"This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition Michael Rakowitz: Backstroke of the West, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, curated by Omar Kholeif, Manilow Senior Curator and Director of Global Initiatives, and presented in the Bergman Family Gallery at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, September 16, 2017-March 4, 2018."

An illustrated study of one of Ilya Kabakov's most fantastic installations. The fictitious hero of this 1984 installation is a lonely dreamer who develops an impossible project: to fly alone in cosmic space. But this dream is also an individual appropriation of a collective Soviet project and the official Soviet propaganda connected to it. Having built a makeshift slingshot, the hero apparently flies through the ceiling of his shabby room and vanishes into space. The miserable room and the primitive slingshot suggest the reality behind the Soviet utopia, in which where cosmic vision and the political project of the Communist revolution are seen as indissoluble. The Man who Flew into Space from His Apartment also raises questions of authorship in modernity. All of Kabakov's work is made in the name of other, fictitious artists. This reveals a hidden rule of the modern art system: only an artist who doesn't want to be an artist or who doesn't even know that he is an artist is a real artist—just as only an artwork that does not look like an artwork is a real artwork. The installation is a narrative, the documentation of a fictitious event. Afterall Books are distributed by The MIT Press.

Modern Artifacts includes all 18 installments of the series, copresented with Esopus and the Museum of Modern Art Archives, that originally appeared in Esopus, the award-winning nonprofit arts annual that suspended publication in 2018. Each of these installments focuses on a particular part of the MoMA Archives--subjects include the museum's first guest book, its "Art Lending Service" program, activities in the museum's garden, materials from the archives of contemporary artists such as James Lee Byars, Scott Burton and Grace Hartigan, and correspondence, photographs and other ephemera related to exhibitions such as the groundbreaking Spaces show in 1970 devoted to installation art. The book, which features several removable inserts of archival materials printed in facsimile, also includes brand-new contributions commissioned from six contemporary artists--Mary Ellen Carroll, Rhea Karam, Mary Lum, Clifford Owens, Michael Rakowitz and Paul Ramirez Jonas--who have each created a project in the book inspired by a particular item or series of items in the MoMA Archives.

Working in cities from Liverpool and Glasgow to Paris and New York, the interventionist artist transforms ordinary urban spaces, disrupting everyday life in ways that reinvent the way we encounter and experience art and compelling people to act and think differently about the world around them. Providing incisive new insights into the work and life of the artist,Cultural Hijack examines how these artists use the city as a playground, a stage, or an instrument for unsanctioned artworks, informal creative practices, activist interventions, and political actions. Drawing on a series of essays, personal testimonies, and original interviews from artists such as Tatsuro Bashi, BGL, Gelitin, Michael Rakowitz, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, this illuminating work enlarges our understanding of the creative process and how artists are developing new weapons in the arsenal of critical resistance, both emancipating and expanding the spaces of artistic and cultural production.

Showcasing the work of an exciting group of contemporary artists, this book reflects the trends shaping art in the United States today.

The Taste of Art offers a sample of scholarly essays that examine the role of food in Western contemporary art practices. The contributors are scholars from a range of disciplines, including art history, philosophy, film studies, and history. As a whole, the volume illustrates how artists engage with food as matter and process in order to explore alternative aesthetic strategies and indicate countercultural shifts in society. The collection opens by exploring the theoretical intersections of art and food, food art’s historical root in Futurism, and the ways in which food carries gendered meaning in popular film. Subsequent sections analyze the ways in which artists challenge mainstream ideas through food in a variety of scenarios. Beginning from a focus on the body and subjectivity, the authors zoom out to look at the domestic sphere, and finally the public sphere. Here are essays that study a range of artists including, among others, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys, Al Ruppersberg, Alison Knowles, Martha Rosler, Robin Weltsch, Vicki Hodgetts, Paul McCarthy, Luciano Fabro, Carries Mae Weems, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Janine Antoni, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Liza Lou, Tom Marioni, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Michael Rakowitz, and Natalie Jeremijenko.

To circumvent is to get around the rules, to find loopholes, to initiate idiosyncratic solutions, to employ subtle metaphor to highlight problematic situations. Michael Rakowitz does just that, combining architecture, design, agitational techniques and a poetic sensibility to create installations and performances that touch on issues of power, visibility and memory. His paraSITe shelters are custom-built tents for homeless people that attach to the hot exhaust vents of buildings, creating not only a heated abode but one much more visible than a cardboard box. Rise conducts the smell of Chinese pastries from a Chinatown bakery to the decidedly un-local art exhibition in an adjacent building. And in Minaret, Rakowitz uses an alarm clock bought in Jordan to broadcast the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, to a city where minarets are otherwise quieted.

Published in connection with an exhibition held at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, May 2004-Mar., 2005.

An account of the English rock band Hawkwind shows them to be one of the most innovative and culturally significant bands of the 1970s. Fifty years on from when it first formed, the English rock band Hawkwind continues to inspire devotion from fans around the world. Its influence reaches across the spectrum of alternative music, from psychedelia, prog, and punk, through industrial, electronica, and stoner rock. Hawkwind has been variously, if erroneously, positioned as the heir to both Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground, and as Britain's answer to the Grateful Dead and Krautrock. It has defined a genre—space rock—while operating on a frequency that's uniquely its own. Hawkwind offered a form of radical escapism and an alternative account of a strange new world for a generation of young people growing up on a planet that seemed to be teetering on the brink of destruction, under threat from economic meltdown, industrial unrest, and political polarization. While other commentators confidently asserted that the countercultural experiment of the 1960s was over, Hawkwind took the underground to the provinces and beyond. In Days of the Underground, Joe Banks repositions Hawkwind as one of the most innovative and culturally significant bands of the 1970s. It's not an easy task. As with many bands of this era, a lazy narrative has built up around Hawkwind that doesn't do justice to the breadth of its ambition and achievements. Banks gives the lie to the popular perception of Hawkwind as one long lysergic soap opera; with Days of the Underground, he shows us just how revolutionary Hawkwind was.

The companion to a one-of-a-kind exhibition at the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art, Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art explores the role of the meal in contemporary art. Feast offers the first survey of the artist-orchestrated meal: since the 1930s, the act of sharing food and drink has been used to advance aesthetic goals and foster critical engagement with the culture of the moment. Both exhibition catalogue and reader, this richly illus- trated book offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the art of the meal and its relationship to questions about hospitality, politics, and culture. From the Italian Futurists' banquets in the 1930s, to 1960s and '70s conceptual and performative work, to the global prevalence of socially engaged practices today, Feast considers a diverse group of artists who have transformed the meal into a compelling artistic medium. After an introductory essay by curator Stephanie Smith, the book includes new interviews with over twenty contributing artists and reprinted excerpts of classic texts. It also features a selection of contextual essays contributed by an international group of critics, writers, curators, and scholars.