Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
"I said, 'I want to stage a play in the middle of the street by a playwright named Samuel Beckett. This play is called Waiting for Godot and it’s about waiting. It’s about waiting for things that may never come. It’s in two acts. One critic described it as two acts in
which nothing happens twice.' And then, I would stop talking. Or rather, I would ask what they thought of what I wanted to do. I would then listen. And it was through this give-and-take that the shape of Godot really took form, giving us a sense of how to do it and what to do. What I mean by that is that it became less of a play and more of something else." Paul Chan in conversation with Kathy Halbreich, excerpted from Paul Chan: Waiting for Godot in New Orleans.
Foreword by Dimitris Daskalopoulos. Text by Sam Thorne, Paul Chan. Interview with Nikolaos Stampolidis, Elina Kountouri. Translation by Alexandra Pappas.
Hbk, 6.5 x 9.5 in. / 168 pgs / 50 color. | 2/19/2019 | In stock $29.95
Founded by artist Paul Chan in 2010, Badlands Unlimited publishes limited edition books, e-books, and artist works. Below, Ranya Asmar of ARTBOOK | D.A.P. speaks with Chan about the integrity of the book as a space, the e-book as artist's book and outsized negative reactions to Badlands' digital publishing program.
Wu Tang is a small mountain range in the northwestern part of Hubei Province of People's Republic of China, just to the south of the city of Shiyan. From these mountains came The Wu Tang Clan, a group of rappers who are physically from Staten Island, New York, but spiritually find there home elsewhere. Wht is Wu Tang? is an unique handmade book and graphic eBook that allegorically grapples with the history of the Clan and their contribution to hip hop through the unlikely personality of Republican presidential candidate and former Texas governor Rick Perry. What is the connection? Wht is Wu Tang?
Published by Walker Art Center. Edited with text by Pavel S. Pys. Foreword by Mary Ceruti. Text by Vic Brooks, Paul Chan.
This volume surveys Paul Chan’s publications and works made between 2010 and 2022 following his return to artmaking. The exhibition takes as its organizing principle the notion of the “breather,” a word that can signify a moment of rest or pause but can also reference a purposeful redirection toward other activities. Chan’s turn to publishing through the founding of his independent press Badlands Unlimited represented a type of “breather.” Badlands for Chan embodied a radical break that seeded new ideas and ways of working. The term is also what Chan titles a recent major body of work. Breathers is an ongoing series of pneumatic sculptures and installations that he considers a new genre of moving-image works. Tacitly and overtly, the metaphor of the “breather” underscores each of the works in the Walker Art Center exhibition, which, with the artist’s input, is conceived in four sections. The exhibition catalog includes scholarly contributions by Chan; Pavel Pys, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center; and Vic Brooks, Senior Curator of Time-based Visual Art at Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (EMPAC). Paul Chan (born 1973) is an artist, writer and publisher who lives in New York. Chan is the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize in 2014, a biennial award honoring artists who have made visionary contributions to contemporary art. Chan founded the independent press Badlands Unlimited in 2010. Badlands has published over 50 books, including the works of Yvonne Rainer, Calvin Tomkins, Lynne Tillman, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carroll Dunham, Claudia La Rocco, Dread Scott, Martine Syms, Craig Owens, Petra Cortright, Cauleen Smith, Ian Cheng, Rachel Rose, Aruna D’Souza and many others.
Published by Badlands Unlimited/Neon. Foreword by Dimitris Daskalopoulos. Text by Sam Thorne, Paul Chan. Interview with Nikolaos Stampolidis, Elina Kountouri. Translation by Alexandra Pappas.
What makes Odysseus such a contemporary character even after 2,000 years? Why is the quality that Homer attributes to him (polytropos, which loosely translates as “cunning” or “many-sided”) so evocative of questions that bind art and reason, creativity and ethics, freedom and conformity?
Odysseus and the Bathers documents the 2018 eponymous exhibition by the internationally acclaimed artist Paul Chan (born 1973) at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, Greece. Inspired by the “polytropic” nature of Odysseus, Chan has created a body of work he calls “breathers”: kinetic sculptures that are unlike anything else in contemporary art. An essay by Chan explores the concept and history of polytropos and its relationship to what Marcel Duchamp called “the creative act.” This book also features an essay by curator Sam Thorne, a conversation between Nikolaos Stampolidis, Director of the Museum of Cycladic Art, and Elina Kountouri, Director of NEON, on the notion of “polytropism,” and fragments by the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, newly translated by classicist Alexandra Pappas, which illuminate how Odysseus’ “cunning” echoes traditions of thinking in ancient philosophy.
Published by DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art. Edited by Karen Marta, Massimiliano Gioni. Text by Stephen Squibb.
The varied practice of Paul Chan (born 1973) includes paintings, drawings, video animations and font design, as well as critical writing. The characters in his works are animated beings, jerking and stuttering as they are violently thrust into the clumsy reel--or "real"--of history. Chan explores the intellectual and sexual animus that courses through our collective language and consciousness, drawing on sources as varied as the King James Bible, Marquis de Sade and Samuel Beckett. Part of the 2000 Words series, conceived and commissioned by Massimiliano Gioni, and published by the Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, 2000 Words: Paul Chan presents the entirety of the artist's works in the Dakis Joannou Collection and includes an essay by Stephen Squibb that reveals the solitary image and its uncanny animation in Chan's work.
Published by Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager. Edited by Heidi Naef, Isabel Friedli. Foreword by Maja Oeri. Text by Daniel Birnbaum.
This volume accompanies the first major solo exhibition on American artist Paul Chan (born 1973) since his series The 7 Lights was presented at the New Museum in 2008. Chan is one of the most versatile and unpredictable artists of his generation, and certainly one of the most original voices in contemporary art today. Active as artist, writer and publisher, he engages the viewer in a challenging discourse about the place of art in social and political life. Chan's combination of old and new works casts new light on the content and complexity of his fascinating art. In addition to early video installations, rarely seen works on paper, sculptures and works from the 7 Lights series, this volume includes reproductions of the 1,005 painted book covers that constitute Volumes (2012), and new works created for the exhibition.
Published by Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation/Badlands Unlimited. Edited by Karen Marta. Introduction by Sven Lütticken.
New New Testament documents Paul Chan’s monumental project Volumes, a series of more than 1,000 paintings made out of dismantled book covers and the texts that complement each painting. "I began destroying books to paint on them, on weekends," Chan says. "Each cover seemed to call for different things; some expressionistic, others naturalistic, still others plainly monochrome. I never read the books I tore apart." A selection of Volumes premiered at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, in 2012, but New New Testament is the first time all the paintings have been united in a single book. Each painting evokes how books and works of art now exist in our digitally interconnected world chiefly as objects of search. The texts that accompany each painting are composed with bewildering combinations of phrases and lexical marks that reflect how historical distinctions between art, media and celebrity culture are rapidly dissolving.
Published by Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation/Badlands Unlimited. Edited by George Baker, Eric Banks with Isabel Friedli, Martina Venanzoni. Introduction by George Baker.
The work of Paul Chan (born 1973) has charted a course in contemporary art as unpredictable and wide-ranging as the thinking that grounds his practice. Paul Chan: Selected Writings 2000–2014 collects the critical essays and artist’s texts that first appeared in Artforum, October, Texte zur Kunst and Frieze, among other publications, as well as previously unpublished speeches and language-based works. From the comedy of artistic freedom in Duchamp to the contradictions that bind aesthetics and politics, Chan’s writings revel in the paradoxes that make the experience of art both vexing and pleasurable. He lays bare the ideas and personalities that motivate his work by reflecting on artists as diverse as Henry Darger, Chris Marker, Sigmar Polke and Paul Sharits, and grapples with writers and thinkers who have played decisive roles in his practice, including Theodor Adorno, Samuel Beckett and the Marquis de Sade.
The first of its kind, How To Download a Boyfriend is a group exhibition in the form of an interactive eBook. Featuring the work of 50 artists from New York and elsewhere, HTDAB showcases what is being made at the intersection of digital and popular culture today. Artists and writers have also created interactive "quizzes" that test readers with funny, probing or simply absurd questions about love and longing in the 21st century. Curated by the staff of Badlands Unlimited.
What is reading? How does reading turn into knowing? How does knowing become doing? Does it matter if knowing only knows? What is a book? Is reading a book different from reading a menu, or an affidavit, or a painting? Why are books associated with bodies? When books are burned, why is it natural to assume that people are next? Does it have to do with Eros? How do you burn an eBook?
Who follows the law? Who or what confers authority to law? Who or what confers authority to the authority who confers authority to law? Is authority what makes law feel unlawful? Is law followed or found? What is the nature of law? What is the relationship between human law and the law of nature? Is art bound by law? If so, which one? If not, why not? If one does not know the law, is one still bound by it?
Lust fills the mind with maddening undeadness and shakes one to the bone with want and longing. The muscle is the mind captured by this foreign agent that comes when it comes and leaves just as swiftly. Is this why Christianity considers it a sin: that lust is without ceremonial dignity? Or is it merely that lust draws us into unveiling ourselves as beings following, without knowing, another law. But didn't Saint Paul write that law is sin? And that without law sin lies dead? Wht is lust? expresses these questions in layered images and texts that aren't in themselves hot or bothered in any way.
Published by Creative Time Books. Edited by Paul Chan. Text by Kalamu Ya Salaam, Paul Chan, Nato Thompson, Christopher McElroen. Foreword by Anne Pasternak.
In November 2006, the artist Paul Chan visited New Orleans, in particular those parts of the city devastated by Katrina. "Friends said the city now looks like the backdrop for a bleak science-fiction movie. (...) I realized it didn't look like a movie set, but the stage for a play I have seen many times." That play was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a play that has often been successfully staged in politically charged circumstances, such as a prison (San Quentin), and during a war (the Siege of Sarajevo, directed by Susan Sontag). In 2007, Chan staged four free outdoor performances of Godot in two New Orleans neighborhoods. This volume records Chan's project in essays and photographs, elucidating the terrible symmetry between Godot and post-Katrina New Orleans, and, as Chan writes, "the cruel and funny things people do while they wait: for help, for food, for hope."
PUBLISHER Creative Time Books
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 7.5 x 10 in. / 352 pgs / 165 color / 46 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 11/30/2010 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2011 p. 87
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783865608093TRADE List Price: $45.00 CAD $55.00
When we reflect on nature, or the history of humankind, or our own intellectual activity, the first picture presented to us is of an endless maze of relations and interactions, in which nothing remains the same. Everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes out of existence. Wht is nature? uses a special technique of overprinting images and texts onto existing sheets of book paper to create a singular reading experience that captures the perpetual unfolding of nature as both a thing and a property within our reality, which is always already a conceptualized reality.
Wht is a Kardashian? uses a special technique of overprinting images and texts onto existing sheets of book paper to create a singular reading experience that captures the chaos and flavor of the famous Kardashian family. A cacophony of images from ancient Rome flow alongside text "written" by a font designed by Paul Chan that rewrites words into short provocative phrases evoke a cascade of Kardashian-like feelings and thoughts that would otherwise lay dormant in one's inner being.
I have debt, who doesn't? Why is it that so many people have debt? And I don't mean student loans or mortgages. I mean the kind of debt that is impossible to pay back, because these debts do not deal in currency: they deal in the elusive transactions that bind people to things, and things to a network of tendencies that strings together to form a semblance of a common good. Can these debts be forgiven? And what would it mean to forgive a debt that cannot be calculated? Through a layering of texts and images, Wht is some debt? tries—rather unsuccessfully but with gusto—to express the inexpressible nature of debt as the fundamental lack that binds the living to time and to each other.
Paul Cézanne was a French artist who painted landscapes, bowls of fruit, and stoves, and whose work laid the foundations for painting in particular and visual arts in general in the 20th century. Cézanne bridged Impressionism with Cubism and other styles that sought to manifest the subjective quality of perception and time embodied in objective experiences of seeing reality as such. Wht was Cézanne? uses the spirit of Cézanne as a departure point to express, through layered texts and images, what concrete experiences of seeing reality today look and feel like. There is not a single image of Cézanne's work, nor images of Cézanne himself in this book, as Cézanne would have preferred.
Silvio Berlusconi is an Italian politician, the prime minister of Italy, as well as an entrepreneur. This unique handmade book and graphic eBook documents the inner life of this multifaceted man. The layering of visual and textual information creates a singular reading experience that evokes what it must be like inside the mind of such a complicated and curious man. The text of Wht is a Berlusconi? was "written" by a font designed by Chan that rewrites words into short provocative phrases, which makes reading this book that much more complicated and pleasurable.
Published by Badlands Unlimited. Edited by Paul Chan. Text by Kalamu Ya Salaam, Paul Chan, Nato Thompson, Christopher McElroen. Foreword by Anne Pasternak.
In November 2006, the artist Paul Chan visited New Orleans, in particular those parts of the city devastated by Katrina. "Friends said the city now looks like the backdrop for a bleak science-fiction movie. (...) I realized it didn't look like a movie set, but the stage for a play I have seen many times." That play was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a play that has often been successfully staged in politically charged circumstances, such as a prison (San Quentin), and during a war (the Siege of Sarajevo, directed by Susan Sontag). In 2007, Chan staged four free outdoor performances of Godot in two New Orleans neighborhoods. This volume records Chan's project in essays and photographs, elucidating the terrible symmetry between Godot and post-Katrina New Orleans, and, as Chan writes, "the cruel and funny things people do while they wait: for help, for food, for hope."
Paul Chan's monumental projection Sade for Sade's Sake takes the work of the notorious pornographer and philosopher, the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), as a departure point for a nearly six-hour-long rhythmic study of bodily ecstasy and bodily repetition. Chan brilliantly renders the foremost quality of Sade's pornography--its fanatical appetite not just for the identifying of sexual possibilities, but for their enumeration and classification--as a rhythmic play of silhouetted bodies that fragment into parts, recombine and atomize, in a mechanized copulation poised between manic repetition and wild abandon. This artist's book brings together for the first time the drawings, writings, notes and fonts created during the production of Sade for Sade's Sake. It elaborates the full scope and thoughtfulness of the projection as a fascinating treatment of sex and eroticism, compulsion and joy, the social body and the sexual body.
Published by Badlands Unlimited/National Philistine.
As a complement to his monumental digital projection Sade for Sade's Sake, Paul Chan created a set of 21 truetype digital fonts. Unlike conventional fonts, Chan's Sade fonts are comprised of sexual phrases and sentence fragments rather than letters, so that what is typed on the keyboard is not what appears on the screen. Some, like "Oh Bishop X" and "Oh Justine," are based on characters in novels by Sade, while others are inspired by characters from the news (Monica Lewinsky), porn stars (Michael Lucas) and poets and writers (Gertrude Stein, Hölderlin) whose work conflates sex with the rhythms and shapes of words. This special edition data CD works with all three operating systems (Mac, Windows and Linux) and includes a special font installer; it also contains a suite of drawings by Chan, and a collection of his digital pdf works made using the fonts.
PUBLISHER Badlands Unlimited/National Philistine
BOOK FORMAT CD-ROM (MAC / PC).
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 1/31/2011 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2011 p. 87
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781936440054TRADE List Price: $70.00 CAD $92.50
AVAILABILITY In stock
in stock $70.00
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Paul Chan's monumental projection Sade for Sade's Sake takes the work of the notorious pornographer and philosopher, the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), as a departure point for a nearly six-hour-long rhythmic study of bodily ecstasy and bodily repetition. Chan brilliantly renders the foremost quality of Sade's pornography--its fanatical appetite not just for the identifying of sexual possibilities, but for their enumeration and classification--as a rhythmic play of silhouetted bodies that fragment into parts, recombine and atomize, in a mechanized copulation poised between manic repetition and wild abandon. This artist's book brings together for the first time the drawings, writings, notes and fonts created during the production of Sade for Sade's Sake. It elaborates the full scope and thoughtfulness of the projection as a fascinating treatment of sex and eroticism, compulsion and joy, the social body and the sexual body.
PUBLISHER Badlands Unlimited
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 8.5 x 11 in. / 240 pgs / 232 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 11/30/2010 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2011 p. 87
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781936440009TRADE List Price: $39.95 CAD $53.95
AVAILABILITY In stock
in stock $39.95
Free Shipping
UPS GROUND IN THE CONTINENTAL U.S. FOR CONSUMER ONLINE ORDERS
This artist’s book for children, commissioned by London’s renowned Serpentine Gallery on the occasion of Chan’s 2007 one-person exhibition there, will be equally delightful to smart, imaginative children and any parent with a even a passing interest in Western philosophy. With words, drawings and cheeky, smart footnotes (citing such diverse sources as Goethe, Nietzsche, Hegel and Google) by Chan, it tells the story of a young girl who is afraid of the night until her shadow shows her how the world can be transformed in the dark. Innovative and engaging--but not at all uptight--this sophisticated children’s book introduces ideas about language, art and contemporary culture with a lighthearted touch that keeps you flipping through the pages again and again.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Text by Massimiliano Gioni, Kitty Scott.
The American artist Paul Chan has gained international acclaim for his video work, drawings and installations that blend a novel drafting aesthetic with philosophical reflections on politics, religion, sex and life. This beautifully produced monograph, published on the occasion of Chan’s highly anticipated one-person exhibition at New York’s recently unveiled New Museum of Contemporary Art, presents the first significant overview of his work. Spanning from the late 1990s through today, it is named for Chan’s most recent project, The 7 Lights (2005-07), a series of large-scale digital projections and drawings that “hallucinate” the Seven Days of Creation. Paul Chan was born in Hong Kong in 1973 and raised in Nebraska. Currently based in New York, he is represented by Greene Naftali Gallery and has had solo museum exhibitions at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Paul Chan: Breathers
Paul Chan: Odysseus and The Bathers
Paul Chan: 2000 Words
Paul Chan: Selected Works
Paul Chan: New New Testament
Paul Chan: Selected Writings 2000-2014
How to Download a Boyfriend eBook
Wht is a Book? eBook
Wht is Lawlessness? eBook
Wht is Lust? eBook
Wht is an Occupation? eBook
Paul Chan: Waiting for Godot in New Orleans
Wht is Nature? eBook
Wht is a Kardashian? eBook
Wht is Some Debt? eBook
Wht was a Cézanne? eBook
Wht is a Berlusconi? eBook
Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (Enhanced Version) eBook 
Paul Chan: The Essential and Incomplete Sade for Sade's Sake eBook
Paul Chan: Sade for Fonts Sake
Paul Chan: The Essential and Incomplete Sade for Sade's Sake
Paul Chan: The Shadow and Her Wanda
Paul Chan: 7 Lights