Jan Verwoert Bücher

"The first book dedicated to these pivotal early works on paper, David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968-1979 brings together the monoprints and collages in which the artist used the body as both a drawing tool and printing plate to explore performative, unconventional forms of image-making. Hammons created the body prints by greasing his own body--or that of another person--with substances including margarine and baby oil, pressing or rolling body parts against paper, and sprinkling the surface with charcoal and powdered pigment. The resulting impressions are intimately direct indexes of faces, skin and hair that exist somewhere between spectral portraits and physical traces. Hammons' body prints represent the origin of his artistic language, one that has developed over a long and continuing career and that emphasizes both the artifacts and subjects of contemporary Black life in the United States. More than a half century after they were made, these early works on paper exemplify Hammons' celebration of the sacredness of objects touched or made by the Black body, and his biting critique of racial oppression. The body prints highlighted in this volume introduce the major themes of a 50-year career that has become central to the history of postwar American art. The book features a conversation between curator and activist Linda Goode Bryant and artist Senga Nengudi, as well as a photo essay by photographer Bruce W. Talamon, who documented Hammons at work in his Los Angeles studio in 1974."

The current economic situation and society’s low confidence in its institutions demands that artists become more imaginative in their self-organization. If labels such as ‘alternative,’ ‘non-profit’ and ‘artist-run’ dominated the self-organized art scene of the late nineties, the separatist position implied by the use of these terms has been moderated during the intervening years. This new anthology of accounts from the frontline includes contributions by artist practitioners as well as their institutional counterparts providing a fascinating account of the art world as a matrix of positions where the balance of power and productivity constantly shifts. Artists, curators and critics discuss empirical and theoretical approaches from Europe, Africa and South and North America on how self-organization today oscillates between the self and the group, self-imposed bureaucratization and flexibility, aestheticization and activism.

This first monograph on Phillip Lai (b.1969, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) charts the artist's sculptural development over the course of the last two decades. Text in English and Chinese.

In over de toekomst en de kunstenaarsinitiatieven reflecteren kunstenaars, (inter)nationale curatoren en schrijvers op de rol van kunstenaarsinitiatieven in deze tijd en op nieuwe vormen van samen denken en samen werken.Het boek biedt droom- en denkmodellen voor iedereen in de kunstwereld en daarbuiten, en wil een bijdrage leveren aan een levendig debat over de betekenis van kunstenaarsinitiatieven. Hoe spelen ze in op een werekd in verandering en hoe verhouden ze zich tot de lokale gemeenschap?