Mousse Publishing

Furla Series: Time After Time, Space after Space

20 August 2018 in Books Comment

Furla Series: Time After Time, Space after Space

2018
English / Italian
152 pages
Softcover, 19 × 26 cm
ISBN: 978 88 6749 331 9

Texts by Helga Christoffersen, Jean-Pierre Criqui, Hendrik Folkerts, Aram Moshayedi, Bruna Roccasalva, Joanna Zielińska

Dancing, talking, singing, playing music, walking, writing, eating, screaming, sleeping… we’ve seen artists do all this and much more, at museums, galleries, art fairs, and foundations. In books, catalogues, and art history texts, we’ve read about works made of bodies, gestures, movements, and actions that unfold in space and time. We’re talking about performance art: a constantly evolving language that artists have always used to respond to change, the “avant-avant-garde” that even today “continues to defy definition, remaining as unpredictable and provocative as it ever was.” –Bruna Roccasalva

Time after Time, Space after Space, realized in co-production with the Museo del Novecento in Milan, is the first edition of Furla Series, the project that from 2017 sees Fondazione Furla engaged in the realization of exhibitions and events dedicated to some of the most important national and international artists, in collaboration with major Italian art institutions. The partnership with the Museo del Novecento is a unique opportunity to meet past, present, and future that activates a dialogue between the masters of the twentieth century and the protagonists of the contemporary art scene. From this premise comes the idea of reflecting on performativity starting from a relationship with the work of Lucio Fontana, which marked a fundamental point in the recognition of the artistic value of the gesture, paving the way for subsequent spatial and performative research. The book contains an introductory text by the curator of the project and five essays dedicated to each artist that explore their approach to the practice of performance. For each artist is provided an extensive photographic documentation of the performance held in Sala Fontana.

Mousse Publishing

The Artist as Curator: An Anthology

20 August 2018 in Books Comment

The Artist as Curator: An Anthology

2017
English
416 pages
softcover, 21 x 28 cm
ISBN 9783960981787

Edited by Elena Filipovic

Texts by Alexander Alberro, Monica Amor and Carlos Basualdo, Biljana Ciric, Ekaterina Degot, Elena Filipovic, Claire Grace, Anthony Huberman, Dean Inkster, Alhena Katsof, William Krieger, Elisabeth Lebovici, Ana Longoni, James Meyer, Isabelle Moffat, Nina Möntmann, Natalie Musteata, Sandra Skurvida, Dirk Snauwaert, Lucy Steeds, Monika Szewczyk, and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Afterword by Hans Ulrich Obrist

This is an anthology of essays that first appeared in The Artist as Curator, a series that occupied eleven issues of Mousse from no. 41 (December 2013/January 2014) to no. 51 (December 2015/January 2016). It set out to examine what was then a profoundly influential but still under-studied phenomenon, a history that had yet to be written: the fundamental role artists have played as curators. Taking that ontologically ambiguous thing we call “the exhibition” as a critical medium, artists have often radically rethought conventional forms of exhibition making. This anthology surveys seminal examples of such exhibitions from the postwar to the present, including rare documents and illustrations.

It includes an introduction and the twenty essays that first appeared in Mousse, a newly commissioned afterword by Hans Ulrich Obrist, and two additional essays that appear here for the first time, discussing twenty-two exhibitions by the Avant-Garde Argentinian Visual Artists Group; Mel Bochner; Marcel Broodthaers; Hank Bull, Shen Fan, Zhou Tiehai, Shi Yong, and Ding Yi; John Cage; Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, and the CalArts Feminist Art Program; Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab); Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, and Max Jorge Hinderer; Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno; Group Material; Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore; David Hammons; Martin Kippenberger; Mark Leckey; Goshka Macuga; Lucy McKenzie and Paulina Ołowska; Hélio Oiticica; Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari; Martha Rosler; Avdey Ter-Oganyan; Philippe Thomas; and Andy Warhol.

Co-published with Koenig Books, London

Mousse Publishing

Gary Kuehn — Practitioner’s Delight

19 August 2018 in Books Comment

Gary Kuehn: Practitioner’s Delight

2018
English / Italian
156 pages
Softcover, 16 × 22 cm
ISBN: 978 88 6749 349 4

Texts by Alex Bacon, Lorenzo Giusti, David Komary, Gary Kuehn, Sara Fumagalli

“Practitioner’s Delight is one of the few evocative titles used by Gary Kuehn in over fifty years of work. It suggests the idea of deviation from current practice and the pleasure of divertissement. It implies skill but nods to amusement. The work is a white parallelepiped cut with precision on one end, out of which flows a pink substance spilling onto the ground. The rigor of the geometric figure dialogues with the indefinite semi-liquid matter, left free to collapse onto itself. Realized in 1966, the work reveals the artist’s perturbing intent, the impulse to ‘subvert the strength of pure form,’ to ‘humiliate it’ and elude ‘the absolute.’” —Lorenzo Giusti

Abundantly illustrated and collecting several essays and a long conversation with the artist the book Practitioner’s Delight has been published on the occasion of Gary Kuehn’s (Plainfield, New Jersey, 1939) first solo exhibition in Italy, at GAMeC Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea – Bergamo, which presents a significant core of about seventy works, including sculptures, drawings, paintings, and installations, among the most important in the artist’s corpus, dating from the early 1960s to the most recent pieces. Both the exhibition and the publication pay homage to the American artist, whose radical language developed from an initial reflection on the physicality of materials and played a significant role in the birth of a new conception of sculpture, equidistant from the subjectivism of Expressionist abstraction and the objectivity and geometric rigor of minimalism. Kuehn participated in watershed exhibitions like the famous 1966 Eccentric Abstraction, curated by Lucy Lippard, and the 1969 When Attitudes Become Form, curated by Harald Szeemann, and spent over five decades exploring the tension between change and deformation, his intent being to refute “the dogma of the cube,” as he has repeatedly declared, and “to subvert the force of pure forms.”

Mousse Publishing

Eric Fischl — If Art Could Talk

23 June 2018 in Books Comment

Eric Fischl: If Art Could Talk
Mousse Publishing

2018
English
128 pages
Hardcover, 20 × 25.5 cm
ISBN: 9788867493326

Texts by Peter Doroshenko, Eric Fischl

“I am one of the first generation artists who grew up in the suburbs. We grew up, post-WWII, in an ascendant America in which the suburbs was its utopian manifestation. We came into our art maturity painfully aware of the disconnection between what was promised and what was delivered.”
—Eric Fischl

Eric Fischl (New York, 1948) is one of only a handful of contemporary painters who regularly, though by no means exclusively, employs sourced images, culled from the internet, newspapers, and magazines, to inform his paintings. The artist then adds his own photographs and blends a final ensemble of information and storytelling. No kings or generals or momentous battles move across Fischl’s canvases, and most of his subjects are quotidian rather than grandiose—suburban bourgeois families, art world mongers and awkward social interactions. In his works, communication is nonexistent and boredom is pervasive. The book, published on the occasion of a solo show held at Dallas Contemporary museum, includes more than 120 painting reproductions and a conversation between Eric Fischl and Peter Doroshenko.

Mousse Publishing

Michael Fliri – Replace Me as the Substitute

3 December 2017 in Books Comment

Michael Fliri: Replace Me as the Substitute

Texts by Koen Leemans, Nicola Setari and Michele Horrigan

In his work Michael Fliri investigates concepts such as metamorphosis, mutation, disguise and transformation. That transition can be seen as a meeting between different worlds in which diametrically opposed notions and ideas appear to communicate effortlessly with one another: conscious/unconscious, light/dark, nature/culture, content/emptiness, appearing/disappearing. Body, landscape, a thought-out theme and imaginative metaphors together form a compelling whole. Central to his work seems to be the question of what it is that determines who and what we are. What is our identity? How do we form our image of ourselves? Are we really who we think we are? In Michael Fliri’s solo presentation Replace Me As The Substitute at De Garage, all facets of his work come together in a comprehensive show. Without wanting to expand to the proportions of a retrospective, the focus lies on a balanced and subtle dialogue, between works that at first sight perhaps look very different, but that more than ever allows the exceptional coherence in his work to come to the fore. The eponymous publication moreover offers an extended and enduring overview and underscores the international significance and the relevance of his artistic practice.

2017
English
120 pages
hardcover, 16 x 24 cm
ISBN 978-88-6749-307-4

Mousse Publishing

Rock, Paper Scissors: Positions in Play

27 September 2017 in Books Comment

Rock, Paper Scissors: Positions in Play

Edited by Hammad Nasar. Texts and contributions by Khalid Albudoor, Maisa Al Qassimi, Aisha Bilkhair, Reem Fadda, Ramin & Ronki Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian, Uzma Z. Rizvi, Michele Robecchi, Osman Samiuddin, Deepak Unnikrishnan, Murtaza Vali, and WTD Magazine.

2017
English
272 pages
Softcover, 17 x 23 cm
ISBN 9788867492756

The playground game of Rock, Paper, Scissors originated in China, was popularized by the Japanese, and can be seen on playgrounds everywhere. This book accompanies the exhibition at the National Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates at the 57th Venice Biennale, and explores the multifarious notions of time as a life practice, venturing beyond regimented definitions of art—seeping into cricket, music, folklore, heritage, and social clubs. The artists in “Rock, Paper, Scissors”—Nujoom Alghanem, Sara Al Haddad, Vikram Divecha, Ramin & Ronki Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian, Hind Mezaina, Deepak Unnikrishnan, WTD Magazine, Lantian Xie, Dr. Mohamed Yousif—enact a habitation of home through playful gestures and acts, in which bodies mark time and transform space.

Mousse Publishing