This book documents for the first time the artist Martin Kippenberger's conceptual project for a global subway system. Begun in 1992, this work consists of imaginary subway entrances and ventilator shafts placed at diverse locations around the globe. Called the "Metro-Net Project," Kippenberger's creation (one "entrance" was exhibited at documenta) allows the viewer to consider ways in which the world has become smaller.

An illuminating study of the work of artist Martin Kippenberger, whose art expressed the enthusiasms and frustrations of the West German middle class. Martin Kippenberger: Everything Is Everywhere is the first scholarly monograph in English on West German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997), one of the most prominent German artists of the 1980s. In this book, Chris Reitz shows that the condition of Kippenberger’s art was an endless, enthusiastic searching, constrained by the impossibility of fulfillment. A child during West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, and a young adult during the economic recession and political tumult of the 1970s, Kippenberger belonged to the first truly postwar generation. But, largely uninterested in the legacy of National Socialism that had occupied his predecessors, Kippenberger instead pursued a hyperproductive artistic practice that reflected the dreams and fears of the ascendent 1980s West German middle class. Kippenberger’s ambitions took him everywhere: he founded a museum in Greece, invested in a fashion business and a restaurant, and even bought a gas station in Brazil. He made art in a dizzying range of genres, from paintings to poetry, from posters to stickers. He made art out of his appetites, too, producing art on the theme of his own alcoholism. Intensely entrepreneurial, Kippenberger carried out an artistic practice in which his diverse endeavors, and the people who joined him in them, were all connected in a sprawling network. Reitz deftly presents Kippenberger’s career as an allegory of the neoliberal networks of capital, technology, and culture that spanned Europe and America in the 1980s.

Martin Kippenberger ISBN 3-8321-7579-2 / 978-3-8321-7579-5 Hardcover, 9.5 x 11.5 in. / 184 pgs / 210 color and 16 b&w. / U.S. $50.00 CDN $60.00 August / Art

During his storied, 25-year career. Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997) assaulted and transformed the art world, casting himself as provocateur, jester, carouser, philosopher, musician, instructor and artist. He was one of the most important cultural figures of his generation, whose influence and impact has only increased since his death. Book jacket.

This is a book about Johannesburg and one man’s place in it: a provocative, teasing, revealing, analytical and poetic text on the city and the life rooted in its concrete streets. A high-water mark in Ivan Vladislavi?’s writing, Portrait with Keys is a sprawling yet comprehensive portrait of his Joburg. His gaze roams freely across the decades, but the focus falls on the eve of the millennium. Neither a novel in any conventional sense nor a collection of short stories, this chain of lyrical texts brings together memoir, history, snapshots, meditations, asides on arts and – not least – observations on that essential urban accessory, the Gorilla steering lock. Home, habit, change, memory, mortality, friendship, ghosts, gardens, walking, falling, selling and stealing are all part of this unique dossier of city life. Portrait with Keys is an extraordinary work, both an oblique self-portrait of the author and a vivid recovery of where we have been all along.