Modern Artifacts includes all 18 installments of the series, copresented with Esopus and the Museum of Modern Art Archives, that originally appeared in Esopus, the award-winning nonprofit arts annual that suspended publication in 2018. Each of these installments focuses on a particular part of the MoMA Archives--subjects include the museum's first guest book, its "Art Lending Service" program, activities in the museum's garden, materials from the archives of contemporary artists such as James Lee Byars, Scott Burton and Grace Hartigan, and correspondence, photographs and other ephemera related to exhibitions such as the groundbreaking Spaces show in 1970 devoted to installation art. The book, which features several removable inserts of archival materials printed in facsimile, also includes brand-new contributions commissioned from six contemporary artists--Mary Ellen Carroll, Rhea Karam, Mary Lum, Clifford Owens, Michael Rakowitz and Paul Ramirez Jonas--who have each created a project in the book inspired by a particular item or series of items in the MoMA Archives.

Documents reflects on the new challenges to humanistic social science in a world in which the subjects of research increasingly share the professional passions and problems of the researcher. Documents are everywhere in modern life, from the sciences to bureaucracy to law; at the same time, fieldworkers document social realities by collecting, producing, and exchanging documents of their own. Capping off a generation of reflection and critique about the promises and pitfalls of ethnographic methods, the contributors explore how ethnographers conceive, grasp, appreciate, and see patterns, demonstrating that the core of the ethnographic method now lies in the way ethnographers respond to, and increasingly share the professional passions and problems of, their subjects. "Sophisticated and provocative. The original and unique focus of this volume effectively opens up a new arena of critique that will move ethnography and qualitative inquiry forward in a way that few other works do." —George Marcus, Department of Anthropology, Rice University "This edited collection asks how an understanding of documentary forms sheds light on the creation and circulation of modern forms of knowledge, expertise, and governance. This is a major intervention in how we understand the everyday practice and techne of the documentary impulse and documentary apparatuses of law, bureaucratic review, and other institutions of modernity, as well as linguistic anthropology, literary theory, and law. The topic of Documents is not just of interest because of epistemological quandaries in the human sciences over textualization and interpretation, but also because the domains to which we increasingly turn our attention are themselves auto-documentary." —William M. Maurer, Chair and Associate Professor, Anthropology, University of California, Irvine Contributors: Mario Biagioli, Donald Brenneis, Carol Heimer, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Adam Reed, Annelise Riles, and Marilyn Strathern. Annelise Riles is Professor of Law and Anthropology at Cornell University.

An examination of how modern art was impacted by the concept of prehistory and the prehistoric Prehistory is an invention of the late nineteenth century. In that moment of technological progress and acceleration of production and circulation, three major Western narratives about time took shape. One after another, these new fields of inquiry delved into the obscure immensity of the past: first, to surmise the age of the Earth; second, to find the point of emergence of human beings; and third, to ponder the age of art. Maria Stavrinaki considers the inseparability of these accounts of temporality from the disruptive forces of modernity. She asks what a history of modernity and its art would look like if considered through these three interwoven inventions of the longue durée. Transfixed by Prehistory attempts to articulate such a history, which turns out to be more complex than an inevitable march of progress leading up to the Anthropocene. Rather, it is a history of stupor, defamiliarization, regressive acceleration, and incessant invention, since the “new” was also found in the deep sediments of the Earth. Composed of as much speed as slowness, as much change as deep time, as much confidence as skepticism and doubt, modernity is a complex phenomenon that needs to be rethought. Stavrinaki focuses on this intrinsic tension through major artistic practices (Cézanne, Matisse, De Chirico, Ernst, Picasso, Dubuffet, Smithson, Morris, and contemporary artists such as Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Hirschhorn), philosophical discourses (Bataille, Blumenberg, and Jünger), and the human sciences. This groundbreaking book will attract readers interested in the intersections of art history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, mythology, geology, and archaeology.

This book features highlights from Russian artist Vladimir Arkhipov's collection of unique inventions. These objects were made by ordinary Russians, at a time when the Soviet Union was in a state of collapse, often inspired by a lack of instant access to manufactured goods.

Catalog for Contemporary Artifacts Show at the Weyrich Gallery, January 2015. (This version includes links to Artist Talk videos on Vimeo to keep file size small.)

Alphabetically arranged and crossreferenced entries provide background information on major American painters, sculptors, printmakers, and photographers, plus important topics and movements central to American art from the sixteenth century to the present.