Focusing on the themes of abject politics, transcending media, performativity, and satire and simulation, 'Parergon' presents the work of over twenty-five visual artists including Kodai Nakahara, Tatsuo Miyajima, Kazumi Nakamura, Yukie Ishikawa, Tsuyoshi Ozawa and Yukinori Yanagi in an array of media spanning painting, sculpture, duration performance, noise, video and photography.00The title makes reference to the gallery in Tokyo (Gallery Parergon, 1981-1987) that introduced many artists associated with the New Wave phenomenon, its name attributed to Jacques Derrida?s essay from 1978 which questioned the?framework? of art, influential to artists and critics during the period. Parergon brings together some of the most enigmatic works that were first generated during a rich two-decade period that are pivotal to the way we perceive and understand contemporary Japanese art today. In the aftermath of the conceptual reconsideration of the object and relationality spearheaded by Mono-ha in the 1970s, this era opened up new critical engagements with language and medium where artists explored expansions in installation, performance, and experimental multi-genre practices.00The book follows the exhibition at Blum & Poe which ran in two parts from February to May 2019 in Los Angeles.

Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha is the most comprehensive study in English to date on the postwar Japanese movement Mono-ha (School of Things), and examines the group's practice in Tokyo between 1968-1972 at the height of the nation's political upheaval against the US-Japan Security Treaty, anti-Vietnam War protests and its oil crisis. The Mono-ha artists--who included Noburu Sekine, Lee Ufan, Kishio Suga and Koji Enokura--all distinguished themselves through an aesthetic detachment that, instead of "creating" things, strove instead to "rearrange" them into artworks that interacted with the spaces around them. While sharing certain traits with the Land Art and Minimalism movements that were taking place in the United States, and the Arte Povera movement in Italy, Mono-ha was ultimately a rejection of the Euro-American avant-garde and is now synonymous with the beginnings of contemporary art in Japan.

Edited by Michael Darling. Text by Graham Bader, Michael Darling, Elizabeth Mangini, Mika Yoshitake.

From the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists’ goal of producing world-transformative art. In this new edition, Groys revisits the debate that the book has stimulated since its first publication.

Making Strange: The Chara Schreyer Collection brings together more than two hundred iconic art works that each in their own way ask us to reconsider how we look at the world. How do artists challenge us to see the everyday world around us with fresh eyes? How do they make our world strange? Making Strange: The Chara Schreyer Collection brings together nearly 250 art works spanning the course of more than 100 years of history that each in their own way ask us to reconsider how we look at the world. Brought together by Chara Schreyer over the course of three decades, the works in this volume invite us to rethink our perception of the everyday in the wake of Marcel Duchamp's radical re-imagination of the object of art and the Russian revolutionary-era literary critic Viktor Shklovsky's conception of "making strange." Whether looking at the idea of "making strange" in the work of Duchamp and Georgia O'Keefe, the legacy of minimalism and its discontents in the sculptures of Donald Judd and Felix Gonzalez Torres, the idea of disaster in America as seen through the eyes of Andy Warhol and Kara Walker, the concrete uses of language in the works of Lawrence Weiner and Glenn Ligon, or the restaging of life through the photographic medium in artists from Diane Arbus to Cindy Sherman, the essays in this catalogue reevaluate the relationship between art and the world and offer a new perspective on the personal act of collecting.

This special edition book on Yoshitomo Nara, one of the most prominent contemporary artists working today, shows the complexity of his work over the past three decades. Thirty years after Yoshitomo Nara rocketed to fame with his Neo-Pop paintings of sinister childlike figures, the artist has deepened his practice. Along with his most recognizable pieces, such as his ceramic figurines and ubiquitous portraits of wide-eyed children, readers will discover his less-known aspects of his works including outdoor sculpture, illustrations on paper, and early versions of his figures. Nara's work is influenced by a passion for punk and rock music, popular culture, manga, and growing up in post-World War II Japan. This special edition book includes a slipcase with 13 booklets featuring the full range of Nara's work. It also includes an LP vinyl record with songs selected by the artist on side A and original music and covers by Yo La Tengo, the American indie rock band, on side B. Published with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art