An intimate look at American artist Sol LeWitt’s masterpiece of conceptual art, drawn on the walls of a medieval tower in Italy. In 1976, Sol LeWitt made a large group of pencil drawings on the internal walls of the Vecchia Torre, a medieval tower in the Umbrian town of Spoleto, Italy. These fragile drawings, made on walls that are susceptible to degradation, have rarely been seen and never been documented, yet they represent one of LeWitt’s major works and a milestone in American conceptual art. This groundbreaking volume brings together an extended essay on LeWitt’s work by art historian Rye Dag Holmboe and a series of 60 photographic plates of the drawings by artist Joschi Herczeg, giving readers an intimate experience of this singular, site-specific work. A visual archive, this book situates LeWitt’s provisional, material, bodily, and highly personal drawings in their historical, biographical, and theoretical contexts. The result is nothing less than a reconsideration of LeWitt’s lifework. At once a work of conservation and a reflection on the relationship between drawing and architecture, Sol LeWitt’s Studio Drawings in the Vecchia Torre sheds new and welcome light on an unseen masterpiece.

Following the critical scepticism surrounding the notion of the ‘self’ as a singular entity during the 1960s, many artists and writers sought to test the apparent problem posed by autobiography as both a traditional genre and as a way of working. Considering the consequent emergence of autotheory, Lifework traces this shift in artistic and literary production during the late twentieth century and beyond, examining a set of diverse practices that mine the line between what it is to make art and what it is to live life. The book’s chapters connect a variety of artistic strategies that cut across medium, geography and time, uncovering how the historical marginalisation of first-person experience has taken on larger social, cultural and political implications in the contemporary moment and how the work of living might still relate to the work of art.

Poems and other texts from the 1960s by a pioneering conceptual artist that show a continuity with his subsequent work in performance and video art. Pioneering conceptual artist Vito Acconci began his career as a poet. In the 1960s, before beginning his work in performance and video art, Acconci studied at the Iowa Writers Workshop and published poems in journals and chapbooks. Almost all of this work remains unknown; much of it appeared in the self-produced magazines of the Lower East Side's mimeo revolution, and many other pieces were never published. Language to Cover a Page collects these writings for the first time and not only shows Acconci to be an important experimental writer of the period, but demonstrates the continuity of his early writing with his later work in film, video, and performance. Language to Cover a Page documents a key moment in the unprecedented intersection of artists and poets in the late 1960s -- as seen in the Dwan Gallery's series of "Language" shows (1967-1970) and in Acconci's own journal 0 to 9. Indeed, as Acconci moved from the poetry scene to the art world, his poetry became increasingly performative while his artwork was often structured and motivated by linguistic play. Acconci's early writing recalls the work of Samuel Beckett, the deadpan voice of the nouveau roman, and the jump cuts and fraught permutations of the nouvelle vague. Poems in Language to Cover a Page explore the materiality of language ("language as matter and not ideas," as Robert Smithson put it), the physical space of the page, and the physicality of source texts (phonebooks, thesauruses, dictionaries). Other poems take the space of the page as an analogue to performance space or implicate the poem in a network of activity (as in his "Dial-a-Poem" pieces). Readers will find Acconci's inventive and accomplished poetry as edgy and provocative as anything published today.

Although deeply grounded in drawing, J. Parker Valentine's diverse practice spans film, video, photography, collage, and sculpture. By pushing the limits of mark making, the many possibilities of narrative and image are encountered and explored. The drawn line exceeds its supports and materials, extending beyond the two-dimensional edges of material to something more sculptural. In the same way that Valentine uses erasure to create an image, the negative space or ephemeral material within a space, such as shadow and light, becomes part of the work. This artist book includes a selection of images--a documentation of exhibited works and those in process--that offer a sense of Valentine's approach to working, which gestures toward abstraction and improvisation. For this book, many images have been adapted, reoriented, and/or manipulated. Also included are three essays that investigate Valentine's process, considering work that has emerged from her previous projects, residencies, and exhibitions to date. Mary Ceruti's essay describes Valentine's lasso sculptures as oscillating between drawing and sculpture, and discusses the suggestive narratives that play out in sculptural space. Suzanne Cotter touches on Valentine's interrogation of the integrity of the medium of drawing and its limits, as well as the transformative nature of her work, as eluding any static reading. Describing the development of Valentine's work in situ, Christiane Maria Schneider considers how each of the works presented are affected by the relationships they enter into, continually moving between the material and immaterial. Valentine was born in Austin, Texas, in 1980. She was artist in residence at Artpace, San Antonio, in 2013. She has had solo shows at Supportico Lopez, Berlin (2010, 2012); Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf (2012); Taka Ishii, Kyoto (2010); Peep-Hole, Milan (2010); and Lisa Cooley, New York (2008, 2010). She lives and works in New York. This book is published on the occasion of J. Parker Valentine's exhibition "Topo" at Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany, February 14-June 29, 2014.

Connecting New England's historical spiritualist and utopian traditions—from Brook Farm to Harvard's LSD research—to work by contemporary artists with regional ties. New England has a rich history of spiritual, mystical, and utopian strivers. Their visionary schemes range from nineteenth-century Transcendentalist experiments in communal living at Brook Farm and Fruitlands to the Harvard Project's LSD research, led by Timothy Leary, in the mid-twentieth century. The search for alternative ways of life often overlapped with the search for the Divine or expanded modes of consciousness and creativity. Visionary New England, which accompanies an exhibition at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, connects these traditions to the work of ten contemporary artists with New England ties. Generously illustrated, with ninety color images, the book interweaves analysis and imagery of New England's visionary traditions with reproductions of paintings, photographs, video, and installations by the artists. Essays examine New England's spiritualist and utopian practices; Transcendentalist writers' conception of Nature as “Other”; and the social significance of spiritualism. Texts by exhibiting artists Anna Craycroft and Candice Lin address the pedagogy of Amos Bronson Alcott, cofounder of Fruitlands, and the effects of opium trade in New England. Visionary New England bridges past and present, offering a new lens through which to understand contemporary art. Essays by Sarah J. Montross, Richard Hardack, Lisa Crossman, Anna Craycroft Artists Gayleen Aiken, Caleb Charland, Anna Craycroft, Angela Dufresne, Sam Durant, Josephine Halvorson, Paul Laffoley, Candice Lin, Michael Madore, Kim Weston

A richly illustrated retrospective of interdisciplinary artist Joyce Campbell and her three decades of work in photography, film, and video. On the Last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies and the Work of Joyce Campbell offers a number of portholes into the relations between photography, philosophy, ecology, material history, science fiction, and the care and reading of sacred and symbolic landscapes, as they have been engaged by artist Joyce Campbell over her near three-decade career. Richly illustrated with a full array of her various bodies of work in photography, film, and video, the publication complements and extends her major 2019 exhibition at Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Bringing together new and existing writings by Christina Barton, Geoffrey Batchen, Elizabeth Grosz, Richard Niania, Bernard Stiegler, Mark von Schlegell, and John C. Welchman with the embedded wisdom and inherited narratives of her Māori and Pākehā collaborators, Campbell demonstrates the interconnectedness of complex biological, spiritual, and representational systems, and the potential of photography to resist the global techno-capitalist hegemony that underpins the exponential collapse of biodiversity and the decline of spirit in our contemporary era. Raised in Aotearoa New Zealand’s rural hinterland, before spending a decade in Southern California, Campbell’s biography mirrors her practice, oscillating between New Zealand’s verdant coasts and the smog-choked, climate-stressed systems of the Californian deserts. She has photographed in extreme conditions in North America, New Zealand, and Antarctica, using the full panoply of techniques from photography’s two-hundred-year history. This publication is the outcome of a close collaboration with volume editor and contributor John C. Welchman (Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism, University of California, San Diego, and Chair, Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts). Copublished with Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi at Victoria University of Wellington Contributors Christina Barton, Geoffrey Batchen, Joyce Campbell, Elizabeth Grosz, Tungāne Kani, Apikara Niania, Richard Niania, Mark von Schlegell, George Smith, Sebastian Smith, Vicky Smith, Bernard Stiegler, John C. Welchman

Reflections on Mischa Kuball's site-specific light and sound installation, res·o·nant, at the Jewish Museum Berlin. In this book, writers and artists consider conceptual artist Mischa Kuball's site-specific light and sound installation, res·o·nant, on view at the Jewish Museum Berlin from November 2017 to August 2019. The contributors echo, shed light on, and reflect on Kuball's creation of a resonant space in and outside the museum space. Contributors Christoph Asendorf, Juan Atkins, Horst Bredekamp, Diedrich Diederichsen, Kathrin Dreckmann, Shelley Harten, Norman Kleeblatt, Alexander Kluge, Daniel Libeskind, Gregor H. Lersch, Léontine Meijer-van Mensch, W.J. T. Mitchell, Hans Ulrich Reck, Richard Sennett, Peter Weibel, Lawrence Weiner, John C. Welchman, Alena Williams