Carolyn Christov Bakargiev Boeken

"Few stories in the history of photography are as astonishing and as compelling as that of the octogenarian Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý. With crude homemade cameras fashioned out of cardboard and duct tape, Tichý took several thousand pictures of the women of his Moravian hometown of Kyjov throughout the 1960s and '70s. These pictures of women going about their daily business are at once banal and extraordinary, transforming the ordinary moments of work and leisure into small epiphanies. Blurred and off-kilter, his photographs have a striking contemporaneity, resembling the early paintings of Gerhard Richter or the photographs of Sigmar Polke. Printed imperfectly and deliberately battered, they evince a surprising retrograde or even antimodernist feeling, which, in the context of the Cold War atmosphere of provincial Czechoslovakia, just before and after the liberalizing moment of the Prague Spring (1968), undoubtedly constituted a kind of oblique political provocation, a nose-thumbing response to the progressive realist perfectionism of official Soviet culture. The catalogue Miroslav Tichý accompanies an exhibition of the same title at the International Center of Photography organized by Chief Curator Brian Wallis. Critical evaluations by Brian Wallis, Roman Buxbaum, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and Richard Prince introduce more than 250 plates and illustrations."--Publisher's website

Anri Sala (Tirana, 1974) uses film, music, sculpture, photographs and drawings to create installations that explore the cracks, gaps, overlaps, and echoes through which reality unfolds in time and events acquire meaning. Through architectural space he modulates visual, sonic and tactile elements and thereby generates new interpretations of reality and unprecedented perceptual possibilities. Music constitutes an integral part of his art and is one of the features shared by his most recent works.This catalogue develops an in-depth examination of AS YOU GO, the project devised by Sala specifically for Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in the form of an exhibition that also constitutes a single new work, extended over time and in the exhibition space, and capable of involving the viewer in an unprecedented perceptual experience.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev reflects on the relationship between destruction and art, and on art's converse capacity for healing. Guiding us through a web of etymological, historical, philosophical, personal and art historical references, she takes the reader from Melanie Klein's ideas on the dyadic relationship between mother and child and Walter Benjamin's reflection on Klee's "Angelus Novus," to Man Ray's metronomes and Objects of Destruction, Lee Miller's photographs from the end of World War II, Gustav Metzger's "Manifesto of Auto-Destruction" and the destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas, which are accompanied by Michael Petzet's report of ICOMOS's response to the monuments. Also included are artworks by Michael Rakowitz, drawings and poems by Anna Boghiguian and a postscript by art historian Dario Gamboni on the concept of "world heritage" and its attendant legislation. For Christov-Bakargiev, "the sphere of art is poised on the edge of the private and of history, and becomes the location where one can experiment the possibilities of being on the edge of the anthropocentric, where the rubble lies."

The Murder of Crows, the somber yet fascinating sound installation by the team of Canadian artists Janet Cardiff (*1957) and George Bures Miller (*1960) , evokes semiconscious dream visions, ancient myths, and last but not least Goya's etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, which shows birds swarming around the head of a sleeping man dreaming. Besides this work, the volume presents selected older projects by the two artists as well as an enlightening text by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, artistic director of dOCUMENTA(13). Rounding out this elaborately designed artist's book are an extensive interview with the artists, detailed information about the recording and playback techniques they employ, a DVD and 3D reproductions, and astonishing ornithological and literary texts referring to the title work that illustrate humankind's special relationship with crows.