Bøger udgivet af Spector Books

In her group of works Desire in Representation Peggy Buth explores the construction of meaning and identity in colonialism. Buth conducted research for her work at the Museé royal d'Afrique centrale in Tervuren near Brussels. In 2008 she published the two volume artist book Desire in Representation: Travelling through the Museum Royale (Part 1) / O My Kalulu! (Part 2) in co-operation with book designer and typographer Till Gathmann. For an exhibition at Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart Buth presented the publication as a multi-media installation. Katalog documents and translates the spatial situation and the video pieces presented at the exhibition into an adequate form for print, the result is a catalogue of the different forms of representation of the artistic material.

When Russian spy Rudolph Abel (1903-1971) was arrested in New York on June 21, 1957, the FBI found fifty oil paintings in his studio. Abel had used his work as an amateur artist and photographer as his cover. His favourite subject: lonely old men in the big city. For his book Amateur Fabian Reiman has conducted research in FBI archives to learn about the circumstances of the life of the artist spy. The pictures taken by the FBI of Abel's studio and workspace show him as someone who was adept in priming canvas as well as making wiretaps. The book was published on occasion of the exhibition Amateur und Überflieger at Kunstverein Hannover in 2013.

Ludlow 38 is the downtown satellite for contemporary art of the Goethe-Institut New York. The space was opened on the Lower East Side in February 2008 and had been designed by artists Ethan Breckenridge and Liam Gillick. The gallery program was curated in collaboration with the Kunstverein München in the first, the European Kunsthalle Cologne in the second and the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart in the third year. After Stefan Kalmár the german curator Tobi Maier became the second father of Ludlow 38 in 2009 and the first curatorial resident of MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow in 2011. The first 3 years of Ludlow 38 represents the program at Ludlow 38 with international artists like Friedl Kubelka, Ferdinand Kriwet, Michaela Melián and Andreas Neumeister, the last two also published by Spector Books.

The architecture of Jerusalem, called the "White City," has long been associated (rightly or wrongly) with Bauhaus émigrés. In the homes of German-speakers, one can still find material vestiges of European modernism and sometimes even the Bauhaus itself.

Cairo: Open City examines the roles that images are playing in the ongoing Egyptian revolution, from the outbreak of the Arab Spring through the present. The catalog includes a variety of approaches to the time-based media of photography and video, from the works of photo journalists, to recordings by activists and citizen journalists, to documents collected by different artists. The different chapters will generate a dialogue between the images: cover images from newspapers will stand alongside photo galleries from blogs, iconic pictures alongside unknown images of people on the streets, images of martyrs alongside long-term documentary projects. The catalog comes out on the occasion of the exhibition in the Museum for Photography Braunschweig and collects essays from young Cairo-based authors.

Taking stock of Munich's neighborhood redevelopment through local signagePhotographer Arne Schmitt (born 1984) documents the recent development and commercialization of Munich's northern neighborhood, Parkstadt Schwabing, through black-and-white photographs of signage, including street signs named after prominent Bauhaus figures. Images are accompanied by short texts chronicling the planning and economic background of the area.

The third issue of the magazine bauhaus is dedicated to things. A thing is defined by its essence, wrote Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius in 1925. The current issue has committed itself to exploring the essence of objects. Parallel to our large retrospective of the designer of the century, Marcel Breuer, for this issue we have sought out objects that may at first sight appear banal, but which permit the analysis of utopia and amancipatory effect, of fetish and consumer behaviour--from teespoon to cactus, from price tag to mirror, from casing to timetable. This issue endeavours to discover how the Bauhaus has changed the way we deal with things and what the debate about the object per se has developed into today.

On Micha Zweifel's humorous sculptural representations of the everydaySwiss-born and Rotterdam-based artist Micha Zweifel (born 1987) makes sculptures and installations portraying everyday motifs: a sleeping dog with a fly on its nose, a parked car or the view of a hedge from up close. This publication gathers his playful work.

Two modern renaissance men pay homage to the medieval tale of ParsifalFrom Wolfram von Eschenbach's epic of chivalry to Richard Wagner's opera, from the knight as fool to the fool as savior, the story of Parsifal has struck deep chords with artists over the centuries. In this collaboration, Georg Baselitz's studies for a 2018 production of Parsifal at the Munich State Opera (2018) are paired with Alexander Kluge's responses to Baselitz's drawings, through stories in which he filters out individual elements from Eschenbach's epic, such as Parsifal's native wit or the figure of the Knight of the Cheerful Countenance. The result is an ongoing communication conducted over long periods of time: aspects of the Middle Ages can be found in the present. The volume concludes with Tristan Marquardt's text "Excerpts from a Parsifal Lexicon," which shows how far our contemporary language has diverged from Eschenbach's in terms of meaning and sound.

The fifth issue of Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau's new periodical focuses on the role of the tropics as an ideal of modernism. Torsten Blume explores aspects of nudity in modernism, Zvi Efrat writes about Arieh Sharon's 'tropical architecture' in Nigeria, Brenda Danilowitz proves the influence of pre-Colombian art on Anni Alber's work with textiles, Carola Ebert and Stefan Locke offer a cultural history of the bungalow as a global architectural phenomenon, Regina Bittner describes the transcultural exchange between Indian and European modernism and Marion von Osten analyses the insidious propaganda used by the Nazis to discredit the Weißenhof settlement in Stuttgart as an Arab village. Also includes articles on information design after Otto Neurath, Erich Borchert and his fate in Moscow and love affairs at the studio complex in Dessau.

Between 1967 and 1990, freelance photographer Reinhard Mende was commissioned by various GDR combines to document factories and the presentation of their manufactured products at the International Trade Fair in Leipzig. He portrayed women at their workbenches, he took shots of lamps, vacuum cleaners and kitchen appliances. The approximately 250,000 pictures in his archive - both in black and white and colour - offer a rare look at the factories and the people who produced all these commodities. Although the perspective was directed by official ideals, Mende followed his own view. Double Bound Economies explores how we might approach this unique body of images today: how we can access them, how we can derive historical insights from them, and for what considerations they might represent a starting point. Along with a number of essays the book includes artistic contributions by Armin Linke, Olaf Nicolai and KP Brehmer.

A two-volume atlas of commercial and military dronesHere, Swiss designer Rob van Leijsen maps the evolution and increasing integration of drones in our society, from America's invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 on. All the models introduced onto the market between 2001 and 2016 are organized by release date and presented along with their technical specifications.

After 80 years it's back! BAUHAUS--the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation's magazine, anyway. Everything from the Bauhaus world: essays, interviews and more. The first issue of bauhaus magazine was published in December 1926 to coincide with the opening of Walter Gropius's classic Bauhaus building in Dessau. For five years, it reported on the most important modern trends, with Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, Ernst Kallai and Hannes Meyer contributing as editors and texts from iconic figures such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Hilberseimer. The current Bauhaus Dessau Foundation is now publishing a new magazine under the old name--to cultivate the legacy of the historic Bauhaus and, given the ideas and approaches of the historic Bauhaus, to address issues of design in the present-day environment. The biannual magazine aims to focus not only on activities in Dessau, but also on those of an international network exploring issues of design. The magazine itself provides a platform for contemporary design, choosing a new graphic designer each year to produce two issues and making it extra-covetable for lovers of the printed word. This inaugural issue focuses on different figurations of "the artist" figure--as generalist, programmer, researcher, pedagogue, teacher, curator and aesthetician.

The latest issue of this unconventional arts and culture magazine This biannual arts and culture magazine showcasing contemporary fashion, criticism, art, music, literature and photography features articles on the contemporary gallery, the work of Cady Nolan, an interview with sociologist Eva Illouz about her new book The End of Love, fashion editorials by Marc Akasheme and Ursina Gysi, and more.

How Soviet Bloc secret police surveilled performance art and happenings--and how artists respondedSubversion need not belong to a particular culture: it can come from artists who outwit the state or from intelligence agencies that infiltrate the art scene on behalf of the state. But what happens when the two sides meet? After Eastern Europe's state security archives were opened, it became possible for this interaction to be studied in detail. Artists & Agents shows how the Stasi, the KGB and other state secret police monitored happenings, performance art and action art, and looks at the debates they had about the new art form; how the police documented artistic actions, how they manipulated them and sought to thwart them; how artists dealt with the possibility that they were being observed by the secret police; and how they now work with the material stored in state archives. Artists & Agents includes work by Sanja Ivekovic, Orange Alternative, Peng! Collective, Daniel Knorr, Cornelia Schleime, Ion Grigorescu and others.

Evocations of body, fetish and architectural space: the first monograph on acclaimed sculptor Lena HenkeThe first monograph on New York-based German sculptor Lena Henke (born 1982) is a comprehensive survey of her colorful, bodily sculptural works--drawing on relationships, sexuality and fetishism--from the past ten years. My Fetish Years focuses on four recurring themes in Henke's practice: intervention, appropriation, desire and self.

A long-term photographic study of civil resistance on a French communeGerman-born photographer Jürgen Nefzger (born 1968) documents a small French commune in Bure, where opponents of nuclear power have been campaigning for decades against the construction of a permanent disposal site for nuclear waste. The book includes Thoreau's famous "Civil Disobedience" essay, which influenced the project.

A slipcased artist's book on the forgotten artwork of a defunct German currencyNew York-based German artist Julian Irlinger (born 1986) explores Notgeld, the emergency money issued alongside the official currency during German hyperinflation (1918-23), using scanned details of the notes, which were designed by artists largely overlooked by art historians.

On the Goethe Institut's one-year pop-up in the Minneapolis SkywayAs part of the Year of German-American Friendship 2018/19, the Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis, titled Goethe in the Skyways, occupied a space in the city's futuristic-looking Skyway system--an artificial network of arcades and pedestrian bridges that was constructed in the 1960s to connect the office buildings in the city center with one another and allow people to avoid the bitter cold of winter. Despite being used and perceived as public spaces, the Skyways are all privately owned, thus symbolizing "public" life in the US, both within politics and business, and in the realms of sport and culture. In this hybrid private-public setting, Goethe in the Skyways was used as a platform for a critical examination of cultural and political controversies in the US and Europe. The publication documents the one-year cultural program.

The boom in the number of small, independent publishing houses over the past 15 years has led to a revival of risography. Artists and designers from all over the world have installed a "Riso" in their studios to produce small print runs inexpensively and independently of large printing houses. Smaller publishers in Latin America still print exclusively on the Risograph, on grounds of cost. Risography's simple stencil printing process can print a huge color spectrum and create interesting optical effects through spot colors and coarse screening, and its homemade look has become a recognizable signifier of independent publishing. In this volume, part of Spector Books' Discovered Series, German designer Sven Tillack (born 1986) approaches risography as a technical process and a specific aesthetic, considering how factors like color, paper, file preparation, printing and processing contribute to risography's distinct look and recent revival.

The rise and fall of a famed Swedish technology companyIn Sweden, the Facit brand is as well known as IBM or Olivetti. Based in Atvidaberg, the company produced mechanical calculators, typewriters and office furniture between 1922 and 1998. By the 1970s, the company had grown from a local family business into one of the world's leading manufacturers. The company-sponsored football team AFF was playing in the first division. But a few years later the Facit organization had disappeared--worn down by global capitalism. The Facit Model: Globalism, Localism, Identity looks at this peculiar example of corporate modernism through the printed matter produced in Facit's in-house print shops, culled from FACIT's archives. Type specimens, manuals, advertising leaflets and product catalogs bear witness to a culture which feels increasingly distant, and yet helped to define many of the codes and forms familiar to us from today's world of work.

Cultural meditations on kitchen design, in an elegantly produced volumeSummarizing contemporary discourses on the kitchen from the realms of sociology, design and gastrosophy, Essays on Kitchens features six kitchens designed by the German-Austrian design studio chmara.rosinke. The project examines different facets of the kitchen: its performative and representational functions and its social and societal role, as well as craft and design aspects. The volume explores how these norms and expectations have developed in public, gastronomic and private settings, and how the kitchen has made its mark on cultural history. These meditations on kitchens and their place in our culture are housed in a handsome volume with a printed mylar cover representing one of chmara.rosinke's simple functional kitchens. Inside, beautiful color photographs show chmara.rosinke's innovative designs in use, assembled and unassembled.

Marcel Breuer's Isokon table as a case study for the museum objectIn 1936, Hungarian-born Bauhaus designer Marcel Lajos Breuer (1902-81) used cut and bent plywood to fashion a prototype of a wide, soft-edged table for the Isokon Furniture Company in London. Today a fixture of the Bauhaus collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum and an emblem of the movement's furniture design sensibilities, Breuer's table presents an interesting curatorial conundrum: what happens to an everyday object when it becomes part of a museum collection This book investigates the material stories, social practices and various phases of commodification and ownership represented by this single object. Delving into the detailed history behind Breuer's table and the exhibition thereof, it also explores the institutional practices of the museum in its project of object archival.

ANCB The Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory (Berlin) was launched in 2009 as a physical and intellectual space focused on the inseparable interplay between urban form and social life. Now in its eighth year, ANCB decided to broaden its experimental journey as an independent public platform with an annual magazine entitled The Metropolitan Laboratory that further explores our deliberate goal of providing an alternative urban discourse. Entitled "Education: Trial and Error", this first issue looks at the topic of artistic and architectural education. As a survey of highly progressive pedagogical approaches, it questions the role of education in past, present, and future. The broad spectrum of articles and essays ranges from Black Mountain College, Joseph Beuys, Paul Thek, Cedric Price, and Oswald Ungers all the way to Beatriz Colomina, Olafur Eliasson, Ai Wei Wei, Thom Mayne, Odile Decq, Peter Cook, and Joan Ockmann, to mention but a few. Inherent to all of these contributions is a profound apprehension of the positive surplus of unsolicited changes, uninvited irritants, unanticipated setbacks, and failures as the future seeds of human achievement and progress.

Created in the mid-1990s by German artists Holmer Feldman (born 1967) and Andreas Grahl (born 1964), The Cabinet of Ramon Haze is a fictional collection of 20th-century artwork. This expanded edition of the original 1999 catalogue raisonné--the very first Spector publication--accompanies a 2018 installation of the "collection."

Contemporary artists reinterpret Russian constructivist El Lissitzky's unconventional exhibition spacesThis book accompanies an exhibition at Dresden's Albertinum of new artworks--by Céline Condorelli, Kapwani Kiwanga, Judy Radul and Heimo Zobernig--that draw upon the core ideas of influential Russian constructivist El Lissitzky. Demonstration Rooms references Lissitzky's experimental 1926 Room for Constructive Art in Dresden.

European designers answer students' questions about their craftHere, designers Marietta Eugster and Manuel Krebs (Norm) from Switzerland, Wayne Daly and Veronica Ditting from the UK, Elisabeth Klement & Laura Pappa and Vinca Kruk (Metahaven) from the Netherlands, Monika Maus from Germany, Boy Vereeken from Belgium, Vier5 from France and Honza Zamojski from Poland answer student questions about their craft.

For the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Staatliches Bauhaus in 2019, the Documenta archive and the University of Kassel conceived an exhibition, a symposium and this publication, as a means of examining the affinities between the legacies of the interconnected "brands" of Bauhaus and Documenta. Both institutions came into being after the cataclysms of world war (in 1919 and 1955) and both of them "exemplify," as the organizers put it, "the liberating power of art and culture." Collecting writings from key figures in the formation of both organizations--including Arnold Bode, Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer--alongside contributions by scholars and academics Bazon Brock, Walter Grasskamp, Birgit Jooss, Philipp Oswalt, Nora Sternfeld, Annette Tietenberg, Fred Turner, Daniel Tyradellis and Daniela Stöppel (among many others), this is a major assessment of two exemplars of Germany's pivotal role in modern and contemporary art.

Plate and Polaroid photographs of the Berlin Wall by native East Berliner Manfred PaulBetween November 1989 and December 1990, German photographer Manfred Paul (born 1942) traveled along the East Berlin Wall with plate and Polaroid cameras. Mauer presents Paul's analog black-and-white photographs of the Berlin Wall, capturing both the hope and uncertainty surrounding its dismantling.

Ambassador for the Bauhaus: on the life and controversial career of Ludwig GroteGerman art historian Ludwig Grote (1893-1974) had an almost unparalleled influence on the conception of the Bauhaus, helping to shape an idea of the school that has extended far beyond its historical existence. Drawing on documents from Grote's archives at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, this book is the first comprehensive study of Grote's activities as an ambassador for the Bauhaus. From his problematic connections within the Nazi cultural scene and the art trade in Munich from 1939 to 1945 to his influential position in the making of arts policy in postwar West Germany, Grote's story is as complex and fascinating as that of the Bauhaus itself. Featuring a range of scholarly perspectives and a full biography and bibliography, Ludwig Grote and the Bauhaus Idea presents a nuanced picture of an inspiring and contradictory Bauhaus art historian.