Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as "social practice." Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawe? Althamer and Paul Chan. Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to challenge the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art. In Artificial Hells, she not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims made for these projects, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.

The surprising and visionary work of an artist who has redefined sculpture's relationship to life.

The World as a Stage presents a key group of international contemporary artists--Pavel Althamer, Catherine Sullivan, Tino Sehgal, and others--who reinvigorate the rich historical relationship between visual art and theater. Challenging negative associations made between the notion of "theatricality" and the realm of visual art in recent decades, the artists in this book make visible the extent to which a sense of theater, or spectacle, now permeates the spectator's role in the museum or gallery and how this carries through to their experience of the contemporary urban environment. Considering a variety of media including installation, sculpture, performance, participatory works, and events, this book deals with issues such as the framing of human presence in the experience of art.

Published to accompany the acclaimed summer 2008 After Nature exhibition at New York's New Museum, this unique catalogue pays tribute to the work of W.G. Sebald by repurposing existing copies of his 1988 three-part prose poem, from which the show borrowed its title. Called an arresting gesture by The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl, the catalogue consists of the original book, enriched with images that have been hand-placed between the pages, and a new fold-out dust jacket. The result is a singular hybrid that is part appropriation, part recycled material--informed by the artistic tradition of the found object. Conceived as an homage, the catalogue features an essay by the New Museum's Massimiliano Gioni, a complete checklist and 25 color images by each of the featured artists, who include Pawel Althamer, Huma Bhabha, Maurizio Cattelan, William Christenberry, Nathalie Djurberg, Werner Herzog, Zoe Leonard, Klara Liden, Dana Schutz and Tino Sehgal, among others.

Set to accompany the first major solo exhibition in the United States of Polish contemporary artist Paweł Althamer, one of the most important European artists to emerge since the 1990s. In association with the New Museum, New York Over the past twenty years, Althamer has established a singular artistic practice featuring an expanded approach to sculptural representation and experimental models of social collaboration. This publication includes extensive documentation of his groundbreaking sculptures, performances, and participatory installations. Althamer creates portraits of himself and others, in materials including plaster, melted plastic, and even a parade float (a nude self-portrait). The artist is known for performances involving entire communities, like his neighbors in Bródno, Poland. With essays by longtime collaborators and interpreters of Althamer’s practice and an interview with the artist by curator Massimiliano Gioni, this publication presents a portrait of the artist as instigator, organizer, teacher, and visionary.

The renowned Polish contemporary artist is known for his participatory art projects, figurative sculptures and performative self-portraits. In the Lentos he showed a large-scale installation that was created in collaboration with international artists, based on a landscape inspired by the Dogon culture. Pawel Althamer relies on social cooperation and the inclusion of his environment and the people close to him. With his projects he questions social structures and networks in order to not seldomly inscribe himself into them in a new way. In the great hall of the Lentos, in collaboration with Bruno Althamer, Youssouf Dara, Jonathan Dellago, Józef Galazka, Piotr Grzegorek, Camille Holowka, Eva Höll, Robert Sosnowski and Rafal Zurek, he created such landscape dominated by earth, clay and wood. Exhibition shots and analytical texts by Massimiliano Gioni and Walter Seidl throw additional light on Althamer's approach. A supplementary photo documentation focuses both on the genesis of the exhibition and on the afterlife and relaunch of the sculptures from Linz for the exhibition titled "Unerwartet" at neugerriemschneider, Berlin.

For over a decade, sculptor Pawel Althamer has been at the forefront of the Polish contemporary art movement. Emerging from the infamous Kowalski Studio at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, Althamer continues to investigate the intricacies of human relationships and question the limits and deeper meaning of individual and social identity. 2000 Words: Pawel Althamer presents the wide array of the artist's work in the Dakis Joannou Collection, along with a thoughtful essay by Massimiliano Gioni communicating the artist's commitment to the transformative potential of art. Conceived by Gioni and published by the Deste Foundation, each monograph in the new 2000 Words series combines a critical, forthright essay with a survey of an artist's works in this important collection.