This celebratory publication honoring Professor Dario Gamboni's work explores the various uses of the postcard since its invention.

With contributions by Andreas Beyer, Sarah Burkhalter, Penelope Curtis, Thierry Dufrêne, Finbarr Barry Flood, Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Gloria Groom, Michèle Hannoosh, Haruko Hirota, Shigemi Inaga, Joseph Leo Koerner, Fred Leeman, Anne Pingeot, Dominique Poulot, Rodolphe Rapetti, Laurence Schmidlin, Richard Shiff, Harriet Stratis, Felix Thürlemann, Philip Ursprung, and Peter Weibel.

An original drawing by Swiss artists Markus Raetz adorns the book cover.

Dance and drawing are intimately linked to the gesture that performs them. The dancing body creates a figure in space and leaves an impact on site, while the action of the artist sets a point into motion and captures an ephemeral event, which is reproduced in graphic or visual form. Throughout the 20th century, the performing and visual arts thus converged on many occasions. While visual artists investigated the embodied and energetic value of form, dancers and choreographers experimented with the interfaces between sign and action, between notation and improvisation, between a spatial sense of self and an architectural configuration of movement. The hybridization of dance and drawing quickened from mid-century onward, as performance art introduced innovative practices and as borders between disciplines were worn thin, causing interdisciplinary forms to emerge. The body of the artist—whether a dancer or a visual artist—is thus shared by these practices and has become the instrument of their simultaneous realization. Drawing has indeed collided with dance in opening up to three-dimensional space, incorporating surfaces (floor, ceiling, walls) as well as volumes into its process.

This correspondence is the focus of this volume, a collection of original essays and interviews in which the accounts of theoreticians and practitioners echo each other. It aims to evaluate and discuss the specific interaction of the two media and how their practices have diversified since 1962, namely since the first public performance of the Judson Dance Theater in New York.

Authors and contributors include Cindy Van Acker, Gabriele Brandstetter, Sarah Burkhalter, Pauline Chevalier, Mark Franko, Katrin Gattinger, Julie Enckell Julliard, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Magali Le Mens, Laetitia Legros, Anna Lovatt, Nolwenn Mégard, Robert Morris, OpenEndedGroup, Nadia Perucic, Catherine Quéloz, Yvonne Rainer, Robin Rhode, Susan Rosenberg, Laurence Schmidlin, Katia Schneller, Alexander Schwan, Alan Storey, and Catherine Wood.

The book is part of the Documents series, co-published with Les presses du réel and dedicated to critical writing.

The work of American artist Kiki Smith, born 1954, is a meditation on the body. Smith observes every aspect of corporal materiality and the conditions that shape our life on earth: physically, spiritually, and politically, but also with regard to emotive categories like control and disgust. Her earlier work often fragmented the body into organs, fluids, and senses. Later, she depicted it as an envelope. Yet in her most recent art she has taken a step back to evoke mankind’s relationship with its environment. Smith uses a wide range of materials and techniques, with a particular interest in the fragility and expressive potential of paper and its resemblance to human skin. This book, published to coincide with an exhibition at MCBA Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland, offers a survey of some forty years of Kiki Smith’s art making, examining in particular the sensory dimension of her output.

Publisher's copy: A landmark survey of Sol LeWitt’s printmaking practice -- The conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) is best known for his programmatic wall drawings and modular structures, but alongside these works he generated more than 350 print projects, comprising thousands of lithographs, silkscreens, etchings, aquatints, woodcuts, and linocuts. This generously illustrated volume is the first to take a comprehensive look at LeWitt’s significant yet underexplored printmaking practice. Drawing together new archival research, interviews, and careful material and visual analyses, David S. Areford brilliantly situates LeWitt’s prints within the broader context of his serial-, system-, and rule-based approach to art making. The specific processes of print media, Areford argues, were perfectly suited for LeWitt’s particular brand of conceptual art, in which the “idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”

With over 400 illustrations, many never before published, this study offers a more complete picture of LeWitt’s oeuvre—and the essential place printmaking holds in it. The result will deepen the understanding not only of the variety of LeWitt’s output but of the genealogy of his distinct geometric and linear formal language.

Today Renaissance-era prints are typically preserved behind glass or in solander boxes in museums, but these decorative objects were once a central part of everyday life. Altered and Adorned is a delightful, surprising look at how prints were used: affixed on walls; glued into albums, books, and boxes; annotated; hand-colored; or cut apart.

This handsome volume introduces readers to the experimental world of printmaking in the mid-15th and 16th centuries and the array of objects it inspired, from illustrated books, sewing patterns, and wearable ornaments to printed sundials and anatomical charts. It features many never-before-published treasures from the Art Institute of Chicago's rich permanent collection, along with essays on the ways prints functioned—in some cases as three-dimensional and interactive works—and how their condition communicates their use.

This book aims to shed light on the development of spatial and tridimensional drawing in American art, both in theory and in practice, from the 1960s through the 1970s. In the late 1960s, new drawing practices emerged in the visual arts with works that expanded the traditional definitions of the graphic medium. Drawing moved off paper and onto new types of surfaces such as walls and floors, as well as into natural and urban sites. It either involved direct marking on an architectural scale, or, more rarely, extended into the third dimension appropriating sculpture's materiality. This book is a dense and well documented research. It examines every aspect of the topic, from linguistic, sociological and aesthetic perspectives, with a thorough selection of works that reflects the sustained appeal of drawing to a variety of artists, who embraced its immediacy, mobility, and economy of means, and who were concerned with time, space, and the body.

Why did collectors seek out posters and collect ephemera during the late-nineteenth and the twentieth centuries? How have such materials been integrated into institutional collections today? What inspired collectors to build significant holdings of works from cultures other than their own? And what are the issues facing curators and collectors of digital ephemera today?

These are among the questions tackled in this volume-the first to examine the practices of collecting prints, posters, and ephemera during the modern and contemporary periods. A wide range of case studies feature collections of printed materials from the United States, Latin America, France, Germany, Great Britain, China, Japan, Russia, Iran, and Cuba. Fourteen essays and one roundtable discussion, all specially commissioned from art historians, curators, and collectors for this volume, explore key issues such as the roles of class, politics, and gender, and address historical contexts, social roles, value, and national and transnational aspects of collecting practices. The global scope highlights cross-cultural connections and contributes to a new understanding of the place of prints, posters and ephemera within an increasingly international art world.

Rudolph Ackermann (1764-1834) was a man of many talents; carriage-maker, artist, inventor, lithographer, publisher, bookseller, publicist and entrepreneur, he also worked tirelessly to raise funds to relieve  his native  Germany after the devastation of Napoleon's invasion. He published works which have created the most lasting visual images of the Regency period; illustrating and promoting the latest styles and fashions in dress, furnishing, domestic architecture, gardens and foreign travel. His monthly magazine The Repository of Arts (1809-1828) remains a primary visual source book for later historians of design. His Microcosm of London (1808-10), paired the talents of Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin to create a landmark work of topographical publishing. He also promoted innovations in carriage design, water-proofing material, chemistry, lithography and steam power. 

This new biography by John Ford includes extensive new research into Ackermann's life, drawing on his papers, accounts and other untapped sources and provides a wealth of material to those interested in early modern print culture and the arts of the Regency period.

In the late medieval and Renaissance period, paper transformed society—not only through its role in the invention of print but also in the way it influenced artistic production. The Art of Paper tells the history of this medium in the context of the artist’s workshop from the thirteenth century, when it was imported to Europe from Africa, to the sixteenth century, when European paper was exported to the colonies of New Spain. In this pathbreaking work, Caroline Fowler approaches the topic culturally rather than technically, deftly exploring the way paper shaped concepts of authorship, preservation, and the transmission of ideas during this period. This book both tells a transcultural history of paper from the Cairo Genizah to the Mesoamerican manuscript and examines how paper became “Europeanized” through the various mechanisms of the watermark, colonization, and the philosophy of John Locke. Ultimately, Fowler demonstrates how paper—as refuse and rags transformed into white surface—informed the works for which it was used, as well as artists’ thinking more broadly, across the early modern world.