Glenn Phillips

With insightful essays and interviews, this volume examines how artists have experimented with the medium of video across different regions of Latin America since the 1960s. The emergence of video art in Latin America is marked by multiple points of development, across more than a dozen artistic centers, over a period of more than twenty-five years. When it was first introduced during the 1960s, video was seen as empowering: the portability of early equipment and the possibility of instant playback allowed artists to challenge and at times subvert the mainstream media. Video art in Latin America was--and still is--closely related to the desire for social change. Themes related to gender, ethnic, and racial identity as well as the consequences of social inequality and ecological disasters have been fundamental to many artists' practices. This compendium explores the history and current state of artistic experimentation with video throughout Latin America. Departing from the relatively small body of existing scholarship in English, much of which focuses on individual countries, this volume approaches the topic thematically, positioning video artworks from different periods and regions throughout Latin America in dialogue with each other. Organized in four broad sections--Encounters, Networks and Archives, Memory and Crisis, and Indigenous Perspectives--the book's essays and interviews encourage readers to examine the medium of video across varied chronologies and geographies.

Glenn Phillips is a critically acclaimed guitarist and composer who's released 20 albums over the past 50 years. From Rolling Stone: "If rock & roll guitarists were kamikaze pilots, Glenn Phillips would be in heaven right now." As a founding member and songwriter of the Hampton Grease Band in the late '60s, he had encounters with John Lennon, Frank Zappa, Spider-Man co-creator and artist Steve Ditko, and played with countless bands of the era including The Grateful Dead, Fleetwood Mac, The Allman Brothers, and Jimi Hendrix (Phillips is a featured interviewee in the Hendrix documentary Electric Church). His first solo album, 1975's Lost at Sea, was recorded at home and self-released. It predated and influenced the do-it-yourself movement that later overtook rock music and led to him being signed to Virgin Records by Richard Branson. Phillips' memoir relates not only his musical experiences, but also the circumstances that shaped him: his parent's alcoholism, his father's suicide, having a daughter on his 18th birthday that was given up for adoption, and his later experiences with panic attacks and how he stopped them. Phillips says, "The common thread to all of my music is that it's all been part of an effort to understand a life that didn't always make sense as it was happening." At its core, that journey is the story of his memoir.

Ever innovative and predictably diverse in their physical formats, artists' books occupy a creative space between the familiar four-cornered object and challenging works of art that effectively question every preconception of what a book can be. Many artists specialize in producing self-contained art projects in the form of books, like Ken Campbell and Susan King, or they establish small presses, like Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn's Coracle Press or Harry and Sandra Reese's Turkey Press. Countless others who are primarily known as sculptors, painters, or performance artists carry on a parallel practice in artists' books, including Anselm Kiefer, Annette Messager, Ed Ruscha, and Richard Tuttle. Artists and Their Books / Books and Their Artists includes eighty important examples selected from the Getty Research Institute's Special Collections of more than six thousand editions and unique artists' books. This elegant catalogue also presents precursors to the artist's book, such as Joris Hoefnagel's sixteenth-century calligraphy masterpiece; single-sheet episodes from Albrecht DuIA rer's Life of Mary, designed to be either broadsides or a book; early illustrated scientific works; and avant-garde publications. Twentieth-century works reveal the impact of artists' books on Pop art, Fluxus, Conceptual, feminist art, and postmodernism. The selection of books by an international range of artists who have chosen to work with texts and images on paper provokes new inquiry into the nature of art and books in contemporary culture.

Harald Szeemann is associated with some of the most important artistic developments of the postwar era. A passionate advocate of avant-garde movements like conceptualism and post minimalism, he collaborated with artists such as Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Cy Twombly, developing new ways of presenting art that reflected his sweeping vision of contemporary culture. Szeemann once stated that his goal as an exhibition maker was to create a "Museum of Obsessions." This richly illustrated volume is a virtual collection catalogue for that imaginary institution, tracing the evolution of his curatorial method through the materials he collected and produced while researching and organising his exhibitions, including letters, drawings, personal datebooks, installation plans, artists' books, posters, photographs, and handwritten notes. This book documents all phases of Szeemann's career, from his early stint as director of the Kunsthalle Bern, where he organized the seminal Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969); to documenta 5 (1972) and the intensely personal exhibition he staged in his own apartment using the belongings of his hairdresser grandfather (1974); to his reinvention as a freelance curator who realised projects on wide-ranging themes until his death in 2005. The book contains essays exploring Szeemann's curatorial approach as well as interviews with collaborators. Its more than 350 illustrations include previously unpublished installation photographs and exhibition documents as well as many other materials from the curator's archive.

Born in Bern, Switzerland in 1933, Harald Szeemann was a crucial force in identifying, exhibiting, and writing about the important new movements in postwar contemporary art. This collection of seventy-four texts from the curator's vast body of written work-which includes essays, lectures, studio notes, reviews, interviews, correspondence, and transcripts-introduces the depth of his method, insight, and inclusive artistic interests. The pieces have been translated from German and French and collected in an informed, authoritative edition, making this the first time Szeemann's work is accessible in English. The first two sections of this volume republish Szeemann's anthologies "Museum der Obsessionen" (1981) and "Individuelle Mythologien" (1985). The final part assembles important writing from 1986 until his death in 2005 to represent the later years of his career and round out a record of his contribution to and dialogue with later twentieth century art and artists. The book's publication coincides with the opening of the Getty Research Institute's exhibition Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions, as well as a satellite show that recreates on Szeemann's "Grandfather exhibition" at the Institute of Contempoary Art, Los Angeles.