste.1 That was not mere genuflection; Grosseteste was the first to propose that the rainbow’s arc – an eternal source of wonder, a symbol of the Virgin and the post-diluvian renewal of life – results from the refraction of light by clouds. His hypothesis wasn’t quite right, but it helped to locate the answer to this age-old question in optical science. Light had not shaken off its religious connotations when the great scientists of the seventeenth century, such as Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, began to study it. In popular culture, light was as much demonic as it was divine, to be feared as well as revered. Things that glitter and glow in the dark are the stuff of folklore. Boyle’s servants

FROM SYMBOL TO

SUBSTANCE: THE TECHNOLOGIES

OF LIGHT

PHILIP BALL

1. Quoted in Georges Duby, The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society 980–1420, trans. Eleanor Levieux and Barbara Thompson, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981, p. 148.

used by nature: in, for instance, the brilliantly reflective wings of the Blue Morpho butterfly, or indeed the peacock feathers that fascinated Robert Hooke. The uses of highly reflective and iridescent pigments with such layered microstructures have so far been confined to applications such as car paints; artists are just beginning to understand how to use these materials to guide light and blend colours. The new technologies of light go much further. It is now possible to subvert the laws of optics themselves: for example, artificial materials that can refract light ‘the wrong way’, or that can guide light rays along artfully curved paths that skirt an object – like river water running round a protruding rock – in effect rendering the object invisible. These ‘invisibility cloaks’ were first made for operating at microwave frequencies; now they work for visible light too. Even light itself is not immune to reinvention: quantum engineering that reconfigures the way light is absorbed and re-emitted as it travels through a transparent substance can effectively slow down light to a crawl, and even bring it to an apparent standstill – and even more extraordinary, can make it seem to exit a material before it even enters. Whether these tricks will find practical uses – storing information in arrested light pulses, for example – remains to be seen.

Trick of the Light

Art has always been beholden to technology to a greater extent than is commonly acknowledged, whether it be the glassmaking expertise that contributed to the manufacture of Egyptian faience, the pigment-making alchemy of the Middle Ages, or the invention of photography or of acrylic resins. In most such instances, the technologies themselves had other motivations; artists see opportunities that scientists and inventors rarely imagine, happily appropriating technical innovation, but also subverting and redirecting it. The technologies of light are no exception, and that is why advanced photonic engineering will surely enter the gallery. But there are additional dimensions to this relationship. For one, light has a symbolic cultural resonance that science has not eroded, that it even enhances as it offers new possibilities for luminal play and new insights into the nature of light itself. Through relativity, light becomes the determinant of time. Quantum engineering imbues light with information and meaning and makes old certainties – the path of a light ray – contingent. Moreover, light is not just about electromagnetism and photons, but about perception and illusion. There are many tricks of light, and they force us to question the relationship between the world that impinges on the senses and the world that the senses reconstruct from that stimulus. There is a science of effect that light mediates. And this is a part of what makes it, and has always made it, such a powerful medium for the artist. 51

Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing

Foreword by Roger Malbert Essays by Brian Dillon and Marina Warner

Designed by John Morgan Studio

ISBN 9781853323133 Hardback 224 pages 23.5×15cm £22.99 / $35.00

This fascinating book, published to accompany the exhibition curated by Brian Dillon and organised in association with Cabinet magazine, takes the cabinet of curiosities as its founding motif.

Includes an anthology of writings on the topic of curiosity throughout the ages and the work of Salvatore Arancio, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, Pablo Bronstein, Broomberg and Chanarin, Gerald Byrne, Leonardo da Vinci, Tacita Dean, Albrecht Dürer, Aurelien Froment, Charles Le Brun and Matt Mullican, amongst others.

New Titles

1264 – 1604

miracle, suggests; namely, what is of itself filled with admirable wonder, not simply in relation to one person or another. Now, abso-lutely speaking, the cause hidden from every man is God. In fact, we proved above that no man in the present state of life can grasp His essence intellectually. Therefore, those things must properly be called miraculous which are done by divine power apart from the order generally followed in things.

thomas aquinas, Summa contra gentiles

1472Then of that age-old fire the loftier hornBegan to mutter and move, as a wavering flameWrestles against the wind and is over-worn;

And, like a speaking tongue vibrant to frameLanguage, the tip of it flickering to and froThrew out a voice and answered: ‘When I came

From Circe at last, who would not let me go,But twelve months near Caieta hindered meBefore Aeneas ever named it so,

No tenderness for my son, nor pietyTo my old father, nor the wedded loveThat should have comforted Penelope

Could conquer in me the restless itch to roveAnd rummage through the world exploring it,All human worth and wickedness to prove.

So on the deep and open sea I setForth, with a single ship and that small bandOf comrades that had never left me yet.

Far as Morocco, far as Spain I scannedBoth shores; I saw the island of the Sardi,And all that sea, and every wave-girt land.

I and my fellows were grown old and tardyOr ere we made the straits where HerculesSet up his marks, that none should prove

so hardy

To venture the uncharted distances;Ceuta I’d left to larboard, sailing by,Seville I now left in the starboard seas.

dante alighieri, La Divina Commedia: L’inferno (Divine Comedy: Inferno), Canto xxvi

215

1604faustus These necromantic books

are heavenly,Lines, circles, scenes, letters and characters:Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.Oh, what a world of profit and delight,Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,Is promised to the studious artizan!

good angel Oh Faustus, lay that damned book aside,

And gaze not on it lest it tempt thy soulAnd heap God’s heavy wrath upon thy head.Read, read the scriptures: that is blasphemy.

evil angel Go forward, Faustus, in that famous art

Wherein all nature’s treasure is contained.Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky,Lord and commander of these elements.

Exeunt angels.

faustus How I am glutted with the conceit of this!

Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,Resolve me of all ambiguities,Perform what desperate enterprise I will?I’ll have them fly to India for gold,Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,And search all corners of the new-found worldFor pleasant fruits and princely delicates.I’ll have them read me strange philosophy,And tell the secrets of all foreign kings.I’ll have them wall all Germany with brass,And make swift Rhine circle fair Wittenberg.I’ll have them fill the public schools with silk,Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad.I’ll levy soldiers with the coin they bring,And chase the prince of Parma from our land,And reign sole king of all the provinces.Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war,Than was the fiery keel at Antwerp-bridge,I’ll make my servile spirits to invent.

christopher marlowe, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus

Hayward_Curiosity_AW_21.04.13.indd 215 25/04/2013 15:06

Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain 1966–1979

Foreword by Caroline Douglas Essays by Nicholas Alfrey, Joy Sleeman and Ben Tufnell

Designed by Inventory Studio


This unique publication proposes a new reading of British art between the mid 1960s and late 1970s, placing landscape and nature at the heart of the emerging artistic movements of the period.

Encompassing sculpture, performance, photography and film, the book includes work from Roger Ackling, Keith Arnatt, Tony Cragg, Jan Dibbets, Antony Gormley, Susan Hiller, John Hilliard, Derek Jarman, David Lamelas, John Latham, Richard Long and many others.

New Titles

Mark Leckey: The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things

Foreword by Roger Malbert Essays by Mark Leckey, Erik Davis and Alixe Bovey

Designed by John Morgan Studio

ISBN 9781853323058 Paperback 104 pages 30.7×24cm £17.99 / $30.00

In The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey explores the tenuous boundaries between the virtual and the real, between the ‘dumb’ and the animate. Myth, monstrosity, animism and the articulate are the subjects of this highly original statement on our increasingly technologised world.

9 781853 323058

Anish Kapoor: Flashback

Michael Bracewell, Andrew Renton


George Condo: Mental States

David Means, Laura Hoptman, Ralph Rugoff, Will Self

ISBN 9781853322891 Hardback 172 pages 30.5×28.5cm £34.99 / $50.00

David Shrigley: Brain Activity

Cliff Lauson, Dave Eggers (interview), Jonathan Monk, Martin Herbert

ISBN 9781853322976 Hardback 186 pages 26.5×19.5cm £24.99 / $40.00

David Shrigley: Pass the Spoon

David Shrigley (foreword), David Fennessy, Nicholas Bone


Gary Hume: Flashback

Caroline Douglas (interview), Dave Hickey


Roger Hiorns: Untitled (Alliance)

Caroline Douglas, Tom Morton


Art of Change: New Directions from China

Stephanie Rosenthal, Paul Gladston, Pauline Yao, Colin Chinnery, Zhu Zhu, Karen Smith, Carol Lu, Katie Hill, Philip Tinari


Backlist

David Shrigley: Pass the Spoon

David Shrigley (foreword), David Fennessy, Nicholas Bone


George Grosz: The Big No

Lutz Becker, Helen Luckett


Tracey Emin: Love is What You Want

Ralph Rugoff, Michael Corris, Jennifer Doyle, Cliff Lauson, Ali Smith

ISBN 9781853322938 Paperback 260 pages 24.5×24.5cm £27.99 / $45.00

British Art Show 7

Tom Morton, Lisa Le Feuvre


Jeremy Deller: Joy in People

Matthew Higgs (interview), Ralph Rugoff, Rob Young, Stuart Hall

ISBN 9781853322945 Hardback 192 pages 28×22.5cm £24.99 / $40.00

Henry Moore and the Arts Council Collection

Caroline Douglas, Benedict Read

ISBN 9781853323027 Paperback 80 pages 21.5×13.5cm £9.99 / $15.00

A Universal Archive: William Kentridge as Printmaker

Foreword by Roger Malbert Text by Rosalind Krauss Interview by Kate McCrickard


Cult Fiction: Art & Comics

Paul Gravett, Emma Mahony


The Artists’ Books Room Buchhandlung Walther König, Burgstraße, Berlin

As a veteran book-trader said to us recently, ‘These days, all the art kids go to König’. The reason is that the people who work at König know everything there is to know about art books. Cologne remains the heart of the König empire, but the sprawling Burgstraße store in Berlin offers perhaps the widest selection and is itself a must for art-book lovers. What’s more, if you have a quiet word with the shop manager, Herr Posthofen, you can also gain access to the hallowed artists’ book room: a locked Wunderkammer of signed and editioned artists’ books and special editions from Ed Ruscha and Dieter Roth, to John Bock and Isa Genzken.

buchhandlung-walther-koenig.de

The Art Book Fair The London Art Book Fair, Whitechapel, London

While most book fairs entail trade types wandering dry-mouthed past endless brightly-lit bookstands in a Kafkaesque nightmare of carpet tiles and retractable promotional stands, the Whitechapel’s London Art Book Fair offers something different: a relaxed environment for art-book-lovers to buy books and chat to the people who make them. Featuring a unique mix of publishers, from big guns to small indies, all selling new and past titles, it’s the perfect place to discover something new, and always at a great price.

whitechapelgallery.org/book-fair

The Art-Book Book-Stand

Have you ever spent so long pouring over art-books that your arms tremble at the very weight of them? Me neither, but if the spine-strain of a beloved book lying flat on a table is too unbearable, then worry no longer – the Taschen bookstand is here. Fashioned in sleek, transparent acrylic, it will give your front-room the air of a Philippe Stark-designed book salon. It also packs flat, so that you can save yourself the ignominy of aching-art-book-arm globally. Phew!

taschen.com

Art Books about Art Books Swiss Photobooks, Lars Müller / Martin Parr, The Photobook: A History, Phaidon

What do you do when you’ve bought all the art books you ever wanted? You buy books about art books of course! Photography’s geek’s geek, Martin Parr, paved the way with his two-volume The Photobook: A History for Phaidon: a majestic must for all photobibliophiles. More recent titles have investigated lesser-known corners of the photobook’s unique history, such as Swiss Photobooks, a collaboration between the Fotomuseum Winterthur and Lars Müller. Big, bold and in-depth, it offers a fascinating alternative history of a much-misunderstood country.

lars-mueller-publishers.com / phaidon.com

The See-Through Bookshop 21st-Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan

How do you fit bookshelves into a completely circular building? The answer: you don’t. In true SANAA style, the bookshop in the Kanazawa Museum of Contemporary Art is a filigree circle that barely seems to support its own weight (London audiences will know the drill if they visited SANAA’s floating Serpentine Pavilion in 2009). And it’s not only the structure that’s light and surprising – the small bookshop is also a beautifully curated selection of Japanese and international titles, including a few from Hayward Publishing – what taste!

kanazawa21.jp/en

The Art-

Book Lover’s

International

Hit-List

Hayward Publishing Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road London, SE1 8XX, UK www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Alex Glen Sales Officer Hayward Publishing +44 (0) 20 7921 0826 [email protected]

Diana Adell Press and Marketing Coordinator Hayward Publishing +44 (0) 20 7960 4357 [email protected]

Distributed in the UK and Europe by: Cornerhouse Publications 70 Oxford Street Manchester M1 5NH +44 (0) 16 1200 1503 www.cornerhouse.org/books

Distributed in North America, Central America and South America by: D.A.P. / Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. 155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10013 +212 627 1999 www.artbook.com

Photography by Ed Park and Mark Colliton

Catalogue designed by Studio Hato and printed by Hato Press, London

Front cover: Martin Creed, Work No. 88 A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball, 1995. © the artist. Image courtesy the artist

hayward publishing catalogue spring 2014

Documents

hayward publishings

new titles82of new buildings

new directions

major survey of creeds

variety of exciting

point of view

scale of creeds work

art historian joachim