Beautifully designed, text-heavy and smart, Album is a deliberately unrepresentative compilation of genre-hopping textual and visual material placed in orbit around the work of the influential young Swiss artists Urs Fischer, Yves Netzhammer, Ugo Rondinone and Christine Streuli--all of whom were born in the early- to mid-1970s, and all of whom represented Switzerland at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Finely printed on uncoated paper, the book includes specially commissioned critical texts, conversations, reports and visual essays that address, sometimes straightforwardly, sometimes obliquely, the larger issues implied in this group's work--such as notions of time, the animal and the human, shock and materiality. With a similarly eclectic mix of historical analysis, literary tableau and art-world journalism, the book imagines a psycho-geography of Switzerland, from its Alps to its art-filled bunkers. Sensitive to the nature of its context, informative and discursive rather than promotional, the book is rounded off with a survey on the future of biennials in relation to the present-day "fair mania" and a selection of critical views.
