Mike Kelley’s 1990s installation of sewn-together stuffed animals and fiberglass deodorizers at Tony Shafrazi Gallery

Of the many presses that will be involved in the fair, we’ve compiled a list of ten exciting publishers that you have most likely not heard of, but should know about. They produce art books, limited artist editions, zines, comics, posters, chapbooks, original web books, freely accessible online archives, and exhibitions. Some focus on emerging artists and street art, while others reprint the long-lost work of established artists. And if you have the opportunity to come to the fair, you can take in some of the special projects such as the Zine-Trade-Meet-Up or Goteblüd’s exhibition of more than six hundred Riot Grrrl zines, with a working photocopy station.

1. Iconoclast Editions
Iconoclast Editions is a project-based studio that provides artists with the opportunity to produce a variety of multi-media work. Since 2002, Iconoclast has produced exhibitions, publications, and artist editions. Its projects include a highly regarded touring museum exhibition, Beautiful Losers. Recent editions include works by Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe, Misaki Kawai, Dan Attoe, and Gary Lee Boas. You can also pick up limited-edition prints like Devils and Babies by Harmony Korine, Performing/Guzzling by Kim Gordon, and 25 Postcards for Writing On by David Shrigley.

Dana Schutz (Rizzoli)
Don’t let all the bright colors fool you; Schutz is drawn toward the macabre. The New York-based painter, who graduated from Columbia’s MFA program in 2002, has had her work shown in museums and galleries around the globe, including paintings of Michael Jackson’s autopsy and people who eat their own flesh.

Following Tara Donovan’s untitled, honeycomb-inspired installation at midtown’s Lever House building, is a bold, black and white lobby display from Barbara Kruger, which was commissioned by real estate mogul Aby Rosen. The space has previously housed works by Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Keith Haring.

According to their website, “The goal of the Lever House Art Collection is to form an exciting and impressive collection of art created in the early twenty-first century, and recognize outstanding artists of aesthetic significance. It is planned to organize an international museum tour of the Collection, accompanied by a major publication.”

What do you think of the concept? More images below.

All photos by 16 Miles of String.

Despite the snarkification of our culture thanks to the likes of Gawker, Perez Hilton, and Simon Cowell, its hard to improve upon Barbara Kruger’s biting feminist witticism. So why try?

This piece, Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face), 1981, is currently on view in The Pictures Generation show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other gems on display include I Can’t Look at You and Breathe at the Same Time, 1981-84, and It’s a Small World, But Not If You Have to Clean It, 1990.

Organized by the then-fresh and now heavy-hitting art historian Douglas Crimp, the exhibition included only five contributors, but Crimp’s illuminating conceptual framework, along with his accompanying essay, came to epitomize the concerns of a wider group of artists. Spanning the decade from 1974-1984, the Met’s exhibition, organized by associate curator of photography Douglas Eklund, brings together over 150 moment-crystallizing works that reflect an appropriation-heavy, photographically informed, postmodernist practice.

The exhibition begins in the Great Hall with a trio of Robert Longo‘s monumental drawings of contorted people in suits, and transitions to Jack Goldstein‘s photographic triptych of tiny figures free-floating in chromatic voids in the second-floor galleries. The two sets of bodies hovering in space create an emotional parallel for the post-Vietnam isolation from popular culture that operated as a jumping-off point for this group of artists. Critical distance from the media allowed for the artistic mining of imagery that laid bare the hidden signifiers of capitalism, social roles, and power structures.

Hollywood’s constant output also offered fertile grounds for unraveling the psychological cues behind visual gestures. Goldstein’s otherworldly 16mm films look closely at trained responses, such as the MGM lion’s roar and a ballerina flexing on point, while Dara Birnbaum‘s kitschy Technology/ Transformation: Wonder Woman video samples moments of female empowerment as highlighted by ’70s-era blasts of special effects.

Print media proved equally ripe as a site for questioning visual truth in newsworthy pictures and hidden coding in advertising. The inherent tension between loaded subject matter and pedestrian imagery comes to the forefront in Troy Brauntuch‘s installation of photo prints, Untitled (Mercedes), with its quotations of Nazi pageantry at Nuremburg and the banal presence of Hitler asleep in a car. Sarah Charlesworth‘s Stills blow up grainy newspaper clippings of falling figures to demonstrate photojournalism’s struggle with representing tragedy, and Richard Prince transforms advertisements into a deadpan sociological survey of consumerism’s ideal appearances. Barbara Kruger‘s poster-sized prints, meanwhile, pair stock images with upfront slogans like “Buy Me I’ll Change Your Life,” in a moment of anti-propaganda.

High culture also comes under visual scrutiny in works that considered the life of art outside of the white box. Allan McCollum‘s Surrogate paintings push the shape of a traditional framed work into a minimalist scope, and, through repetition, invoke the atmosphere of artworks operating as visual white noise. With her camera, Louise Lawler peeks into private collections hung in offices and homes, coolly observing the juxtaposition of mid-century masters with tureens and fax machines. Upending notions of originality through re-photographing fine-art images, Sherrie Levine‘s appropriations of Edward Weston’s classic male torsos feel increasingly layered in reference to the physical proximity of the Met’s new Greek and Roman Galleries. Along with Levine’s bold questioning of male authorship, other women in the exhibition offer feminist viewpoints, underscoring their nickname, “The Theoretical Girls.” Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons‘ photographs borrow the traditional girlish pastimes of dressing up and playing with dolls to reveal expectations of fulfilling femininity.

Vitrines throughout the exhibition also highlight the importance of printed matter and ephemera to this moment, as artists’ books, records, invitation cards, and posters all provide moments for artist intervention in the circulation of ideas. These artists, along with critics, actively created a shared dialogue through texts and projects for the page in brainy magazines, such as Real Life, October, Wedge, and ZG. A screening room further expands the show’s scope with a constantly running schedule, featuring works by Ericka Beckman, Barbara Bloom, and Michael Smith, among others.

While The Pictures Generation highlights the more experimental beginnings of the 30 artists in the show, the overall injection of representation into the maneuvers of conceptualism and minimalism comes across as a radical shift. Even with the friction of institutionalizing their subtly protesting works, the tactics of these practitioners undeniably continues to inform subsequent generations of media-savvy artists.

The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue, is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through August 2.

Image: Robert Longo, Untitled (from the series Men in the Cities), 1981