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Title:
Kunst lehren / Teaching art : Staedelschule Frankfurt/Main

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The Frankfurt am Main Staedelschule, and its gallery Portikus, form a leading international center for experimental contemporary art. The Staedelschule was founded in 1817 by Johann Friedrich Staedel for the purpose of introducing students to his prodigous art collection. This publication is authored by contemporary Staedelschule professors and visiting lecturers, including Pamela Lee, Niklas Maak, Jan Verwoert and Okwui Enwezor, who discuss what teaching art means in the context of a contemporary academy, and at what point the art market should be introduced in a student's education. It serves as an example of the kind of discourse available to Staedelschule students, as there is always in residence an impressive international cast of artworld practitioners. This volume is not only functional, however; it also includes a series of new photographs, produced especially for this project, by Wolfgang Tillmans.

Title:
Model Martin Kippenberger: Utopia for Everyone

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Painter Christopher Wool has written, "Some of the best stand-up performance I ever saw was Martin [Kippenberger] telling jokes in the back of some bar or restaurant." Which is not to dismiss the legendary German artist, who was at the forefront of the much-storied Cologne art scene of the early 1990s--Kippenberger, who died in 1997, used humor like a laser, to illuminate power structures and taboos. One of the most important artists of the twentieth century, he not only worked in a variety of media--painting, sculpture, books and multiples--but, taking a cue from Joseph Beuys, actively tried to conceive new possibilities on which to model an art practice. This volume, published for an exhibition at Austria's acclaimed Kunsthaus Graz, includes incisive essays by curator and critic Daniel Birnbaum and linguist and writer Martin Prinzhorn, which examine the softer, more utopian side of the artist.

Title:
Chronology

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“It has never been my ambition to treat artworks as illustrations of philosophical doctrines. Rather, I believe that the works explored give rise to their own set of concepts.” A philosophical essay on time, phenomenology and beyond, Daniel Birnbaum’s Chronology was recently reviewed in the April 2006 issue of frieze as a “compelling and sophisticated take on the common theme of Deleuzian immanence.” Whereas many theoretical books littering the bookshops of art institutions are laudations of excess, Birnbaum’s convictions presented in Chronology cut a way through the “caesuras of non-meaning and blankness into the thick web of sense.” The works of artists such as Stan Douglas, Eija-Liisa Athila, Doug Aitken, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Tacita Dean, Darren Almond, Tobias Rehberger, Pierre Huyghe, and Philippe Parreno are scrutinized as so many attempts to capture the very dialectic of time itself. As Brian Dillon writes in frieze, “Birnbaum’s notion of an art of unpredictable becoming … has its aporias too. A brief aside apropos Matthew Barney – to the effect that his art is all meaning, all of the time – is quite telling.” Daniel Birnbaum is Rector of the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and Director of its Portikus gallery. A contributing editor of Artforum, he is the author of a number of texts on art and philosophy.

Title:
Under pressure : pictures, subjects, and the new spirit of capitalism

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Under Pressure gathers together the contributions to the same-titled conference held at the "Institut fuer Kunstkritik from 2006 to 2007". Can "exit" and "disobedience", as envisioned by Virno, be considered as options from an artistic point of view? And what would an insistence on "status" or long-term projects as invoked by Boltanski/Chiapello look like if artists were to take on this strategy? How much can one count on pictures alone, as Mitchell seems to do? And, can pictures really change the "ways of worldmaking"?

Title:
As a weasel sucks eggs, an essay on melancholy and cannibalism

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Originally published in Swedish in 1992, this book examines the enigmatic relation of melancholia to an early kind of cannibalism, which psychoanalysis, in particular, stressed. It contains reading of, amongst others, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Sigmund Freud, G. W. F. Hegel, and the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf. The authors also quote Goethe and Rabelais, for whom food is a cosmic principle, the soil of fertility, on which all creation is based. In a transferred sense, food also plays that same role for the melancholiac he who questions the normal order of things, who creates an other unknown food, with a variety of meanings. The authors trace the desire for this other food through the ages, and scrutinize its relationship to both primitive sacrificial rites as well as contemporary anthropology, philosophy, and linguistic theory.

Title:
Defining contemporary art: 25 years in 200 pivotal artworks

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Defining Contemporary Art responds to this unique landscape with an innovative approach to art history. Assembled and written by eight of the most prominent curators working today, all of whom have both witnessed and shaped this period, this book tells the story of the two hundred pivotal artworks of the past twenty-five years. These artworks include not only the most talked about pieces but also the quietly influential works, those which may have been overlooked at the time of their making but which went on to change the paradigm of their era.

Title:
Olafur Eliasson: Inner city out

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Merging art and science, Eliasson engages the observer as participant, challenging the passive viewing experience by utilizing such elements as temperature, smell, moisture and light to trigger physical sensations. Olafur Eliasson: Inner City Out documents the artist's first project in Berlin, where he has lived and worked for many years. Designed for the Martin-Gropius-Bau, and curated by Daniel Birnbaum, it examines the relationship between the museum and the city, bridging the two through ephemeral installations placed in various locations throughout the city as well as within the museum itself.

Title:
Amy Simon: a different state of mind

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This publication gathers the interior photographs of Amy Simon. Like the apartment depicted in these images, the places where Simon works hold special significance for her, attuned as she is to the mood and suggestiveness of interiors. Further exploring Simon's engagement with issues of domesticity, the book features a series of new drawings and wallpaper designs recently exhibited at the Venice Biennale.

Title:
Making worlds: 53rd Venice Biennale

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Like the most recent exhibitions curated by Daniel Birnbaum, the Art Biennale 2009 will present worlds in the making. A work of art is more than an object, he says, more than a commodity. It represents a vision of the world, and, if taken seriously, it can be seen as a way of world-making. It is Birnbaum’s ambition to create a show that, although articulated into individual zones of intensity, remains fundamentally a unique exhibition.

Title:
De ou par Marcel Duchamp

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Ulf Linde is without doubt one of the world’s most important interpreters of Marcel Duchamp’s art. For more than half a century, he has pursued intense studies of Duchamp’s entire oeuvre and has made perfect replicas of all his major works. His as-yet unpublished manuscript scrutinizing the mathematical principles behind Duchamp’s art reveals what Linde claims to be the key to Duchamp’s poetic universe.