Publications
Ericka Beckman: Double Reverse
Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1995
Edgar Arceneaux Written in Smoke and Fire
The MIT List Visual Arts Center is heavily invested in furthering scholarship on contemporary art and artists through publishing catalogues in conjunction with our exhibitions. The following is a reverse chronological list of exhibition catalogues offered by the List Center, dating back to 1980.
Readers will note that most catalogues published by the List Center include installation photos from the exhibition.
Publications may be purchased in the gallery, or charged by phone or e-mail (please note: we currently accept MasterCard and Visa only).
To purchase a catalogue, or for more information, contact: Theresa Silver at (617) 253-9479.
Ericka Beckman: Double Reverse
2020, Hirmer Publishers
Since the mid-1970s, Ericka Beckman (b. 1951, Hampstead, NY) has forged a signature visual language in film, video, installation, and photography. Often shot against black, spatially ambiguous back drops, her moving image works are structured according to the logic of child’s play, games, folklore, or fairy tales, and populated by archetypical characters and toy-like props in bright, primary colours. Throughout her work, Beckman engages profound questions of gender, role-playing, competition, power and control.
The publication will include selected works spanning thirty years of Beckman’s career, providing the first opportunity to survey her contribution to the art world. With new scholarly essays on Beckman’s work that offer an art-historical consideration of her early Super-8 Films and a critical situating of the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with the structures of games, gambling, and capitalism, the exhibition catalogue contextualizes Beckman’s practice on the occasion of this major survey exhibition. More than 20 colour images in the catalogue include photo- documentation of Beckman’s works since 1983 and installation views of the MIT List Center exhibition.
Contributions by Henriette Huldisch, Piper Marshall, Shelby Shaw, and Selby Nimrod.
ISBN: 978-3-7774-3304-2, 92 pages, 248 colour illustrations
Tony Conrad: A Retrospective
2019, Koenig Books
Including new texts and Conrad’s own writings about selected works dating from 1966 to 2016, Introducing Tony Conrad surveys the artist’s work in painting, sculpture, film, video, performance and installation. It includes the artist’s early structural films; projects in which he treated film as a sculptural and performative material; his series of Invented Acoustical Tools, presented as sculptures themselves; his ambitious films about power relations, set in the military and in prison; and his final sculptures and installations, which evoke and critique what he perceived as an emerging culture of surveillance, control and containment.
Edited with text by Cathleen Chaffee. Text by Rachel Adams, Vera Alemani, Constance DeJong, Diedrich Diederichsen, Anthony Elms, David Grubbs, Henriette Huldisch, Branden W. Joseph, Andrew Lampert, Christopher Müller, Annie Ochmanek, Tony Oursler, Tina Rivers Ryan, Jay Sanders, Paige Sarlin, Christopher Williams.
ISBN 9783960983361
Paperback, 7.75 x 11 in. / 304 pgs / 125 color / 125 bw.Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1995
2018, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Hirmer Verlag
Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1995 shines a spotlight on a historical moment and a body of work in the history of video art that has been largely overlooked since its inception. This catalogue publication produced in conjunction with the exhibition explores the connections between our current moment and the era when video art was transformed dramatically with the entry of large-scale, cinematic installation into the gallery space. It provides a reevaluation of monitor-based sculpture since the 1970s and serves to complement a tightly focused survey of works that have been rarely seen in the last twenty years. Artists featured in the exhibition and publication include: Dara Birnbaum, Ernst Caramel, Takahiko Iimura, Shigeko Kubota, Mary Lucier, Muntadas, Tony Oursler, Nam June Paik, Friederike Petzold, Adrian Piper, Diana Thater, and Maria Vedder. This publication featurestexts by Edith Decker-Phillips, exhibition curator Henriette Huldisch and Emily Watlington.
ISBN 978-3-7774-3067-6
(143 pgs, softcover, color and b&w illustrations)Villa Design Group Tragedy Machine
2018, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Mousse Publishing
The work of Villa Design Group – Than Hussein Clark, James Connick, and William Joys — draws on the formal languages of architecture, theater, and the decorative arts. Tragedy Machine, by imagining a form for the automated creation of dramatic scripts, considers the speculative possibilities of “queer objects.” This exuberant catalogue features an essay by the exhibition curator, Alise Upitis, and conversation between VDG and Bonnie Honing, Nathalie Du Pasquier, and Miriam Leonard. It follows the first institutional show of the group at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, in 2016, where the architectural installation doubled as the setting for premiering This Is It or Dawn at Bar Bazukha, a four-act adaptation of The Iceman Cometh (1939) by Eugene O’Neill.
Edited by Alice Upitis and Villa Design Group. Texts by Alise Upitis, Villa Design Group, Bonnie Honing, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Miriam Leonard
ISBN (MIT List Visual Arts Center): 978-0-938437-536 ISBN (Mousse Publishing): 978-88-6749-314-2
(114 pages, hardcover, color illustrations)Edgar Arceneaux Written in Smoke and Fire
2017, MIT List Visual Arts Center
This catalogue was published in conjunction with the List Center’s exhibition Edgar Arceneaux Written in Smoke and Fire which was on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center October 14, 2016-July 8, 2017. Arceneaux’s work in installation, sculpture, drawing, photography, and video, draws inspiration from a wide-ranging set of sources: American history, astronomy, science-fiction, architecture, music, and movies. His solo exhibition at the List Center presented three major, interlocking projects that reflected on history and remembrance, and considered how specific national, cultural narratives change over time.
This is Arceneaux’s most comprehensive institutional catalogue to date and features an introduction by exhibition curator Henriette Huldisch; Arceneaux’s own reflection on his body of work A Book and a Medal; and two two critical essays by Adrienne Edwards, curator at large at the Walker Art Center and curator for Performa, New York and art historian and critic Phil Taylor.
ISBN-10 0-938437-04-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-93847-04-08
(117 pgs, softcover, color illustrations)An Inventory of Shimmers: Objects of Intimacy in Contemporary Art
2017, MIT List Visual Arts Center | Delmonico Books | Prestel
This publication was produced in conjunction with the exhibition An Inventory of Shimmers: Objects of Intimacy in Contemporary Art which was organized by Henriette Huldisch, curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
This group exhibition brings together twelve international artists and works that variously investigate our intimate relationships with objects; that act as vehicles for affective engagement or transactions of desire, including by carrying the traces of things we can’t see but have to trust, intuit, or perceive in ways that are not related to vision or hearing; and that are engaged with actions of interpersonal care, trust, intimacy, or love.
Featured artists include Andrea Büttner, Sophie Calle, Alejandro Cesarco, Jason Dodge, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Antonia Hirsch, Jill Magid, Park McArthur, Lisa Tan, Erika Vogt, Susanne M. Winterling, and Anicka Yi.ISBN 978-3-7913-5611-2 (96 pgs, 25 color, 4 b&w)
Charlotte Moth Travelogue
2017, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein and
This flexicover book, co-published by Snoeck and Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, is the first comprehensive monographic publication on the work of Paris based artist Charlotte Moth (b. 1978) This publication coincides with Moth’s first US museum exhibition Seeing while Moving at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Charlotte Moth sets out to discover the mysterious in the familiar, focusing her attention on the spaces and objects with which we live. She uses photography and film, slide projections, and sculptural arrangements to explore the conditions of perceiving materiality in space and time. Travelogue brings together photographs of Moth s researches since 1999 (alongside texts by Eva Birkenstock, Penelope Curtis, Kasia Redzisz, and the artist herself). Moth - educated at the Royal College of Art, London - often chooses architectural icons or art-historical topics as the subjects of her projects: her travels have brought her to Ibiza on the trail of the late Dadaist Raoul Hausman, and to St. Ives, England, where she visited the studio of British sculptor Barbara Hepworth.
ISBN 978-3-86442-188-4 (244 pgs, color and b&w illustrations)
Gwenneth Boelens In Two Minds
2017, Roma
In Two Minds documents Gwenneth Boelens’ practice of the past ten years, comprising photography and sculpture, as well as performative and filmic works. An extensive chapter of notes, written by her partner and editor Nickel van Duijvenboden, illuminates Boelens’ work and evolving attitudes from an intimate and studious perspective. Conversations and reflections are punctuated by a rich vein of illustrations and process images, as well as citations from twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Published in 2014 this catalog is offered in conjunction with Boelens’ 2017 MIT List Visual Arts Center exhibition At Odds.
978 94 91843 09 9 (120 pgs)
The Color Out of Space
2016, Dancing Foxes Press | MIT List Visual Arts Center | EMPAC Rensselaer
The work of Rosa Barba (born 1972), encompassing sculpture, installation, text-based wall works, and publications, probes the precarious relationships between historical record, personal anecdote, and fictional narrative. The Color Out of Space takes as its point of departure a film that expands into outer space the artist’s ongoing interrogation of geologic time as measured against the span of a human lifetime. This publication was published in conjunction with the MIT List Visual Art Center’s 2015 exhibition Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space and features essays by Victoria Brooks, Henriette Huldisch, and Gloria Sutton. It was edited by Henriette Huldisch, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schroeder; design by Filiep Tacq.
ISBN 978-09853377-97 (96 pgs, 44 illustrations)
First Light: Tala Madani
2016, DelMonico Prestel
For more than a decade, Tala Madani has developed a practice centered on playful yet provocative representations of men. In paintings, drawings, and stop-motion animation, Madani creates deadpan and often hilarious satirical works that both mock virility and redistribute the dynamics of power. This book includes essays by exhibition curators Kelly Shindler and Henriette Huldisch that consider Madani’s treatment of light, her film work, and a conversation between Madani and artist A. L. Steiner.
Published by the Contemporary Art Musuem St. Louis, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and DelMonico Books Prestel
ISBN 978-3-7913-5590-0 (88 pages, 23,0 x 27,0 cm, 65 color illustrations, hardcover)
Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige/The Rumors of the World: Rethinking Trust in the Age of the Internet
2015, Sternberg Press
This book traces the work and research of filmmakers and visual artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige into junk and spam e-mails, specifically advance fee frauds and scam messages. Here, the artists unfold material that they have collected since 1999, focusing on the way that personal narratives are formed and articulated in a post-digital age. This work funcitons as a jumping-off point for a broader discussion by leading scholars and thinkers on the nature of power and trust in the age of the Internet. Underlying this is an interrogation of faith: How has trust been recpomposed by the Internt, and equally how does the traditional practice of faith question the way that individuals relate to each other online.
The Rumors of the World: Rethinking Trust in the Age of the Internet, is edited by Omar Kholeif and published by Sternberg Press, in association with Villa Arson, Nice, France: HOME, Manchester, UK; and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, USA. The publication features contributions from the artists and Nicolas Auray, Finn Brunton, Norman M. Klein, Franck Leibovici, Éric Mangion, Laura U. Marks, Sarah Perks, Jacques Rancière, Uzma Z. Rizvi, and Rasha Salti.ISBN 978-3-95679-119-2 (240 pages, 128 color ill., softcover)
Library
2015, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Torpedo Press
In conjunction with the exhibition List Projects: Lina Viste Grønli, the List Center and Torpedo Press have published an artist’s book, Library. The book includes writings by the artist and an essay on statistical linguistics by exhibition curator Alise Upitis.
ISBN: 978-82-93104-18-6 (61 pgs, b/w, edition of 250)
Joan Jonas: They Come to Us without a Word
2015, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Gregory R. Miller & Co.
In conjunction with Joan Jonas’s project for the US Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, the MIT List Visual Arts Center has produced They Come to Us without a Word. Designed in close collaboration with Jonas herself, the book features an extensive collection of images selected by the artist, including stills, drawings and photographs. Also included is a foreword by Paul C. Ha (Director, List Visual Arts Center); essays by Ann Reynolds and Marina Warner; a major new text by Jonas; and an interview with the artist by Ingrid Schaffner.
ISBN 978-1-941366-07-03 Cloth, 12 x 8 inches, 180 pgs, 160 color
Anicka Yi: 6,070,430K of Digital Spit
2015, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Mousse Publishing
In conjunction with Anicka Yi’s exhibition, the List Center has produced the artist’s first catalog, 6,070,430K of Digital Spit. The book includes an exchange between Caroline A. Jones (Professor of Art History, MIT) and Yi on scent, ethnicity, and symbiotic microorganisms; an essay on networks and extravisual means by Johanna Burton (Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum, New York); and an essay by book editor and exhibition curator Alise Upitis on the irreducible ambiguity of Yi’s work.
ISBN 9788867491315 100 pgs, color
In the Holocene
2015, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Sternberg Press
Contributions by Berenice Abbott, Leonor Antunes, Marcel Broodthaers, Roger Callois, Hanne Darboven and Lucy R. Lippard, Eric Duyckaerts, Max Frisch, Frederich Froebel, Joao Maria Gusmao and Pedro Paiva, Florian Hecker and Quintin Meillasoux, Alfred Jarry, On Kawara, John Latham, Sol LeWitt, F. T. Marinetti, Daria Martin, Mario Merz, Helen Mirra, Man Ray, Ben Rivers and Mark von Schlegell, Pamela Rosenkranz and Erik Wysocan, Robert Smithson, Paul Valéry, Iannis Xenakis. Edited by João Ribas
In the Holocene is based on a 2012 group exhibition of the same name at the MIT List Visual Arts Center that explored art as a speculative science, investigating principles more commonly associated with scientific or mathematical thought. Through the work of an intergenerational group of artists, the exhibition and book propose that art acts as an investigative and experimental form of inquiry, addressing or amending what is explained through traditional scientific or mathematical means: entropy, matter, time (cosmic, geological), energy, topology, mimicry, perception, consciousness, et cetera. Sometimes employing scientific methodologies or the epistemology of science, other times investigating phenomena not restricted to any scientific discipline, art can be seen as a form of inquiry into the physical and natural world. In this sense, both art and science share an interest in knowledge, realism, and observable phenomena, yet are subject to different logics, principles of reasoning, and conclusions.
Works by Berenice Abbott, John Baldessari, Rosa Barba, Robert Barry, Uta Barth, Joseph Beuys, Alighiero Boetti, Carol Bove, Marcel Broodthaers, Matthew Buckingham, Hanne Darboven, Thea Djordjadze, Aurélien Froment, Terry Fox, Laurent Grasso, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, Rashid Johnson, Kitty Kraus, Germaine Kruip, Daria Martin, John McCracken, Trevor Paglen, Man Ray, Ben Rivers, Pamela Rosenkranz, Robert Smithson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Georges Vantongerloo, Lawrence WeinerISBN 978-3-943365-52-8
380 pages, 19 b/w and 47 color ill., softcover with dust jacketThe Very Quick of the Word
2014, Sternberg Press
Ken Okiishi’s artwork has explored the subject in between digital and continuous space, the changing nature of authorship, memory, and perception, and the indeterminacy of consciousness as it clashes with the strictures of technology. He has engaged seminal works by figures including Woody Allen, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, Stephen Spielberg, David Wojnarowicz, Jacques Demy, and Larry Clark (and the histories and personalities that circulate around these cultural products), infusing them with autobiographical and technological elements that reframe them through the incongruity of “real life.” While working on the exhibitions at MIT and CCS Bard that occasion this publication, Okiishi realized a radical material rupture in his work, as linguistic and bodily glitches became registered both inside and outside the screen, and the surface of media itself became the support surface for weirdly gestural paintings. This series of works, titled gesture/data, was first exhibited at CCS Bard and, most recently, was exhibited to great acclaim at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. This book is the first instance of considering Okiishi’s work from the last fifteen years as a heterogeneous whole. Contributions by Ken Okiishi, Annie Godfrey Larmon, and MIT List Center curator Alise Upitis.
This publication takes the format of the exhibition catalogue—as a carrier for the circulation of texts and images—as a format in crisis. The physical book appears here as a dummy that is loaded with various files, many appearing as the glitchy in-between that we have become accustomed to as files load on so many different devices and scales of screens. Included in this mass of files is Annie Godfrey Larmon’s thesis on the work of Ken Okiishi (the first in-depth study of the artist’s work), a new text by Alise Upitis on computing and the conditions of translation, images from Okiishi’s series gesture/data (2013–ongoing), and a screenplay book of Okiishi’s 2010 runaway hit, (Goodbye to) Manhattan.
The Very Quick of the Word is published in conjunction with Ken Okiishi’s exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center (July 16–September 1, 2013) and the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (March 24–May 26, 2013).
Design by Ken OkiishiISBN 978-3-95679-064-5
160 pages, 8 b/w and 81 color ill., softcoverHelen Mirra: Edge Habitat Materials
2014, Whitewalls/Distributed by the University of Chicago Press
Edge Habitat Materials is a survey of all works made by Helen Mirra between 1995-2009. The book, in the form of a binder, includes texts by Bradin Cormack on walking as minimal aesthetic practice, Tom Wessels on beavers abandoning their ponds, and portions of Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura’s translation of Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. The survey is organized according to primary material—rock, wood, textile, and usw (un so weiter)—and includes line drawings by Mirra of certain of her works. Additions to the book–sent intermittently to readers who mail in a postcard included in the book–include texts by Liz Kotz, Yuri Tsivian, and Alise Upitis, as well as a cloth bookmarker made by Mirra. Models for this publication include The Audubon Society’s Field Guide to North American Mushrooms (1981), Daniel Spoerri’s An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (1966), and Richard Tuttle’s Small Sculptures of the 70s (1998). Edge Habitat Materials is produced by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and edited by List Assistant Curator Alise Upitis.
ISBN 978-0-945323-25-9
150 b&w pgs, 90 die cut; 2 postcards, additions to followSonia Almeida: Forward / Play / Pause
2014, MIT List Visual Arts Center
This limited edition artist’s book was produced on the occasion of Sonia Almeida’s first U.S. solo exhibiiton, Forward/Play/Pause, at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. The work of Sonia Almeida explores the disjunction between our phenomenal experience of color and the ways in which the scientific analysis of color is thought to provide facts about reality. In doing so, Almeida explores the limits of abstraction, as well as how elements traditionally associated with other mediums and disciplines—such as film and textiles, translation and information—can be operative in painting. Her artist’s book features full color reproductions of images from her sketchbooks or graphical notebooks, as well as a text by MIT List Assistant Curator Alise Upitis. Artist’s Book in an edition of 1000.
ISBN 9780938437802
96 pages plus two page supplement, 96 colorJoachim Koester: Of Spirits and Empty Spaces
2014, Mousse Publishing
Starting in the mid-1990s, Joachim Koester developed an oeuvre that could be described as a complex web in which journalistic and historical research fuses with personal and fictive narratives. He belongs to an artists’ generation whose practices are based on what Hal Foster once described as the “archival approach.” Balancing the thin line between documentary and fiction, Koester’s films, photos, and installations reexamine and activate forgotten histories, failed utopias, and the obsolete. In his work, bygone counter-cultural movements reemerge in the same way that geographical and spiritual journeys are retraced. Thomas Caron, ed., Texts by Thomas Caron, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Christopher Pinney, Clara Schulmann, Catherine Wood, and Joachim Koester.
Joachim Koester: Of Spirits and Empty Spaces is published to accompany five independent, complementary exhibitions of the work of Joachim Koester, at Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne; List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; S.M.A.K., Ghent; and Centre d’Art Contemporain, Genève.ISBN 9788867490882
352 pages, English Hardcover, 16.5 x 23.5Amalia Pica
2013, MIT List Visual Arts Center and MCA Chicago
This volume accompanies the first major solo museum exhibition in the United States of the work of Argentinean-born, London-based artist Amalia Pica (born 1978). Pica explores metaphor, communication and civic participation through drawings, sculptures, large-scale photographic prints, slide projections, live performances and installations. Using simple materials such as photocopies, light bulbs, drinking glasses, beer bottles, bunting and cardboard, Pica creates work that is both formally beautiful and conceptually rigorous. Pica is particularly interested in the limits and failures of language and human communication, and the ways in which thought translates to action, idea to object. Amalia Pica is the fourth volume in MCA Chicago’s MCA Monographs series and features essays by writer Ana Teixeira Pinto and writer and curator Tirdad Zolghadr as well as an interview with the artist and exhibition co-organizers MIT List Curator João Ribas and MCA Pamela Alper Curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm.
ISBN 9781938922114
112 pgs, 60 color, 15 b&wCheyney Thompson: Metric, Pedestal, Landlord, Cabengo, Récit
2013, Koening Books, London
This publication was produced on the occasion of Cheyney Thompson’s first monographic museum survey Metric, Pedestal, Landlord, Cabengo, Récit at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Cheyney Thompson has made the technology, production and distribution of painting the subject of his work. His Chronochromes (2009-2011) are composed using the color system devised by Albert H. Munsell in the early 1900s. Thompson grafts this system onto a calendar: each day is assigned a complementary hue pair, with every hour changing the value, and every month changing the saturation, of each brushstroke. The catalogue features texts by Simon Baier, Yve-Alain Bois, Ann Lauterbach and MIT List Curator João Ribas.
ISBN 9783863351540
200 pgs, 104 color, 52 b&wAlan Uglow: Standards and Portraits
2013, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Working in series that evolved gradually over decades, Alan Uglow (1941-2011) maintained an abiding focus on formal economy, using simple geometrical shapes to structure the surface of his canvases and emphasizing the materiality of painting rather than direct pictorial content. The exhibition Alan Uglow: Standards and Portraits at the MIT List Visual Arts Center presents two of the artist’s most important series, Standardsand Portraits, both centered on his decades-long investigation into the medium of painting. This publication produced in conjunction with the exhibition features an essay by Molly Warnock, assistant professor of Art History at Emory University, Atlanta.
ISBN 9780938437796
Softcover, 18 pgs, 1 color, 1 b&wNairy Baghramian: Boats Magazine
2012, Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg Berlin
In her investigation of sculptural form, Nairy Baghramian uses disparate tropes and motifs drawn from a variety of sources—from interior design to physiology—in her investigation of sculptural form. For her commissioned installation at the List, Baghramian abstracts materials and forms derived from utilitarian and maritime objects, drawing out the formal and creative processes that define notions of the ‘sculptural.’ This limited edition catalog, disguised as an upscale boating magazine was produced on the occasion of Baghramian receiving the 2012 Hector Art Prize. Edited by Thomas Köllhofer, Ulrike Lorenz with text by André Rottmann.
ISBN 9783868283440
Softcover, 78 pgs, 132 color illustrations, German/EnglishOtto Piene: Lichtballett
2011, MIT List Visual Arts Center
A leading figure in multimedia and technology-based art, Otto Piene was a founder, with Heinz Mack, of the influential Düsseldorf-based Group Zero in the late 1950s. This publication highlights the artist’s ongoing exploration of light as an artistic and communicative medium. Piene’s Lichtballett (light ballet) performances, first produced using hand-operated lights directed through perforated stencils, became mechanized in the 1960s. The artist’s light sculptures consisted of motorized lamps, grids, and discs producing a flow of projected light; these machines evolved into kinetic sculptural environments of mechanized effects through the 1960s and ’70s. Featuring Piene’s own writings on light as an artistic medium, an essay by art historian Michelle Y. Kuo, and an interview with curator João Ribas, Otto Piene: Lichtballett documents the artist’s pioneering investigation of art and technology.
ISBN 9780938437789
96 pages, b/w, features a die-cut coverHans Haacke 1967
2011, MIT List Visual Arts Center
When invited to do a solo exhibition at MIT in 1967, Hans Haacke was known as a “kinetic” artist—yet he made it clear upon arriving that his works were now to be called “systems,” produced with the “explicit intention of having their components physically communicate with each other, and the whole communicate physically with the environment,” according to the artist’s statements in 1967. These early works involved provoking and staging time-based events: wind in water vs. water in wind; the cycles of feedback systems of organic life; the dynamism of water in its solid state—freezing, evaporating, and melting; and the production of artificial climates. The exhibition Hans Haacke 1967 brought together from Haacke’s solo 1967 exhibition together again for the first time in fourty-four years. The exhibition was organized for MIT’s List Visual Arts Center by Caroline A. Jones, professor in the History,Theory, and Criticism Program at MIT. This catalogue publication features an essay by Jones, writings by Haacke, and the first English publication of a text written by art historian and curator Edward F. Fry. Fry’s text served as the introduction to the catalogue accompanying his cancelled survey of Haacke’s work which was planned for the Solomon R. Guggenhiem Museum in New York in 1971.
ISBN 9780938437772
80 pages, color and b/wJuan Downey: The Invisible Architect
2011, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Bronx Museum of the Arts
Juan Downey: The Invisible Architect is the first US museum survey of Juan Downey. A fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies in 1973 and 1975, Downey played a significant role in the New York art scene of the 1970’s and ‘80s. The exhibition was organized by curator Valerie Smith, Head of the Department of Visual Art, Film, and Media at the Hausder Kulturen der Welt, in Berlin, Germany. The accompanying catalogue publication features essays by Gustavo Buntinx, Julieta Gonzalez, Valerie Smith, and Michael Taussig as well as interviews with: Carmen Beuchat (choreographer,dancer); Marilys Belt de Downey; Eugenio Dittborn (artist); Rick Feist, (artist and online editor); Carlos Flores Delpino (filmmaker); Stephen Fried (architect); Ismael Frigerio (artist); Frank Gillette (artist); Eva Hanhardt (Pratt Institute Professor, Center for Sustainable Design Studies); John Hanhardt (Senior Curator for Film and Media Arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum); Jim Harithas (artist, Director of the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, TX); Kirk von Heflin (filmmaker); Alfredo Jaar (artist); Beryl Korot (artist); Cristóbal Lehyt (artist); Les Levine (artist); Antoni Muntadas (artist); David Ross (curator, writer); and Bill Viola (artist).
ISBN 9780938437765
238 pages, color and b/wStan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom
2011, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston
Published on the occasion of the first museum survey of artist and filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984) at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom is the first monograph to consider his pivotal contribution to postwar media art. Exploring his investigation into the links between art, technology, and communication, the publication brings together scholarship on VanDerBeek’s pioneering films and immersive projection environments, as well as documentation of site-specific and telecommunications projects, and a critical assessment of his writing on technology and media. Essays by the exhibition’s co-curators João Ribas and Bill Arning, and VanDerBeek scholars Mark Bartlett, Jacob Proctor, Gloria Sutton, and Michael Zryd provide an overview of the artist’s influence on contemporary media practices.
ISBN 9781933619330
216 pages, color and b/wFrances Stark: This could become a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of the mind
2010, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Through both writing and visual art, Frances Stark has produced candid and affecting work about language, doubt, failure, and creative anxiety for over two decades. Stark’s writings stand as a self-reflexive inquiry into the process of artistic production, as well as the often-elided demands of daily life. Frances Stark: This could become a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of the mind, published on the occasion of her 2010-2011 exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, features a selection of the artist’s writings from 1997-2006, with margin notes by João Ribas.
ISBN 9780938437758
170 pages, b/wTavares Strachan/Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home
2010, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home, is the next phase of a new project by Bahamian-born, New York-based artist Tavares Strachan. Since 2006, Strachan has been working on a multiphase body of work that explores space and deep-sea training. “Orthostatic” means to stand upright, and “tolerance” refers to the ability to withstand pressure. Combined, the phrase refers to the physiological stress that cosmonauts and deep-sea explorers endure while exiting, and re-entering our home, the thin surface of planet Earth. The Orthostatic Tolerance comes after two years of intensive research and hands-on training that has taken the artist to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This 88 page catalogue publication documents a diverse range of Strachan’s previous and most recent works including a number of new works that were developed during Strachan’s 2009-2010 residency at MIT.
ISBN 9780938437741
88 pages, color and b/wVirtuoso Illusion: Cross Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde
2010, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Virtuoso Illusion: Cross-Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde is an investigation of cross-dressing (drag) as an artistic strategy in the development of avant-garde art. This 72 page catalogue publication explores how artists that cross-dress as part of their conceptual process have invigorated experimental art. The catalogue also features essays by Michael Rush, exhibition curator; Ara H. Merjian, Assistant Professor of Italian Studies and Art History at New York University, New York, NY; and exhibiting artist John Kelly, a performer, dancer, actor, and musician who began his career as part of New York’s East Village club scene during the 1980’s. The publication has both color and black and white illustrations. Artists featured in the catalogue include: Charles Atlas, Matthew Barney, Claude Cahun, Harriet “Harry” Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Marcel Duchamp, Michelle Handelman, John Kelly, Katarzyna Kozyra, Kalup Linzy, Ma Liuming, Manon, Pierre Molinier, Yasumasu Morimura, Brian O’Doherty, Ryan Trecartin, and Andy Warhol.
ISBN 9780938437734
72 pages, color and b/wTobias Putrih & MOS: Without Out
2009, MIT List Visual Arts Center
This catalogue publication was produced by the List Visual Arts Center in conjunction with the exhibition Tobias Putrih & MOS: Without Out. The exhibition featured a series of works created as the result of a collaboration between Slovenian artist Tobias Putrih and Michael Meredith, one of the principals in MOS, a collective of architects and designers. The publication includes color and black-and-white reproductions of key works as well as essays by Timothy Hyde, Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and Svetlana Boym, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. In addition the catalogue includes an interview with Tobias Putrih and Michael Meredith conducted by Boym.
ISBN: 978-0-938437-72-7
64 pages, color and b/wMatthew Day Jackson: The Immeasurable Distance
2009, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston
The Immeasurable Distance is a solo exhibition that includes work based on Matthew Day Jackson’s residency at MIT. His research and experiences at MIT are manifested in sculptures, paintings, objects, videos, photos, and books. Playing with themes as large as technology, nature, and God, Jackson analyzes and comments on today’s culture and the influence scientific discoveries have had on our decision-making as a society. This exhibition catalogue features essays by curator Bill Arning, science and technology curator of the MIT Museum, Deborah Douglas, author and MIT professor David Mindell, systems administrator for the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Tom Morton, and a comic strip by illustrator David Tompkins.
ISBN: 978-1933619217
99 pages, colorDavis, Cherubini: in Contention
2009, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Davis, Cherubini: in Contention focuses on the relationship that exists in artistic collaboration. Nicole Cherubini and Taylor Davis, both established artists, come together to create and share authorship of single sculptures. This exhibition catalogue documents their unique creative process and the dialogue that exists between these two artists’ understanding their own work when compared to the other’s efforts. This catalogue features an essay by curator Bill Arning and a preface by List Center director Jane Farver.
ISBN: 978-0-938437-71-2
43 pages, colorAdel Abdessemed: Situation and Practice
2008, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Adel Abdessemed: Situation and Practice features a collection of Abdessemed’s previous street “acts” as well as several works created specifically for this exhibition. Abdessemed works in video, animation, performance, and installation, taking on topics such as religion, sexuality, and more recently, global violence. While many consider his pieces performative, Abdessemed refers to his work simply as “acts” acknowledging the political implications of the term. This exhibition catalogue includes essays by List Visual Arts Center director Jane Farver; professor, author, and editor Tom McDonough; art critic, columnist, teacher, and curator Pier Luigi Tazzi; and an interview with MIT professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) Linguistic Theory, Syntax, Semantics, Philosophy of Language, Noam Chomsky, conducted by Adel Abdessemed.
ISBN: 978-0-938437-70-4
128 pages, color photos and illustrationChantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space
2008, Blaffer Gallery, Art Museum of the University of Houston; MIT List Visual Arts Center; Miami Art Museum; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis
Filmmaker and video artist Chantal Akerman in Moving Through Time and Space, presents five pieces that underscore her ability to blur the line between what we consider to be factual and what we consider to be fantasy. Organized in collaboration with the Blaffer Gallery, the Miami Art Museum, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, the exhibition features Akerman’s first museum installation De l’autre côté (From the Other Side) and her most recent installation, Les Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre (Women of Antwerp in November). This exhibition catalogue includes essays by MIT List Visual Arts Center curator Bill Arning; the Miami Art Museum executive director and chief curator Rina Carvajal; writer, editor, and independent curator Klaus Ottmann; the Blaffer Gallery director Claudia Schmuckli; and director of the Parrish Art Museum, Terrie Sultan.
ISBN: 978-0-9778028-5-2
72 pages, colorDavid Claerbout: The Shape of Time
2008, JRPRingier
The video artist David Claerbout explores time as a material through the intersection of still and moving images, challenging traditional practices by using as his unit of currency the pixel rather than the shot. Some of his works evolve from found photographs that he converts to digital images and then merges with moving footage in order to introduce time; in other works, he uses digital video footage of the changing of natural light over time to investigate what time is. This exhibition catalogue documents Claerbout’s work in great detail, from planning drawings and photographs through photographs of the works in installation. It also includes an interview of the artist by Christine Van Assche, New Media Curator at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, as well as writings by Dirk Snauwaert, Françoise Parfait, and Raymond Bellour, and a biography and a bibliography.
ISBN 978-3-905829-38-9
160 pages, color and b/w illustrationsSounding the Subject/Video Trajectories: Selections from the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection and the New Art Trust
2007, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Sounding the Subject/Video Trajectories features works drawn from the collections of Pamela and Richard Kramlich and the New Art Trust.Sounding the Subject considers the use of sound, the human voice, and theatrical performances by artists Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Stan Douglas, David Hammons, Nam June Paik, and Pipilotti Rist. This exhibition was organized by guest curators Daniel Birnbaum, Rector of the Städelschule Art Academy and Director of the Portikus Gallery in Frankfurt–am-Main, Germany, and Mechtild Widrich, Ph.D. candidate, MIT’s History, Theory, and Criticism program.
The exhibition’s theme continues in a library-format exhibition, Video Trajectories, that features works by artists that were created from the 1960s to the early 2000s. Video Trajectories was organized by guest curator Caroline A. Jones, MIT Professor, MIT’s History, Theory, and Criticism program. Video Trajectories presents time-based media works by Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Vito Acconci, Doug Aitkin, Allora & Calzadilla, John Baldessari, Dara Birnbaum, Dan Graham, Gary Hill, Joan Jonas, Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, Mariko Mori, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Pipilotti Rist, Richard Serra and Carlotta Fay Schoolman, Bill Viola, and Jane and Louise Wilson. This 80-page catalogue publication features essays by curators Daniel Birnbaum, Mechtild Widrich, and Caroline A. Jones, and introductions by Pamela and Richard Kramlich and List Center Director Jane Farver.ISBN-13: 978-0-938437-68-2, ISBN-10: 0-938437-68-2
80 pages, color and b/w illustrationsCameron Jamie Exhibition Catalogue
2007, Walker Art Center
Cameron Jamie’s work — a blend of video, sound, performance, photography and drawing — confronts the dysfunction of European and American society. His critical gaze often focuses on ritualistic practices in popular culture such as hot dog eating contests and backyard wrestling. Taking suburban phenomena of this sort as his primary material, Jamie explores the dark underbelly of the American dream in drawings, film and performance. This artist-designed exhibition catalogue features more than 60 works in various media, illuminating the artist’s process with selections from his personal archive of clippings and ephemera, as well as raw sketches for his projects. An essay by exhibition curator Philippe Vergne, a forward by Walker director Kathy Halbreich and a reprint of a poem by Charles Bukowski selected by the artist provide context for this first large-scale, museum presentation of Jamie’s work.
ISBN-10: 0935640878, ISBN-13: 978-0-935640-87-8
8.5 x 10.5 inches, 176 pages, 178 color and 73 b/w imagesMelanie Smith: Spiral City & Other Vicarious Pleasures
2006, A&R Press
English-born Melanie Smith has lived and worked in Mexico City for nearly two decades. Her work reflects the social, economic, and aesthetic patterns of the city and how these patterns translate to an artistic form. Spiral City & Other Vicarious Pleasures features paintings, photography, and video works by Melanie Smith as well as collaborations with other artists. Smith uses colors, textures, materials, and found objects from the urban environment in examining the complex and chaotic visual elements that compose the megalopolis that is Mexico City. This exhibition catalogue features text by curator Cuauhtemoc Medina, as well as contributions by Essex University art history professor Dawn Ades, author and Royal College of Art professor David Batchelor, and Mexican artist Eduardo Abaroa.
ISBN: 978-968-9056-07-2
208 pages, colorSensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art
2006, MIT Press and MIT List Visual Arts Center
The relationship between the body and electronic technology, extensively theorized through the 1980s and 1990s, has reached a new technosensual comfort zone in the early twenty-first century. In Sensorium,contemporary artists and writers explore the implications of the techno-human interface. Ten artists, chosen by an international team of curators, offer their own edgy investigations of embodied technology and the technologized body. These range from Matthieu Briand’s experiment in “controlled schizophrenia” and Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller’s uneasy psychological soundscapes to Bruce Nauman’s uncanny night visions and François Roche’s destabilized architecture. A 260-page catalogue contains a main essay by Caroline A. Jones; essays on the artists by Bill Arning, Jane Farver, Yuko Hasegawa, and Marjory Jacobson; and an Abecedarius (from “Air” to “Zoon”) that offers an extensive rethinking of the body’s relations with technology. Abecedarius entries are by Bill Arning, Caroline Bassett, Michael Bull, Zeynep Çelik, Constance Classen, Jonathan Crary, Chris Csikszentmihàlyi, Mark Doty, Joseph Dumit, Michel Foucault, Peter Galison, Donna Haraway , Martin Jay, Amelia Jones, , Hiroko Kikuchi, Stephen M. Kosslyn, Bruno Latour, Thomas Y. Levin, Peter Lunenfeld, William J. Mitchell, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Maria Stafford, Neal Stephenson, Michael Swanwick /William Gibson, Sherry Turkle, and Stephen Wilson.
ISBN-13: 978-0-262-10117-2, ISBN-10: 0-262-10117-3
color and b/w illustrations9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966
2006, MIT List Visual Arts Center
In 1966, a Bell Laboratories physicist brought a group of avant-garde artists together with 10 open-minded members of the science and technology fields for 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, a series of investigatory Happenings which took place at the 69th Regiment Armory and were duly noted by critics Lucy Lippard and Brian O’Doherty. The resulting seminal performances included John Cage’s Variations VII, in which 30 photocells were mounted around the performance space, activating a variety of sound sources — including a blender, 20 radio channels and two Geiger counters — as the performers moved around. An 88-page exhibition catalogue includes original essays by Clarisse Bardiot (researcher at Daniel Langlois Foundation), Michelle Kuo (Harvard PhD. candidate), and Catherine Morris (exhibition curator). It also includes reprinted reviews of the original performances 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering by Lucy Lippard and Brian O’Doherty, and an interview with Herb Schneider (engineer).
ISBN: 978-0-938437-69-7
color and b/w illustrationsAmerica Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler
2006, Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, MIT List Visual Arts Center, MIT Press
During their decade-long collaboration (1985-1995), Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler produced some of the most influential conceptual art projects of the time. Among their witty and stimulating installations and outdoor projects was Camouflaged History, a house painted in a U.S. Army-designed camouflage pattern using 72 commercial paint colors included in the municipally-approved “authentic colors” of historic Charleston, South Carolina. The commercial name of each paint, commemorating an aspect of the city’s history, is also painted on the house, revealing and illuminating the lingering Civil War-era past of the region. Like the Earthwork pioneers, Ericson and Ziegler took the whole country as their working space; but rather than impose a conspicuous work of art upon a site or situation, they devised projects that altered sites subtly, creating a patchwork of poetic narratives and histories to be excavated. A 216-page exhibition catalogue including descriptions of all Ericson and Ziegler projects as well as photographs and installation views of their exhibitions and previously unpublished and never-before-exhibited plans and drawings from their archives. The catalogue contains essays by exhibition curators Bill Arning and Ian Berry, an interview with Ziegler, and an extensive biography and bibliography. In addition, curators who originally commissioned Ericson and Ziegler’s public works-Judith Hoos Fox, Kathy Goncharov, Mary Jane Jacob, Patricia Phillips, Lane Relyea, Ned Rifkin, Valerie Smith, and Judith Tannenbaum-provide texts about their experiences of working with the artists.
ISBN-13: 978-0-262-01228-7, ISBN-10: 0-262-01228-6
colorChristian Jankowski: Everything Fell Together
2005, Des Moines Art Center
This survey of Christian Jankowski’s career in film, video, photography and installation is the first to track his progress from 1992 to 2005. Over that time, Jankowski has come to the fore with a circular method of creation in which the very process of making a video, film or installation becomes the content of the work. His interest in studying the relationships and boundaries between fiction and documentary, art and commerce, art and the public and art and popular culture has brought him into collaboration with children, magicians, customs officials, artists, therapists, psychics and television preachers, giving them what seems to be creative responsibility, but quietly retaining the framing and, of course, the last word. Jankowski’s subtly funny and decidedly engaging critique of the nature of contemporary art production makes him one of the most thought-provoking image makers working today. The exhibition upon which this book is based was highlighted by Artforum as one of the top shows not to miss, worldwide. A 200-page catalog with essays by Jeff Fleming, acting director of the Des Moines Art Center; Jordan Kantor, assistant curator, department of drawings, The Museum of Modern Art; Norman M. Klein, professor, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles; and Bruce Wagner, author and director. These are supplemented with interviews by Bill Arning, curator of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Brothers Strause, color reproductions, and the artist’s biography and video/film history.
color
Pavel Braila
2005, MIT List Visual Arts Center
A fully-illustrated 31-page catalogue. Produced by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, it features essays by Jane Farver, director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Michael Wilson, associate editor of Artforum. The catalogue includes many color illustrations and the artist’s exhibition history.
31 pages, color
Sturtevant: The Brutal Truth
2004, Hatje Cantz Verlag
A set of fully-illustrated catalogues designed by Sturtevant. Volume 1, Sturtevant, The Brutal Truth, includes facsimiled handwritten notes, a conversation between John Waters and Sturtevant, essays by Bernard Blistene, Udo Kittlemann, and Mario Kramer and illustrations of the work from the original exhibition. Volume 2, Raisonne on Sturtevant, is a complete listing of her paintings, sculptures, films, and videoworks to date by MMK Berlin art historian Lena Maculan, and an interview that Gerd de Vries conducted with the artist.
Cerith Wyn Evans: Thoughts unsaid, now forgotten...
2004, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Catalogue includes an essay by Bill Arning, curator of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, black and white images and extensive descriptions of the work in the exhibition, and the artist’s exhibition history.
paper, 31 pages, color
Marjetica Potrc: Urgent Architecture
2004, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art
Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc discovers beauty in the unplanned urban landscapes of shantytowns, trailer parks, and barrios. In her installations in various art institutions across the globe, she sends instructions to the musum staff on how to build her installations — often inspired by a type of shelter found halfway across the world — out of local materials. Here she instructs/constructs a massive installation of housing units based on observations made of temporary shelters and gated communities in Caracas, the West Bank, and West Palm Beach. Urgent Architecture includes a DVD of an interview with the artist. A fully-illustrated 66-page catalogue. Produced by the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, it includes texts by Carlos Basualdo, Liyat Esakov, Marjetica Potrc, Michael Rush, and Eyal Weizman. The Catalgue is accompanied by a DVD featuring an interview with Marjetica Potrc.
66 pages, color, and a DVD
Body Parts: A Self-Portrait by John Coplans
2003, powerHouse Books
A fully-illustrated 64-page catalogue. It features a series of photographs, a prologue by John Coplans and a conversation between Jean-Francois Chevrier, professor, Academie des Beaux-Arts, Paris and John Coplans.
64 pages, color, black and white
Michael Joo
2003, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exploring how science, religion and the media shape consciousness, Michael Joo’s artworks knit together the physical and the metaphysical. Matter and subject matter, energy and waste, the visible and that which cannot be seen — this is the stuff of Joo’s sculptures. His densely layered works are accretions of meaning brought about by succinctly-handled conjunctions and disjunctions in a space. This publication is the first monograph on the artist and will feature the first compilation of his own writings. A fully-illustrated 71-page catalogue. Produced by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, it features an introduction by Jane Farver, director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and texts by art theorist and critic Daniel Birnbaum, artist and teacher Charles Gaines, and Michael Joo. Also included are the artist’s bibliography and history of exhibitions.
71 pages, color, black and white
Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am
2003, MIT List Visual Arts Center
The United States will be represented at the 50th Venice Biennale by an artist known for questioning accepted notions of “truth” via combinations of historical artifacts, art objects, film, video, audio and altered museum labels. Fred Wilson’s U.S pavilion will deal with Renaissance Venice and the role black Africans played in what was then the most cosmopolitan and ethnically diverse city in the world. Part of Wilson’s exhibition will focus on the more personal themes of sadness and regret and will include new individual works and an installation about the legend of Othello, the Moor of Venice. A fully-illustrated 66-page catalogue. Produced by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, it features acknowledgements by Jane Farver; essays by Paul H.D. Kaplan and Salah Hassen; and an interview of Kathleen Goncharov and Fred Wilson. The catalogue is accompanied by a CD documenting Fred Wilson’s work in Venice.
paper, 66 pages, color, black and white, a CD of the exhibition
Paul Pfeiffer
2003, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Using advanced technology to transform and isolate moments from movies and televised sporting events, Paul Pfeiffer’s work examines contemporary notions of racial and sexual identity and how we respond to the human body when it is placed in extreme situations such as ecstasy and pain. Pfeiffer’s work also explores issues of time and the increasingly blurry distinction between reality and representation in everyday life. A fully-illustrated 64-page catalogue. Produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the MIT List Visual Arts Center, it features a foreword by Jane Farver and Robert Fitzpatrick; essays by Lawrence Chua, Jane Farver, and Dominic Molon and a conversation between Paul Pfeiffer and John Baldessari.
paper, 63 pages, color, black and white
After the Beginning and Before the End
2002, Bergen Kunstmuseum, Norway
A fully illustrated 180-page exhibition catalogue with a complete list of the collection, acquired through the year 2000. Organized and published by Bergen Kunstmuseum, it features an introduction by Gunnar B. Kvaran and Jon Hendricks, exhibition curators, and a special essay by curator/critic Jan van der Marck. The collector, Gilbert Silverman also contributed an essay, “Instruction Drawing” which reveals how the collection began.
tele-journeys
2002, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Focused on young artists from around the world who are living and working away from their cultures of origin, and who, like their predecessors of the 1960s and 70s, are creating new ways to articulate responses to the ever present problem of reconciling the global with the local. A catalogue in color and black and white, with an essay by independent curator and critic Jens Hoffmann and introductory remarks by Joan Jonas and Jane Farver. It includes biographies and images from each of the participating artists.
paper, 44 pages, color, black and white
Mirror Mirror
2002, MIT List Visual Arts Center
A catalogue, created in conjunction with AA Bronson’s Mirror Mirror,designed by AA Bronson and Barr Gilmore. The catalogue features an introduction by curator Bill Arning.
paper, 69 pages, color, black and white
YES YOKO ONO
2001, MIT List Visual Arts Center
A fully illustrated catalogue, the first major art publication surveying ONO’s artistic career. The catalogue features essays by exhibition curator Alexandra Munroe, Murray Sayle, David A. Ross, Jann S. Wenner, Jon Hendricks and others.
paper, 350 pages, color, black and white
Inside Space: Experiments in Redefining Rooms
2001, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Accompanying the show organized by Curator Bill Arning, this catalogue contains essays by Bill Arning and New York-based practicing architect, critic, and professor Joel Sanders. The exhibition featured the work of Monica Bonvicini, Elmgreen & Dragset, Teresita Fernandez, Juan Maidagan and Dolores Zinny, Henrik Olesen, and Oona Stern.
paper, 48 pages, color, black and white
Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s
2000, Queens Museum of Art, New York
Edited by the curators, with an introduction by cultural historian Stephen Bann and essays by exhibition curators László Beke, Okwui Enwezor, Gao Minglu, Claude Gintz, Apinan Poshyananda, Mari Carmen Ramírez, Terry Smith, Reiko Tomii with Chiba Shigeo, Margarita Tupitsyn, Sung Wan-kyung, and Peter Wollen. Fully illustrated.
paper, 279 pages, color
Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts-Events, Objects, Documents
2000, Columbia University Press, New York
The catalogue places in art historical context the work of these two 1960s visual/performance art avant-guardists which continues to exert a profound influence on artists working today. With essays by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, professor of art history, Columbia University and Barnard College, and Judith F. Rodenbeck, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University and an interview with Allan Kaprow.
paper, 155 pages, black and white
Luca Buvoli: FLYING - Practical Training for Beginners
2000, MIT List Visual Arts Center
An artist’s book, in the shape of a wing, produced in an edition of 1500 to accompany the premiere of Buvoli’s animated film, FLYING — Practical Training for Beginners at the List Visual Arts Center. The aerodynamically-designed book houses within it, encased in plastic pockets, a flip book and an instructional manual. which allow the reader to re-experience the “33-step method” for flying.
paper/plastic, instruction book: 164 pp., full color
flip book: 74 pp., black and whiteLoCurto/Outcault: selfportrait.map
2000, Lyman Allyn Museum of Art at Connecticut College, MIT List Visual Arts Center, University of Washington Press
A full-color catalogue documenting collaborative team Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault’s new group of work, in the form of large-scale photographs, based on digital mappings of their bodies. With essays by Helaine Posner, exhibition curator, and David Gelernter, a professor of computer science, Yale University, who is also an artist and writer.
paper, 63 pages, color
Jane and Louise Wilson
2000, Serpentine Gallery, London
A full-color catalogue covering four of the Wilsons’ recent video installation works: Stasi City (1997), Gamma (1999), Parliament (1999), and Las Vegas, Graveyard Time (1999). The book contains an essay by New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl plus a dialogue between the Wilsons and Lisa Corrin, curator, Serpentine Gallery.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Meanwhile, The Girls Were Playing
1999, MIT List Visual Arts Center
A full-color catalogue which documents Campos-Pons’ video/sculptural installation work created for the MIT List Visual Arts Center. With an essay by Michael D. Harris, Assistant Professor of African and African-American Art, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and exhibition organizer Jennifer Riddell.
A Unique American Vision: Paintings by Gregory Gillespie
1999, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens
A full-color catalogue of a 20-year retrospective exhibition organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, site of one of Gillespie’s first solo exhibitions in 1970. With an essay by Carl Belz, director emeritus, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, and interview conducted by Donald Keyes, exhibition curator, Georgia Museum of Art.
Eve Andrée Laramée: A Permutational Unfolding
1999, MIT List Visual Arts Center
A full-color catalogue of Laramée’s Spring 1999 installation created for the MIT List Visual Arts Center which explores a web-like matrix of associations with digital technology, reaching back to Jacquard’s 1801 loom and into connections with politics, history, the decorative arts, music, and the biological world, all of which offered an impetus to or models for thedevelopment of computing and the internet. With essays by Jonathan Crary, Columbia University; Barbara Maria Stafford, University of Chicago, Jessica Riskin, MIT, and exhibition curator Jennifer Riddell.
Alfredo Jaar: Lament of the Images
1999, MIT List Visual Arts Center
A full-color catalogue of Jaar’s “Rwanda Projects,” a series of photography and text-based work generated from the artist’s his in Rwanda in 1994 where he traveled to collect the testimonies of survivors of the genocide there. Presented at the List Visual Arts Center during Winter 1999. With an essay by exhibition guest curator Debra Bricker Balken.
Lewis deSoto: Recital
1998, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Lewis deSoto’s installation, Recital, 1998, was a poignant tribute to a marriage. Through an innovative use of technology, deSoto sensitively fused the distinct talents of Dr. Hideomi Tuge, a brain pathologist, and Dr. Tuge’s wife, Chiyo, a composer and pianist. The inspiration for Recital came to deSoto by the chance discovery of a book by Dr. Tuge entitled The Atlas of the Brain of a Pianist, which is a posthumous mapping of Chiyo Tuge’s brain by Dr. Tuge. For the installation, a grand piano was placed in a stage-like setting in front of a theater curtain. Despite the absence of a pianist, eerie strains of Chiyo’s music flowed from the piano, conveying a powerful sense of loss. Dr. Tuge’s atlas is in place where sheet music normally would have been, its pages turned by an automatic page-turner. deSoto stated, “While the book projects sensibilities that are commonly labeled scientific and objective, the relationship between husband and wife, devotion and loss, science and art are implicated as the installation connects the image of the brain (creativity) with the experience of the music (memory).” A brochure documenting deSoto’s Fall 1998 installation Recital with an essay by exhibition curator Jennifer L. Riddell.
Matthias Mansen: About the House
1998, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen
A full-color catalogue of work made by German woodcut artist Matthias Mansen while he was living in New York from 1989-1992. The work, About the House, which was shown only in the U.S. at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, is of monumental scale, and depicts an everday, domestic interior, with people going about their tasks and rituals. Unfolding in a cinematic fashion, the viewer “walks” through the house that Mansen creates. The catalogue is illustrated by the artist with original woodblock prints bound into the book.
ISBN: 3-87909-535-3
Hardcover, 112 pages, color illustrationsMirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation
1998, MIT Press
This catalogue will expand upon the themes explored in the exhibition of the same name, originating at the List Art Center in April 1998 and travelling to the Miami Art Museum and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through 1998 and 1999. The exhibition explores the relevance of the Surrealist aesthetic to women artists from the 1930s and intervening generations to its continued relevance to contemporary artists. The contributors reexamine art historical assumptions about gender, identity, and intergenerational legacies within modernist and postmodernist frameworks. Questions raised include: how did women in both groups draw from their experiences of gender and sexuality? What do contemporary artistic practices involving the use of body images owe to the earlier examples of both female and male Surrealists? What is the relationship between self-image and self-knowledge? Essays by Dawn Ades, Whitney Chadwick, Salomon Grimberg, Katy Kline, Helaine Posner, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Dickran Tashjian. Edited by Whitney Chadwick, author of Myth in Surrealist Painting (1980) and Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1985).
ISBN: 0-262-53157-5
paper, 258 pages, color plates, b/w ills.Francesc Torres: The Repository of Absent Flesh
1998, MIT List Visual Arts Center
In “The Repository of Absent Flesh,” Francesc Torres converted a warehouse for the display of found objects, such as a camera, a motorcycle, aand the model of the human brain. As visitors would pass, a light came on and a recorded voice narrated the brief story of each object. All told, 20 stories mingle into an aesthetic overture concerning tragedy and triumph in human life. A full-color catalogue which documents Torres’ Winter 1998 installation created at the List Visual Arts Center includes an essay by art historian Arthur Danto, as well as the full texts of each of the 20 stories pivotal to the installation.
Jill Reynolds: The Shape of Breath
1997, MIT List Visual Arts Center
This catalogue fully documents Reynolds’ Winter 1997 exhibition The Shape of Breath. As artist-in-residence, Reynolds completed the installation on site in the List Visual Arts Center’s Bakalar gallery, where visitors could observe the artist at work as she individually blew by hand more than 10,000 glass bubbles. The stems of each delicate bubble were then inserted into a curved, backlit wall within the darkened gallery, transforming it into a simulacrum of a night sky. In her work, Reynolds seeks poetic metaphors for communication and language, and ways for making tangible and forcefully present the ways in which human presence is inextricably linked to the landscape and universe around us. With essays by Katy Kline, LVAC director and Steven Pinker, Director of the MIT Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.
ISBN: 0-938437-55-0
paper, 20 pages, full color illustrationsThe Art of Detection: Surveillance in Society
1997, MIT List Visual Arts Center
The artists represented in this exhibition, Bill Beirne, Niels Bonde, Diller + Scofidio, Laura Kurgan, Richard Lowenberg, Steve Mann, and Julia Scher, insert their work within an ecology of surveillance data and images, disrupting the flow in order to draw attention to the ideological dimensions of the pressing desire within our culture to identify, show, quantify, and regulate. Their work at times replicates the more traditional forms of surveillance, such as video and photography; or alternatively, investigates the dematerialized forms of monitoring becoming increasingly prevalent which may map our movements, activities, associates, and lifestyles. The projects and installations reflect upon and problemmatize a function of contemporary life that has become so ubiquitous and familiar, yet still may prompt an inchoate sense of threat — to privacy, to democracy, to the individual. Paradoxically, the insertion of the technologies of surveillance into our daily lives may also offer subversive or socially efficacious potential that has not yet been recognized. With artists’ statements, b/w reproductions, essays by Timothy Druckrey and exhibition organizer Jennifer Riddell.
paper, 48 pages
Recovering Lost Fictions: Caravaggio's Musicians
1997, MIT List Visual Arts Center
The catalogue Recovering Lost Fictions both documents and supports the eponymous installation/collaboration between contemporary artists Kathleen Gilje and Joseph Grigely shown at the List Visual Arts Center during Fall 1997. The installation explored the ways in which art is reconfigured by the institutional processes devoted to its study by examining a remarkable, recently restored second version of Caravaggio’s masterpiece The Musicians,the fully authenticated version of which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition examined the restoration, and subsequent attribution of the second, as yet unauthenicated version, recently restored in New York by Gilje. The purpose is to show how one painting has more than one history, and how the processes of conservation and art criticism contribute towards the construction of these histories.
The catalogue itself, a carefully researched and documented study, explores the relationship between the two versions of The Musicians in the context of Caravaggio’s social and cultural milieu. Modeled after the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., exhibition brochures focusing on a single work, the catalogue offers images of both versions of The Musicians as well as X-rays made during the restoration that reveal that the artist had initially painted, then painted over, an extraordinary incident among the three musicians. With an essay by Joseph Grigely.paper, 13 pages, color reproductions
Kay Rosen: Short Stories/Tall Tales
1997, MIT List Visual Arts Center
While the adage, pictures are worth a thousand words, points to the endless interpretive and descriptive possibilities offered by visual representations, the specificity of language and words themselves are generally thought to offer more incisive meanings. Kay Rosen upsets this order by using language as the subject of her paintings, turning words themselves into pictorial images that explore the vicissitudes of language. The work asks viewers to explore the ways meanings are read, derived, and decoded from language by using puns, repetitions, abrogating conventional grammatical rules, and examining the graphical properties of words themselves. With a text by exhibition organizer Jennifer Riddell.
paper, 30 pages, nine hand silk-screened images of Rosen's recent work.
J.C. Grigely & Co.: Ordinary Conversations
1996, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Joseph Grigely was artist-in-residence at the MIT List Visual Arts Center during the Fall of 1996 and created an installation entitled Ordinary Conversations. Grigely, who became deaf as a result of a childhood accident often askes people to write down what they are saying when he is unable to read their lips due to speech idiosyncrasies. For the past several years, Grigely has incorporated these conversations into his art, creating wall pieces and table-top tableaux or still lifes of the notes and scraps generated from exchanges with gallery visitors over the course of his projects. His work explores the differences between speech and writing, reading and listening. The catalogue for the LVAC exhibition takes the form of an artist’s book, which Grigely conceives of as a “catalogue” of some of the conversations he has had, and includes reproductions of some of the more interesting, wry, and telling notes people have written to him.
ISBN: 0-938437-53-4
paper, 32pages, b/w illus.19 Projects: Artists-in-Residence at the MIT List Visual Arts Center
1996, MIT List Visual Arts Center
This beautifully designed catalog documents the projects undertaken between 1985 and 1993 as part of the LVAC’s Artist-In-Residence program. Over the course of ten years, nineteen artists came to the List Visual Arts Center for periods of time ranging from two weeks to several months and were invited to make a new work and to push their research and creativity in new directions. Liberated from its conventional definition of mute display container, the List Center gallery was reconceived to become an active hybrid of studio, laboratory, library or staging area. The catalog includes brief introductory essays and an in-depth interview with each artist in addition to photo documentation and biographical information. Artists include Victor Burgin, Betye Saar, Marina Abramovic, Ann Hamilton, May Sun and Robert Cumming.
ISBN: 0-938437-51-8, LC: 95-47172
paper, 224 pages, color & b/w illus., bio and biblioFace-to-Face: Recent Abstract Painting
1996, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Much recent art has involved overt social and political topics and has included text or recognizeable, often media-based imagery. How is looking at a painting without immediate external refernce a different experience for the viewer? While this exhibition makes no claim for comprehensivity, the variety of strategies employed by the ten participating artists demonstrate the vitality and relevance of abstraction as it approaches its centennial. Artists: Fandra Chang, April Hankins, Prudencio Irazabal, Shirley Kaneda, Byron Kim, David Ortins, Fabian Marcaccio, Dona Nelson, Jo Ann Rothschild, Sandy Walker. Essay by Katy Kline. Artist entries by curators Katy Kline, Ron Platt and Helaine Posner.
ISBN: 0-938437-52-6
paper, 32 pages, 10 color reproductions, artist bios and biblios.Next of Kin: Looking at the Great Apes
1995, MIT List Visual Arts Center
The six artists represented in this exhibition employ a variety of aesthetic approaches to advance our understanding of our complex and multivalent relationships with the great apes. James Balog, Walton Ford, Sean Landers, Jean Lowe, Richard Ross and Daisy Youngblood either critique or look beyond the historically-erected symbology and archetypes which tend to dominate contemporary consideration of our simian next of kin. Essay and artists’ entries by curator Ron Platt; additional essays by Harriet Ritvo and Tommy L. Lott.
ISBN: 0-938437-50-X
paper, 48 pages, including color and b/w illus., artists' bios. and biblios.Muntadas: Between the Frames: The Forum
1995, MIT List Visual Arts Center
A document of the video installation by Spanish artist Antonio Muntadas, this catalog includes stills from the installation, comments from Muntadas, and production notes from Caterina Borelli. Between The Frames confronts viewers with a provocative series of interviews casting light on the practices and values embedded in the institutional presentation of contemporary art. It is a rich and illuminating stimulus to discourse — addressing as it does a variety of cultural practices from a truly international perspective. Published by the List Visual Arts Center and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, the catalog includes essays by Wexner Centercurator of new media Bill Horrigan and independent curator Debra Balken.
ISBN: 0-938437-49-6, LC: 31860
paper, 48 pages, color and b/w illus., bio. and biblio.The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation
1995, MIT Press
While the subject of the feminine has been explored in depth over the past generation, until very recently its counterpart, masculinity, has been largely ignored in contemporary art exhibitions. This thematic exhibition explores the social construction of masculinity through the works of eleven artists, including Matthew Barney, Tina Barney, Clegg & Guttman, Graham Durward, Lyle Ashton Harris, Dale Kistemaker, Mary Kelly, Donald Moffett, Keith Piper, Charles Ray and Michael Yue Tong. The fully illustrated catalog examines postwar views on masculinity from an interdisciplinary perspective. In addition to a primary focus on the visual arts, masculinity in sociology, literature, cultural studies and the mass media are also examined. Contributors include co-curators Helaine Posner and Andrew Perchuk, Simon Watney, Harry Brod, Steven Cohan, bell hooks, and Glenn Ligon.
ISBN: 0-262-16154-0(hc)
160 pages, artist bios. and biblios.Leon Golub and Nancy Spero: War and Memory
1994, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Leon Golub and Nancy Spero are senior American painters whose works have consistently wrestled with questions of power and the individual. Golub’s monumental canvases, with their looming figures and lacerated surfaces thrust themselves belligerently into the spectator’s face. Spero’s more delicate works on paper, episodic and ephemeral, infiltrate the spectator’s awareness more surreptitiously. War and Memory, a joint retrospective, is the first major exhibition to survey their strangely interdependent symmetry. Essay by Katy Kline and Helaine Posner.
ISBN: 0-938437-48-8
paper, 103 pages, color and b/w illus., biblios., bios.Ghost in the Machine
1994, MIT List Visual Arts Center
The capabilites of digital imaging challenge our assumptions about photography’s role in relation to issues of authenticity and reality, while also revealing how sophisticated new technologies allow artists unprecedented freedom in the creation and manipulation of photographic images. The six artists represented in this exhibition employ conceptual art strategies while maintaining a focus on the human form and human condtion. The heightened sense of reality created in these human and machine collaborations can seem the work of a spectral presence born during the interactive process. Artists in the exhibition are Anthony Aziz & Sammy Cucher, Keith Cottingham, Jeff Wall, and Michael Wenyon & Susan Gamble. Essay and artists entries by Ron Platt, assistant curator, List Visual Arts Center.
paper, 10 pages, 9 b/w illus.
Sandy Walker: Woodblock Prints
1994, MIT List Visual Arts Center
A group of large, dramatic woodblock prints by this California artist manage to balance the competing demands of eye, intellect and emotion. They hover between abstraction and representation. Though based in nature the prints are less the mirror of a specific location than an evocation of the rhythms and pulses of the natural world. Essay by Katy Kline.
ISBN: 0-938437-47-XI
paper, 13 b/w prints; catalogue raisonnéMaria Fernanda Cardoso
1994, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Colombian artists Maria Fernanda Cardoso has devoted much of her artistic energy to exploring the often tenuous, always fascinating bond between humans and other animal species. In her sculpture she transforms preserved grasshoppers, snakes, frogs, piranhas and other fauna into classical minimal shapes and arrangements. Essay by curator Ron Platt.
ISBN: 0-938437-46-1
paper, 32 pages, 16 full color and b/w illus., biblios., bios.The Anxious Salon
1993, MIT List Visual Arts Center
A full-color 14-page catalogue. The exhibition featured paintings by Vincent Desiderio, Attila Richard Lukacs, Odd Nerdrum, Hanneline Røgeberg, and Thomas Woodruff. Introduction and artist entries by Ron Platt and Helaine Posner.
14 pgs, color
Angela Grauerholz: Recent Photographs
1993, MIT List Visual Arts Center
This exhibition includes fourteen recent, large-scale black and white photographs by a German-born artist presently living and working in Montréal. Portraits, nudes, landscapes, urban sites and interior settings are among Grauerholz’s diverse subjects. Her tentative images are soft-focused, sepia-toned and ambiguous in relation to time and place. Influenced by film and literature, the artist wants her photographs to be “as open as I can possibly make them, so that the viewer can reinvest what he or she feels into a particular scene, into a particular image.” Essay by the curator Helaine Posner.
ISBN: 0-938437-45-3, LC: 93-79813
paper, 32 pages, 14 bi-color illus., bio. and biblio.Subversive Crafts
1993, MIT List Visual Arts Center
This exhibition brings together the work of twelve artists from the United States and Canada who undermine the decorative and comfortable domesticity usually associated with crafts. Though crafts have too often been considered the stepchildren of the more intellectual and elevated “Fine Arts”, these subversive crafts people acknowledge the realm of the familiar and homey everyday object as a powerful milieu to provide an intimate, experiential and incisive commentary on the emotive conditions of contemporary life. Artists: Laura Baird, Kate Boyan, Lou Cabeen, Nancy Edell, John Garret, Anne Kraus, Keith Lewis, Paul Mathieu, Matt Nolen, Richard Notkin, Leslie Sampson, Jane Sauer, Joyce Scott, Barbara Todd, and Lillian Tyrell. Introductory essay and essays on individual artists by Katy Kline.
ISBN: 0-938437-44-5, LC: 93-78548
paper, 60 pages, color illus., bios. and biblios.Corporal Politics
1992, Beacon Press and MIT List Visual Arts Center
This exhibition examines the prevalence of the body fragment as both theme and content in contemporary art, demonstrating the dramatic, often disturbing degree of dissolution which has characterized recent art. Work by artists Louise Bourgeois, Robert Gober, Annette Messager, Rona Pondick, Kiki Smith, David Wojnarowicz, Lilla LoCurto and William Outcault include representations of internal organs, bodily fluids, isolated limbs and other body parts which speak to the alienation and sense of fragmentation of individuals in today’s society. These artists deconstruct ideals of coherent identity and an integrated self. Introduction by Donald Hall. Essays by Thomas Laqueur and curator Helaine Posner as well as additional texts by the artists.
ISBN: 0-8070-6601-X
72 pages, 28 color and b/w illus.Michiko Kon: Still Lives
1992, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Japanese photographer Michiko Kon’s rich black and white photographs hover between the grotesque and the poetic. Her theatrically staged Surrealist still-lifes combine organic materials which range from flowers to vegetables to that most emblematic of Japanese cultural icons — raw fish. The sense of impending decay embodied in the fleshy materials and references to the body underscores photography’s ability to freeze and preserve the transitory. Introduction by Katy Kline. Essay by Michiko Kasahara.
10 pages, 7 b/w illus.
The Process of Elimination: The Bathroom, The Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste
1992, Princeton Architectural Press
This exhibition examines overlapping patterns of biological digestion, economic consumption, and aesthetic simplification. The observation is made that the streamlined style of modern design, which served the new ideals of bodily hygiene while engaging the manufacturing policy of planned obsolescence, emanated from the domestic landscape of the bathroom and kitchen. The organically modeled yet machine-made surfaces of streamlined objects are shown to have collapsed the natural and the artificial, the biological and the industrial, into an aesthetics of waste. Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller.
ISBN: 0-938437-42-9
paper, 80 pages, color and b/w illus.Terra Nova: Drawings and Models by Lebbeus Woods
1992, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Lebbeus Woods is an experimental architect whose wildly visionary inventions explore alternative possibilities in societal living. His technology is equally romantic, optimistic and sinister. Essay by Diana DuPont with additional text by the artist.
Orshi Drozdik, Jon Tower: Science Fictions
1992, MIT List Visual Arts Center
This two-person exhibition examines the fugitive nature of various scientific systems. Jon Tower’s drawings, sculpture and installations are wry ruminations on mathematics, chemistry and genetics and address how beliefs come to be accepted or rejected. Orshi Drozdik uses the display techniques of the natural science museum to comment nostalgically on the gradual obsolescence of Enlightenment physics, 19th century medicine and Linnean botany. Introductions by Katy Kline and Helaine Posner. Interview by Jan Avgikos and essay by Jon Tower.
ISBN: 0-938437-41-0
paper, 47 pages, 15 b/w illus.Cannibal Eyes
1992, MIT List Visual Arts Center
The five artists in this exhibition incorporate existing photographs into their own photographic work, often radically rejuxtaposing the recycled or “cannibalized” imagery to darkly comic or profoundly disturbing effect. The work addresses such diverse issues as the objectification of women, the seductive nature of war, and genetic manipulation. Work by John O’Reilly, Tina Potter, Aura Rosenberg, John Schlesinger and Joachim Schmid. Essay and texts on each artist by Ron Platt.
ISBN: 0-938437-40, LC: 91-51145
paper, 24 pages, bios., biblios., 15 b/w illus.Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Drawings
1991, MIT List Visual Arts Center
The first American retrospective of this Danish artist’s work, this exhibition includes work executed from 1982 through 1989. An essay by the curator, Helaine Posner places the work in context.
ISBN: 0-938437-39-9
paper, 48 pages, bio., biblio., 5 color-5 b/w illus.Warren Neidich: Historical In(ter)vention
1991, MIT List Visual Arts Center
An installation consisting of photography, video and sculpture examining the contradictions of the American past as well as the ways in which the media shape and distort our perceptions of cultural events. Essay by David Joselit with text by Warren Neidich. Introduction by Ron Platt and Anita Doutha.
ISBN: 0-938437-38-0
paper, 16 pages, 9 color-b/w illus.Barbara Broughel: Storytelling Chairs
1991, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Broughel’s assemblages, made with a bi-cultural collage of elements, speak of the conquest of the Iroquois and embody the Euro-Indian cultural pastiche that it produced. Eight chairs encourage viewers to ponder the thin line between borrowing and plundering and to acknowledge the morality of indebtedness. Essay by Edward Ball.
ISBN: 0-938437-37-2
paper, accordion brochure contains full-color reproductions of the chairs and 4 b/w illus.Juan Francisco Elso Padillo
1991, MIT List Visual Arts Center
The Cuban sculptor, who died in 1988, created a small but influential body of work devoted to identifying a particularly Latin American mythology through an unusual combination of secularism and mysticism. The works on view, in wood and other natural materials, include the monumental piece left unfinished at his death. This is the first public exhibition of Elso’s work in the United States. Essay by Luis Camnitzer.
ISBN: 0-938437-36-4
paper, 15 pages, bio., biblio., 23 b/w illus.(not so) Simple Pleasures: Content and Contentment in Contemporary Art
1991, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Painting, sculpture, crafts, and photography by ten artists from across the United States and Canada who use various subtle strategies to embed potent meaning within an attractive object or image. Work by Judie Bamber, Michael Banicki, John Currin, Ronald Jones, Ken Lum, Joyce Scott, Andres Serrano, Masami Teraoka. Essay by Dana Friis-Hansen.
ISBN: 0-938437-34-8
paper, 32 pages, bios., biblios., 23 b/w illus.The Missing Picture: Alternative Contemporary Photography from the Soviet Union
1990, MIT List Visual Arts Center
A retrospective of the work of Boris Michailov and exhibition of four younger soviet photographers inspired by his work: Vladimir Kupreanov, Ilya Piganov, Maria Serebrjekova and Alexey Shulgin. Essays by John P. Jacob and Tatiana Salzirin provide an historical overview and context. Introduction by Katy Kline.
ISBN: 0-938437-35-6
paper, 59 pages, bios., biblios., 39 b/w illustrationsSatellite Intelligence: New Art from San Diego and Boston
1990, MIT List Visual Arts Center
A collaborative project between the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and the MIT List Visual Arts Center, this exhibit is a comparative look at smart art from two similarly sized cities whose identities derive at least in part from their respective positions in the orbits of the two centers of the American art cosmos, New York and Los Angeles. Work by 12 artists. Intro. by Hugh M. Davies and Katy Kline. Essay by Ronald J. Onarato.
ISBN: 0-934418-35-7
36 pgs, bios, selected biblios., artists statements, 12 b/w illustrationsSynthetic Spaces: Holography at MIT
1990, MIT List Visual Arts Center
This is the first selective survey of holography from MIT’s Spatial Imaging Group since its founding in 1982. The exhibit features many important design and technical advancements originated or developed by the laboratory headed by Dr. Stephen A. Benton. Introduction by Dana Friis-Hansen and Betsy Connors. An essay by Dr. Benton presents an overview of progress in holography and points to future developments in the field.
ISBN: 0-938437-33x
10 pages, biblio., 7 b/w illustrationsMatt Mullican: The MIT Project
1990, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Over the past 15 years Mullican has developed a lexicon of stylized signs and images, and a variety of structures for the signs to organize our world and describe its systems and relationships. An extraordinary range of media have comprised his program, including bulletin boards, fabric banners, posters, stained glass, carved stones, rubbings, tapestries and, most recently, the invisible world of the computer data bank. Introduction by Katy Kline. Essay by Johannes Meinhardt (English translation from German) and interview with the artist by Michael Tarantino.
ISBN: 0-938437-32-1
paper, 60 pages, bio., biblio. 21 color illustrationsNancy Burson: The "Age Machine" and Composite Portraits
1990, MIT List Visual Arts Center
The artist has worked at the frontier of computer-assisted art for over fifteen years. This catalogue contains fifteen of the artist’s provocative computer-assisted portraits, which age or combine the features and facial structures of two or more subjects. Essay by Dana Friis-Hansen.
ISBN: 0-938437-31-3
12 pages, bio. biblio. 5 b/w illustrationsJno Cook: Radically Recycled Cameras
1990, MIT List Visual Arts Center
An exhibition of cameras and photographs by Chicago-based artist Jno Cook. He designed and constructed a wide variety of cameras, all made from reclaimed optical and mechanical materials, as well as common household objects such as cookie tins. Introduction by Ron Platt. Interview with the artist.
ISBN: 0-938437-30-5
8 pages, bio., biblio. and list of exhibitions. 8 b/w illustrationsRebecca Purdum: Paintings
1990, MIT List Visual Arts Center
First one person museum exhibition of this young New York painter. Purdum’s large canvases, which she paints with her fingertips, are noted for their robust but delicately handled color. Essay by Dana Friis-Hansen.
ISBN: 0-938437-29-1
paper, 36 pages, bio. biblio., 7 b/w and 8 color illustrationsStill Performances
1989, MIT List Visual Arts Center
A fully-illustrated 40-page catalogue in black and white. The catalogue documents the linguistic explorations of Russian artists Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin realized through a series of portrait images and superimposed word play. It features an introduction by Katy Kline and Steven High and an essay by John P. Jacob. It contains a bibliography and selected solo and group exhibitions.
40 pgs, black and white
Trouble in Paradise
1989, MIT List Visual Arts Center
This exhibition features 14 New England artists who address topical political and social issues which face the U.S., including freedom of expression, homelessness, militarism, toxic waste, AIDS, and substance abuse. It features painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, and environmental installations. Essay and texts on each artist by curator Dana Friis-Hansen.
ISBN: 0-938437-27-5
44 pages, bios. biblio., 16 b/w illustrationsRichard Ross: Museology Triptychs
1989, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Photographer Richard Ross’ “museology” work involves large triptychs in which mysterious and suggestive details from Old Master paintings were shot with a simple child’s plastic camera. Essay by Gerard Haggerty.
ISBN: 0-938437-28-3
10 pages, selected bio., fold-out, 4 b/w and 3 color illustrationsClockwork: Timepieces by Artists, Architects, and Industrial Designers
1989, MIT List Visual Arts Center
An eclectic selection of timepieces make up this exhibition which challenges conventional notions toward the marking of time. Nearly thirty artists, architects, and designers from the United States and Canada are represented. Essays by J. T. Fraser and Dana Friis-Hansen.
ISBN: 0-938437-22-4
56 pages, biblio. 44 b/w illustrationsBeverly Pepper: An Autobiography in Form
1989, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition of small-scale maquettes, studies and sculptures by Beverly Pepper. Essay by Judith Hoos Fox.
8 pages, bio., fold-out, 12 b/w illustrations
Felix Droese: House of Weaponlessness
1989, MIT List Visual Arts Center
This dramatic exhibition of huge slabs of raw wood and monumental paper silhouettes was the sole representative of West Germany at the 1988 Venice Biennale. Essay by Katy Kline.
ISBN: 0-938437-23-2
36 pages, bio., 20 b/w illustrationsThree on Technology: New Photographs by Robert Cumming, Lee Friedlander & Jan Groover
1988, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition of commissioned photographs examining the “look” of the technological revolution. Cumming’s interiors, Friedlander’s portraits, and Groover’s still lives are introduced by Katy Kline, with essays by Leo Marx and Alan Trachtenberg.
ISBN: 0-938437-21-6
72 pages, 37 b/w illustrationsTishan Hsu: Paintings
1988, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition of sculptural paintings which combine industrial scale, high-tech materials, and electronic imagery with forms suggestive of the body or landscape in transformation. Essay by Dana Friis-Hansen.
8 pages, bio., biblio., 7 b/w illustrations
Art and Architecture at MIT: A Walking Tour
1988, MIT List Visual Arts Center
A history and guide to the art and architecture of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with four walking tour maps. Author: Katy Kline.
ISBN: 0-938437-25-9
95 pages, 94 b/w illustrationsPeter Fischli David Weiss
1987, MIT List Visual Arts Center
A 28-page catalogue with black and white illustrations. Defying gravity, the provisional arrangements of the two Swiss artists attempt to gain a different understanding of the world. Introduction by Katy Kline; essays by Karen Marta and Patrick Frey.
28 pgs, black and white
LA Hot and Cool
1987, MIT List Visual Arts Center
An illustrated 72-page catalogue of the first east-coast exhibition to bring together some of the most provocative and promising young Los Angeles artists of the 1980s. The exhibition traced the interaction of two distinct traditions (hot and cool) in LA art: on the one hand the political and passionate work of Chris Burden and Ed Kienholz, on the other hand the more conceptual and ironic work developed by John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, and Ed Ruscha. Includes introduction and artist entries by Dana Friis-Hansen; a conversation between Christopher Knight and Howard Singerman.
72 pgs, black and white
Ellsworth Kelly: Small Sculpture 1958-1987
1987, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition of small scale sculpture in wood and various metals. Essay by Katy Kline.
33 pages, selected chronology, 13 b/w illustrations
Out of Eastern Europe: Private Photography
1987, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition featuring private photographs by thirty contemporary artists from Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland. Catalogue text includes discussion on the issues surrounding the creation of these works, and a critical, historical analysis. Essays by guest curator John P. Jacob and photography critic Lynn Zelevansky.
ISBN: 0-938437-17-8
56 pages, texts about each artist, 53 b/w illustrationsTony Smith: The Shape of Space
1987, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition of work by sculptor Tony Smith. Essay by Dana Friis-Hansen. Artist’s quotes.
8 pages, bio., biblio., fold-out. 13 b/w illustrations
Natural Forms and Forces: Abstract Images in American Sculpture
1986, MIT List Visual Arts Center
A fully-illustrated 68-page catalogue accompanying the eponymous exhibition. The show reflects upon the enduring identification with natural forms and forces of the best American art of the 20 th century. Among the artists represented are Eve Hesse, Michael Lekakis, Robert Smithson, Lynda Benglis, John Duff, Richard Serra. The catalogue contains essays by Douglas Dreishpoon and Katy Kline.
68 pgs, black and white
Things are Seldom What They Seem, Or Local Sculptors/Found Materials
1986, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition featuring work by Abram Ross Faber, Brewster Luttrell and Pia Massie, three Boston sculptors whose work incorporates found materials. Introduction by Katy Kline.
ISBN: 0-938437-16-X
10 pages, texts by each artist, bios., fold-out, 3 b/w illustrationsLouise Nevelson: Works in Wood
1986, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition of wood sculpture by Louise Nevelson. Essay by guest curator Ceil Friedman.
8 pages, bio., biblio. fold-out, 6 b/w illustrations
Alvaro Siza: Buildings and Projects
1986, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition featuring the work of Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza. Essay by guest curator Peter Testa.
6 pages, bio., biblio., fold-out, 9 b/w illustrations
Alexander Calder: Artist as Engineer
1986, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition brochure exploring the engineering aspects of Calder’s sculpture. Essay by guest curator Joan Marter.
8 pages, bio., biblio., fold-out, 3 b/w illus.
Dedication of the Albert and Vera List Visual Arts Center
1985, MIT List Visual Arts Center
This illustrated publication honors Albert and Vera List for their longstanding support of the visual arts at MIT.
27 pages, black and white
Nude, Naked, Stripped
1985, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition focusing on 18 contemporary artists examining varying attitudes toward the body without clothes. Artists included are Lius Cruz Azaceta, Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Robert Mapplethorpe, Alice Neel, TODT and others. Essays by Carrie Rickey and Dana Friis-Hansen.
ISBN: 0-938437-13-5
76 pages, artists' statements, 47 b/w illustrationsArtists and Architects Collaborate: Designing the Wiesner Building
1985, MIT List Visual Arts Center
In-depth documentation and discussion of the pioneering collaboration of artists and architects in the designing of MIT’s Wiesner Building. Essays by Robert Campbell and Jeffrey Cruikshank. Introduction by Calvin Tomkins. Interviews with artists, architects, and project protagonists: Jerome Wiesner, Deborah Hoover, Kathy Halbreich, William Porter, Alan Shields, John de Monchaux, I.M. Pei & Partners, Scott Burton, Kenneth Noland, Richard Fleischner, Steve Pelletier and Rob Steinberg and Harry Portnoy.
ISBN: 0-938437-12-7
94 pages, 35 b/w illustrations., includes 10 page color photo insertRobert Moskowitz: Recent Paintings and Pastels / Judith Shea: Recent Sculpture
1985, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition featuring the work of Robert Moskowitz and Judith Shea. Essay by Katy Kline.
ISBN: 0-938437-11-9
44 pages, bios., biblios., 18 b/w and 2 color illustrationsAesthetics of Progress: Forms of the Future in American Design 1930s-1980s
1985, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition featuring objects of American design from the 1930s and the 1980s. Essay by Katy Kline. Insert details the exhibition installation designed by Tod Williams & Assoc., Architects, NY.
ISBN: 0-938437-10-0
28 pages, 16 b/w illus.Jacques Lipchitz: Sculptor and Collector
1985, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition of small-scale maquettes, studies and sculptures by Jacques Lipchitz. Essay by guest curator Jeanne L. Wasserman.
8 pages, artist's quotes, fold-out, 14 b/w illustrations
On the Wall/On the Air: Artists Make Noise
1985, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition featuring the work of 20 contemporary performance, installation and recording artists. The exhibition was comprised of visual works as well as a series of artist’s audioworks on WMBR radio. Artists included Laurie Anderson, Jacki Apple, Glenn Branca, Jack Goldstein, Christian Marclay and others. Essay by guest curator Kevin Concannon.
6 pages, fold-out, 12 b/w illustrations
Visions of Paradise: Vito Acconci, David Ireland, James Surls
1984, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition featuring installation work by Vito Acconci, David Ireland and James Surls in response to the theme of paradise. Essay by Gary Garrels.
ISBN: 0-938437-09-7
56 pages, statements by the artists, bios., biblios., 42 b/w illustrationsJackie Windsor/Barry Ledoux: Sculpture
1984, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition featuring sculpture by Jackie Winsor and Barry Ledoux. Introduction by Kathy Halbreich. Interviews with the artists.
ISBN: 0-938437-08-9
40 pages, bios., biblios., 10 b/w & 3 color illustrationsPeter Campus/Photographs David Deutsch/Paintings and Drawings
1983, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition of photographs by Peter Campus and paintings and drawings by David Deutsch. Essay by Katy Kline and Kathy Halbreich.
ISBN: 0-938437-07-0
28 pages, artists' statements, bios. biblios., 12 b/w illustrationsAffinities: Myron Stout, Bill Jensen, Brice Marden, Terry Winters
1983, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition focusing on the work and shared ambitions of Bill Jensen, Terry Winters, Brice Marden, and Myron Stout. Essay by Kathy Halbreich.
ISBN 0-938437-06-2
44 pages, artists' statements, bios., biblios., 17 b/w illustrationsWakeby Day, Wakeby Night: Monumental Monotypes by Michael Mazur
1983, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Catalogue documents MIT’s commission of monotype mural by Michael Mazur. Essays by Katy Kline and Eugenia Parry Janis.
24 pages, fold-out, bio., biblio., 7 b/w and 2-page color illustrations
Mediums of Language: Vernon Fisher, Myrel Chernick, Paul Sharits
1982, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition featuring the work of Vernon Fisher, Myrel Chernick and Paul Sharits in which language as an integral element. Essay by Kathy Halbreich. Interviews with the artists.
ISBN: 0-938437-05-4
60 pages, bios., biblios., 20 b/w illustrationsRecent European Prints
1982, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition featuring contemporary European prints by 18 artists including Georg Baselitz, Francesco Clemente, Felix Droese, Jörg Immendorf, Anselm Kiefer, Mimmo Paladino, Arnulf Rainer and others. Essay by Katy Kline and Garry Garrels.
8 pages, fold-out, 13 b/w illustrations
Great Big Drawings
1982, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition focusing on contemporary large scale works on paper by 17 artists including Chuck Close, Bryan Hung, Robert Moskowitz, Elizabeth Murray, Joel Shapiro and others. Essay by Katy Kline.
6 pages, fold-out, 4 b/w illustrations
Body Language: Figurative Aspects in Recent Art
1981, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition focusing on the figurative aspects of contemporary painting, sculpture and photography. Artists included Jennifer Bartlett, Jonathan Borofsky, Barry Ledoux, Robert Longo, David Salle, Joel Shapiro, Cindy Sherman and others. Essay by guest curator Roberta Smith.
ISBN: 0-938437-02-X
116 pages, bios., biblios., 53 b/w illustrationsFurniture by Architects
1981, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition featuring chairs, tables, and lamps by 17 contemporary architects including Frank Gehry, Vico Magistretti, Robert Mangurian, Billie Tsien, Tod Williams and others.
ISBN: 0-938437-01-1
44 pages, 14 b/w illustrationsFour Painters
1981, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition featuring the work of painters Carroll Dunham, Ralph Hilton, John Kohring and Carol Lindsley. Essay by Kathy Halbreich.
32 pages, bios., biblios., 16 b/w and 4 color illustrations
Rooms
1981, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition featuring site-specific installations by Richard Artschwager, Cynthia Carlson and Richard Haas. Essay by Susan Sidlauskas.
50 pages, interviews with the artists, bios., biblios., 22 b/w illustrations
Jonathan Borofsky: Installation
1980, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Brochure accompanying an installation by Jonathan Borofsky at MIT’s Hayden Gallery which included a ping-pong table, a coke machine, wall paintings, and a videotape documentary of the artist’s working process. Essay by Kathy Halbreich.
8 pages, interview with the artist, bio., biblio., fold-out, 7 b/w illustrations
The Material Object
1980, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition featuring sculptures by T. Bills, R. Horn, J. Gibbons, and N. Pearson. Essay by Kathy Halbreich.
28 pages, artists texts, bios., biblios., 20 b/w illustrations
Bochner/Serra
1980, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition featuring the work of Mel Bochner and Richard Serra focusing on the use of language as a stimulant for conceiving and making art. Essay by Kathy Halbreich.
52 pages, bios., Biblios., 38 b/w and one color illustration
Agnes Denes
1980, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Brochure documenting exhibition and residency of Agnes Denes. Essay by Gary Garrels. Artist’s statements.
4 pages, bio., biblio., fold-out, 3 b/w illustrations
Between Inventory and Memory: The Architecture of Aldo Rossi
1980, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Exhibition of the work of Italian architect and theorist Aldo Rossi. Essay by Katy Kline.
6 pages, artist's statement, chronology, fold-out, 4 b/w illustrations