Paul Thek in Process evolved from the discovery of an unrealized publication project by the American artist Paul Thek (1933–1988), which had been discussed while he was installing his first space-filling environment, Pyramid/A Work in Progress in 1971, and which was to have been released for documenta 5.For this project, around 800 images were taken capturing the progress of the installation, as well as the final form of this pivotal work of 1970s installation art, Pyramid/A Work in Progress.This book contains not only a large number of unpublished images, but also evaluates the complex organizational task of the installation's conception and eventual realization. It offers an exhibition history seen through the backdoor, with particular attention paid to the status of the ephemeral objects that remain as contingent representatives of the lost work.The selected and reproduced source material is understood as curated in terms of its re-incorporation of what has been left out of art and exhibition history.Consequently, the book takes a documentary and fragmentary approach, and reproduces numerous contact sheets and a large selection of the photographic images, all the remaining correspondence between the artist and the institution, the exhibition and work-related ephemera, as well as the press coverage of the show.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y., Oct. 21, 2010-Jan. 9, 2011, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Feb. 5-May 1, 2011, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, May 22-Sept. 4, 2011.

Edited and with text by Doryun Chong. Text by Mike Kelley, Hiroko Kudo.

Winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize A collection in five parts, Susan Howe’s electrifying new book opens with a preface by the poet that lays out some of Debths’ inspirations: the art of Paul Thek, the Isabella Stewart Gardner collection, and early American writings; and in it she also addresses memory’s threads and galaxies, “the rule of remoteness,” and “the luminous story surrounding all things noumenal.” Following the preface are four sections of poetry: “Titian Air Vent,” “Tom Tit Tot” (her newest collage poems), “Periscope,” and “Debths.” As always with Howe, Debths brings “a not-being-in-the-no.”

"Materiality has reappeared as a highly contested topic in recent art. Modernist criticism tended to privilege form over matter--considering material as the essentialized basis of medium specificity--and technically based approaches in art history reinforced connoisseurship through the science of artistic materials. But in order to engage critically with the meaning, for example, of hair in David Hammons's installations, milk in the work of Dieter Roth, or latex in the sculptures of Eva Hesse, we need a very different set of methodological tools. This anthology focuses on the moments when materials become willful actors and agents within artistic processes, entangling their audience in a web of connections. It investigates the role of materiality in art that attempts to expand notions of time, space, process, or participation. And it looks at the ways in which materials obstruct, disrupt, or interfere with social norms, emerging as impure formations and messy, unstable substances. It reexamines the notion of "dematerialization"; addresses materialist critiques of artistic production; surveys relationships between matter and bodies, from the hierarchies of gender to the abject and phobic; explores the vitality of substances; and addresses the concepts of intermateriality and transmateriality emerging in the hybrid zones of digital experimentation." -- Publisher's description.

The Explicit Material gathers varied perspectives from the discourses of conservation, curation and humanities disciplines to focus on aspects of heritage transmission and material transitions. The authors observe and explicate the myriad transformations that works of different kinds - manuscripts, archaeological artefacts, video art, installations, performances, film, and built heritage - may undergo: changing contexts, changing matter, changing interpretations and display. Focusing on the vibrant materiality of artworks and artefacts, The Explicit Material puts an emphasis on objects as complex constructs of material relations. By so doing, it announces a shift in sensibilities and understandings of the significance of objects and the materials they are made of, and on the increasingly blurred boundaries between the practices of conservation and curation.