Lb Autofocus Retina Published On The Occasion Of The Exhibition Lothar Baumgarten Autofocus Retina Museu Dart Contemporani De Barcelona 7 February 15 June 2008

The title of this book, Autofocus Retina means a configuration of four diamond shaped mirrors connoting the inner mechanics of a camera lens: the photographic eye. Lothar Baumgarten (b. Germany 1944, living and working in Berlin/New York) presents a personal selection of photographs, sculpture, drawings and film, from the late 1960s to the present day. The book follows the creative trajectory of an artist who does not comply with the aesthetic vision of art but who continually questions the logic structuring Western thought and systems of representation. Featuring essays on Baumgarten's work by Hal Foster, Michael Jakob, Craig Owens, Anne Rorimer and Friedrich Wolfram Heubach. Each text has been chosen by the artist himself along with special graphic illustrations and images.

When we talk about the geographical, ecological, ethnographic, historical, documentary, and cosmopolitan “turns” in relation to the work of practitioners of contempory art, what exactly do we mean? Are we talking about a “reading strategy”? About an interpretive model, as would be derived from the linguistic turn of the 1970s, or rather about a stratigraphic structure that could be read across multiple cultural practices? Do we wish to read one system by means of another system, in a way that one nurtures the other so that it can open us up to other forms of being? Or is it rather about a generative movement in which a new horizon emerges in the process, leaving behind the practice that was its point of departure? The recurrence of “turn” in place of “style”, “-ism”, or “tendency” would ultimately respond to a clear urgency of the contemporary global world: a movement characterised by aesthetic pluralism, by the simultaneousness of various modi operandi, and by a great multiplicity of languages that constantly change their state while having many features in common. And “turn” would also allow within the space of the contemporary — of here and now —, a great diversity of stories from all around the world that should be confronted simultaneously in an intellectual outlook that is continuous and disjunctive, essential to understanding the present as a whole.

This catalogue accompanies an exhibition featuring the collaborative work of Swiss artist Ursula Biemann and Brazilian architect Paulo Tavares. An introduction by curator Yesomi Umolu discusses the exhibition within the framework of the Broad MSU's Land Grant commissioning program and the histories of land appropriation in the United States. This is presented alongside an interview with Ursula Biemann and installation shots from the presentation at the Broad MSU. This publication is coupled with the artist's book Forest Law.

The “biennale culture” now determines much of the art world. Literature on the worldwide dissemination of art assumes nationalism and ethnic identity, but rarely analyzes it. At the same time there is extensive theorizing about globalization in political theory, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, political economy, sociology, and anthropology. Art and Globalization brings political and cultural theorists together with writers and historians concerned specifically with the visual arts in order to test the limits of the conceptualization of the global in art. Among the major writers on contemporary international art represented in this book are Rasheed Araeen, Joaquín Barriendos, Susan Buck-Morss, John Clark, Iftikhar Dadi, T. J. Demos, Néstor García Canclini, Charles Green, Suman Gupta, Harry Harootunian, Michael Ann Holly, Shigemi Inaga, Fredric Jameson, Caroline Jones, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Anthony D. King, Partha Mitter, Keith Moxey, Saskia Sassen, Ming Tiampo, and C. J. W.-L. Wee. Art and Globalization is the first book in the Stone Art Theory Institutes Series. The five volumes, each on a different theoretical issue in contemporary art, build on conversations held in intensive, weeklong closed meetings. Each volume begins with edited and annotated transcripts of those meetings, followed by assessments written by a wide community of artists, scholars, historians, theorists, and critics. The result is a series of well-informed, contentious, open-ended dialogues about the most difficult theoretical and philosophical problems we face in rethinking the arts today.

A photo of a secret CIA prison. A map designed to help visitors reach Malibu’s notoriously inaccessible public beaches. Guidebooks to factories, prisons, and power plants in upstate New York. An artificial reef fabricated from 500 tons of industrial waste. These are some of the more than one hundred projects represented in Experimental Geography, a groundbreaking collection of visual research and mapmaking from the past ten years. Experimental Geography explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide (and possibly make a new field altogether). This lavishly illustrated book features more than a dozen maps; artwork by Francis Alÿs, Alex Villar, and Yin Xiuzhen; and recent projects by The Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Raqs Media Collective, and the Center for Urban Pedagogy. The collection is framed by essays by bestselling author Trevor Paglen, Jeffrey Kastner, and editor Nato Thompson.

Eight art projects were developed in a dialogue with each other over a period of eighteen months including videos, photographs and research essays.

Documenting the third edition of La Triennale, the international contemporary art triennial previously known as "La Force de l'Art," this catalogue also features an anthology of writings by thinkers exploring the connections between artistic practice and the writing of culture throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. This anthology reflects the theoretical and conceptual content of La Triennale 2012, and is fully part of the curatorial project. It is a tool of theoretical thinking about the relations between art and anthropology.

This is the first comprehensive monograph on an important contemporary artist, one who has come to represent the Russian avant-garde in the post-Stalinist era much in the way that Joseph Beuys was a stimulus for European art after World War II. In her fascinating text, Amei Wallach draws on extensive research and interviews with Kabakov and his circle over the past eight years, and puts the work in the context of the artist's life and the social, historical, cultural, and political forces that have shaped it - from his boyhood during Stalin's regime, to his obligatory career as a children's book illustrator in the official Artists' Union, to his involvement in Moscow's furtive and fertile underground avant-garde of artists and writers, to his more recent travels in the international art circuit. This groundbreaking volume also includes an introduction by Robert Storr, a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and commentaries by the artist himself that accompany the 290 illustrations, including paintings, drawings, albums, and sketches and photographs of installations.