The highly distinctive publications on contemporary art are shaped by the personal preferences and friendships of the publisher. Painting and drawing, photography, video, installation, and new media are of interest as independent positions or in combination with architecture and the environment.

The second issue in the exciting and experimental cross-disciplinary series “Findings on…” by Astrid van Baalen and Hester Aardse from the pars Foundation is centred on Elasticity in the broadest sense of the word. What happens when one gives a simple rubber band to an architect, historian, choreographer, chemist, artist, mathematician, physicist, economist, anthropologist, and geologist and asks each of them for a statement on elasticity? The economist studies the elasticity of supply and demand of market forces. The architect calculates the elasticity of the steel structure of a building during an earthquake. The anthropologist studies the flow of people returning to their homes in the wake of a natural disaster. “The Pars Foundation” draws researchers out of their specialized niches in order to publish their brilliant, crazy, important, or bewildering results and assembles them in this interdisciplinary volume. “Findings on Elasticity” is the second part of a publication series that together will constitute an atlas of creative thinking. There are no guidelines for the form their contributions must take. It may be images, poems, essays, sketches on coasters, formulas or a piece of sculpture; the editors only ask that a contribution reflect the respondent’s own field as well as his or her passion for the topic.

The acclaimed Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson developed a sequence of spatial experiments for his Your Chance Encounter exhibition in the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan. His piece challenges visitors to move around and get their bearings, and stimulates them to see the museum as a public space for addressing art and reality critically.

The installations were developed especially for the exhibition. They are arranged in a tight context with the spatial structure of the museum and extend the concept of architecture by the Japanese architecture practice SANAA. Olafur Eliasson does not work only in the museum galleries, but also in the corridors in between and the adjacent courtyards, thus linking the indoor and outdoor areas closely and examining this museum’s unique qualities.

The artist’s book was created in close co-operation with Olafur Eliasson’s studio. Its elaborate design with an extensive pictorial section offers a comprehensive record of the exhibition and an important analysis of this successful artist’s work. An essay by art historian Eve Blau interprets the exhibition in relation to its surroundings and contrasts the experimental approaches of Olafur Eliasson and SANAA, while curator Hiromi Kurosawa introduces the history and context of the museum in Kanazawa.

With texts by Eve Blau, Hiromi Kursawa

The book contains a collection of essays by scholars and artists from a range of different fields including art, art history, architectural theory and philosophy. The essays are based on papers given at a symposium in Copenhagen in June 2008 and refer to the following considerations: When spectators confront and designers invent works of art and architecture, vital questions regarding their appearance arise. These are not simply questions about what appears, also what does not, i.e. what withdraws when works are experienced and created. How do we cope with this withdrawal, with latencies that escape concretization? What are the productive paradoxes associated hereto and how do they influence the processes of making? Based on multiple discourses on these subjects, contemporary positions in art, architecture and philosophy draw up new challenges, especially with regard to the creative practices. Within and between these positions emerge potentials for modes of thinking and doing with a new sensitivity.

With contributions by Michael Asgaard Andersen and Henrik Oxvig, Renaud Barbaras, Andrew Benjamin, Olafur Eliasson, Sanford Kwinter, David Leatherbarrow, Martin Seel, David Summers and Sven-Olov Wallenstein

Silvia Bächli was invited to design the official contribution for the Swiss Pavilion at this year’s Biennale in Venice. This book offers a look inside her studio and documents the preparation of her works for the Biennale, illustrating her working process with spatial situations and snapshots that show her trying out various constellations as well as focusing on individual works and groups. The works and pictures from the artist’s studio are combined with photographs of her working stay in Iceland. Bächli has developed her body of drawings over the course of three decades, using varying formats and techniques. Drawing, for her, is a movement of seeing, of gentle deviations and displacements within the gravitational field of an aimless attentiveness to things and dreamlike phenomena that doesn’t really come to rest even in the finished drawing. The result is not just painterly moments; the drawings often seem to capture, as if in film stills, a cinematic look way of looking at bodies and things or their details, at landscapes, gestures, structures, and processes.

The German artist Katharina Grosse has fulfilled her dream of a tailor-made studio, a place large enough to accommodate her large-scale works and where an industrial atmosphere is combined with soft light and neutral walls. In close cooperation with the artist, the firm Augustin und Frank Architekten planned the studio in Berlin’s Mitte neighborhood and completed it in 2007. The result is a compact reinforced concrete cube containing workrooms, storerooms, an archive, offices and living space. The contributors to this publication use Grosse’s studio as a springboard to explore the relationship between painting and architecture, and the role that studios play in the production of art. Numerous photographs show the raw architecture of the new building and the artist’s appropriation of the space.
With contributions by Georg Augustin, Laura Bieger, Andreas Denk, Ulrich Loock and Philip Ursprung.

With contributions by Georg Augustin, Laura Bieger, Andreas Denk, Ulrich Loock und Philip Ursprung

Silvia Bächli (1956) has become one of the most successful Swiss artists of her generation. This publication was developed with the artist, and is the first comprehensive survey of her output. Silvia Bächli’s art makes us feel unsure of ourselves. It sends viewers on a tightrope walk between banality and deliberate continuity. Her art always concentrates on the minimum. We see isolated arms or faces or eyes. No context is provided at all. She illustrates the impressions that remain after a walk. Despite the general trend in art towards being ever more provocative, louder and more strident, Silvia Bächli has stuck to Indian ink, gouache, oil paint and thin, smooth white paper for over twenty years.

Pipilotti Rist, eine der gefeiertsten Schweizer Künstlerinnen der Gegenwart, und Richard Julin, Chefkurator der Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, haben sich in Zürich einen Tag lang den Vorbereitungen von Rists Einzelausstellung Gravity, Be My Friend in Stockholm gewidmet. Das aus dieser Begegnung resultierende Buch eröffnet neue Dimensionen von Pipilotti Rists Welt und fördert Anekdoten aus dem kreativen Prozess zu Tage. Das reich illustrierte Buch zeigt u. a. Bilder des neuen Werks Tyngdkraft, var min vän sowie von jüngeren Arbeiten wie Homo sapiens sapiens, 2005, A Liberty Statue For Löndön, 2006. 

Pierre Mendell has been designing the posters for the Staatsoper in Munich from 1993 to 2006. With over a hundred motifs to his name, he has not only successfully created an unmistakable identity for the Munich opera, he has also linked this opera house with a form of visual expression that is unparalleled in its originality and immediacy. Mendell’s simple, almost archaic, visual language is admired over the world and his poster designs are represented in leading collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Hanna Saliba ranks among the most innovative restaurateurs in Germany. His restaurant Saliba in Hamburg, which serves Syrian cuisine, is renowned far beyond the city’s borders for its magical culinary experiences. Some of the restaurant’s guests —Hans Hansen from Hamburg, the Munich designer Pierre Mendell, and the publisher of this volume — developed the concept for this book together with Saliba as an expression of their enthusiasm for Arab cuisine, particularly for the diversity and sophistication of its incomparable hors d`oeuvres called Mazza. “Eating with the eyes” is to be taken literally. Arabic calligraphy complements the feast for the eyes and makes the book much more than a collection of recipes for amateur cooks and professional chefs.

With a preface by Udo Steinbach
With photographs by Hans Hansen

Eliasson believes that art is a practice through which vital aspects of society and life may be examined, challenged, and renegotiated. Cultural practices such as art are not driven by capitalistic values, but operate through reflection on the values that define sociality, on the way that experience and ethics are intertwined, and ultimately on how subjectivity is defined. Eliasson’s interest in architecture, space, time, and art thus comes from a fundamental interest in human beings and in our potential to re-evaluate the conditions that determine or influence our sense of subjectivity. Eliasson explores these aspects of his work in this volume which documents in detail three exhibitions: Your Light Shadow, Hara Museum, Tokyo; Notion Motion, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, and The light setup, Malmø Konsthall. This volume also contains a seminal text by the artist. Olafur Eliasson’s large-scale installations addressing aspects of human perception are as fascinating as they are unsettling.

This book by the internationally celebrated Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist is literally a chocolate box themed to address the last, mysterious 15 minutes before the fall of mankind. Rist burst on to the international art scene in the mid-1990s with mesmerizing video installations influenced by visual art, music, architecture, and social politics. Her witty, poetic, and experimental work fuses natural and urban worlds, and often features erotic or uncanny images of the human body, particularly her own.

Pipilotti Rist (1965) is one of the world’s most major video artists. Her installations question our usual looking and listening habits. She has had numerous one-woman shows, in locations including Chicago, Zurich, New York, Montréal.

A Time and Place shows the extensive body of work by the German artist Christian Moeller, who lives in Los Angeles. It includes work dating from 1991 to 2003, and describes his fascinating tightrope walk between analogue and digital worlds. This is the first time there has been a monograph consisting of both internet and book pages. Playing to the particular strengths of each medium, A Time and Place gives it readers a book that, strange as it may sound, can be read at a computer that is logged on the internet. The artist’s texts, drawings and photographs in the book are complemented by digitized internet film documentation sequences in image and sound.

Felice Varini has been exploring architectural space with his painting for over twenty years. His sensitive interventions have fascinated observers all over the world, as his work makes seeing into a real experience. Varini takes enclosed spaces or the urban environment and arranges lines in them whose formal organization is not clear at first glance. Then, all of a sudden, a figure is revealed to the viewer at a single point, the “point of view”. If viewers leave the invisible co-ordinates of the point of view, the ostensible order is broken again.
This publication brings all the major works together, along with an essay by the art historian Fabiola Lopez, who explains Varini’s approach
and places it in art-historical terms.

The artist-couple Gerda Steiner (b. 1967) and Jörg Lenzlinger (b. 1964) are two of the most imaginative figures on the young Swiss scene. This publication contains numerous colour photographs and appears to accompany their "Good and Silly Miracles" exhibitions in the church of San Stae at this year's Venice Biennale. The artists use artificial plants, nectar lakes, bears to take viewers into a truly amazing world, creating a distinctive, miraculous aesthetic. The artist's book accompanying the exhibition brings together photographs from numerous journeys on which the artist-couple cannot and do not want to abandon their hopeful search for an earthly paradise. Their dreams have now come true – wonderland is everywhere. This publication is complemented by a booklet with short reports on strange occurences by various authors.

Roth Time offers a major survey of the artist’s work since his death in 1998. Five decades of drawings, graphics, books, paintings, objects, installations, films and video works are being shown. This publication takes you into Dieter Roth’s creative world: innovative and touched with genius, a chaotic and lucid whole, reflecting both him and his era. Based on the artist’s biography it is also a very accessible introduction to Roth’s work.

With texts by Dirk Dobke and Bernadette Walter

Spirale was an international artists’ magazine for young art and is now one of the most important records of how art developed in the 50s. It marks the change of generations in post-war art and documents the development of abstract and constructive/concrete art in Europe. The Spirale was edited by Marcel Wyss, Dieter Roth, and Eugen Gromringer and appeared from 1953 to 1964.

Ivan Chermayeff's collages suggest personalities that grow out of envelopes and stamps, letterheads and labels, pebbels and Polaroids, all magically transformed into eyes, noses, mouths, ears and earrings, hats, and cigarettes. Some are sad, some angry, som ecomic, yet all are engaging and inventive. As Joseph Giovanni writes in this introductory essay, "These are elliptical works that, like puzzles, challenge us to make connections that Chermayeff has made, to bring the gragments into a whole. The wisdom of this wit is that his invention beckons us into our own invention. We are the participants in his creation." For anyone who likes to look beyond the obvious, this book is a source of endless amusements and inspiration." "Collages make it possible for everything to be something else." Ivan Chermayeff

With a preface by Joseph Giovannini

British art and architecture of the 1950s are of extraordinary topicality today. This applies particularly to the Independent Group which included artists such as Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and Magda Cordell, the photographer Nigel Henderson, critics Reyner Banham and Lawrence Alloway as well as architects such as Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling and Colin St. John Wilson.

“Clothing as housing, the shell in which we live and breathe.” That is the credo of the cosmopolitan fashion designer, Christa de Carouge, who has roots in both Geneva and Zurich. Just as no-one changes their home without good reason, Carouge’s timeless creations are designed to last. The materials are of the finest quality, the color is almost always black, occasionally red or white. Silk is her preferred fabric, even for heavy-duty garments. Subtle folds and throws enclose the wearer’s form. No buttons, no hooks. The simplicity of the forms, the precious fabrics, and the life-style and life-sense that go with these are much desired today. And overwhelmingly successful. The architecture expert, Werner Blaser, goes into the background that applies here, and with a sideways glance at Mies van der Rohe’s leaning toward reduction and the sensitive material collages of Le Corbusier, he explores the way in which Christa de Carouge’s philosophy meets a particular need of people today, whose clothes must have identity, and combine comfort with aesthetics. The designer herself finds her own equilibrium and inspiration in travel.

This surprising collection of “isms” ranks among the most important publications on avant-garde art in the 1920s. Hans Arp and El Lissitzky took a refreshing, frankly opinionated inventory of artistic attitudes and movements from 1914 to 1924. Lissitzky’s exuberant design of the book epitomizes the style of the times.

With an essay by Alois M. Müller