Publications

Cosima von Bonin: Character Appropriation

Meredith Malone and Dirk von Lowtzow

This catalog accompanies an exhibition of work by this leading international contemporary artist that spans the last decade of her creative production, including a selection of her signature textile “paintings,” architectural sculptures, and outsized stuffed animals. The book features an essay by Meredith Malone, associate curator at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as a new installment in a series of scripted “conversations” between Cosima von Bonin and Daffy Duck, written by von Bonin’s longtime collaborator Dirk von Lowtzow, a Berlin-based musician and art critic.
Paper $10.00 2011 ISBN: 978-0-936316-33-8 | Distributed by University of Chicago Press

Ghost: Elizabeth Peyton

Hilton Als, Sabine Eckmann, Beate Kemfert, Elizabeth Peyton

A bilingual catalog copublished by the Opelvillen, Rüsselheim, and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum with Hatje Cantz will accompany the exhibition. This first major monograph of Elizabeth Peyton’s prints is an in-depth exploration of the artist as a critical printmaker. Featuring more than seventy full color illustrations, the catalog includes an essay by exhibition curator Sabine Eckmann and contributions by critic Hilton Als and printer David Lasry, as well as an interview with the artist conducted by Beate Kemfert of the Opelvillen.
Cloth $85.00 2011 ISBN: 978-3775727976 | Available from Hatje Cantz; distributed in the US by D.A.P.

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break II

Sharon Lockhart

This book evolved from an archive of images collected by artist Sharon Lockhart while researching her project Lunch Break—a series of films and photographs she produced from a long-term collaboration with the workers of Bath Iron Works in Maine, whom she portrayed as they took their lunch break, a classic workday ritual. A companion volume to that project, this publication offers a stunning array of images drawn from a variety of sources, including WPA documentary photographs, Old Master oil paintings, contemporary art, and photographs by Lockhart herself. The result is a rich visual narrative that explores the pursuit of leisure in the context of work.
Paper $30.00 2011 ISBN: 9780936316314 | Distributed by University of Chicago Press

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break

Sabine Eckmann

American artist Sharon Lockhart is well known for her formally strict and conceptually precise films and photographs.  Lunch Break, her newest solo exhibition, is the product of more than a year spent at the Bath Iron Works shipyard in Bath, Maine, observing and engaging with the shipbuilders during breaks from their daily routines.  The resultant two film installations and three series of photographs present images that are devoid of sentiment yet deeply humane, intimate in their focus on everyday situations while reflective of broader global conditions through their historically grounded approach.The catalog includes over one hundred images in full color, essays by exhibition curator Sabine Eckmann and art historian Matthias Michalka, and an interview with Lockhart conducted by filmmaker James Benning.
Paper $40.00 2010 ISBN: 9780936316291 | Distributed by University of Chicago Press

Allison Smith: Needle Work

Allison Smith

Contemporary artist Allison Smith’s diverse creative practice critically engages with popular forms of historical reenactment through a variety of mediums. For the core of Allison Smith: Needle Work, the artist used art supplies found at local fabric and craft retail stores to create contemporary revisions of European and American gas masks dating from World War I and beyond . From there she explored a range of related masklike forms in which the ghoulish and the foolish, the horrific and the playful intertwine, drawing into question essential notions of camouflage and masquerade. The project also includes staged photographic portraits of the remade masks and a set of silk parachutes printed with a pattern of research images the artist collected of early masks. This color illustrated exhibition catalog includes an essay by Wendy Vogel in which she considers Smith’s project in relation to key notions put forth by Peter Sloterdijk in his Terror from the Air. The volume also features interviews with the artist about her creative practice and with exhibition curator Lauren Adams, assistant professor of art at Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.
Paper $15.00 2010 ISBN: 9780936316307 | Distributed by University of Chicago Press

Chance Aesthetics
Meredith Malone

Winner of the Midwest Art History Society Award for Outstanding Catalogue for 2009
Chance Aesthetics embraces the role played by chance in modernist art from the beginning of the twentieth century through the early 1970s. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Kemper Art Museum, this volume brings together a broad range of artistic practices that replace active decision-making with the unexpected possibilities inherent in accident and random influence. Dropping pieces of cut paper onto a surface and gluing them down where they lay; dripping or flinging paint across a canvas; letting the progressive decay of organic materials determine a composition; and flipping coins to compose a musical scores— these are some of the processes used by artists included in the volume that both tap into the creative potential of chance and control its operation.
Cloth $35.00 2009 ISBN: 9780936316277 | Distributed by University of Chicago Press

Metabolic City

Heather Woofter

Metabolic City surveys work by the British collective Archigram; the Japanese Metabolists (whose members include Fumihiko Maki, architect of the Kemper Art Museum); and the Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys, an early member of the Situationist International. This publication explores these group’s plans, models and conceptual projects.
Brochure $5.00 2009

The Barbizon School and the Nature of Landscape

Rachel Keith

Rejecting the traditional artistic conventions of academic landscape painting, such as the Ideal, the Pastoral, and the Heroic, artists in the Barbizon School strived instead to depict an unmediated vision of nature. This brochure explores how the Barbizon region of France appealed to these artists for both its diverse landscapes and its reputation as an unspoiled natural haven. Color illustrations are featured of Museum works by Corot, Durand, Inness, and others.
Brochure $5.00 2008

Thaddeus Strode: Absolutes and Nothings
Sabine Eckmann and Meredith Malone
with a contribution by Benajmin Weissman

Thaddeus Strode's vibrant large-scale paintings are universes unto themselves: wild mash-ups of California surf and skateboard culture, Zen philosophy, rock music, literature, film, and comic books. Absolutes and Nothings marks the artist's first major museum show, presented as part of the Kemper Art Museum's Contemporary Projects series. Strode's images draw on a wealth of motifs inspired by a broad range of sources in popular culture, freely combined with the artist's own creations. The strength and visual pleasure of Strode's aesthetic come from his self-reflexive combination of painterly styles and incongruous elements, in which enigmatic texts, phantoms, monsters, and castaways play off one another to produce cryptic--and captivating--fantasies. Including over two dozen full-color images of works from 2001 to the present, as well as essays by Sabine Eckmann, Meredith Malone, and Benjamin Weissman, Absolutes and Nothings is a fascinating premier monograph from one of our most vital and exciting contemporary visual artists.
Cloth $30.00 2008 ISBN: 978-0-936316-24-6 | Distributed by University of Chicago Press

On the Margins
Carmon Colangelo
with essays by Eleanor Heartney and Paul Krainak

War and disaster have shaped the first years of the twenty-first century, both in the United States and throughout the world. On the Margins brings together a culturally diverse group of international artists whose work addresses contemporary social and political conditions through a wide spectrum of styles and media. The exhibition aims in part at underscoring the contrast between the realities of disaster and how they are presented--what we see and what we don't seethrough the lens of today's media. All of the works in the show were created in the last seven years. Through a range of aesthetic strategies and effects, from the confrontational, to the humorous, to the quietly elegiac, they consider the ways in which war and conflict around the world impact--or fail to impact--our everyday life. A diverse lineup of artists is included: Adel Abidin, Laylah Ali, Paolo Canevari, Enrique Chagoya, Willie Cole, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Willie Doherty, Jane Hammond, Martha Rosler, and Do-Ho Suh. The exhibition was curated by Carmon Colangelo, and the catalog includes essays by Eleanor Heartney and Paul Krainak addressing the themes and artworks in the exhibition, as well as an illustrated checklist and artist biographies.
Cloth $30.00 2008 ISBN: 978-0-936316-24-6 | Distributed by University of Chicago Press

Beauty and the Blonde
Catharina Manchanda

As an icon of beauty and object of desire, the blonde has captivated the American public for nearly a century. Beauty and the Blonde critically examines representations of the blonde during three formative decades of American cultural history. The brochure investigates how representations of blondeness in popular culture were appropriated and reexamined by American artists in painting, sculpture, film, and photography.
Brochure $5.00 2007

Window | Interface
Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick
with a contribution by Anne Fritz

Windows both connect and divide interior and exterior, public and private spaces. Interfaces update the function of the window in today's world of omnipresent screens and digital information. Window | Interface explores how artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Cerith Wyn Evans, Monika Fleischmann, Kirsten Geisler, Pierre Huyghe, Richard Long, and others have addressed the role of windows and interfaces as mediums of perception and transport. The book investigates art that explores the limits of the body in relation to the surrounding world and reveals the embodied character of human experience.
Paper $15.00 2007 ISBN: 978-0-936316-22-2 | Distributed by University of Chicago Press

Andrea Fraser, "What do I, as an artist, provide?"

Meredith Malone

Since the mid-1980s, Andrea Fraser has achieved a certain renown for her work in critiquing institutions and dramatizing the relationship between art and its audiences. Influenced by feminism, psychoanalysis, appropriation, and site-specificity, Fraser's practice has often centered on sociological performance and discursive analysis of various art world positions: the docent, the curator, the visitor, the dealer, the collector, the critic, the art historian, and, as the title of this exhibition suggests, the artist. This exhibition brochure includes ten images and an essay from curator Meredith Malone exploring the themes and impact of Fraser's work.
Brochure $5.00 2007

Reality Bites: Making Avant-garde Art in Post-Wall Germany
Edited by Sabine Eckmann
with essays by Diedrich Diederichsen, Beate Kemfert, Gertrud Koch, Lutz Koepnick, Iain Whyte, and Sabine Eckmann

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989 instigated a new era of German history, rapidly--yet profoundly--altering everyday German life. Reality Bites investigates the effect of that historical context, identifying the new kinds of work that have grown out of it, full of strategies and materials borrowed from and referring back to one kind of recent German reality or another, aesthetic exploration of experience in which the themes of reality and history take on increased meaning. This representative selection of about 70 pieces created since 1989 includes work from Franz Ackermann, Kutlug Ataman, Cosima von Bonin, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Bernhard Garbert, Isa Genzken, Beate Gütschow, Rudolf Herz, Sabine Hornig, Christian Jankowski, André Korpys & Markus Löffler, Ulrike Kuschel, Eva Leitolf, Via Lewandowsky, Michel Majerus, Mariele Neudecker, Olaf Nicolai, Marcel Odenbach, Manfred Pernice, Daniel Pflumm, rude_architecture (Friedrich von Borries, Gesa Glück, Tobias Neumann), Silke Schatz, Gregor Schneider, Collier Schorr, Renata Stih & Frieder Schnock, and Wolfgang Tillmans.
Cloth $55.00 2007 ISBN: 3775719067 | Copublished with Hatje Cantz

[Grid < > Matrix]
Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick
with contributions by Gwyneth Cliver and Patience Graybill

[Grid < > Matrix] traces two different but closely related modes of organizing the visible world and its aesthetic representations. In analog cultures, the notion of the grid empowers the production of images that claim universal authority. Most often static in nature, grid-like structures, spaces, and images approach the viewer as immediately recognizable and hence devoid of unwanted surprises. Digitally-based matrices, by way of contrast, set the modernist grid into motion. They have the ability to catalyze visual expressions and experiences that, in spite of their algorithmic foundations, aim at open-ended and often unpredictable transformation. Grid and matrix, as presented in this exhibition, form a central dialectic of modernist and postmodernist culture. Featuring two essays, one by each of the exhibition curators, the publication's aim is not to tell a story of linear historical progress, but to explore continuities and ruptures between the analog and the digital, between the organizational principles of older and newer media.
Paper $15.00 2006 ISBN: 0-936316-20-9 | Distributed by University of Chicago Press

Models and Prototypes
Catharina Manchanda

As a preparatory step, models have always occupied a special place in the context of artistic production. This changed in the twentieth century when many artists set out to redefine the parameters of art and artistic production. With new artistic objectives, structural and conceptual models emerged as complete and viable works of art in and of themselves. Beginning in the 1910s, the model--conceived as a system defined by a set of rules--became increasingly important, as did boxes, model-scale display cases, and architectural maquettes. Marcel Duchamp and many Conceptual artists of the 1960s radically challenged existing definitions of the artwork with the help of structural and conceptual models and the emergence of an emphasis on multiples. The centrality of models for contemporary artists, many of whom are also interested in social and historical issues, presses the question of why they became and remain such compelling subject and tool. Models and Prototypes includes artwork by Mark Bennett, Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, Thomas Demand, Marcel Duchamp, Isa Genzken, Jenny Holzer, Wassily Kandinsky, Claus Oldenburg, Edward Ruscha, and Katrin Sigurdadottir, among others.
Paper: $15.00 2006 ISBN: 0-936316-19-5 | Distributed by University of Chicago Press

Inside Out Loud: Visualizing Women's Health in Contemporary Art
Janine Mileaf
with contributions by Barbara Baumgartner, Isabelle Graw, Jodi Kovach, Zoe Leonard, Catherine Lord, Claire Ruud, and Claire Vancik

The full-color exhibition catalog, Inside Out Loud: Women's Health in Contemporary Art, features a central essay by Mileaf, “The Subjects of Women's Health,” and a forward by Mark S. Weil, Ph.D., the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts and director of both the Kemper Art Museum and the Sam Fox Arts Center. The volume also includes a 10-page timeline — organized by Barbara Baumgartner, Ph.D., associate director of the Program in Women and Gender Studies in Arts & Sciences — of women's health over the last 400 years; excerpts from Catherine Lord's online diary The Summer of Her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation; and the first English translation of a 1991 interview with artist and activist Zoe Leonard.
Paper $25.00 2004 ISBN: 0-936316-18-7

H. W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis
Sabine Eckmann
with contributions by Bradley Fratello, George V. Speer, and H.W. Janson

This catalog accompanies the exhibition H.W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis. The exhibition highlights paintings and sculptures by such artists as Beckmann, Gris, Picasso, Alexander Calder, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró that were instrumental to Janson's understanding of modern art, as well as later purchases including works by Dubuffet, Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Mardsen Hartley. The catalog illustrates the works in the exhibition as well as many other objects Janson acquired. In addition to Sabine Eckmann's essay on H.W. Janson, it includes texts that explore the reception of modern art, and a lecture heretofore unpublished by the late H.W. Janson.
Cloth $50 2002 ISBN: 1-58821-106-1 | Copublished with Salander-O'Reilly Galleries

A Gallery of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis
Joseph Ketner
with essays by contributing authors

This publication surveys Washington University's outstanding art collection, by focusing on 85 "masterpieces" which document the collection's most significant 19th- and 20th-century artworks. There are essays by 53 scholars interpreting artwork by Breton, Corot, Daumier and others.
Cloth $50.00 1994 ISBN: 0-936316-16-0
Paper $40.00 1994 ISBN: 0-936316-16-0