Paul Chan: Selected Writings 2000-2014 - Softcover

Paul Chan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3952397148 ISBN 13: 9783952397145

Publisher: Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation/Badlands Unlimited, 2014

Synopsis

The work of Paul Chan (born 1973) has charted a course in contemporary art as unpredictable and wide-ranging as the thinking that grounds his practice. Paul Chan: Selected Writings 2000–2014 collects the critical essays and artist’s texts that first appeared in Artforum, October, Texte zur Kunst and Frieze, among other publications, as well as previously unpublished speeches and language-based works. From the comedy of artistic freedom in Duchamp to the contradictions that bind aesthetics and politics, Chan’s writings revel in the paradoxes that make the experience of art both vexing and pleasurable. He lays bare the ideas and personalities that motivate his work by reflecting on artists as diverse as Henry Darger, Chris Marker, Sigmar Polke and Paul Sharits, and grapples with writers and thinkers who have played decisive roles in his practice, including Theodor Adorno, Samuel Beckett and the Marquis de Sade.

About this title

Review

Many of the texts articulate, in a prose that is at once dialectical, aphoristic, and limpid, the artist's refusal to reject the value of art within a political project and a concomitant notion of aesthetics that values contingency and collaboration over sutured perfection. Here, as in the Stewart documentary, exposition is punctuated by abstraction-by way of mysterious short stories, scatological poems, and typographic experimentation-featured in a section of gray-bordered pages titled "Fonts and Works" that constitutes an artist's book nestled within a book by an artist. (Mira Schor Artforum)

Tommaso Speretta: Apart from reading your write a lot, since many years. The Selected Writings book, published on the occasion of your show at the Schaulager, testifies your extensive activity as a writer. What are you looking for when you write? Paul Chan: For something to read. I am really pleased with the exhibition in Basel. The fact that it exists is a testament to Schaulager’s commitment to their willingness to take risks with a dubious artist like me. But in many ways it is Selected Writings that I think of most fondly. It is just one book in an ocean of other books. And it took an impossible amount of work. But it was worth it. (Tommaso Speretta Domus)

Divided into four sections- on the relation of art and politics, on his own art, on other artist and thinkers, and one including many of his stunning image-text fonts and drawings - the volume collects philosophical text, travelogues, allegory and fable , maxim and aphorism, poems, political analysis, statements, a commencement address, exhibition catalogue contributions, etcetera. Chan is not an artist who also writes; he's an artist and a writer. He brings to ideas the same rigor, osbession, and imagination he applies to his art. (Alan Gilbert BOOM Magazine)

Edition details

• Publisher: Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation/Badlands Unlimited
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 3952397148
• ISBN 13: 9783952397145
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 390
• Editor: Eric Banks, Isabel Friedli, George Baker