What is Vienna Actionism?
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| Editor(s) | Wiener Aktionismus Museum |
| Author(s) | Eva Badura-Triska, Julia Moebus-Puck, Lisa Moravec |
| Design | Studio FRANZ |
| Size | 17.9 x 25.5 cm |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Pages | 292 |
| Language(s) | English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-157-3 |
| Illustrations | 267 |
Blows were dealt. An artist exposed and cut himself, others urinated in glasses, daubed themselves with dirt, and masturbated over the Austrian flag. Meanwhile, music was playing, including the national anthem; someone read pornographic writings. Vienna in the late 1960s: what had started in the artists’ homes and studios was now brough out on the grand stage, and taboos were broken in full view of the public.
The Vienna Actionism Museum’s first publication is dedicated to the idea of Vienna Actionism in the dynamic context of abstract realism, Fluxus, and the international Happening scene. The book relates the story of one of art history’s most influential art movements, spearheaded by the Actionists Günter Brus and Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.
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Freeters
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This book is about the mediation of artistic thinking and artistic action in processes. The artistic practice of Freeters is characterized by strategies of thought and action that are needed in a society with constantly changing conditions, in a working world that overturns itself in its dynamics. The necessity of shaping the present through artistic thought and action can no longer be limited to the art context.
FREETERS’ AI approach should be understood less as a scientific methodology and more as a call not to reduce our intelligence to only rational thought processes with a utility maxim. Of course, AI has already made impressive progress in many areas of our public services via the hard components of machine learning. However, it is doubtful whether this approach alone can really give rise to a superintelligence that will one day create a resource-saving paradise on earth. Nor is it guaranteed that we as Homo Sapiens will be assigned a place in this paradise by such a unilaterally gifted superintelligence. Cognitively, this machine will be superior to us in any case – only the necessary feeling of happiness of a consensual coexistence does not seem quite conceivable.
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Photography of Presence
24€ Add to cartThe Importance of the Moment in Artistic Photography
Can photographs exist which represent concrete places? In view of the daily flood of images, this question seems superfluous at first. Only on closer inspection does the distance between the visual experience of places and the media images generated from them become apparent. “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment,” Henri Cartier-Bresson once stated. The present volume examines this decisive moment and explores the question of how artistic photography can describe the gap between spatial reality and photographic image and make the present at the time the photograph was taken visible.
With works by Viktoria Binschtok, Julian Faulhaber, Mareike Foecking, Stephanie Kiwitt, Nikolaus Koliusis, Barbara Probst, and Wolfgang Zurborn as well as texts by Holger Kube Ventura.
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Nobuyuki Tanaka
Primordial Memories25€ Add to cartThe craft of traditional Japanese lacquer finishing in contemporary art
In his extraordinary sculptures, Nobuyuki Tanaka (b. 1971 in Tokyo) combines a lacquer finishing that has been practiced in Japan for centuries with an organic formal language. Tanaka is considered the most important representative and pioneer of the use of lacquer in contemporary art. He uses the material in polished deep black or intense red as a multi-layer coating for large-format sculptures. This results in abstract works with lively, curved, glossy surfaces in which the multi-faceted effect created by the interplay with changing light conditions plays a key role. The lavishly illustrated book includes texts by Britta E. Buhlmann, Beatrice Kromp, Antje Papist-Matsuo, Annette Reich, Atsuhiko Shima, and Nobuyuki Tanaka.
In his extraordinary sculptures, the artist combines a treatment of lacquer practiced for centuries in Japan with an organic language of form.
An exceptional representative and pioneer of the use of lacquer in contemporary art, Tanaka uses the lacquer mostly in polished deep black, sometimes also in intense red, as a multi-layer coating for his large-scale sculptures.
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Anna Leonhardt
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Anna Leonhardt studied painting and graphic art at the Dresden University of Fine Arts (HfBK) from 2002–2008, completing her education with postgraduate training with Ralf Kerbach until 2010.
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Martin Noël
The Retrospective38€ Add to cartThe Protagonist of the Modern Woodcut
The German painter, draftsman, and graphic artist Martin Noël (b. Berlin, 1956; d. Bonn, 2010) played a leading role in reviving the linocut and the woodcut, two techniques that had long been eclipsed by other media. In his large-format works on paper, he staked out a widely regarded and distinctive position in contemporary art. Noël was especially interested in the compositional relationship between line and surface. Released on occasion of the retrospective of his oeuvre at the Albertina, Vienna, this book presents an overview of the most important periods in the artist’s creative evolution, with an emphasis on the woodcut carved into the printing plate and the woodblock’s subsequent emancipation as an art object in its own right. Particular attention is paid to the application of ink to the surface and its painterly structure as well as the picture’s migration from object to canvas. The resulting paintings are exemplary of Noël’s late oeuvre.
Martin Noël studied graphic art and painting at what is now the Cologne University of Arts and Sciences. His art garnered numerous prizes and other honors, including fellowships from Kunststiftung NRW, Stiftung Kunstfonds, and Letter Stiftung. Works by Noël are in the German Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz, and the collection of Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern.
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Nadira Husain
Manzil Monde30€ Add to cartNadira Husain’s (b. Paris, 1980; lives and works in Berlin, Paris, and Hyderabad) work combines figures, symbols, and ornaments from different cultures in complex imageries that reflect her own multicultural experience. To achieve a harmonious, though by no means placid, coexistence of all elements, the artist harnesses painting, drawing, printing processes, traditional artisan practices, and a range of materials including textile and ceramics, recognizing no hierarchy of media or genre. Hybridization and the translocation of motifs serve her to tease out similarities as well as divergences between myth and pop culture: the Indian deity, the cartoon character, and the fashion label appear as equals in the universe of her art.
The book contains several essays that explore Nadira Husain’s oeuvre as a significant contribution to the discourse around postmigration, transculturality, and feminism in contemporary art.
Nadira Husain studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She is currently a visiting professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she co-teaches with the Belarusian artist Marina Naprushkina.
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Female Gaze
From Virtual to Reality25€ Add to cartWorks of Art Take a Stance
The “female gaze” embodies a stance that is the polar opposite of the “male gaze.” The latter term came into use in the movie and advertising industries in the 1970s to describe the fact that women typically appear in films in supporting roles, as accessories to men, rather than as protagonists. The male gaze originated in a patriarchal society that has begun to change. The female gaze champions a modern form of emancipation that challenges men to abandon entrenched structures. Much more importantly, it encourages women to become aware of the strength that lies in their femininity and make it the source of their own creative expression and their own perspective on the world. For many years, the writer Silke Tobeler has visited artists in their studios, collecting the photographs she took there and her conversations with her hosts on her blog, Female Gaze.
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Karlheinz Bux
über Linie …15€ Add to cartClarity, Complexity, and Linearity
The defining artistic means in the work of Karlheinz Bux (b. 1952 in Ulm, lives and works in Karlsruhe) is the line. As edges and folds, they determine vertically oriented sculptures, which simultaneously convey compactness and openness, dynamism and repose. In Bux’s pencil drawings and photo-based works, they form the subject of the image in the form of complex linear structures. This present book documents the artist’s large-format works and provides insight into his oeuvre, with texts by Michael Hübl, Christine Reeh-Peters, and Carmela Thiele.
Karlheinz Bux studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe and taught as a lecturer at Pforzheim University and as a visiting professor at the Mainz University of Applied Sciences. His works are represented in private and public collections, including the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, the Hurrle Collection, and the Würth Collection.
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PULS 22
36€ Add to cartPULS, an initiative of Bukarest’s National Museum for Contemporary Art (MNAC) began during the COVID-crisis. Since then, the museum supports Romanian artists by biennially purchasing more than 100 relevant creative works, carefully selected from a large pool of submissions by a democratic jury of artists and art professionals. PULS22 showcases in book-form MNAC’s most recent acquisitions and their subsequent exhibition. This volume, like the former PULS20, is an exciting panoramic snapshot of the country’s dynamic multigenerational art scene. The installation shots speak of an outstanding exhibition and the potential for future loans to curated shows elsewhere.
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Susanne Rottenbacher
Radiationen40€ Add to cartIn expansive compositions in light, Susanne Rottenbacher (b. Göttingen, 1969; lives and works in Berlin) visualizes the fire of life in its timebound and fluid dimension. Plotinus called fire the “spiritual potency of beauty.” Pursuing a similar vision, Rottenbacher’s works orchestrate light as energy in space. To this end, the artist, who studied light and stage design in the United States and the United Kingdom, creates weightless luminous choreographies realized in colorful LED technology in combination with acrylic glass as a translucent vehicle of form. The results are installations in three dimensions that are deeply silent yet unfold in a magical ecstasy of light.
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Fritz Overbeck und Hermine Overbeck-Rohte
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Rainer Jacob
justICE30€ Add to cartRainer Jacob (b. Jena, 1970; lives and works in Leipzig) has anonymously installed objects made of ice in public settings in cities including Berlin, Leipzig, Paris, Moscow, Oslo, Prague, and Budapest since 2013. He then allows them to dematerialize and records the process in photographs. Radiators, wall outlets, QR codes, and the Duchampian pissoir are among his recurrent motifs. The impermanence of the ice objects builds bridges to street art, Fluxus, and action art. Critical observations on the unequal distribution of resources and political power in contemporary society, his works reflect on our perceptions and question the idea of originality in art while also probing the outer limits of sculpture.
The publication showcases the ice objects of the past ten years, embedding them in a decade that has marked a sea change in the life of humankind: JustICE captures an artist’s distinctive perspective on societal processes.
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João Penalva
The Asian Books40€ Add to cartThe First Survey on the Exceptional Artist Books of João Penalva
Since 2007 João Penalva (b. 1949, Lissabon; lives and works in London) has exhibited large format unbound books, printed with archival inks on fine art paper, displayed on tables with chairs, to be handled freely. Each one is published in an edition of three and one artist’s proof. Those whose content relate to Asia, whether factually or fictionally, are collected here for the first time: Taipei Story, 2007; Portraits: Machines and Kabuki Wigs, 2009; The Toshiba Book of Happiness, 2009; Hello? Are you there?, 2009; Michio Harada, 2015; Boro, 2017.
João Penalva studied Fine Art at the Chelsea School of Art in London. His works have been shown in manifold international exhibitions. Penalva represented Portugal 2001 at the Venice Biennale and 1996 at the São Paulo Biennale.
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James Francis Gill
Catalogue Raisonné of Original Prints, Vol. 239€ Add to cartThe Catalogue Raisonné of the Co-Founder of American Pop Art
James Francis Gill (b. 1935, Tahoka; lives and works in Texas) is one of the most important artists of American Pop Art. His paintings, often based on photographs, provide an unusually personal approach to the icons of the 1950s and 60s. Gill suddenly became Hollywood’s most celebrated artist when his Marilyn Triptych was added to the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962 – even before the works of Andy Warhol. Through friendships with celebrities such as John Wayne, Martin Luther King, and Marlon Brando, Gill became the contemporary artist-witness of an entire generation. Nevertheless, he kept his distance from the exuberant Hollywood of the time and surprisingly withdrew in 1972, only to reappear on the art market thirty years later. This catalogue raisonné in two volumes impressively documents his work from the early political motifs to the Pop Art icons of his late work.
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Erich Hörtnagl
to be a man38€ Add to cart“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” The witty remark, attributed to Diane Arbus, succinctly captures the twofold code at work in Erich Hörtnagl’s (b. Innsbruck, 1950) pictures. Aesthetically appealing photographs, mostly in black and white, show men (and women) in a wide variety of cultural, social, and religious contexts: from Swedish bikers and drag queens to monks in Myanmar, from Turkish belly dancers to Tyrolean performers in traditional attire. What looks at first glance like a conventional photobook soon reveals itself to be a brilliantly staged interactive riddle around clichéd notions of masculinity with positive and negative connotations, around gender roles and persistent stereotypes. With the deftly composed visual meta-narrative in to be a man, Hörtnagl, a seasoned theater and film director, lures us into a trap, and the only way out is by taking the challenge head-on: by engaging in self-reflection and questioning our own prejudices and ideas.
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Stephan Kaluza
Mechanik Sehnsucht. Kunsterzeugung und Betrachtung14€ Add to cartUngewohnte Antworten aus der Sicht des Kunsterzeugers
Die Frage, was Kunst ist und wie sie entsteht, wird gerne von denen beantwortet, die sie selbst nicht erzeugen. Die Betrachtung und Interpretation steht im Vordergrund und damit eine wissenschaftliche Distanz zur Kunst. Es gibt aber durchaus die Eigen-Betrachtung derer, die Kunst aktiv herstellen und naturgemäß einen inneren Blick auf die prozessualen Bedingungen haben, die überhaupt erst das entstehen lassen, was anschließend betrachtet und beurteilt wird. Diese Sichtweise ist nicht zwangsläufig identisch mit der von außen. Nicht die Interpretation oder eine deduktive Schlüssigkeit steht hier im Vordergrund, sondern ein ableitender und besonders ein schöpferischer Sinn, der sich aus dem Prozess des Kunstherstellens von selbst ergibt.
Die Arbeiten von Stephan Kaluza (geb. 1964 in Bad Iburg, lebt und arbeitet in Düsseldorf) wurden unter anderem im Ludwig Museum Koblenz, im State Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul, in der Kunsthalle Osnabrück, im Palacete des Artes Rodin, Salvador, im Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, sowie in der KAI 10 | Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf, ausgestellt.
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Clemens Krauss
Antidot | Gegengift40€ Add to cartClemens Krauss restlessly shuttles across history; his vehicles are painting, video art, sculpture, and performance. Yet Krauss is not “just” an artist, he is also a psychoanalyst and physician. As such, he has first-hand experience of time as the defining factor of existence, daring him to play with it. The bosom of painting is where he feels safest after his hazardous excursions back into his youth and forward into death. Executed in thick paints, his work is physical, material, which is also to say, it exists in time: everything passes away, even the picture. Evanescent, more than anything, are encounters of the sort Krauss stages as part of his psychoanalytical practice; all that remains is the indelible impression they leave. To be indelible, to recall the past, while also “letting happen what has never happened,” as he puts it, these are the ambitions he pursues in his art. Preserved between the covers of the present catalogue and reproduced in thousands of copies, his works now fan out in an instant to circulate for an indeterminate period of time among countless hands, whence they will effortlessly penetrate the barriers of our inner lives to bring us one step closer to transcendence.
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Michel Majerus 2022
49€ Add to cartMichel Majerus (1967–2002) ranks among the most interesting painters of his generation and left a singular and multifaceted oeuvre that still speaks powerfully to contemporary concerns. His works quote phenomena of everyday culture such as comic strips, advertisements, and videogames as well as sources of inspiration from art history ranging from minimalism to Pop Art. Decontextualizing the different elements of pictures, he integrated them into novel contexts of meaning by, for instance, setting them on a par with art-historical references.
Twenty years after his death, a series of exhibitions throughout Germany showcase different periods and aspects of his creative output. Five solo exhibitions at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Michel Majerus Estate, and Galerie neugerriemschneider, Berlin, pay tribute to Michel Majerus’s art in unprecedented breadth.
Concurrently, thirteen museums mount presentations of works by Michel Majerus from their collections: Ludwig Forum Aachen; Kunsthalle Bielefeld; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Sprengel Museum Hannover; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunsthalle Mannheim; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; Neues Museum Nürnberg, Nuremberg; Saarlandmuseum—Moderne Galerie, Saarbrücken; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
The extensive publication accompanying the exhibition series Michel Majerus 2022 includes three essays and two artists’ contributions as well as visual documentation of the exhibitions and presentations from the collections. It is rounded out by a biographical sketch of Michel Majerus, a history of exhibitions of his work, and archival photographs.
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Candida Höfer
Kunsthistorisches Institut Bonn35€ Add to cartThe Kunsthistorisches Institut Bonn, Yesterday and Today
The imposing presence of architecture captured in the absence of humans: that is the defining characteristic of the photographs with which Candida Höfer (b. 1944, Eberswalde; lives and works in Cologne) has risen to international renown. In 1992, she captured the Kunsthistorisches Institut der Rheinischen Friedrich- Wilhelms-Universität Bonn in ten analogue black-and-white pictures that have not been on public display. In 2020, Höfer returned to the institute to take more pictures using a digital camera. The two series now make their public début in the institute’s halls and are gathered in this book. Undertaking a historically and aesthetically captivating comparison, Höfer probes the ways in which university life has changed over almost three decades.
Candida Höfer was a member of Bernd Becher’s inaugural photography class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her works were shown at documenta 11 in 2002, and in 2003, she and Martin Kippenberger represented Germany at the 50th Biennale di Venezia.
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Billy Al Bengston
Paintings & Watercolors48€ Add to cartThe First Monograph on the Californian Pop Artist Since More Than Thirty Years
Billy Al Bengston (b. 1934, Dodge City; lives and works in Venice, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii) is the very personification of the cheerful, carefree attitude towards life in California – with his work as well as his person: a former surfer and motorcycle racer, an extravagant artist and key figure of West Coast Pop Art. After studying at the California College of Arts and Crafts and the Otis Art Institute, he exhibited at the legendary Ferus Gallery in 1957 and was the central figure among a group of artists that included Frank Gehry, Edward Kienholz, Ed Ruscha, and Ken Price. BAB, as he apostrophizes himself, inserts car and motorcycle parts as motifs into his otherwise abstract paintings, using lacquer and spray paint instead of oil, and aluminum panels with at times dented surfaces instead of the traditional canvas. Art and lifestyle combine to create the individual “Bengston iconography” of California Cool.
