David WOJNAROWICZ
History Keeps Me Awake at Night
This engaging and richly illustrated book comprehensively examines the life and art of David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992), who came to prominence in New York’s East Village art world of the 1980s, actively embracing all media and forging an expansive range of work both fiercely political and highly personal. [publisher’s note]
Published by Yale University Press, 2018
Design by Garrick Gott
Monographs / Exhibition Catalogues
Richard Roe is the fictional memoir of a legal person, published by Sternberg Press and designed by Luke Gould. The name is one of the oldest used in English law when the real name of someone is withheld, or when a corpse can’t be identified. Richard Roe is a known unknown, a one-size-fits-all, a potentially everyone and actually no one.
Divided into seven fragmentary sections, this memoir gives voice to the legal fictions that influence terms of selfhood, politics and economics. On the occasion of this launch, Coburn will read excerpts from the book exploring concepts of personhood from legal, psychological, and metaphysical realms.
Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net. Please note: events at Swiss Institute are limited capacity, and entry is on a first-come, first-served basis.
Walker Evans is an American photographer who is known for his striking images of the Great Depression. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are “literate, authoritative, and transcendent”. Today is his 115th birthday.
A new book by Mark Wigley, Cutting Matta-Clark is published earlier this year by Lars Muller. It investigates Matta-Clark and his mythical notion of anarchitecture.
Back in 2011, exactly a decade after the tragedy, a contemporary art show titled “September 11” was open in MoMA PS1. While many other cultural institutions across the States exhibited heavy sentimentalism in their commemorative events, Peter Eleey, curator of the ‘September 11’, adopted a much sober approach, deliberately shying away from any images of the towers, the plane, the smoke and the wreckage. Instead, the exhibition presents only one work made in direct response to the attacks by Ellsworth Kelly, in which the artist proposes to cover the Ground Zero with a simple mound of glass, and another 70 works by 41 artists largely made prior to the event.
Images of the attacks, Eleey argues, ‘were political images from the moment of their making’ and that is why they were not included. The gesture of remembrance without subsuming oneself under the mainstream rhetoric of jingoism was something the show had taught us.
Here is a review of the exhibition by Steven Stern from Frieze.com.
Ellsworth Kelly, Ground Zero, 2003, image courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art
Photo by Marianne Barcellona/ Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Photograph by Gordon Parks © 2015 Calder Foundation, New York / DACS / Art Resource, NY
via rubiks.com
