Kirjahaku

Look Up and Stay in Touch presents the final works in artist Slater Bradley’s decade-long doppelganger project. Bradley (born 1975) has explored the way cultural icons are so imbued with myth that they become a mirror image (doppelgänger) of the self. Earlier works in the series include faked tribute videos in which Bradley’s doppelganger, Ben Brock, performs as late musicians Ian Curtis, Michael Jackson and Kurt Cobain. These final two works in the series focus on another of Bradley’s obsessions: the actor River Phoenix. The installations were produced in collaboration with Academy Award–nominated cinematographer and filmmaker Ed Lachman, director of photography for the film, Dark Blood, an unreleased 1993 film starring Phoenix that was in production at the time of the actor’s death. The video installations Shadow (2010) and Dead Ringer (2011) are based on the film, and the latter features an appearance by Bradley himself.

Best known for the slashed and cut canvases--and related spatial environments--of the Concetti spaziali that he created primarily in the 1950s and 60s, Argentine–Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) trained as a sculptor at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera and used ceramics and clay modeling to explore larger problems in sculpture and painting. Lucio Fontana: Sculpture is published in conjunction with the first U.S. museum exhibition dedicated solely to the artist’s groundbreaking ceramic work, and explores the innovative and often contrarian ways in which Fontana made use of the medium. With a foreword by Aspen Art Museum CEO and Director, Chief Curator, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, the publication collects landmark text by Jan van der Marck, Paolo Campiglio and Lucio Fontana himself, and features thoughts on Fontana’s influence from contemporary sculptors Kathy Butterly, Charles Long and Katy Schimert.

Los Angeles–based artist and filmmaker Morgan Fisher first achieved widespread recognition in the late 1960s and 1970s for a body of experimental films that deconstructed the language of cinema, both as raw material and as a set of production methods and technical procedures. Since the late 1990s, Fisher has focused primarily on painting (and the painting’s environment), and this volume is published in conjunction with the first solo museum exhibition of his paintings in the U.S., at Aspen Art Museum. Containing interviews conducted with Fisher over a span of 25 years--conversations between Fisher and Walead Beshty, Yve-Alain Bois, Stuart Comer, Christophe Gallois and Jean-Philippe Antoine, Melissa Gronlund, William E. Jones, Scott MacDonald, Frances Stark and Christopher Williams--and featuring new work by Fisher conceived especially for the exhibition, this is an invaluable Morgan Fisher sourcebook.

This volume offers a compelling examination of the surprising conceptual and visual correspondences between the works of these two pivotal artists known for their innovative practices. Klein (1928-1962) was a major figure in postwar art who opened up new possibilities for material, conceptual and performative expression, often touching on the metaphysical. Hammons (born 1943) is a conceptual artist whose works in performance, installation, sculpture, printmaking and other media confront contemporary realities with an often hard-hitting wit. This publication aims not to draw out any notion of influence or direct correlation between these bodies of work, but rather to elucidate a resonance between two artists who both engage transformative processes to invest the humblest of everyday materials with deep aesthetic significance.