This fall, discover Glenn Ligon’s sharp, insightful writings; Gustav Metzger’s account of his extraordinary life, art and political activism; and a collection of cartoons by Jason Rhoades that reveal the artist’s imaginative thinking.
A long-awaited and essential publication, Distinguish piss from rain collects three decades of Glenn Ligon’s incisive research into race, history, art, and contemporary culture. Ligon, best known for his historical text-based paintings and sculptures, began writing in the early 2000s, and as artist and critic Wayne Koestenbaum says, “words are among the materials [Ligon] knows how to deal with irony, humor, multivalence and directness. Ligon’s essays further demonstrate his virtuoso combination of razor-sharp insight and anecdotal detail, exploring the work of his peers, such as Julie Mehretu and Chris Ofili, as well as artists who came before him, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Andy Warhol. through interviews with Helga Davis, Thelma Golden, Byron Kim, Hamza Walker and others.
Illustrationsmeanwhile, offers a glimpse into the mind of cult Los Angeles artist Jason Rhoades through a facsimile edition of an undated sketchbook of the artist’s drawings. A leading figure in the international art world of the 1990s, Rhoades was a world builder, an outlier. “Imagine the internet as a colossal sculpture, made up of wood, buckets, neon, extension cords, appliances and other ordinary things,” explains curator Ingrid Schaffner. “This is what Jason Rhoades considered the accumulation of his art: a dynamic system to explore and communicate life’s questions.” Illustrations serves as a guide to Rhoades’ visionary work: a collection of didactic cartoons, organized by keyword, that illustrate key concepts, materials, artwork, and personal references. (See: ‘abstraction’, ‘curator’, ‘doughnut’, ‘Marcel Duchamp’, ‘dishonest’.)
The interviews, which lasted more than twenty years, Gustav Metzger: Interviews with Hans Ulrich Obrist covers Metzger’s entire life. With a remarkable candor that speaks to the long friendship between artist and interviewer, Metzger talks about his Orthodox Jewish childhood in Nuremberg in the 1930s and his arrival in England as part of the Kindertransport, shedding light on his early contributions to computer art , his leading role in London’s Destruction in Art Symposium and his call for an art strike from 1977 to 1980, and reflects on his thinking about ecology, nature and the thread of extinction.
To learn more about these titles and discover other recent releases from Hauser & Wirth Publishers, visit shop.hauserwirth.com.
