An intimate look at American artist Sol LeWitt’s masterpiece of conceptual art, drawn on the walls of a medieval tower in Italy. In 1976, Sol LeWitt made a large group of pencil drawings on the internal walls of the Vecchia Torre, a medieval tower in the Umbrian town of Spoleto, Italy. These fragile drawings, made on walls that are susceptible to degradation, have rarely been seen and never been documented, yet they represent one of LeWitt’s major works and a milestone in American conceptual art. This groundbreaking volume brings together an extended essay on LeWitt’s work by art historian Rye Dag Holmboe and a series of 60 photographic plates of the drawings by artist Joschi Herczeg, giving readers an intimate experience of this singular, site-specific work. A visual archive, this book situates LeWitt’s provisional, material, bodily, and highly personal drawings in their historical, biographical, and theoretical contexts. The result is nothing less than a reconsideration of LeWitt’s lifework. At once a work of conservation and a reflection on the relationship between drawing and architecture, Sol LeWitt’s Studio Drawings in the Vecchia Torre sheds new and welcome light on an unseen masterpiece.

Following the critical scepticism surrounding the notion of the ‘self’ as a singular entity during the 1960s, many artists and writers sought to test the apparent problem posed by autobiography as both a traditional genre and as a way of working. Considering the consequent emergence of autotheory, Lifework traces this shift in artistic and literary production during the late twentieth century and beyond, examining a set of diverse practices that mine the line between what it is to make art and what it is to live life. The book’s chapters connect a variety of artistic strategies that cut across medium, geography and time, uncovering how the historical marginalisation of first-person experience has taken on larger social, cultural and political implications in the contemporary moment and how the work of living might still relate to the work of art.

"In this heroic period of computer art, artists were required to build their own machines, collaborate closely with computer scientists, and learn difficult computer languages. White Heat Cold Logic's chapters, many written by computer art pioneers themselves, describe the influence of cybernetics, with its emphasis on process and interactivity; the connections to the constructivist movement; and the importance of work done in such different venues as commercial animation, fine art schools, and polytechnics."--Jaquette.

With his `in-your-face¿ style and intellectual background, Gordon Bennett has become one of Australia¿s leading contemporary artists. He has garnered international critical acclaim for the complex ways in which his work engages with historical and contemporary issues of cultural and personal identity ¿ with a focus on the interaction between Australia¿s indigenous, colonial, and postcolonial identities. This visually stimulating volume presents a thorough analysis of Bennett¿s practices and complex body of work to date, as well as a never before published intimate and revealing conversation between the artist and his long term associate Bill Wright

The most comprehensive collection to date of the artist Bruce Nauman's writings plus all of his major interviews from 1965 to 2001. Since the 1960s, the artist Bruce Nauman has developed a highly complex and pluralistic oeuvre ranging from discrete sculpture, performance, film, video, and text-based works to elaborate multipart installations incorporating sound, video recording and monitors, and architectural structures. Nauman's work is often interpreted in terms of movements and mediums, including performance, postminimalism, process, and conceptual art, thereby emphasizing its apparent eclecticism. But what is often overlooked is that underlying these seemingly disparate artistic tendencies are conceptual continuities, one of which is an investigation of the nature of language. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Nauman has refrained from participating in the critical discourse surrounding his own work. He has given relatively few interviews over the course of his career and has little to do with the art press or critical establishment. Indeed, he granted Janet Kraynak and The MIT Press almost complete autonomy in the preparation of this volume. In contrast to Nauman's reputation for silence, however, from the beginning of his career, the incorporation of language has been a central feature of his art. This collection takes as its starting point the seeming paradox of an artist of so few words who produces an art of so many words. Please Pay Attention Please contains all of Nauman's major interviews from 1965 to 2001, as well as a comprehensive body of his writings, including instructions and proposal texts, dialogues transcribed from audio-video works, and prose texts written specifically for installation sculptures. Where relevant, the texts are accompanied by illustrations of the artworks for which they were composed. In the critical essay that serves as the book's introduction, the editor investigates Nauman's art in relation to the linguistic turn in art practices of the 1960s—understanding language through the speech act—and its legacy in contemporary art.

Connecting New England's historical spiritualist and utopian traditions—from Brook Farm to Harvard's LSD research—to work by contemporary artists with regional ties. New England has a rich history of spiritual, mystical, and utopian strivers. Their visionary schemes range from nineteenth-century Transcendentalist experiments in communal living at Brook Farm and Fruitlands to the Harvard Project's LSD research, led by Timothy Leary, in the mid-twentieth century. The search for alternative ways of life often overlapped with the search for the Divine or expanded modes of consciousness and creativity. Visionary New England, which accompanies an exhibition at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, connects these traditions to the work of ten contemporary artists with New England ties. Generously illustrated, with ninety color images, the book interweaves analysis and imagery of New England's visionary traditions with reproductions of paintings, photographs, video, and installations by the artists. Essays examine New England's spiritualist and utopian practices; Transcendentalist writers' conception of Nature as “Other”; and the social significance of spiritualism. Texts by exhibiting artists Anna Craycroft and Candice Lin address the pedagogy of Amos Bronson Alcott, cofounder of Fruitlands, and the effects of opium trade in New England. Visionary New England bridges past and present, offering a new lens through which to understand contemporary art. Essays by Sarah J. Montross, Richard Hardack, Lisa Crossman, Anna Craycroft Artists Gayleen Aiken, Caleb Charland, Anna Craycroft, Angela Dufresne, Sam Durant, Josephine Halvorson, Paul Laffoley, Candice Lin, Michael Madore, Kim Weston

What do we mean when we say that we are bored? Or when we find a subject boring? Contributors to On Boredom: Essays in art and writing, which include artists, art historians, psychoanalysts and a novelist, examine boredom in its manifold and uncertain reality. Each part of the book takes up a crucial moment in the history of boredom and presents it in a new light, taking the reader from the trials of the consulting room to the experience of hysteria in the nineteenth century. The book pays particular attention to boredom’s relationship with the sudden and rapid advances in technology that have occurred in recent decades, specifically technologies of communication, surveillance and automation. On Boredom is idiosyncratic for its combination of image and text, and the artworks included in its pages – by Mathew Hale, Martin Creed and Susan Morris – help turn this volume into a material expression of boredom itself. With other contributions from Josh Cohen, Briony Fer, Anouchka Grose, Rye Dag Holmboe, Margaret Iversen, Tom McCarthy and Michael Newman, the book will appeal to readers in the fields of art history, literature, cultural studies and visual culture, from undergraduate students to professional artists working in new media.

At a time when Abstract Expressionism prevailed and was identified as an American-abstract art, artists with a different vision adopted a less painterly and subjective approach. These?Minimal? artists attempted to remove expressive, narrative or symbolic interpretations for the viewer to concentrate on the qualities of form, colour, space and materials. To draw the viewer into a direct relationship with the artwork they created their own pictorial language, often based on the use of simple geometric forms and employed industrial materials.0The Marzona Collection was shown in a museum context in Vienna at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in 1995, then during the 2001 Venice Biennale at Villa Manin (and also in the Kunsthalle Bielefeld) and has been on long-term loan to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.00Exhibition: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac - Ely House, London, UK (28.04.-29.07.2017)).

This catalogue gathers images of the works installed at the Foundation Carriero (Milan) and a previously unpublished biography on LeWitt, illustrated with personal and archive images, many of which have never been seen before and compiled for the publication by Sofia LeWitt, the artist's daughter.One decade after the death of Sol LeWitt the exhibition, Between the Lines aims to offer a new perspective on the American artist's practice, exploring its confines -- though always adhering to the underlying norms and principles of his ideas -- and singling-out the most interesting moments of the method of investigation and the processes that may arise.Curated by Francesco Stocchi and renowned architect Rem Koolhaas (his first time as curator) in close partnership with the Estate of Sol LeWitt, the exhibition is based on a powerful and innovative key to interpretation, aimed above all at reformulating the idea that a work must adapt to the architecture, thereby challenging the very notion of site-specificity.Between the Lines aims to move beyond the division that traditionally separates architecture and art history and which characterizes the artist's entire body of work, aimed more at the process than at the final result, free from any aesthetic or idealist opinion.Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Sol LeWitt: Between the lines at Fondazione Carriero, Milan (17 November 2017 - 24 June 2018).English and Italian text.