In 2011, the Contemporary Art Club (CAC) in cooperation with the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien (KHM, Museum of Fine Arts Vienna), organised an exhibition series at the Theseustemple, a classicist building constructed at the beginning of the 19th century in Vienna’s Volksgarten. The project was launched with an exhibition by Andy Hope 1930, followed by Kitty Kraus and André Butzer. The series concluded with a dialogue between Lucy McKenzie and Ian Hamilton Finley, a complex and diverse group of young contemporary artists. This publication aims at documenting this experiment. Accordingly, also the concept to this exhibition series, the basis for the discussion initiated by CAC with the participants, will be published. ↑ ↓ ↓

This long-awaited monograph presents the breadth of JB Blunk's practice and includes never-before-seen archival and newly commissioned photographs of jewelry, ceramics, paintings, furniture, sculpture and his hand built house. Edited by Mariah Nielson and Åbäke, the book features essays by Lucy Lippard, Glenn Adamson, Fariba Bogzaran and Louise Allison Cort. JB Blunk is designed by Åbäke, printed by die Keure and co-published by Blunk Books and Dent-de-Leone. ↑ ↓ ↓

Those who feel the truth of 14th century German theologian Meister Eckhart’s words, “When the soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it,” might do well to consider Franck André Jamme’s latest book, Tantra Song: Tantric Painting from Rajasthan from this point of view. It is an evocation of the image as a threshold leading to new dimensions of meaning, a revelatory understanding that some images are more than mere data; they are instead vital seeds, living carriers of possibility. ↑ ↓ ↓

Kaleidoscopic Eye departs from an argument between André Breton and Roger Caillois. The confrontation arose from their discovery of Mexican jumping beans—beans that make sudden movements and leap into the air. Caillois conjectured that larva or some other animal was making the beans move. Breton rejected his theory, accusing Caillois of being a closed-minded positivist who negated the marvellous and the poetic in his attempt to find a rational explanation. For Breton, absolute or objective chance blurred the borders of rationality, proffering a chaotic and stimulating universe: convulsive beauty. Caillois wrote a letter ending the relationship with Breton, declaring his attempt to reconcile research with beauty. Caillois sought to examine chance, chaos, and the irrational with the goal of finding a pattern similar to the structure of coral. T his structure should combine, in one system, everything that had until then been systematically excluded—a structure capable of taking into consideration all the possible forms of reality. Kaleidoscopic Eye was first published as part of the exhibition Kaleidoscopic Eye, in 2009 at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, now republished in its second edition. ↑ ↓ ↓

“Invited by Lucie Stahl to respond to her gorgeous and trashy collaged posters, I look back in my diary and am surprised by the number of parallels in our dreams and notations. I’ve never met Lucie Stahl but we live in the same world: oil spills, palm fronds, novelty key chains, sports beverages. Like me, she’s a self-appointed reporter. Stahl’s posters begin with her odd inclination to write down fragments of overheard conversations, ambient thoughts and fleeting anxieties that – once preserved (and obsessively so, under buckets of chemical gloss) function as video-grabs from the deluge of information that we understand, more or less, to comprise consciousness.” (Chris Kraus) ↑ ↓ ↓