Wolfgang Stoerchle is a particularly notable artistic figure of the early seventies who left a certain but little advertised mark on a generation of Californian artists, especially through videotapes and performances involving his body as raw material. His short but eventful life is surrounded by rumours, and his abrupt death in 1976 may have emphasised the myth around him even more. His entire body of work was produced in eleven years, between 1965 and 1976. Forty-five years after he passed away, his name still drifts across the West Coast art world, awaiting wider recognition. This is the first monograph on Stoerchle’s work and includes interviews with Daniel Lentz, Paul McCarthy, Matt Mullican, David Salle, Helene Winer, and an unpublished review by James Welling, alongside ephemera and documentation of Stoerchle’s video works and performances, as well as rarely seen sculptures, installations, and paintings.

Edited by Alice Dusapin, with Justin Jaeckle and designed by Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé.

Over the course of approximately one year, The Registry of Promise consisted of four autonomous, interrelated exhibitions, which can be read as individual chapters in a book. In this series, Chris Sharp reflects on our increasingly fraught relationship with what the future may or may not hold, and the work engages with and plays upon the various readings and mutability of “promise”, along with the inevitability of what may come, whether positive or negative. Such polyvalence is particularly topical, as we have shifted from the anthropocentric promise of modernity to a negative faith in the post-human.

Including artists Becky Beasley, Patrick Bernatchez, Juliette Blightman, Peter Buggenhout, Nina Canell, Michael Dean, Alexander Gutke, Jochen Lempert, Jean-Luc Moulène, Marlie Mul, Matt Mullican, Rosalind Nashashibi, Antoine Nessi, Jean-Marie Perdrix, Reto Pulfer, Mandla Reuter, Hans Schabus, Lucy Skaer, Michael E. Smith, Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli, Francisco Tropa, Andy Warhol, Anicka Yi.

Since the late 1970s, American artist Matt Mullican has developed a practice of performing under hypnosis that extends from his investigations into representation and subjective projection. The evolution of this body of work offers perspectives on repetition and renewal in performance practice. This book is the outcome of an extensive research project into Mullican’s hypnosis performances and a shared exploration of character construction, undertaken as part of the If I Can’t Dance project together with invited researcher Vanessa Desclaux. In her essay, Desclaux addresses the question of personification in light of her analysis of Mullican’s creative process.

Artists on Hanne Darboven is the first instalment in a series culled from Dia Art Foundation’s ‘Artists on Artists’ lectures, focused on German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven. Established in 2001, the lecture series highlights the work of modern and contemporary artists from the perspective of their colleagues and peers. The inaugural ‘Artists on Artists’ title is published in conjunction with the opening of Darboven’s 1980–83 installation “Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983” (“Cultural History 1880–1983”) at Dia:Chelsea in New York City.