Mike Kelley

John C. Welchman

Essays by Mike Kelley, Christoph Grunenberg.

The Uncanny

Joseph Kosuth

Gabriele Guercio

Fiona Biggiero

Joseph Kosuth: Re-defining the Context of Art is a theoretical reading of Kosuth’s media-related practice and includes essays by Gabriele Guercio, John C Welchman and Joseph Kosuth himself. The book is richly illustrated with documentation of three groupings of works: The Second Investigation, 1968; Redefining the Context of Art at MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1997; and his retrospective at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in 2004. These exhibitions all addressed the ‘context’ of art by reframing Kosuth’s public media works, such as on billboards or the television, within the gallery and also by employing media tactics, such as his public questionnaires, within an art setting.

Re-defining the Context of Art: 1968 - 2014. the Second Investigation and Public Media

The first comprehensive survey of Joseph Kosuth's work, centering on The Second Investigation (1968–74) This first comprehensive survey of Joseph Kosuth's work with public media centers on his pioneering project The Second Investigation (1968–74). This indexical work takes the form of anonymous advertisements in media—newspapers, magazines, billboards, television—based on a taxonomy of the world developed in the early nineteenth century by Roget for use in his thesaurus. Marking the start of Kosuth's sustained engagement with public media, this work anticipated the media orientation of New York postmodernism beginning in the late 1970s. Featuring a significant reexamination of Kosuth's work with language and media by art historian John C. Welchman, an appendix by art historian Gabriele Guercio, as well as the artist's own reflections on art and media, the book is richly illustrated with unpublished material from the artist's archive along with documentation of the artist's eponymous 1997 exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and his 2004 retrospective at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

Redefining the Context of Art, 1968 and After: The Second Investigation and Public Media

Jacinto Lageira

Marie-Laure Bernadac

Joseph Kosuth is a prominent conceptual artist who draws his inspiration from hsitory and its stratifications as well as philosophy and literature. In this exhibition Kosuth has developed his work on neon sentences; visitors proceed through the Louvre reading the sentences and reflecting on the process of the vision and considering what it means. The texts are written by the artist himself, which breaks from his usual practice of borrowing them from literature and philosophy.

'ni apparence ni illusion'

Rémy Zaugg

The Art Museum of My Dreams Or a Place for the Work and the Human Being

Vitrines and glass cabinets are familiar apparatuses that have in large part defined modern modes of display and visibility, both within and beyond the museum. The twelve contributions to this volume examine some of the points of origin of the vitrine and the various relations it brokers with sculpture, first in the Wunderkammer and cabinet of curiosities and then in dialog with the development of glazed architecture beginning with Paxton's Crystal Palace (1851). The collection offers close discussions of the role of the vitrine and shop window in the rise of commodity culture and raises key questions about the nature and implications of vitrinous space.

Sculpture and the Vitrine

The second volume of writings by Los Angeles artistMike Kelley, focusing on his own work.

Minor Histories--statements, Conversations, Proposals

In one of his sparkling aphorisms on the end of 'optical' art, Marcel Duchamp suggested that the title of an artwork was an 'invisible color'. John Welchman now offers the first critical history of how and why modern artworks receive their titles. He shows that titles were seldom produced and can rarely be understood outside of the institutional parameters that made them visible - exhibitions, criticism, catalogues, and even national politics.

A Visual History of Titles

Invisible Colors

Critical analyses of some of the major European artists and movements in the twentieth century, delivered with verve and insight. The ten essays in After the Wagnerian Bouillabaisse offer original critical discussions of some of the major European artists and movements in the twentieth century, beginning with important reassessments of Italian Futurism and the unique and disruptively consequential compounding of words and images in Dada and Surrealism. Welchman writes with verve and insight about the production, and circumvention, of affect in the work of Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger; the delirious splits and metaphorical ricochets fired up by Salvador Dalí; and the social and philosophical ideas mobilized by René Magritte. The second half of the volume examines mid- and later-twentieth century artists, offering a revisionist assessment of Hans Hartung; a new analysis of major themes and issues in the work of Antoni Tàpies; a meditation on "whiteness" in the practice and thinking of Günter Brus; and an exploration of exchanges between the US and the UK about sculpture between 1945 and the 1970s. The book concludes with an essay on the relations between writing and seeing in the work of Swiss artist Rémy Zaugg. The volume is the second in Welchman's series XX-XXI on European art from this and the last century.

John C. Welchman

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