Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century
Phaidon, hardback, £39.95
For its first exhibition in its inaugural space in the Bowery, which opens on 1 December, the New Museum presents an exhibition of the most striking sculpture currently being made by artists internationally. Entitled 'Unmonumental', the exhibition brings together what Massimiliano Gioni, one of the curators at the museum, describes as 'a sculpture of fragments, a debased, precarious, trembling form that we have called unmonumental'. It is a sculpture that reflects the extreme fragility of this century and also reconfigures our definition of sculpture. The outstanding catalogue includes excellent essays by the New Museum's team of curators - Richard Flood, Massimiliano Gioni, Laura Hoptman and Trevor Smith - as well as texts and images devoted to each of the artists in the exhibition.
China Art Book
Dumont, 672 pp, £24.95
'I never place art apart from basic human rights - freedom of expression, for example. Also, it's the responsibility of individuals, and especially of artists, to speak out in what you believe in. This is as important as the strokes of paint, or other forms of art.' It seems appropriate that Ai Wei Wei, whose words these are, should be the first artist to feature in this book, which is essential for anyone interested in Chinese contemporary art. In many people's eyes, contemporary Chinese art began in the late 1970s when the artist, architect and curator Ai Wei Wei established 'The Star' group, the first artist collective to present avant-garde art in China. The book goes on to showcase the work of 80 artists in total, all of whom have been selected by Uta Grosenick and Caspar H Schubbe, with the advice of Amelie Wedel, a London gallerist who specialises in Chinese contemporary art. Each artist is given their own mini-chapter in the book, with excellent information on their work, their shows to date, a statement from each artist and reproductions of key works. Some of the artists are already well known in the West - for example, Cai Guo-Qiang, Wang Qingsong, Zhang Huan, Yue Minjun, Cao Fei and Zhang Xiaogang - but the book also provides the chance to discover to lesser-known, younger artists, such as Liu Ding, Sun Xun, Liu Wei and Song Kun. There is currently no better reference book for collectors, curators and dealers looking for a short cut to the best contemporary Chinese artists working today.
Artists in China: Inside the Contemporary Studio
Thames & Hudson, hardback, 448 pages, £48
Another book on the Chinese contemporary art scene which takes an altogether different approach - stunning World of Interiors-like photographs of artists' studios and other major gallery spaces in Beijing and Shanghai. The idea is to give a sense of the physical places out of which the most exciting art from China has emerged, but, whilst being a voyeur always carries a certain allure - and these are particularly enviable private spaces to peek into - ultimately one learns little about the art itself.
The Theatre of the Face: a History of Modern Portrait Photography
Phaidon, hardback, 336 pages, £39.95
Ralph Waldo Emerson said friends could tell what time it was by looking at his face; for Jonathan Miller the face is 'where we are - we kiss, we speak, we eat through it. It's where we look, listen and smell. It's where we think of ourselves as being finally and conclusively on show. It's the part we hide when we are ashamed and the bit we think we lose when we are in disgrace'. This fascination with the face, a person's in-built badge of identity, has dominated photography's history from social documentation to street photography. This fascinating survey by the former editor of ArtForum magazine, presents its own history of photography through this particular genre charting its transition from Lewis Hine's humanistic portrait of an unknown American soldier in 1918 and August Sander's clinical project to record German society in its entirety, to Walker Evans' spontaneous subway portraits taken with his camera smuggled up his sleeve - he described himself as 'a penitent spy and apologetic voyeur' - and, much more recently, to Cindy Sherman and Nikki S Lee, two of contemporary photography's most convincing chameleons. A terrific essay by Kozloff accompanies a selection of over 500 photographs - the only disappointment is the absence of any pictures by Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus, whose estates are so tightly governed that their minders continue to refuse to allow their pictures to be reproduced alongside the work of other photographers.
Olafur Eliasson
Thames & Hudson, hardback, 276 pages, £29.95
Olafur Eliasson's 2003 'Weather Project' miraculously brought sunshine into the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, and was visited by over 2 million people, making Eliasson one of the most popular artists in the world. The Danish artist, now based in Berlin with a 'factory' of assistants working on future projects, had in fact been creating similar projects around the world since the 1990s. In 1998 he turned a river green in Bremen, Germany, by pouring environmentally friendly dye into the city's water system; and in the same year he created 'The very large ice step', which consisted of a series of slabs of ice situated in a park in a Parisian suburb. In all of his work Eliasson experiments with temporality, with the relationship between time, space, light and nature, the dialogue between art and architecture, and, crucially, with the dynamics between the art work and the viewer (as Daniel Birnbaum says in this monograph, 'Eliasson's work is not complete without you'). This book, the first comprehensive presentation of Eliasson's work since the 1990s, accompanies a survey show at SFMoMA which will tour to various museums in the US over the next few years. If you aren't lucky enough to see the show itself, a few hours spent with this book will hopefully transport you into the interactive art of Olafur Eliasson.
Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar
Steidl, hardback, £40
In her first project entitled 'The Innocents' Taryn Simon documented cases of men wrongfully convicted of violent crimes and released many years later as a result of DNA testing which proved their innocence. In her new book the American artist takes on once again the role of informant or detective, seeking out places in the US normally off limits to the general public. As Salman Rushdie says in his introduction, 'I am always immensely grateful to people who do impossible things on my behalf and bring back the picture.' Among the extraordinary pictures that Simon brings back are photographs of a federally licensed marijuana plant; the Cryonics Institute in Michigan where hundreds of bodies currently reside in a frozen state awaiting possible rejuvenating medical advancements; and the contraband room at JFK Airport. Each photograph comes with Simon's own matter-of-fact captions. For the contraband room at JFK she writes: 'Among the items seized from passengers in the 48 hours before this photograph was taken: African cane rats infested with maggots, Andean potatoes, Bangladeshi cucurbit plants, a pig's head from South America'. If that doesn't make your jaw drop, then some of the places that Simon has managed to access will. Not only is she one of the most original young American photographers, she's also surely the most determined and persuasive. In what Rushdie calls 'our age of secrets', projects such as this seem ever more necessary. An exhibition of these photographs, Simon's inventory of hidden America, was at the Whitney in New York and the Photographers' Gallery in London earlier this year, and is currently at the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, until 27 January 2008.
30,000 Years of Art: The Story of Human Creativity across Time and Space
Phaidon, 1064 pages, £29.95
If you've ever wondered what was being made in Peru or Nigeria at the time Velasquez was painting the Venus de Milo, this is the book for you - a vast, compendious, limb-crushing tome which covers 30,000 years of art, presenting key works, as well as unexpected ones, being created simultaneously all over the world. The aim is to try to see how art from countries as far away from each other as, say, Japan is from Greece, all fits together. In some cases of course it doesn't and that difference is to be celebrated, but the book does encourage a new pan-global perspective on the history of art from the first cave paintings to Brice Marden's Chinese calligraphy-inspired works from the early 1990s.
HIM BOOK
Trolley Books, £14.99, an edition of 1001 copies
If you were at this year's Zoo Art Fair at the Royal Academy you'll have perhaps locked eyes with a spookily life-like waxwork sculpture of Charles Saatchi. The artist responsible for the work, Robert Gordon McHarg III, has now published a book of photographs of his Saatchi lookalike dressed up in various (dis)guises. The book is a wonderfully hilarious and subversive hymn - the pun is deliberate (the book is in fact published in the same size as old hymn books) - to 'HIM', the man McHarg's publishers describe as having 'unparallelled... influence to form opinion and success on new artists'. When asked about the sculpture, McHarg said, 'It's the biggest action figure I'll ever own, it's all about the artist collecting the collector, a David and Goliath battle over power and punch lines.'
Art Affairs
Hatje Cantz, 24.80 euros
For the last five years Berlin-based artist Gabriele Heidecker has been travelling to art fairs around the globe, observing and photographing the art world at work, installing, buying, selling and looking at art. Every year new fairs are announced and one can hear the art world sigh at the prospect of having to attend yet another fair. And yet, it is at art fairs that galleries do most of their business. In his essay accompanying Heidecker's photographs Marc Spiegler, one of a triumverate of directors in charge of ArtBasel, argues that fairs are no longer simply market places but have evolved into cultural platforms where visitors expect intellectual substance, in the form of talks by art world experts, as well as glamour - rubbing shoulders with models and rockstars on the opening night. More and more people attend art fairs but they remain exclusive events, with hidden codes and rules of operation. As a visitor, you might think you've walked into an art mall where everything is for sale but the chances of your being allowed to buy a work are remote - unless you are a recognised collector, a museum director or are so high up the art totem pole that you managed to see the work before the fair even opened.
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