Jan Verwoert Knihy

If we don’t merely reduce art to clever code play in the arenas of representation, how do we speak about what is at stake? In response to this question, Verwoert addresses the forces at the heart of the tragicomedy that making, showing, and critiquing art implicates us in. He honors the basic joys of turning one thing into another, and the miracles of rhythm and rhyme that characterize the residual level of mimetic magic in art. In this key, the unverifiable is practiced daily: bodies are remade, feelings transfigured. As Alina Szapocznikow wrote, the mouth chews and out comes sculpture. Verwoert’s 'COOKIE!' renders visible the endless emotional labor of setting the stage (for others), poses the thorny question of whether there could ever be a labor union for con-artists (like us), and gestures toward an ethics of disappointment to battle false expectations and as a way to come to terms with the fact that, no matter how you look at it, criticism hurts.

"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 first major monograph dedicated to the work of the internationally acclaimed abstract painter.

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.

No New Kind of Duck seeks to coin concepts for what we get to know by doing art and being among people. The book is the outcome of an exchange between editor Jan Verwoert and the participants of the Graduate School at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), the artists Alex Martinis Roe, Jeremiah Day, Azin Feizabadi, Lizza May David and Ralf Baecker as well as composers Nuria Nuñez Hierro and Björn Erlach. No New Kind of Duck features an introductory essay by editor Jan Verwoert on the politics of artistic knowledge production. It comprises a series of discussions in which the contributing artists and composers name the stakes of practicing their art today. In parallel, the book presents a careful selection of original artistic contributions. The book won't use words to justify works. It understands the coining of concepts and making of art as two closely related yet distinct material practices. We speak. We act. We put both together in a book. No New Kind of Duck is born out of the spirit of Berlin as a polis , a place where people live to make art and, at the end of the day, get together to talk concepts and politics. The title originated in a remark by Mike Kelley (recounted by Day) on how asking a Rock guitarist ‘Can you play this song?’ echoed the question posed to a folk artist: ‘Can you carve a good duck?’—whereupon the contributors agreed laughing that, yes, for sure, we want No New Kind of Duck.

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?