New book on the work of American contemporary artist and sculptor 'Charlie Simonds/Herbert Molderings: About Time'.This richly illustrated book in vice versa format features brilliant photos of Simonds' utopian "Floating Cities" by the artist himself.An illustrated essay by art historian Herbert Molderings on Simonds' famous "Dwelling" series offers a new interpretation of the works as memorials of the indigenous culture of the First Americans.Further reading:'Charles Simonds: Dwelling', 9783863358204, is also available.
In 1945 Marcel Duchamp published a photographic self-portrait in the American magazine View, which depicts him, according to the caption, “at the age of 85.” In reality he was, at the time, only 58 years old. Thus far the circumstances of surrounding this incunable of the “staged photograph” were unknown. A recently discovered script by Friedrich Kiesler is published in this book for the first time, in which he describes in full detail how he assisted his friend Marcel Duchamp to style himself as a senile artist-philosopher in front of the camera of New York photographer Percy Rainford. The well-known Duchamp expert Herbert Molderings interprets Duchamp’s self-portrait as an innovative, conceptual use of photography. The camera was used as a “time machine,” but not, as customary, to capture a present moment, but rather to look into the future.
Marcel Duchamp is often viewed as an "artist-engineer-scientist," a kind of rationalist who relied heavily on the ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincar'. Yet a complete portrait of Duchamp and his multiple influences draws a different picture. In his 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-1914), a work that uses chance as an artistic medium, we see how far Duchamp subverted scientism in favor of a radical individualistic aesthetic and experimental vision.Unlike the Dadaists, Duchamp did more than dismiss or negate the authority of science. He pushed scientific rationalism to the point where its claims broke down and alternative truths were allowed to emerge. With humor and irony, Duchamp undertook a method of artistic research, reflection, and visual thought that focused less on beauty than on the notion of the "possible." He became a passionate advocate of the power of invention and thinking things that had never been thought before.The 3 Standard Stoppages is the ultimate realization of the play between chance and dimension, visibility and invisibility, high and low art, and art and anti-art. Situating Duchamp firmly within the literature and philosophy of his time, Herbert Molderings recaptures the spirit of a frequently misread artist-and his thrilling aesthetic of chance.
László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) war neben Walter Gropius der international einflussreichste Lehrer des Bauhauses. Im Wesentlichen ist es seinem künstlerischen und publizistischen Wirken zu verdanken, dass die Fotografie in den 1920er-Jahren zu einem integralen Bestandteil des modernen künstlerischen Schaffens wurde. Mit seinen Fotogrammen, deren ästhetische Möglichkeiten er 1922 'entdeckte' und bis 1943 erfindungsreich auslotete, schuf er Ikonen des Mediums, die bis heute auf ihre vollständige Entdeckung warteten. Das Werkverzeichnis, von Renate Heyne mit kunstwissenschaftlicher Gründlichkeit bearbeitet, versammelt in chronologischer Abfolge erstmals alle derzeit bekannten, nahezu 450 Werke, von denen ein Großteil bisher nur in historischen Publikationen und Auktionskatalogen publiziert war. In seinem Informationsgehalt geht der Band weit über ein klassisches Werkverzeichnis hinaus: Er erläutert die künstlerischen, technischen und biografischen Umstände der Entstehung der Fotogramme, betrachtet sie in ihren Bezügen zu anderen Schaffensbereichen und beschreibt sie am Beispiel ausgewählter Stücke ausführlich. Eine Biografie und eine Fotogramm-Bibliografie runden den catalogue raisonné ab.
