Mousse Publishing

Gene Beery

19 July 2019 in Books Comment

Edited by Balthazar Lovay
Texts by Kenneth Goldsmith, Balthazar Lovay, Jo Melvin, Gregor Quack

“Many years ago, on the way to England to work on a museum project, I was seated in the plane next to a young man who was a classical lute player. We got to talking, and I asked him what he was listening to on his Discman. He showed me the CD and began to talk about the music. It was a collection of a minor composer’s music played from transcriptions of broadsides that were sold on the street for pennies in the Middle Ages. The composer, however, was clever and included beautifully handdrawn images on his scores. Over the ages, they were framed and preserved, not so much because of the music but because of how beautiful and distinctive they were as objects. While his peers’ music—printed and distributed in the same form without decoration—vanished, this composer’s scores remain as the only examples of the genre. By default, they are now considered classics. And in the same way, Beery’s scribbles remain one step ahead of the curve, anticipating a future reception in which they too will be considered classics.” — Kenneth Golsdmith

For more than 60 years, Gene Beery has interrogated the moment of esthetic experience with humor and irony. What are the stakes of an encounter between a viewer and the work? What does the surface of the canvas promise to whoever looks at it? Beery positions himself with pictures to be read, whose phrases announce the arrival, the impossibility or the absurdity of such an experience. Behind the apparent lightness and sarcastic distance of his practice emerges a deep reflection on the existence of art and the role of the artist.

Gene Beery is the first monograph dedicated to this American artist and offers an in-depth investigation of his work. It assembles more than 65 artworks and three essays, by Kenneth Goldsmith, Jo Melvin and Balthazar Lovay, as well as an interview with Gene Beery by Gregor Quack.

2019
English
172 pages
Hardcover, 21 × 28 cm
ISBN: 9788867493746

Mousse Publishing

Laida Lertxundi — Landscape Plus

26 April 2019 in Books Comment

Laida Lertxundi: Landscape Plus

Edited by Alejandro Alonso Díaz
Texts by Erika Balsom, Anna Mannubens, Laida Lertxundi, Alejandro Alonso Díaz

“I experience a conflict coming from a tradition of filmmaking written and defined by men. I make films that depict, at their core, this conflict between form and feeling. Forms appear as neutral, organizing permutations. There is feeling in the presence of desire, longing, and loss.

There is loss in the translation of feeling to form, of one culture to another, and of an experience while filming to its representation on the screen.”—Laida Lertxundi

Landscape Plus is the first monograpy on the work of the Spanish-born, Los Angeles-based filmmaker Laida Lertxundi, published in collaboration with fluent.

With essays by Erika Balsom, Anna Mannubens, Laida Lertxundi, and Alejandro Alonso Díaz this book explores the wider practice of the artist, featuring a number of premiered visuals, plus sets of images illustrating her exhibitions, projects, and works. For the first time since Lertxundi began making films, a publication maps her overall practice and allows for enhanced readings that navigate around film-theory, feminism, and subjectivity. As a whole, the book intends to present an essential constellation of Lertxundi’s universe.

2019
English, Spanish, Basque
128 pages
Softcover, 16 × 24 cm
ISBN: 978 88 6749 371 5

Mousse Publishing

Alexandre Estrela and João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva: Lua Cão

29 March 2019 in Books Comment

Alexandre Estrela and João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva: Lua Cão

Texts by Marco Bene, Natxo Checa, Alexandre Estrela, Chris Fitzpatrick, José Freixo, João Maria Gusmão, Andrea Lissoni, Bruno Marchand, Pedro Paiva, Post Brothers, Filipa Ramos

“I moved to Lisbon to relax and do nothing, but found myself sucked into an endless stream of dinner parties. The Portuguese give extreme importance to meals; following the legacy of the ancient Greek symposium, all important conversations gravitate around large portions of ameijoas à bulhão pato, rojões à minhota, morce la da régua, and açorda. […] At one of these banquets I sat next to the artists João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva. And rather than saying I was leading an idle life, I mentioned I was freelancing, writing vacuum cleaner reviews on the internet. I was surprised when they showed interest, and baffled when they asked me to read one”—Marco Bene

Published on the occasion of the fourth staging of the eponymous exhibition by Alexandre Estrela and João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva at La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Lua Cão isn’t just a catalogue, but another of the many constellations that comprise the show. Curated by Natxo Checa, the exhibition—commenced in a cave in the Azores and shortly after travelled to Zé dos Bois in Lisbon, Kuntsverein München in Munich, and lastly to Madrid—is a choreographed and immersive moving-image experiment, which tests the intersection of the three artists’ works, 16mm films and digital videos triggered at different moments over the course of a four-hour cycle, like a panoptic cinema. Featuring images from all the four exhibition chapters, a 16 pages reprint of Lua Cão (Tom & Jerry) (Amsterdam: ROMA Publications, 2018), conversations, emails, and essays by a group of critics, curators and participants to the event, the catalogue recounts the phenomenology of the project, all sides of its prism. The journeys inspiring the realization of metaphysical works of art, reflections on imploded cinema, Portuguese gastronomy and the joys of projectionism, considerations on the somatic properties of Lua Cão, loose thoughts on art and time, volcanic tunnels, melon-shaped skulls, spiderwebs, drunken zombies, demonic dogs, and the digestive benefits of Coca-Cola.

2018
English, Spanish
200 pages
Hardcover, 21 × 28.5 cm
ISBN: 978 88 6749 358 6

Mousse Publishing

Oslo Pilot

28 March 2019 in Books Comment

Oslo Pilot
Edited by Eva González-Sancho and Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk

Texts by Lida Abdul, Kim Henning Andreassen, Merete Joelsen Aune, Mark Bain, Amy Balkin , Lene Berg, Dineo Bopape, Barbara Browning & Yve Laris Cohen, Pavel Büchler , Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann, Dora García, Mette Edvardsen, Marte Eknæs, Cassius Fadlabi, Jan Freuchen & Sigurd Tenningen, Alberto Giacometti, Félix González-Torres, Matthew Goulish, Johan Grimonprez & Catherine Bernard, Lina Viste Grønli, Ane Hjort Guttu, Flaka Haliti, Thomas Hirschhorn, Liv Kristin Holmberg, Jonas Ib F.H. Jensen, Farhad Kalantary, Mike Kelley, Karl Larsson, Mara Lee, LIGNA, Minouk Lim, Lotte Konow Lund, Inger Wold Lund, Metahaven, Henri Michaux, Juan Muñoz, Miriam Myrstad, Maurizio Nannucci, Maria Nordman, Douglas Park, Matthew Rana, Martha Rosler, Allen Ruppersberg, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Lisa Tan, Lisa Torell, Vibeke Tandberg, Jan Verwoert, Annee Grøtte Viken, Andy Warhol, Haytham El-Wardany, Stephen Willats, Pamela Wye, and Knut Åsdam.

To make art in and for the public domain today is to engage with the precariousness that both defines and threatens our experience of it. OSLO PILOT (2015–17)—a project investigating the role of art in and for the public space—laying the groundwork for Oslo Biennial First Edition brings together 38 previously published texts spanning the past 80 years and 19 commissioned texts exploring art in public spaces and spheres. It also includes an edited transcript of the symposium, organized by OSLO PILOT in the fall of 2016, “The Giver, the Guest, and Ghost: The Presence of Art in Public Realms.” The publication embodies the idea of the city as a prerequisite and basis for work, and focuses on the conditions of public space as a field where many agencies, identities, and interests meet and are made visible.

2018
English, Norwegian, Arabic, Korean, Spanish, Swedish
608 pages
Softcover, 17 × 24 cm
ISBN: 978 88 6749 342 5

Mousse Publishing

Lucio Fontana: Ambienti / Environments

7 January 2019 in Books Comment

Lucio Fontana: Ambienti / Environments
English Edition : Italian Edition

Marina Pugliese, Barbara Ferriani, and Vicente Todolí, eds.
Texts by Marina Pugliese, Barbara Ferriani, Enrico Crispolti, Paolo Campiglio, Luca Massimo Barbero, Orietta Lanzarini, Anne Rana, Jennifer Josten, Maria Villa

“The spatial environment was the first attempt to liberate the viewer from a static plastic form, the environment was completely black, with black Wood’s light. Upon entering, you were absolutely alone, each visitor engaged with their own immediate reaction, not dictated to by an object, or by things laid out like merchandise, man was faced with himself, with his own conscience, his own ignorance, his own physical being, etc. etc. The important thing was not to do the usual exhibition of paintings and sculptures, and enter in the spatial debate—immediately afterwards I did the ‘holes,’ the rupturing of a dimension! The void, etc. etc.” —Lucio Fontana

This publication is produced in conjunction with Ambienti/Environments, held at Pirelli HangarBicocca from September 2017 to January 2018. Focused on Lucio Fontana’s pioneering work in the realm of installation art, the exhibition presented a selection of his most experimental yet least-known works, Ambienti spaziali (Spatial Environments), seen together for the first time. Fontana’s environments, conceived before the famous “holes” (Concetti spaziali), were revolutionary for their time for their use of innovative materials such as neon and Wood’s lamps and they anticipated the research on light and space that would develop in the following decades. But the endeavor also has contemporary relevance inasmuch as Fontana’s research touches on several aspects of relational aesthetics, and is connected to contemporary practices of an environmental character, such as those of Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, or Tomás Saraceno. The exhibition was the result of long and in-depth study in several museums and private archives carried out by the co-curators, the art historian Marina Pugliese and the art conservator Barbara Ferriani. Some of the environments were reconstructed for the first time since the artist’s death, in collaboration with Fondazione Lucio Fontana.

The book collects the most up-to-date research on this body of Fontana’s work and will prove useful for any future investigation of the spatial environments, as well as meeting the need for a new and critical look at the historical and artistic period in which they were conceived. A detailed collection of work entries dedicated to the entirety of Fontana’s environmental production accompanies an extensive selection of essays, historical images, and installation views.

2018
English
228 pages
Hardcover, 22 × 28.5 cm
ISBN: 978 88 6749 291 6

Mousse Publishing

How Evil Is Pop Art? — New European Realism 1959–1966

6 January 2019 in Books Comment

How Evil Is Pop Art? New European Realism 1959–1966

2018
English / Italian
144 pages
Softcover, 23 × 30 cm
ISBN: 978 88 6749 341 8

Texts by Tobia Bezzola and Vincenzo de Bellis

Tullia Zevi’s question “How evil is Pop Art?” posed in her 1964 review of the Venice Biennale, neatly summed up the moral indignation of the times with which large parts of the audience viewed this new form of art. Pop was not simply just another new “-ism” in the established tradition of the avant-garde, and it was not a style either. Pop was the new, iconoclastic statement of a young generation of artists, breaking for the first time since the Dadaists with fundamental premises of modern Western art. –Tobia Bezzola

This richly illustrated catalogue is published on the occasion of the group exhibition curated by Tobia Bezzola How Evil Is Pop Art? New European Realism 1959-1966, at the Spazio -1. Collezione Giancarlo e Danna Olgiati, which stems from the desire to re-read the European Pop phenomenon via a sophisticated selection of works thanks to the encounter between two private collections: the Collezione Giancarlo e Danna Olgiati, and one of the foremost private collections of this artistic current. With forty-two works, all of which executed between 1959 and 1966, the show compares the works of thirty-one artists, including pioneers of early British Pop such as Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, Allen Jones, and David Hockney, alongside some of the major exponents of French Nouveau Réalisme, names like Martial Raysse, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Daniel Spoerri; also on display are the works of Peter Klasen and Konrad Lueg representing a radical break from German abstract painting. An important position is occupied by the different groups of Italian Pop Art, including famous representatives like Mimmo Rotella, Franco Angeli, Gianfranco Baruchello, Tano Festa, Mario Schifano, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, who distinguished themselves for the multiplicity of their languages, as well as for the inescapable link with the cultural tradition of their country.

Mousse Publishing