Trisha Brown : So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing

"Best known for her innovative choreography, which revolutionized Modern dance, Trisha Brown has for many years made drawings and other works beyond the stage that integrate the performing and visual arts. Drawing has long featured prominently in her practice, shifting from a tool for schematic composition into a fully realized component of her broader investigation into the limits of her own body. Whether she is working within the frame of a sheet of paper, on the wall or on the stage, Brown delights in the play between structure and improvisation, between repetition and invention and between choice and chance. This volume, published to accompany an exhibition at the Walker Art Center, presents a broad survey of Brown's visual arts practice going back more than three decades. Featuring over 40 drawings, it includes essays by exhibition curator Peter Eleey and performing arts curator Philip Bither, as well as a specially-commissioned survey of Brown's drawing vocabulary contributed by the artist." -- Publisher's website

James Lee Byars: 1/2 an autobiography, sourcebook

"I see my autobiography as an arbitrary segment of so many pages of time, of things that I have paid attention to at this point in my life," wrote James Lee Byars (1932-1997) in 1969. He was then 37, about half the average male lifespan at the time, and accordingly thought it appropriate to write his "1/2 autobiography." Byars' art ranged from highly refined objects to extremely minimal performance and events, and books, ephemera and correspondence that he distributed widely among friends and colleagues. Today, more than 15 years after his death, assessments of his art must negotiate Byars' performance of his charismatic self in his life and art. For his first major posthumous survey in the US, exhibition curators Magalí Arriola and Peter Eleey decided to produce a catalogue in two "halves," playing on his "1/2 autobiography": a catalogue of the exhibition itself, including new scholarship, and a sourcebook of primary documents. 1/2 an Autobiography, Sourcebook constitutes the latter volume--a reference guide filled with photographs and documents drawn from a variety of archival sources, including The Getty Research Institute, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives, MoMA and Byars' own papers. This volume also includes a series of previously unseen interviews that artist and art historian David Sewell conducted with Byars in the late 1970s in preparation for a book that was never published. These discussions cover a number of Byars' major projects, among them The World Question Center, The Holy Ghost and the artist's time at CERN

Ethics

"In this volume, artist and writer Walead Beshty evaluates the relation of ethics to aesthetics, and demonstrates how this encounter has become central to the contested space of much recent art. He brings together theoretical foundations for an ethics of aesthetics; appraisals of art that engages with ethical issues; statements and examples of methodologies adopted by a diverse range of artists; and examinations of artworks that question the ethical conditions in which contemporary art is produced and experienced.." -- Publisher's website

Dance

"Dance surveys the choreographic turn in the arts from the 1950s onwards, exploring the philosophies of movement instrumental to the development of experimental dance, the concepts of embodiment, corporeality, choreopolitics, and the notion of dance in an expanded field" -- p. [4] of cover