Situation, edited by Claire Doherty
Documents of Contemporary Art series, Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press
Forthcoming autumn 2009

Situation – a unique set of circumstances produced in both space and time, and ranging across material, social, political, and economic relations – has become a key concept in twenty-first century art. The idea of situation has evolved in the recent contexts of globalization but is rooted in earlier artistic practices from the 1960s and 1970s. Situation is considered here through the development of notions of site and context; the artist as ethnographer or fieldworker; the production of actions in public space; and the relationship between place and locality. In addition to these four thematic and interdisciplinary sections of the anthology, the final section focuses on the crucial role of the curator and the curatorial brief in the instigation and production of contexts for situation-specific art and its future.

Artists surveyed include Vito Acconci, Francis Alÿs, Artist Placement Group (APG), Ursula Biemann, Liesbeth Bik, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Janet Cardiff, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Adam Chodzko, Tacita Dean, Guy Debord, Andrea Fraser, Hamish Fulton, Liam Gillick, Dan Graham, Renée Green, Group Material, Pierre Huyghe, Robert Irwin, Ilya Kabakov, Allan Kaprow, Július Koller, Ligna, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jonathan Monk, Robert Morris, Constant Nieuwenhuis, Gabriel Orozco, Walid Ra’ad, Raqs Media Collective, Martha Rosler, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Jos Van der Pol, Lawrence Weiner, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Qiu Zhijie

Writers include Saul Albert, Arjun Appadurai, Hannah Arendt, Marc Augé, Wim Beeren, Josephine Berry Slater, Daniel Birnbaum, Ava Bromberg, Benjamin Buchloh, Marcus Brüderlin, Michel de Certeau, Douglas Crimp, Gilles Deleuze, T.J. Demos, Rosalyn Deutsche, Thierry de Duve, Charles Esche, Patricia Falguières, Marina Fokidis, Hal Foster, Michel Foucault, Hou Hanru, Martin Heidegger, Brian Holmes, Mary Jane Jacob, Geeta Kapur, Vasif Kortun, Miwon Kwon, James Lingwood, Lucy R. Lippard, Lu Jie, Doreen Massey, James Meyer, Ivo Mesquita, George E. Marcus, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Brian O’Doherty, Craig Owens, Irit Rogoff, Simon Sheikh, Peter Weibel.

Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation
This book, edited by Claire Doherty and published by Black Dog Publishing, describes the shift in focus that has taken place in much contemporary art practice in the last decade. From the notion of relational aesthetics to the concerns of site-specificity, this book provides a new critical investigation into the production and curation of contemporary art. Including reprints of seminal texts alongside new essays, interviews and case studies by leading international artists, writers and curators, this anthology provides an overview of this increasingly significant (and contested) field of art practice. Contributors include: Kathrin Böhm, Nicolas Bourriaud, Daniel Buren, Nathan Coley, Adam Dant, Catherine David, Jeremy Deller, Rod Dickinson, Claire Doherty, Paul Domela, Jimmie Durham, FURTHER Up in the Air, Charlie Gere, Thomas Hirschhorn, Miwon Kwon, Maria Lind, James Lingwood, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Mejor Vida Corp., Aleksandra Mir, Oda Projesi, Irit Rogoff, Becky Shaw and Richard Wentworth. ISBN 1-904772-06-04

For orders, please contact katie@situations.org.uk publication retails at £50.

Thinking of the Outside: New art and the city of Bristol
Six internationally acclaimed artists were commissioned to respond to Bristol's historic landscape. This book traces how their research took the artists beyond the limits of the city, to examine present-day boundaries, architecture and attitudes that deal with the relationship between outsider and insider. With commissioned essays in response to the new works in situ, interviews with the artists and documentation of work-in-progress, this book offers in-depth analysis and evaluation of a scattered-site exhibition in context. Artists: Nathan Coley, Phil Collins, Kathleen Herbert, Susan Hiller, Silke Otto-Knapp, João Penalva.

Edited by Claire Doherty. Contributors include Jon Brett, Morgan Falconer, Alex Farquharson; Jörg Heiser, Josephine Lanyon, Francis McKee, Emily Pethick, Denise Robinson. Drawings by Joff Winterhart. Distributed by Cornerhouse. Published by Bristol Legible City and the University of the West of England in association with Arnolfini. ISBN 1 86043 3774

For orders please contact bookshop@arnolfini.org.uk publication retails at £20.

Curating Subjects
Curating Subjects, edited by Paul O’Neill and published by Open Editions, is an anthology of new curatorial writing that documents the inter-dependent relationships between the curatorial past, present, and speculative futures. Instead of following established conventions with existing publications and writing about themselves, the authors were invited to provide a text about the curatorial work of others within one of three categories: (1) Curating and under-represented historical projects/existing paradigms, (2) Under-considered current curatorial issues, and (3) Potential or desirable futures for contemporary curation. These three loosely aligned themes are intermingled in the final design and layout, resulting in a diversity of stylistic approaches to the subject. The overall result is a wide range of responses demonstrating a pluralist, dynamic, and emergent curatorial discourse, where critical essays, theoretical explorations, academic documents, proposals, historical overviews, polemics, exhibition critiques, interviews, and fictional accounts sit side by side. 

Edited by Paul O’Neill, contributors include Julie Ault, Søren Andreasen, Lars Bang Larsen, Julie Ault, Carlos Basualdo, Dave Beech, Mark Hutchinson, Irene Calderoni, Anshuman Das Gupta, Grant Watson, Clémentine Deliss, Eva Diaz, Claire Doherty, Okwui Enwezor, Anne Fletcher, Liam Gillick, Jens Hoffman, Robert Nickas, Hans Ulrich Oberst, Sarah Pierce, Simon Sheikh, Mary Anne Staniszewski, Andrew Wilson, and Mick Wilson. ISBN 978-0-949004 -16-1

"This book is a welcome addition to the growing literature about exhibition making. Moving away from autobiographical, first person narratives, Curating Subjects instead invites its broad range of contributors to comment upon the curatorial endeavors of others. Conflating and colliding the past and the present with possible futures, this book unfolds as an idiosyncratic conversation that is at once informative, entertaining, and often revealing." 
-Matthew Higgs 

For orders, please contact orders@openeditions.com or order online at www.amazon.co.uk