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Institut national d’histoire de l’art

Martha Rosler Library at unitednationsplaza, Berlin

Martha Rosler Library
November 14, 2007 - January 20th, 2008
Institut national d’histoire de l’art
6 rue des Petits-Champs
75002 Paris, France
http://www.inha.fr

e-flux and the Institut national d’histoire de l’art are pleased to announce the opening of Martha Rosler Library on Wednesday, November 14th at 18:30 hrs at Galerie Colbert. Comprised of approximately 7,700 titles from the artist’s personal collection, the Library was opened to the public by e-flux in November 2005 as a storefront reading room on Ludlow street in New York City. It has since traveled to Frankfurter Kunstverein, MuHKA, Antwerp and unitednationsplaza, Berlin. The library will remain on view in Paris through January 20th, 2008.

“In an act of incredible generosity, one of Americas most important living artists temporarily dispossessed herself of the vast majority of her personal library so that it could be made available for consultation. No borrowing was possible, but the eclectic ensemble of books on economics, political theory, war, colonialism, poetry, feminism, science fiction, art history, mystery novels, children’s books, dictionaries, maps and travel books, as well as photo albums, posters, postcards and newspaper clippings could be studied at will. Smart, decidedly political in orientation, often funny, and all over the place (in that way a perfect mirror of its owner), the library is packed with essential reading and titles that even your better bookstores would love to get their hands on. As the product of decades of avid reading, the contents of the library are both the source of Rosler’s work and an installation/artwork that continues many of the concerns with public space, access to
information and engaged citizenship that traverse her entire oeuvre.”

Artforum

November 2007 in Artforum
Artforum
350 Seventh Ave, 19th Floor
New York, New York 10001
t: 212.475-4000 f: 212.529-1257

http://www.artforum.com

This month in Artforum: Surfing on acid? Painter Mary Heilmann catches the “fall line” of postwar abstraction–then flares through its highs and its lows–with her retrospective that goes on view this month at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, after opening last spring at the Orange County Museum of Art. Art historian and critic Anne M. Wagner takes a close look at the artist’s reinvention of color, surface, and pattern, as well as mark, system, and grid; and then Heilmann herself curates an exhibition in the magazine’s pages, “Signs and Wonders,” which ranges from the iconography of Black Flag to the stacked sculptures of Donald Judd.

“If Heilmann [is] a painter’s painter, then so be it. She is also a painter for anyone who has paid attention to the art of the century so recently behind us and who has wondered how and whether painting will manage to keep itself afloat in the century to come.” –Anne M. Wagner

“I came to New York expecting to align myself with the sculptors, like Smithson. . . . I thought I would be part of that gang. Of course, that doesn’t happen so easily. I wasn’t invited into the Smithson/Serra gang. So I switched my practice rather vocally to painting, because they all hated painting.”