Raphael Gygax Livres

Twenty-five years ago, the first 8-bit Nintendo console went on the market; now most home computers have hundreds of thousands of times that power. Arcangel, who is 27 this year, is a full-fledged member of the generation that grew up on home video games. With Beige, a collective of fellow programmers, he has embarked on a hacker's nostalgia his return to Super Mario Brothers removes all of the action to leave a landscape of blue sky and puffy clouds; Shoot Andy Warhol is a working video game in which viewers gain points for hitting Warhol and lose them by accidentally shooting Colonel Sanders, the Pope or Flavor Flav instead. Arcangel appropriates and rewrites electronic history, and his accessible sites and published code offer viewers tools for action in a reality that is less and less tangible, through a field that has come to dominate our daily lives. Arcangel's work was shown at the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

American artists Cory Arcangel, Jessica Ciocci & Jacob Ciocci/Paper Rad, Shana Moulton, and Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch, have been brought together in this publication. In their works the artists create an overwhelming, color-charged aesthetic with an excessive density of content, reacting to the consumer-oriented condition of Western society. In their image-spaces the four collaborations address a culture of excess, constructing their critique via a form of appropriation, which simultaneously releases a veritable deluge of images. In the tradition of experimental film and Scatter art they probe potential unconventional narrative patterns and test for the disintegration of stereotypes. As a result, the video works are often shown in sculptural settings, in which fragments of pop culture and handcrafted forms are amalgamated into a multimedia Gesamtkunstwerk. * * Published with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich. * *

Gathering together works by Cory Arcangel, Alex Bag & Patterson Beckwith, Judith Bernstein, Vittorio Brodmann, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Simon Denny, Harun Farocki, Tabor Robak, and many others, this publication brings together artists who use formats and imagery from popular culture usually addressed to children or teenagers. The adoption of such motifs disseminated in specific entertainment formats should not be seen merely as a reference to (or appropriation of) popular culture: it becomes an implicit (or explicit) critique of a kind of capitalist production of consumer worlds that have also infiltrated the field of art for quite some time. These playful children’s or fantasy worlds, with their pop aesthetic and inherent promise of “innocence,” contrast with the reality of neoliberal advertising and market strategies. Subjected to a contextual shift, the rhetoric of these formats develops a new vocabulary. * * The publication includes essays by art and film critic Esther Buss, art historian and philosopher Hans Ulrich Reck, and writer and computer programmer Alexander R. Galloway, as well as contributions by curators Raphael Gygax and Judith Welter, and various interviews with the artists. * * Published with Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich.

Since the late 1990s, Carey Young has investigated the growing influence of international corporations on the individual in works that span a variety of media including video, performance, text, and installation, and which draw on the tradition of Conceptual art. Notably, she studies how language is transformed by corporate culture, or how contractual structures and their linguistic markers progressively pervade and reshape all domains of life. Like a double agent, she immerses herself in the business or legal worlds, donning the appropriate attire and enacting recommended scenarios in order to examine and question the reach of each institution’s power, and its ability to shape our contemporary reality. * * The publication was published in conjunction with Carey Young’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, curated by Raphael Gygax, and offers an overview on her works from 2003 to today. It includes contributions by the artist, Martha Buskirk, Raphael Gygax, and Tirdad Zolghadr. Carey Young has presented her work in numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2010); the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and The Power Plant, Toronto (both in 2009); she participated in the Taipei Biennial in 2010, the Moscow Biennial in 2007, the Sharjah Biennial in 2005, and the Venice Biennial in 2003. * * Published with the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich.

The American artist Stephen G. Rhodes’ installations, which are distinguished by the combination of diverse media, are based on selected references from a wide range of historical and cultural sources, including the American past and the histories of art and film, which he fuses into a new and dense semantic system. In the cycle of works Rhodes presented in 2009 under the title “Dar Allers war ne’er eny Bear Bear” at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery, for example, he linked Walt Disney’s “Song of the South” (1946), a movie adaptation of Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus” stories, which are in turn based on the oral histories of the slaves on the plantations of the American South, to Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980). Building such connections allows him to take up the repressed depths of the American past and place them in new contexts. * * This first monograph, published in conjunction with Rhodes’ solo exhibition at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (February 2013) will give an overview of the artist’s oeuvre of the last ten years. Accompanied by essays from Brian Price, John David Rhodes, Laurence A. Rickels, and Keston Sutherland, and an extensive interview by Raphael Gygax with Stephen G. Rhodes. * * Published with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

Since the mid-1990s, Alex Bag has emerged as a significant figure in video performance, influencing a generation of younger artists like Cory Arcangel and Shana Moulton. Known for her technically simple yet impactful video performances, she humorously critiques TV culture and the art system, exploring romantic notions of the artist. Bag's work offers a profound critique of market dynamics and societal norms, often featuring herself as a versatile actor in various roles. Her breakthrough video, "Untitled Fall '95," portrays an art student sharing her aspirations and experiences in a diary-like format. Throughout her career, she has examined advertising structures in network TV, as seen in "Coven Services" (2004), and explored various TV genres in works like "Fancy Pantz" (1997) and "Gladia Daters" (2005). By integrating elements from advertising, film, and reality TV, her art critiques contemporary neoliberal societal structures. This publication serves as the first comprehensive monograph on Bag's influential work, featuring texts by Raphael Gygax, Bruce Hainley, and Glenn Phillips, along with a glossary of her interview responses, a complete videography with transcripts, scripts, stills, ephemera, reference materials, photographs, and her "typewriter prose." It is published in collaboration with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

This publication stems from two exhibitions at the Migros Museum in Zurich, focusing on documenting time-based works. It explores the relationship between fixed-time disciplines, like sculpture and installation, and time-based art forms, such as dance and performance. The emphasis is on the intersections created by these overlaps and the resulting art. Raphael Gygax suggests that performances, their venues, and involved objects can be interpreted as rituals, while Heike Munder examines the body as a potential archive of history, with movement processes inscribed into collective memory. Verena Kuni discusses temporality and transience in art, particularly concerning sound and music. Philip Auslander argues that the materials documenting performances can also be seen as performative. Babette Mangolte, drawing from her experience with the Judson Dance Theater, analyzes the connection between movement and speed in documenting performance processes. Kristina Köhler investigates filmic strategies within the performative, exploring their dynamics between performance, event, and representation. This anthology is published in collaboration with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

„Extra Bodies“ is a theoretical volume rooted in the PhD research of Raphael Gygax, curator at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, and complements an exhibition held from November 2017 to February 2018. It explores an artistic trend that emerged in the 1990s within the performing arts, where artists incorporate “other bodies” into their work, emphasizing their “vitality.” A key strategy involves leveraging the social roles of these bodies, referred to as “extras,” to underscore the societal dimensions of the artwork. This volume situates this phenomenon within the broader context of the 1990s, particularly in relation to Relational Aesthetics and its theoretical frameworks. It examines the shift from a “bio-political” to a “psycho-political” body over the past three decades. Through case studies of artists like Ai Weiwei, Vanessa Beecroft, and Teresa Margolles, the author creates a typology of the “extra body,” investigating its various contexts and references. Additionally, the research links the performing body to its integration into the art market and global art system. The exhibition’s sections, highlighting this phenomenon and its historical precedents from the 1960s onward, are complemented by short texts and a rich image section, along with interviews featuring artists, gallerists, and participants embodying the “extra body.” Published in collaboration with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst.