Bas Jan Ader disappeared at sea in 1975 while attempting to sail from the east coast of the United States to Europe as part of a project titled In Search of the Miraculous. The circumstances of his disappearance have led many interpreters to identify Ader with the role of the tragic romantic hero. This identification has obscured the fact that Ader’s art was a critical investigation of precisely those romantic motives his persona has now come to be associated with. In this book, Jan Verwoert highlights the specific ways in which Ader’s cycle of works explores those motives with an artistic ...

Beverly Buchanan’s Marsh Ruins (1981) are large, solid mounds of cement and shell-based tabby concrete, yet their presence has always been elusive. Hiding in the tall grasses and brackish waters of the Marshes of Glynn, on the southeast coast of Georgia, the Marsh Ruins merge with their surroundings as they enact a curious and delicate tension between destruction and endurance. This volume offers an illustrated examination of Buchanan’s environmental sculpture, which exists in an ongoing state of ruination. Amelia Groom illuminates Buchanan’s vision of sculptural ruination, and probes her remarkable work in terms of ideas of witnessing, documentation, landscape, and cultural ...

Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion (1982–84) is a video essay populated by punk and rock performers (Patti Smith, Jim Morrison, Black Flag and Glenn Branca) and historical figures (including Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers). This coming together of several narrative voice-overs, of singing and shouting voices, of jarring sounds and text overlaid onto shaky, gritty images, proposes a historical genealogy of rock music and an ambitious thesis on the origins of America. In this illustrated book, Kodwo Eshun examines this landmark work of contemporary moving image in relation to Graham’s wider body of work and to the broader culture of ...

One wintry day in 1983, David Hammons peddled snowballs of various sizes. He laid them out in graduated rows and spent the day acting as obliging salesman. Calling the unannounced street action Bliz-aard Ball Sale, he inscribed it into a body of work that, from the late 1960s to the present, has used a lexicon of discreet actions and consciously ‘black’ materials to comment on the nature of the artwork, the art world and race in America. Although Bliz-aard Ball Sale has been frequently cited and is increasingly influential, it has long been known only through scant descriptions and a handful ...

Glenn Ligon’s iconic Untitled (I am a Man) (1988) remembers the signs carried by striking African-American sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968. In this study of the painting Gregg Bordowitz discusses its relevance to representations of self, race and gender, with reference to other key works by Ligon such as the Profile Series (1990-91) as well as Narratives and Runaways (both 1993). At this moment of political upheaval and dissent against the resurgence of fascism in the United States, Bordowitz’s timely account cites historical figures ranging from Sojourner Truth, who delivered her famous speech ‘Ain’t I A Woman?’ in 1851, ...

Initially associated with the Rio de Janeiro-based Neo-Concretist group, Hélio Oiticica later became one of the key figures of Brazil’s Tropicália movement. During his stay in New York, and in collaboration with film-maker Neville D’Almeida, Oiticia conceived Block-Experiments in Cosmococa – program in progress (1973–74), a series of nine ‘supra-sensorial’ environments, each incorporating slide projections, soundtracks, cocaine powder drawings and a set of instructions for visitors. The work is the epitome of what Oiticica called his ‘quasi-cinemas’ and constitutes his desire to merge individual ‘life-experience’ with art. In this book, Sabeth Buchmann and Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz consider the influence the ...

Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women (1979) marks the transition of photography as an art form from the printed page to the gallery wall. In the photograph a woman looks outward, as if at the viewer; a camera occupies the centre of the image; the photographer stands on the right. Modelled on Édouard Manet’s painting Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère, Picture for Women is an ambitious attempt to relate the artistic and spectatorial demands of the late 1970s to modernist pictorial art. In this book, David Campany offers an account of Wall’s move from a Conceptual approach to a reengagement with the idea ...

Lee Lozano’s Dropout Piece (begun c.1970) is one of her most challenging and elusive works. First and foremost, it is the name Lozano gave to her self-imposed transformation from art world insider to outsider. It is also a large-scale action carried out with lifelong, indeed posthumous, consequences. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer presents Dropout Piece as a great experiment in art and endurance. Situating the work within the context of ‘Life-Art’ pieces such as Dialogue Piece, General Strike Piece, Grass Piece and Boycott Women, she demonstrates how Dropout Piece exhibits an extraordinary range of artistic intents. Drawing closely upon Lozano’s private notebooks, Lehrer-Graiwer argues ...

A ‘complex’ can be an architectural configuration, a psychological syndrome or a political apparatus. In this book, John Miller approaches Educational Complex through corresponding lines of enquiry, considering the representation of Kelley’s schools (and his childhood home) as architectural models; popular fantasies associated with false memory syndrome; and the liberal democratic premises underpinning education. During his lifetime, Mike Kelley worked with a wide range of media, exploring themes as varied as grassroots politics, religious systems and social class. Miller shows that in Educational Complex, Kelley expands this political and aesthetic focus to test the ideological horizon of art as an institution. This ...

Pierre Huyghe’s 19-minute film Untitled (Human Mask) opens with drone shots of a Japanese town, wracked by a well-known triple devastation of earthquake, tsunami, nuclear plant meltdown. The context is specific, yet curiously expansive – an atmosphere for troubled times. Are we witnessing the end of the Capitalocene? The emergence of an environmental uncanny? No one remains to guide us but a cat, a cockroach, some larvae and a monkey in a human mask. With infinite curiosity, filmmaker Mark Lewis, Huyghe’s contemporary, gives us a tour through the experience – the pleasures and frustrations – of Untitled (Human Mask). Weaving ...

Urban parkland, invention and repetition are the key motifs of Rodney Graham’s Phonokinetoscope (2001). Drawing together Graham’s early commitment to photography and subsequent investigations into film, music and installation, the work consists of a turntable driving a projector, a vinyl LP with psychedelic rock song written and performed by the artist, and a 16mm film loop featuring Graham riding a bicycle around Berlin’s Tiergarten, while tripping on acid. In this book, Shepherd Steiner discusses Phonokinetoscope as a pivotal work in the context of the artist’s early explorations of proto-cinema and later preoccupations with the ‘temporal object’. He uncovers a practice indebted ...

Sanja Iveković’s Triangle is an 18-minute performance that took place on 10 May 1979: while Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito’s motorcade passes by below, the artist is sitting on her balcony, reading a book, sipping whiskey and making ‘gestures’ as if performing masturbation, until a security official arrives and asks her to leave. Exhibited as four black-and-white photographs and a short descriptive text, Triangle is one of the most resonant and defiant works of performance made in the 1970s. Focusing on the genesis of the work, its documentation and the politics of canon construction, Ruth Noack discusses Triangle in relation to ...