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Title:
Roman Signer

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Summary:
Since the mid 1970s Roman Signer has examined the forces of the elements – air, fire, earth and water – in a combination of performance (documented by photography and video) and sculpture (the physical remains of his acts). With a Dadaist love for the absurd, his artworks include Race (1981), in which the artist races a rocket across a field (hopelessly behind from the outset, the artist loses by nearly the entire length); Action at Hotel Weissbad (1992), in which an ordinary table is shot out a hotel window, the resulting photographs showing a table flying incongruously over a sleepy Swiss village; Power of Rain (1974), in which rainwater gathers slowly in a funnel until its force shatters a block of plaster; and Bicycle with Rockets (1991), the photographs of which show a fiery bicycle flying through the gallery like a demon comet. Often Signer will exhibit in the gallery the remains of an event not witnessed by the public, such as four empty barrels and a violently splattered wall, the remains of an explosion of paint in the gallery space (Portrait Gallery, 1993), or four sand piles with perfectly round craters on each, the neat result of four simultaneous explosions at their peaks (Cones of Sand, 1988). Roman Signer’s work has been exhibited at major venues across Europe and North America, as well as important international exhibitions such as Documenta 8 (1987), Skulptur Projekte in Munster (1997) and the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), in which he represented Switzerland.

Title:
Everyday is a good day : The visual art of John Cage

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Summary:
One of the twentieth century's most influential and iconoclastic protagonists, John Cage (1912-1992) may be described not so much as a composer, artist and author, as a thinker who applied his ideas equivalently to sound, visual art and writing. As with his music, the use of chance operations--in particular via the Chinese "Book of Changes," or "I Ching" - was central to Cage's approach to visual art, determining technique, the placement of forms and even tonal values. "Every Day is a Good Day" provides the first broad assessment of Cage's art, and is fully illustrated with plates of his drawings, watercolors and prints, including series such as "Where R=Ryoanji" (1983-92). Cage's working methods and philosophies are brought to light in new interviews with key collaborators: printmaker and writer Kathan Brown, founder of Crown Point Press; Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust; artist Ray Kass; and Julie Lazar, curator of Cage's composition for a museum, "Rolywholyover: A Circus." Extracts from a 1966 interview between John Cage and critic Irving Sandler are also reproduced. At the heart of the book is a "Companion to John Cage," a selection of quotes by Cage and notes on key themes and influences, all of which make it essential reading on this important figure of the twentieth-century avant garde.

Title:
Fischli and Weiss: the way things go

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$16.95
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Summary:
In discussing what makes The Way Things Go utterly compelling to its viewers—whether they have seen it one time or many times—Jeremy Millar leaves no doubt as to why this film was chosen for the One Work series. As everyday objects crash, scrape, slide, or fly into one another with devastating, impossible, and persuasive effect, viewers find themselves witnessing a spectacle that seems at once prehistoric and postapocalyptic. Millar tells us why this extraordinary film speaks to us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. If history is "just one thing after another," then The Way Things Go is truly a historic work.