OFFPRINT PARIS SELECTED BOOKS

Offprint Paris

Art publishing fair

15-18 nov 2012

Beaux-Arts de Paris

Offprint Paris is an Art Publishing Fair focused on emerging practices in Art.

They give special attention to the evolution of publishing/curating from traditional “spaces” (catalogues, artists books, photobooks, newspapers, but also museums and schools) towards new spaces and artists organizations (independent publishing, self publishing strategies, websites, blogs, social networks, activism, non institutional activities...).

They consider that the topic of “Publishing” can offer a stimulating hermeneutic to analyse the structure and development of the contemporary art world in a context of digitalization of cultures.

A WALK THROUGH THE BOOKS PRESENTED AT THE FAIR

SORRY FOR THE QUALITY OF THE PHOTOS THAT I HAVE MADE TOO FAST THINKING TO THE BOOKS AND 

NOT TO THE SHOT
THIS IS JUST MY SELECTION

In ReThinking a Lot, Eran Ben-Joseph shares a different vision for parking’s future. Parking lots, he writes, are ripe for transformation. After all, as he points out, their design and function has not been rethought since the 1950s. With this book, Ben-Joseph pushes the parking lot into the twenty-first century. 

The central figure in this book is the American artist Robert Smithson, who achieved cult status in the international art scene during the 1960s and 1970s and continues to generate great interest among artists and curators to this day. In 1971, Smithson realized the famous Land Art work Broken Circle/Spiral Hill for the exhibition Sonsbeek 71in Emmen, the Netherlands. It is one of only three Land Art works in the world by Smithson that still remain preserved. For the first time, this book brings together a complete selection of archival material related to the work — ranging from photographs, film scripts and drawings to original manuscripts and letters — spread over different archives in the Netherlands and the US.

In Radical Prototypes, Judith Rodenbeck argues for a more complex etiology. Allan Kaprow coined the term in 1958 to name a new collage form of performance, calling happenings “radical prototypes” of performance art. Rodenbeck offers a rigorous art historical reading of Kaprow’s project and related artworks. 

In Spacesuit, Nicholas de Monchaux tells the story of the twenty-one-layer spacesuit in twenty-one chapters addressing twenty-one topics relevant to the suit, the body, and the technology of the twentieth century. He touches, among other things, on eighteenth-century androids, Christian Dior’s New Look, Atlas missiles, cybernetics and cyborgs, latex, JFK's carefully cultivated image, the CBS lunar broadcast soundstage, NASA’s Mission Control, and the applications of Apollo-style engineering to city planning. The twenty-one-layer spacesuit, de Monchaux argues, offers an object lesson. It tells us about redundancy and interdependence and about the distinctions between natural and man-made complexity; it teaches us to know the virtues of adaptation and to see the future as a set of possibilities rather than a scripted scenario.

The Return of Religion reader engages with the popular assumption of the return of religion to the field of artistic practice and its discourses, the public sphere, contemporary politics, and media in the West as a constitutive “myth” of our current condition. Through a wide-ranging selection of texts, a remarkable group of artists, art historians and theorists, scholars of religion, and sociologists unpack the historical underpinnings of religion’s so-called “return,” art’s long-standing relationship with iconoclasm and connection to religious representation, the manipulation of certain religious imagery in the mass media, and contemporary art’s potential to complicate and problematize commonly held beliefs about the role and potential of the image in today’s world. The reader contains newly commissioned texts, a number of new translations, and adapted contributions from On Post-Secularism, a series of lectures and conversations that took place within the framework of The Return of Religion 

project in late 2008 and early 2009.

Is an archive that tells stories. Is a sculptural manifesto. Is a model of reality. Is a series of places and ideas. Questions the images that we have of built Modernism. Thinks about research studios as sculpture. Combines a collection of found uses of the public realm. Develops minimal billboard houses with maximum common space. Recognises an identity-giving potential for the future in historical memories. Is a source of inspiration and a working tool for a “more real reality”. Refers to planned cities and historical cities that have grown in time. Considers monuments as graphic signs or signposts. Has a sculptural view of public space. Asks which Modernism is still important to us today.

The Centre Pompidou-Metz is organizing a major project around the American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007). In the 13,000 square feet of Galerie 2, the Centre Pompidou-Metz is hosting a retrospective of Sol LeWitt's wall drawings on a scale never seen before in Europe. The selected thirty-three wall drawings, the largest group ever exhibited in Europe, span the artist's career from its beginnings to his final works.

Whether you love or hate conceptual artist Ryan Gander's work, it is always challenging, posing deliberate questions to the viewer. 

In 1961, a solo exhibition by Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana met with a scathing critical response from New York art critics. Fontana (1899--1968), well known in Europe for his series of slashed monochrome paintings, offered New York ten canvases slashed and punctured, thickly painted in luridly brilliant hues and embellished with chunks of colored glass. One critic described the work as "halfway between constructivism and costume jewelry," unwittingly putting his finger on the contradiction at the heart of these paintings and much of Fontana's work: the cut canvases suggest avant-garde iconoclasm, but the glittery ornamentation evokes outmoded forms of kitsch. In Lucio Fontana, Anthony White examines a selection of the artist's work from the 1930s to the 1960s, arguing that Fontana attacked the idealism of twentieth-century art by marrying modernist aesthetics to industrialized mass culture, and attacked modernism's purity in a way that anticipated both pop art and postmodernism.

der:die:das:

Is a mono thematic magazine based in Zurich. 

It draws its inspiration from objects of everyday life. 

Our relationship with the mundane is put to question and 

deconstructed through the investigation of objects, 

ideas and stories. The familiar is staged in an unfamiliar way 

while the alien in the usual is discovered.

der:die:das:

Is a platform where ideas can unfold, coherences be discovered 

and fresh viewpoints can be taken. 

The “thing” is portrayed in a playful way with 

a mixture of visual works and text-based pieces, 

that allow for a new perspective. 

Each issue is based on an object following the letters of the alphabet. 

der:die:das:

Is published every six months in German with an English translation.

It is distributed worldwide and available in selected book shops and galleries.

GAGARIN is published twice a year by

is a recent artist’s magazine (°2000), entirely dedicated to the publication of especially written and unpublished texts by artists who are now working, anywhere in the world. Each issue contains a number of artists’ writings, if possible from an equal number of countries. The texts are published in their original language and alphabetical writing, with unabridged translations in English added. Advertising and visual material are deliberately kept out. In collaboration with the Research Centre for Artists’ Publications / Archive for small Press & Communication (ASPC) at the Neues Museum Weserburg in Bremen (Germany), GAGARIN features a supplementary Index of Artists’ Writings published world wide. GAGARIN is indexed in Art Biography Modern ABM by Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, Oxford, UK. GAGARIN is aimed at those who do not tend to wait until everything is accepted and synthesised and those who are prepared to leave the road to search for stimulating art and ideas while they are still fresh. GAGARIN does not restrict itself to a particular period or import and runs trough the codes that are applied in the world of art. Its orientation is artistic, documentary and historical. GAGARIN also aspires to provide an accurate source of information about the collaborating artists, using their own words.

Artisanale et 100% faite main, elle est le fruit du travail d’une petite équipe passionnée de dessin : Sophie Toulouse, artiste et illustratrice, et Barbara Soyer, active dans le champ de l’édition et de l’art contemporain.  En anglais, «the drawer» signifie «le tiroir». Il désigne aussi «celui qui dessine». Assumant la polysémie de son titre, la revue The Drawer pourrait donc s’envisager comme un «tiroir à dessins». Ce qu’elle est d’une certaine façon : nouvelle revue entièrement constituée de dessins et consacrée au dessin, que l’on peut ouvrir et refermer à loisir, propice enfin aux associations les plus inattendues, The Drawer porte donc bien son nom.

“Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized.’”
--Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years

SOON ON THE BOOKLIST DETAILED REVIEW OF THE SELECTED BOOKS