The images from Abu Ghraib are as murderous for America as those of the World Trade Center in flames. The whole West is contained in the burst of sadistic laughter of the American soldiers, as it is behind the construction of the Israeli wall. This is where the truth of these images lies. Truth, but not veracity. As virtual as the war itself, their specific violence adds to the specific violence of the war.

In The Conspiracy of Art, Baudrillard questions the privilege attached to art by its practitioners. Art has lost all desire for illusion: feeding back endlessly into itself, it has turned its own vanishment into an art unto itself. Far from lamenting the “end of art,” Baudrillard celebrates art’s new function within the process of insider-trading. Spiraling from aesthetic nullity to commercial frenzy, art has become transaesthetic, like society as a whole.

Conceived and edited by life-long Baudrillard collaborator Sylvère Lotringer, The Conspiracy of Art presents ...

The images from Abu Ghraib are as murderous for America as those of the World Trade Center in flames. The whole West is contained in the burst of sadistic laughter of the American soldiers, as it is behind the construction of the Israeli wall. This is where the truth of these images lies. Truth, but not veracity. As virtual as the war itself, their specific violence adds to the specific violence of the war.

In The Conspiracy of Art, Baudrillard questions the privilege attached to art by its practitioners. Art has lost all desire for illusion: feeding back endlessly into itself, it has turned its own vanishment into an art unto itself. Far from lamenting the “end of art,” Baudrillard celebrates art’s new function within the process of insider-trading. Spiraling from aesthetic nullity to commercial frenzy, art has become transaesthetic, like society as a whole.

Conceived and edited by life-long Baudrillard collaborator Sylvère Lotringer, The Conspiracy of Art presents Baudrillard’s writings on art in a complicitous dance with politics, economics, and media. Culminating with “War Porn,” a scathing analysis of the spectacular images from Abu Ghraib prison as a new genre of reality TV, the book folds back on itself to question the very nature of radical thought.

In 2003, after returning from a monthlong stay in Baghdad, American artist Paul Chan was given a gift from a colleague in the human-rights group Voices of the Wilderness: a copy of three speeches on democracy written by Saddam Hussein in the 1970s, before he became president of Iraq. The speeches, compiled here for the first time in English, are politically perverse, yet eerily familiar. The then vice president of Iraq characterizes social democracy as demanding authority, and defines free will as the patriotic duty to uphold the good of the state. This volume takes the speeches as an opportunity to ask what democracy means from the standpoint of a notorious political figure who was anything but democratic, and to reflect on how promises of freedom and security can mask the reality of repressive regimes. With drawings by Paul Chan, including a new suite in its entirety, and essays by Bidoun’s Negar Azimi, philosopher and artist Nickolas Calabrese and journalist Jeff Severns ...

In 2003, after returning from a monthlong stay in Baghdad, American artist Paul Chan was given a gift from a colleague in the human-rights group Voices of the Wilderness: a copy of three speeches on democracy written by Saddam Hussein in the 1970s, before he became president of Iraq. The speeches, compiled here for the first time in English, are politically perverse, yet eerily familiar. The then vice president of Iraq characterizes social democracy as demanding authority, and defines free will as the patriotic duty to uphold the good of the state. This volume takes the speeches as an opportunity to ask what democracy means from the standpoint of a notorious political figure who was anything but democratic, and to reflect on how promises of freedom and security can mask the reality of repressive regimes. With drawings by Paul Chan, including a new suite in its entirety, and essays by Bidoun’s Negar Azimi, philosopher and artist Nickolas Calabrese and journalist Jeff Severns Guntzel, this book is the inaugural copublication of the Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art and Chan’s own Badlands Unlimited.

This book, produced in collaboration with the Yves Klein Archives, is the first of its kind to illustrate the relationship between Yves Klein, one of the most important artists of the postwar period, and the United States of America – a relationship of mutual fascination and influence. Photos, letters and notes, many of which are previously unpublished, bear witness to the ties that Yves Klein forged with the USA through his working life. Important figures of the American art scene (Leo Castelli, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Marcel Duchamp) all play a part in the story – as does President Eisenhower! This exceptional album opens with an interview with Rotraut Klein-Moquay, who describes her trip to the USA with Yves Klein in 1961, and is followed by the artists reflections on his own work. A further perspective is provided by the American art critic Robert Pincus-Witten, who worked for the New York art dealer Leo Castelli during this time. This book ...

This book, produced in collaboration with the Yves Klein Archives, is the first of its kind to illustrate the relationship between Yves Klein, one of the most important artists of the postwar period, and the United States of America – a relationship of mutual fascination and influence. Photos, letters and notes, many of which are previously unpublished, bear witness to the ties that Yves Klein forged with the USA through his working life. Important figures of the American art scene (Leo Castelli, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Marcel Duchamp) all play a part in the story – as does President Eisenhower! This exceptional album opens with an interview with Rotraut Klein-Moquay, who describes her trip to the USA with Yves Klein in 1961, and is followed by the artists reflections on his own work. A further perspective is provided by the American art critic Robert Pincus-Witten, who worked for the New York art dealer Leo Castelli during this time. This book covers a fascinating period in the history of twentieth-century art and features several unabridged documents from the archives, including the Chelsea Hotel Manifesto.

OMMU is pleased to present “Postcards and Rare Multiples”, an exhibition of just what the words say, postcards and rare multiples, designed and produced for and by Eric Wrenn OFFICE.

This is a practice that signals an impressive implementation of graphic design as an exercise in providing space for the wild circulation of images and information to slow down and find new configurations; configurations that let the quality of its content—be it clever, elegant or even stupid—communicate like the clouds of smoke from Magritte’s pipe. A personal business card as an American flag is a good example, where the stars and stripes are put to use as an image that expresses one’s personal contact without the need of an email.

With works produced specifically for OMMU, “Postcards and Rare Multiples” is a chance to see this noteworthy practice respond and reconfigue itself specifically for the exhibition format.

Eric Wrenn OFFICE x Comme des Garçons poster (after ...

OMMU is pleased to present “Postcards and Rare Multiples”, an exhibition of just what the words say, postcards and rare multiples, designed and produced for and by Eric Wrenn OFFICE.

This is a practice that signals an impressive implementation of graphic design as an exercise in providing space for the wild circulation of images and information to slow down and find new configurations; configurations that let the quality of its content—be it clever, elegant or even stupid—communicate like the clouds of smoke from Magritte’s pipe. A personal business card as an American flag is a good example, where the stars and stripes are put to use as an image that expresses one’s personal contact without the need of an email.

With works produced specifically for OMMU, “Postcards and Rare Multiples” is a chance to see this noteworthy practice respond and reconfigue itself specifically for the exhibition format.

Eric Wrenn OFFICE x Comme des Garçons poster (after Inoue Tsuguya)
2011
Offset print on paper
610 × 863 mm (24 × 34 in)
Edition of 250

Sports stationery
2012
Foil stamp on paper with matching envelope
127 × 177 mm (5 × 7 in)
Edition of 250

America business card
2012
Letterpress on paper
89 × 51 mm (3.5 × 2 in)
Edition of 500

Eric Wrenn sticker
2009
Silkscreen on glow-in-the-dark vinyl
216 × 70 mm (8.5 × 2.75 in)
Edition of 250

Blackberry Euro-Trip zine
2010
Laserjet print on paper
127 × 190 mm (5 × 7.5 in)
Edition of 50

Eric Wrenn OFFICE at OMMU shopping bag
2012
Silkscreen on leopard print paper bag
177 × 280 mm (8.5 × 11 in)
Edition of 200

Once upon a time, so we are told by the atomists of ancient Greece, triangular and star-shaped, round and sickle-moon atoms whirled about in outer space, with every atom finding its orbit in free fall and accidentally hooking up with others. Wild monsters with three trunks, free-floating uteruses and interlocked brain boxes flew through the emptiness of space, tangling into universes, blazing new suns and dying planets. Potential worlds, one after the other, kept taking shape until creation found rest of sorts and – as humankind hopes – a higher meaning.

The Greek atomists envisioned the works of writers being created in the same manner. According to Democritus, letters are atoms swirling about in chaos, where clouds of pure possibility converge into real works like Homer’s Odyssey or Plato’s Dialogues. Every book is the offspring of such chance encounters.

Hence, it is we, the readers, who invest this chance with meaning. First, we are struck by the title, the ...

Once upon a time, so we are told by the atomists of ancient Greece, triangular and star-shaped, round and sickle-moon atoms whirled about in outer space, with every atom finding its orbit in free fall and accidentally hooking up with others. Wild monsters with three trunks, free-floating uteruses and interlocked brain boxes flew through the emptiness of space, tangling into universes, blazing new suns and dying planets. Potential worlds, one after the other, kept taking shape until creation found rest of sorts and – as humankind hopes – a higher meaning.

The Greek atomists envisioned the works of writers being created in the same manner. According to Democritus, letters are atoms swirling about in chaos, where clouds of pure possibility converge into real works like Homer’s Odyssey or Plato’s Dialogues. Every book is the offspring of such chance encounters.

Hence, it is we, the readers, who invest this chance with meaning. First, we are struck by the title, the name of the author and possibly the publisher. That alone is enough to begin imagining a story; we can already smell the word worlds like sugar candy. It takes only a few pages for us to dream our way out of the book and back into our own minds. Into imaginary inner worlds, perhaps never even waking up until we find ourselves gazing at the imaginary Library of Lutz & Guggisberg: we hold their books in our hands, and, in doing so, we weigh the weight of our own imaginations.

Yes, the feel of their books is a delight, though we can only leaf through them in our own heads. They are unborn books, or, as the Talmud tells us, the child in the womb is a book that has neither been opened nor leafed through.

Lutz & Guggisberg have been working on their imaginary Library for years. In Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau, the grand master of wordplay, wrote a dust jacket text for an unwritten book; another Lutz, graphic artist Hans Rudolf Lutz from Zürich, and Alex Sadkowsky once put together a catalogue of opening sentences and invented beginnings for novels. But now the jacket texts and sentenc-es have become objects, patiently sawed out of wood, beautifully printed and lined up on shelves.

The books of Lutz and Guggisberg pay homage to an almost extinct literary form: the so-called blurb. After lengthy detours, this curious literary species found its last refuge on the spine of books. Condemned to attract the attention of potential readers in large letters behind transparent plastic film, the blurb as a jacket text was reduced to monosyllables, “a masterpiece” or even, as the German doyen of literature Reich Ranicki once quipped, “a great masterpiece”. But before sinking into the quicksand of idiocy, the blurb has spawned some notable purple prose. In the mid 18th century, a loose sheet of paper, a prospectus, was inserted in books, and in 19th-century France, the prière d’insérer acquired currency, a letter sent to editors-in-chief, asking them to publish the enclosed publicity text in their newspapers. Emile Zola once complained to Flaubert about the stupidity of one such text – albeit, without advising him that he himself had penned it. Flaubert kept meticulous watch on his blurbs. We imagine Bouvard and Pécuchet at the end of their turmoils, having dotted the garden of their estate with mighty watermelon heads, performed emergency operations on bloated calves and enlisted their educational methodology to raise two children and turn them into precocious criminals, we imagine them now proceeding to accumulate a kind of miscellany of the foolishness of their century by copying out bits and pieces from newspaper clippings and announcements – a scrap paper novel of surrealist proportions – before finally embarking on their ultimate hobby: inventing the spines of unwritten books. Lutz & Guggisberg may well be considered latter-day descendants of Bouvard and Pécuchet, perched behind their twin lectern in the kingdom of cross-eyed perception.

Look at them long enough and you will discover meaning in these rows of books, just as you might find meaning in the world. The name of an author makes an appearance elsewhere as a character in a novel; a blurb in one book refers to a word in the title of another. Yes, it is all here, the entire universe of chance and intent, gathered together in the free falling elementary particles of a new creation.

“Clinamen” is what the Greeks called the curve along which atoms fall. This clinamen, a curi-ous creature, makes an appearance in a novel by the French absinthe addict Alfred Jarry: it is a novel about a very special Doctor Faust, a Faust who does not make a pact with the devil, as Goethe has it, because the real world is not good enough for him; instead, he makes a pact with chance. And because the real world is not good enough for him, Jarry’s Doctor Faustroll invents pataphysics. Pataphysics is the science of what cannot be known; it extends not only beyond physics but beyond metaphysics as well, or rather behind it: epi ta metaphysica. A “science of imaginary solutions”, in which nonexistent solutions provide answers to nonexistent or at least unaskable questions. Pataphysicians learn to exercise their minds, ensuring that what occurs to them would never occur to anyone else. Except maybe to Andres Lutz and Anders Guggisberg. For ten years now, the two artists have been bombarding our senses with whey-like configurations, exploding display cases and trinkets from invented isles, about whose animal world we receive instruction from a kind of resurrected Hans A. Traber.

Dozens of tragedies by Sophocles have vanished, the second half of Gogol’s Dead Souls went up in flames, and Nietzsche wrote Prefaces to Unwritten Works. Possibly these lost books or those that were never even written are the greatest masterpieces of all, as consummate as our fantasy in its deepest dreams. The body of a text rolls in endless rolls off the body of Doctor Faustroll: “Then the paper wallpaper came off Faustroll’s corpse. Like a score, every art and every science was inscribed in the curves of the limbs, proclaiming their perfection all the way to infinity.” One senses that infinity on getting lost in the imaginary Library of Lutz & Guggisberg. The Imaginary Library written by Stefan Zweifel (Translation by Catherine Schelbert)

Andres Lutz (1968) and Anders Guggisberg (1966) live and work in Zurich. The artist duo attracted international attention in solo exhibitions at Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau, at Museum Folkwang in Essen, at Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris, at Kunstverein Freiburg, at Villa Merkel in Esslingen, and at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

Covering the last twenty years of Gilles Deleuze’s life (1975-1995), the texts and interviews gathered in this volume complete those collected in Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974) . This period saw the publication of his major works: A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Cinema I: Image-Movement (1983), Cinema II: Image-Time (1985), all leading through language, concept and art to What is Philosophy? (1991). Two Regimes of Madness also documents Deleuze’s increasing involvement with politics (with Toni Negri, for example, the Italian philosopher and professor accused of associating with the Red Brigades). Both volumes were conceived by the author himself and will be his last. Michel Foucault famously wrote: “One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian.” This book provides a prodigious entry into the work of the most important philosopher of our time. Unlike Foucault, Deleuze never stopped digging further into the same furrow. Concepts for him came from ...

Covering the last twenty years of Gilles Deleuze’s life (1975-1995), the texts and interviews gathered in this volume complete those collected in Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974) . This period saw the publication of his major works: A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Cinema I: Image-Movement (1983), Cinema II: Image-Time (1985), all leading through language, concept and art to What is Philosophy? (1991). Two Regimes of Madness also documents Deleuze’s increasing involvement with politics (with Toni Negri, for example, the Italian philosopher and professor accused of associating with the Red Brigades). Both volumes were conceived by the author himself and will be his last. Michel Foucault famously wrote: “One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian.” This book provides a prodigious entry into the work of the most important philosopher of our time. Unlike Foucault, Deleuze never stopped digging further into the same furrow. Concepts for him came from life. He was a vitalist and remained one to the last.

Capital has managed to overcome the dualism of body and soul by establishing a workforce in which everything we mean by the Soul—language, creativity, affects—is mobilized for its own benefit. Industrial production put to work bodies, muscles, and arms. Now, in the sphere of digital technology and cyberculture, exploitation involves the mind, language, and emotions in order to generate value—while our bodies disappear in front of our computer screens.

In this, his newest book, Franco “Bifo” Berardi—key member of the Italian Autonomist movement and a close associate of Félix Guattari—addresses these new forms of estrangement. In the philosophical landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, the Hegelian concept of alienation was used to define the harnessing of subjectivity. The estrangement of workers from their labor, the feeling of alienation they experienced, and their refusal to submit to it became the bases for a human community that remained autonomous from capital. ...

Capital has managed to overcome the dualism of body and soul by establishing a workforce in which everything we mean by the Soul—language, creativity, affects—is mobilized for its own benefit. Industrial production put to work bodies, muscles, and arms. Now, in the sphere of digital technology and cyberculture, exploitation involves the mind, language, and emotions in order to generate value—while our bodies disappear in front of our computer screens.

In this, his newest book, Franco “Bifo” Berardi—key member of the Italian Autonomist movement and a close associate of Félix Guattari—addresses these new forms of estrangement. In the philosophical landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, the Hegelian concept of alienation was used to define the harnessing of subjectivity. The estrangement of workers from their labor, the feeling of alienation they experienced, and their refusal to submit to it became the bases for a human community that remained autonomous from capital. But today a new condition of alienation has taken root in which workers commonly and voluntarily work overtime, the population is tethered to cell phones and Blackberries, debt has become a postmodern form of slavery, and antidepressants are commonly used to meet the unending pressure of production. As a result, the conditions for community have run aground and new philosophical categories are needed. The Soul at Work is a clarion call for a new collective effort to reclaim happiness.

Set in post-9/11 New York City, Reena Spaulings was written by a large collective of writers and artists that bills itself as The Bernadette Corporation. Like most contemporary fiction, Reena Spaulings is about a female twenty-something. Reena is discovered while working as a museum guard and becomes a rich international supermodel. Meanwhile, a bout of terrible weather seizes New York, leaving in its wake a strange form of civil disobedience that stirs its citizens to mount a musical song-and-dance riot called “Battle on Broadway.” Fashioned in the old Hollywood manner by a legion of professional and amateur writers striving to achieve the ultimate blockbuster, the musical ends up being about a nobody who could be anybody becoming a somebody for everybody. The result is generic and perfect—not unlike Reena Spaulings itself, whose many authors create a story in which New York itself strives to become the ultimate collective experiment in which the only thing shared is ...

Set in post-9/11 New York City, Reena Spaulings was written by a large collective of writers and artists that bills itself as The Bernadette Corporation. Like most contemporary fiction, Reena Spaulings is about a female twenty-something. Reena is discovered while working as a museum guard and becomes a rich international supermodel. Meanwhile, a bout of terrible weather seizes New York, leaving in its wake a strange form of civil disobedience that stirs its citizens to mount a musical song-and-dance riot called “Battle on Broadway.” Fashioned in the old Hollywood manner by a legion of professional and amateur writers striving to achieve the ultimate blockbuster, the musical ends up being about a nobody who could be anybody becoming a somebody for everybody. The result is generic and perfect—not unlike Reena Spaulings itself, whose many authors create a story in which New York itself strives to become the ultimate collective experiment in which the only thing shared is the lack of uniqueness.

About the Author

The artist-collective Bernadette Corporation was founded in a night club in 1994. In the beginning the group organized spontaneous, purposeless events in public space. In 1995 they morphed into a fashion label, then a self-publishing company that from 1999 to 2001 published an art magazine called Made in USA. Bernadette Corporation has also produced films, including Hell Frozen Over (2000), and Get Rid of Yourself (2003), as well as exhibits at art galleries and museums throughout the world.

Depressed, cynical, and subversive, East Coaster Reginald Fortiphton has been brought to Seattle by a West Coast publishing company that wants him to write a guide to the American Northwest. His job is to travel, on their dime, from Eugene, Oregon, to Vancouver, shining an admiring light on the region—which the publishers feel has been neglected by the New York publishing monopoly. Pacific Agony is his ironic attempt to fufill his assignment. To ensure that the project goes as planned, the very respectable Narcissa Whitman Applegate—notable member of the Willamette-Columbia Historical Legion and the Daughters of the Oregon Trail Historical Committee (and named after a nineteenth century missionary who was famously killed by Oregon’s Nez Percé Indians)—is asked to annotate the manuscript. Her notes at the bottom of the page become progressively more outraged as the alienated Reginald’s mock travel narrative skewers the region with merciless political observations—while ...

Depressed, cynical, and subversive, East Coaster Reginald Fortiphton has been brought to Seattle by a West Coast publishing company that wants him to write a guide to the American Northwest. His job is to travel, on their dime, from Eugene, Oregon, to Vancouver, shining an admiring light on the region—which the publishers feel has been neglected by the New York publishing monopoly. Pacific Agony is his ironic attempt to fufill his assignment. To ensure that the project goes as planned, the very respectable Narcissa Whitman Applegate—notable member of the Willamette-Columbia Historical Legion and the Daughters of the Oregon Trail Historical Committee (and named after a nineteenth century missionary who was famously killed by Oregon’s Nez Percé Indians)—is asked to annotate the manuscript. Her notes at the bottom of the page become progressively more outraged as the alienated Reginald’s mock travel narrative skewers the region with merciless political observations—while he spirals into a depressive mania.

This acidic, satirical novel hilariously eviscerates contemporary American culture at the same time that it exposes some of the darker motivations of American middle-class liberalism.