The Aspen Complex. Martin Beck. Sternberg Press.

With essays by Sabeth Buchmann, Felicity D. Scott, Alice Twemlow

Martin Beck’s exhibition “Panel 2—‘Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes…’” draws on the events of the 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA) and the development of the Aspen Movie Map to form a visual environment that reflects the interrelations between art, architecture, design, ecology, and social movements.

The 1970 IDCA marked a turning point in design thinking. The conference’s theme, “Environment by Design,” brought together venerable figures of modern design in the United States, including Eliot Noyes, George Nelson, and Saul Bass; environmental collectives and activist architects from Berkeley such as the Environmental Action Group, Sim Van der Ryn, and Ant Farm; as well as a group of French designers and sociologists, among them Jean Aubert, Lionel Schein, and Jean Baudrillard. The conference quickly escalated into a site of unresolvable conflict about communication formats and the potential role of design for environmental practices in a rapidly changing society.

The ensuing decade heralded the development of an interactive navigation system, which used the same Colorado resort town as its test site. The Aspen Movie Map—initiated by MIT’s Architecture Machine Group (the predecessor to the Media Lab) and partially funded by the US Department of Defense—is an image-based surrogate travel system using footage filmed in Aspen. Meant to prepare users for quick orientation in places they have never been to, the Aspen Movie Map was a seminal prototype for today’s military and consumer navigation systems.

The Aspen Complex documents two versions of Beck’s exhibition—at London’s Gasworks and Columbia University’s Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery—and brings together yet unpublished archival material and new research on the 1970 IDCA and the Aspen Movie Map.

D 25 €
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Amber.

This catalogue was published on the occasion of Amber, the fourth edition of Arnhem Mode Biennale, that is held from 1 June until 3 July 2011.

Nominated for The Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2011

Publisher: Arnhem Mode Biennale
Art Director: Laurenz Brunner
Design: Laurenz Brunner, Alexander Shoukas, Christopher West

D 15€

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The Borrowed Gaze – Variations GTB. Karin Hanssen. MER. Paper Kunsthalle.

The Borrowed Gaze/Variations GTB, a series of paintings created by Karin Hanssen, reappropriates the female Rückenfigur (back figure) of the famous work Paternal Admonition (1654) of Gerard ter Borch. Almost identical replications of ter Borch’s paradigmatic image of a woman in a satin dress circulated on the market already in the 17th century. Today, in the era of technical reproduction and digital simulation, this practice acquires new relevance. By transferring the image to the here and now, and by producing new variations, the art of Karin Hanssen critically examines concepts of authorship and appropriation. Moreover, her extensive replication also fundamentally alters the status of ter Borch’s image. The tension between old and new more specifically creates the background against which the iconic woman from the past truly comes alive, for the first time displaying the complexity of her individual identity.

D 32,50 €

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Kippenberger: The Artist And His Families.

Over the course of his 20-year career, Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997) cast himself alternately as hard-drinking carouser and confrontational art-world jester, thrusting these personae to the forefront of his prodigious creativity. He was also very much a player in the international art world of the 1970s right up until his death from liver cancer in 1997, commissioning work from artists such as Jeff Koons and Mike Kelley, and acting as unofficial ringleader to a generation of German artists, including Markus and Albert Oehlen, Georg Herold and Günter Förg.Written by the artist’s sister, Susanne Kippenberger, and translated from the German by Damion Searls, this first English-language biography draws both from personal memories of their shared childhood and exhaustive interviews with Kippenberger’s extended family of friends and colleagues in the art world. Kippenberger gives insight into the psychology and drive behind this playful and provocative artist.

Translated by Damion Searls

D 35€

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Displayer #04

Published by Karlsruhe University Of Arts And Design

The production of publicity, and in a wider sense of a public, is among the key strategies of any exhibition. Publications play a crucial role here. By editing and publishing the magazine Displayer, students come to better understand central questions of exhibition design and curatorial practice, and can make contact with authors outside the school. Displayer is a continuation of students’ practical and theoretical work in a public, published form. Historic and contemporary exhibitions, guest lectures and seminar projects can here be investigated in greater depth, with seminar themes worked through in interviews and by re-editing texts for publication. Following the seminar’s intensive investigation and discussion, the final publication itself becomes a kind of exhibition space for ongoing questions and concerns.

D 12€

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Forests, Gardens & Joe’s

Mixing and matching an abandoned Story Book Forest, historical Victory Gardens and a bar called Joe’s, in this artist’s book Amy O’Neill unfurls middle-American stories to create a feral landscape in which childhood memories rule. The project is designed by O’Neill for the Centre culturel suisse in Paris.

Co-published with:
Centre Culturel Suisse. Paris.

Edition of 100.

D 24.80€

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YEAR 2012

This second YEAR is still an almanac, a choral book revealing behind the stage. Seasons are information. Hey, look at what has been done, should be or will be or never be. This issue is like talking with images. You can connect one page to another. Text can be spare, descriptive or exhaustingly disruptive. What have you done means what it will be. We asked people about what’s in their mind from the past or for the future and that creates an all present. Last time, we talked about no future, now we are no present. YEAR is still a chain reaction, organizing its content in the form of sequences. YEAR is still an experimental constellation.

The time of manifestos and propaganda is back! From the everyday or larger issues of sociability and historicity. It takes the shape of a collage of disparate sources in time and place. Advertisement, propaganda and manifestos are the ultimate forms for abstraction and engrained subjectivity like space from outer space. Porn and insults, unreal kind of novellas, advertisement as public space, again, opposed to archives, distinction opposed to evaluation, again, narrative to order, cool to distance, taste to energy, again, beauty to sense, sense to idea, idea to experience, experience to life and life to style and style to knowledge and knowledge to power and power to all perversive shit. Still.

As an author use your imagination to be radical, literal and obscene! As a reader use your intellect and senses to be radical, metaphorical and obscene!

With contributions by:
Damien Airault
The After Lucy Experiment
Jacques André
Danai Anesiadou
Etablissement d’en face
Heidi Ballet
Pierre Bellouin
Grégoire Bergeret
Gilles Berquet
Marco Bruzzone
Tiphaine Calmettes
Rafael Carneiro
Laurie Charles
Jacques Charlier
Jagna Ciuchta
François Curlet
Laurence Dujardyn & Matthias Wille
Dorothée Dupuis
Daniel Firman
Théodore Fivel
Michel François
Steinar Haga Kristenen
Kati Heck & Julia Wlodkowski
Mai Hofstad Gunnes
Eleni Kamma
Julia Kremer & Summer Lake
King Lee
Yann Leguay & Pacôme Beru
Jonas Locht
Mirka Lugosi
Charles Lum, Coco Capitán & Nico Grijalba
Oliver A. Martinez Kandt & Moris
Julien Meert
Jacopo Miliani
Padraic E. Moore
Nicolas Moulin
Shelly Nadashi
Joel Napolillo
Sophie Nys
Nikolay Oleynikov
Jurgen Ots
Douglas Park
Eddie Peak & Vincent Honoré
Mick Peter
Shanta Rao
Boris Rebetez
Azzedine Salek
Aura Seikkula
Alberta Sessa & Francisco Camacho
Caroline Soyez Petithomme
Pierre Tatu
David de Tscharner
Joelle Van Autreve
Filip Van Dingenen
Loic Vanderstichelen
Katleen Vermeir & Ronny Heiremans
Lauren VHS
Gilles Yvain

D 18 €

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Mousse #33

Starring
by Antonio Scoccimarro
Morgan Fisher
The Rewards of Self-Repression
by Christopher Williams
Pedro Costa
The Need to Be Dehypnotized
by Andrea Lissoni
Talking About
This Should Have Been: The Eighties
by Dieter Roelstraete
Talking About
Learning Modalities
by Nova Benway, Johanna Burton, Jens Hoffmann, Dane Jensen, Leora Morinis, Sarah Robayo Sheridan
Freeman Dyson
Be Prepared for Surprises
by Hans Ulrich Obrist
Raphael Hefti
Push It to the Max
by Alexis Vaillant
Talking About
On Art, Language and Consecutive Matters
by Julian Myers
Robert Barry
What Is Essential Is Invisible to the Eye: A Few Words on the Work of Robert Barry
by Andrew Berardini
Amy Gerstler
Like Sea Anemones at High Tide…
by Catherine Taft
Chadwick Rantanen
Holding Patterns
by Jonathan Griffin
Toril Johannessen
A Personal History with Science
by Adnan Yildiz
Hugh Scott-Douglas
Exposed Surfaces
by Ruba Katrib
Agenda & Focus on Michael Dean and Gillian Wearing
Books
by Stefano Cernuschi
New York – Matt Hoyt
A Feast of Friends
by Cecilia Alemani
Los Angeles – Dawn Kasper
Crash Course in Being Present
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Berlin – Klaus Weber & Judith Hopf
Messages in Bottles
London – Anthea Hamilton & Alice Channer
Full Frontal: Because We Can’t Think in Three Dimensions
Maryam Jafri
Between History and Geography
by Luigi Fassi
Talking About
Inner Wealth
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
Portfolio – Michael E. Smith
The (Re)Shape of Things: Michael E. Smith
by Dominic Molon
Alex Israel
L.A. Man
by Gigiotto Del Vecchio
Liam Gillick
Spaces of Critical Exchange
by Fionn Meade
Lawrence Alloway
The Open Critic and his Enemies: Alloway and Material Culture
by Ulrich Lehmann
Lucas Blalock
Techniques in Marriage
by Clara Meister
What Is Alternative? Alternative to What? – Curated by Vincenzo de Bellis
Nevermind
by Nato Thompson

D 8 €

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Confessions of a Poor Collector (2nd ed.) Eugene M. Schwartz. Edition Taube.

Reprinting of a booklet written in 1970 by Eugene M. Schwartz (1927–1995); the original followed a lecture that he delivered at the New York Cultural Center. He proposes some easy instructions on how to build a whorthwhile art collection and just spend the least possible money for it.

D 8 €

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Berlin Sampler

From Cabaret to Techno: 1904-2012, a century of Berlin music

Listen to the city – Read the stories of the major musical works made in Berlin over the last hundred years and the events that shaped them.

English version.

D 18 €

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