Books in the Writing Art series

Writings by the conceptual artist Michael Asher—including notes, proposals, exhibition statements, and letters to curators and critics—most published here for the first time.The California conceptual artist Michael Asher (1943-2012) was known for rigorous site specificity and pioneering institutional critique. His decades of teaching at CalArts influenced generations of artists. Much of Asher's artistic practice was devoted to creating works that had no lasting material presence and often responded to the material, social, or ideological context of a situation. Because most of Asher's artworks have ceased to exist, his writings about them have special significance. Public Knowledge collects writings by Asher about his work—including preliminary notes and ideas, project proposals, exhibition statements, and letters to curators and critics—most of which have never been previously published. Asher gave few interviews, didn't write art criticism, and rarely published extensive accounts of his own work. Yet writing was central to his artistic practice, serving as a tool for working out ideas, negotiating institutional parameters, and describing thought processes. In these texts, he considers writing and documentation, discusses artistic practice, offers notes for gallery and museum talks, presents artist statements for exhibition-goers, describes individual works and their situational context, and reflects on teaching and art education. Among other things, Asher provides his definition of site specificity, addresses the function of art in public space, and analyzes the intersection of teaching art and institutional models of education. Readers will see an artist at work, formulating ethical and political strategies for making art in a situational world.

Chosen to represent the United States at the 46th Venice Biennale, Bill Viola, a New York artist living on the West Coast, is recognized internationally for his work in video and sound installations. This book brings together a selection of essays, notebook entries, drawings, and descriptions of projects that map Viola's personal course through the readings, observations, experiments, and associations that form the groundwork for his art. Each work illustrated is accompanied by a description by the artist, as well as comments on the work's origins from the artist's notebooks.For the last 25 years, Viola has used innovative multimedia technologies to explore the phenomena of sense perception as a language of the body and avenue to self-knowledge, integrating many disciplines and philosophies to reveal contemporary art's relevance to the modern world. His views have deep roots in mysticism, poetry, philosophy, Eastern art, shamanism, Chinese Taoism, Sufism, and Zen Buddhism. Viola's chief concerns today are to draw attention to the upset ecological balance of nature by focusing on the connection between our inner and outer lives, on the conception of the self as part of the whole.Published in association with the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London.

Rock My Religion collects eighteen of Graham's essays from all periods of his work, beginning with his essays on minimalist artists such as Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, continuing with his writings on punk rock and popular culture, and concluding with his more recent considerations of architecture, urban space, and power.Dan Graham's artworks and critical writings have had an enormous influence on the course of contemporary art over the past quarter century. Rock My Religion collects eighteen of Graham's essays from all periods of his work, beginning with his essays on minimalist artists such as Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, continuing with his writings on punk rock and popular culture, and concluding with his more recent considerations of architecture, urban space, and power.Alternating with these theoretical essays are descriptions and documentations of Graham's own works and installations—projects that trace his explorations in conceptual art, video, photography, architecture, and public sculpture, showing the integral connections between Graham's criticism and his own artwork. Although as an artist Graham has been associated with minimalism, conceptual art, and postmodernism, his writing does not conform to the stylistic and theoretical constraints of any specific movement. With sources and topics ranging from Ronald Reagan to the Sex Pistols, from Michel Foucault to Dean Martin, Graham's eclectic investigations into the complex cultural relationships between art production and social reality are always strikingly original. What makes these writings particularly astonishing, though, is Graham's willingness to examine specific manifestations of popular culture (television, magazines, rock and roll, drugs) without regard to traditional qualitative judgments and without separating "high" or "low" culture from the processes of everyday life.

In 2006, even though he could barely type, China¿s most famous artist started blogging. For more than three years, Ai Weiwei turned out a steady stream of scathing social commentary, criticism of government policy, thoughts on art and architecture, and autobiographical writings. He wrote about the Sichuan earthquake (and posted a list of the schoolchildren who died because of the government¿s ¿tofu-dregs engineering¿), reminisced about Andy Warhol and the East Village art scene, described the irony of being investigated for ¿fraud¿ by the Ministry of Public Security, made a modest proposal for tax collection. Then, on June 1, 2009, Chinese authorities shut down the blog. This book offers a collection of Ai¿s notorious online writings translated into English--the most complete, public documentation of the original Chinese blog available in any language. The New York Times called Ai ¿a figure of Warholian celebrity.¿ He is a leading figure on the international art scene, a regular in museums and biennials, but in China he is a manifold and controversial presence: artist, architect, curator, social critic, justice-seeker. He was a consultant on the design of the famous ¿Bird¿s Nest¿ stadium but called for an Olympic boycott; he received a Chinese Contemporary Art ¿lifetime achievement award¿ in 2008 but was beaten by the police in connection with his ¿citizen investigation¿ of earthquake casualties in 2009. Ai Weiwei's Blog documents Ai¿s passion, his genius, his hubris, his righteous anger, and his vision for China

Texts by Hans Haacke that range from straightforward descriptions of his artworks to wide-ranging reflections on the relationship between art and politics.Hans Haacke's art articulates the interdependence of multiple elements. An artwork is not merely an object but is also its context—the economic, social, and political conditions of the art world and the world at large. Among his best-known works are MoMA-Poll (1970), which polled museumgoers on their opinions about Nelson Rockefeller and the Nixon administration's Indochina policy; Gallery-Goers' Birthplace and Residence Profile (1969), which canvassed visitors to the Howard Wise Gallery in Manhattan; and the famously canceled 1971 solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, which was meant to display, among other things, works on two New York real estate empires.This volume collects writings by Haacke that explain and document his practice. The texts, some of which have never before been published, run from straightforward descriptions to wide-ranging reflections and full-throated polemics. They include correspondence with MoMA and the Guggenheim and a letter refusing to represent the United States at the 1969 São Paulo Biennial; the title piece, "Working Conditions,” which discusses corporate influence on the art world; Haacke's thinking about "real-time social systems”; and texts written for museum catalogs on various artworks, including GERMANIA, in the German Pavilion of the 1993 Venice Biennial; DER BEVÖLKERUNG (To the Population) of 2000 at the Berlin Reichstag; Mixed Messages, an exhibition of objects from the Victoria and Albert Museum (2001); and Gift Horse, unveiled on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2015.