Books by Andrew Lampert

William Wegman: Writing by Artist

by Andrew Lampert

The long-awaited compendium of Wegman’s hilarious, ingenious writings and language-centric art, from the early 1970s to the present
While he’s famous the world over for his instantly recognizable images of Weimaraner dogs, William Wegman has long been one of Conceptual art’s true innovators. Filled with previously unknown and wildly entertaining texts, drawings and early photos, Writing by Artist is the first collection to focus on Wegman's longstanding and deeply funny relationship to language.
This career-spanning edition presents a thematically organized selection of rediscovered writings dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, alongside landmark early photographs and hilarious drawings from throughout his career. All of the works brilliantly incorporate words in one form or another, altering logic and pushing the boundaries of what artist writing can be. Writing by Artist serves as a genuine epiphany for those only familiar with his later work, and a welcome reminder of his madcap inventiveness for the already enlightened. What you do or don’t know about William Wegman now conveniently fits into this strangely beguiling book.
William Wegman was born in 1943, in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He received a BFA in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, in 1965 and an MFA in painting from the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana, in 1967. By the early ’70s, Wegman’s work was being exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. In addition to solo shows with Sonnabend Gallery in Paris and New York, Situation Gallery in London and Konrad Fisher Gallery in Düsseldorf, his work was included in such seminal exhibitions as When Attitudes Become Form and Documenta V, and was regularly featured in Interfunktionen, Artforum and Avalanche magazines. Wegman has created film and video works for Saturday Night Live and Nickelodeon, and his video segments for Sesame Street have appeared regularly since 1989. In 1995, Wegman’s film The Hardly Boys was screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Wegman has appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and with Jay Leno, The David Letterman Show and The Colbert Report.

Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective

by Rachel Adams, Christopher Williams, David Grubbs, Annie Ochmanek, Andrew Lampert, Tina Rivers Ryan, Branden Joseph, Tony Conrad, Cathleen Chaffee, Vera Alemani, Constance DeJong, Diedrich Diederichsen, Anthony Elms, Henriette Huldisch, Christopher Müller, Tony Oursler, Jay Sanders, Paige Sarlin

An in-depth introduction to an artist who forged a unique path through numerous artistic movements and a vast range of cultural forms
Throughout his six-decade career, Tony Conrad (1940–2016) forged a unique path through numerous artistic movements and a vast range of cultural forms―from Fluxus to rock music, from structural film to public access television. Published on the occasion of the first large-scale museum survey devoted to works Conrad presented in museum and gallery settings, this richly illustrated catalogue offers an in-depth introduction to Conrad's life and career.
Including new texts and Conrad's own writings about selected works dating from 1966 to 2016, Introducing Tony Conrad surveys the artist's work in painting, sculpture, film, video, performance and installation. It includes the artist's early structural films; projects in which he treated film as a sculptural and performative material; his series of Invented Acoustical Tools, presented as sculptures themselves; his ambitious films about power relations, set in the military and in prison; and his final sculptures and installations, which evoke and critique what he perceived as an emerging culture of surveillance, control and containment. The list of contributors testifies to Conrad's wide and lasting influence; this volume includes texts by Constance DeJong, Diedrich Diederichsen, Anthony Elms, Branden W. Joseph, Tony Oursler and Christopher Williams, among many others.

Margaret Watts Hughes: Sound May Be Seen

by Andrew Lampert, Christine Burgin

Ethereal and enigmatic glass slides preserve the resonance of Hughes' voice in rippling, organic compositions

The acclaimed Welsh singer and philanthropist Margaret Watts Hughes (1842-1907) was one of many inventors of her day fascinated by the visual documentation of sound. Her "eidophone" comprised a tube attached to a chamber covered in rubber, or "diaphragm." Hughes covered a glass slide with grains of sand or coarse pigment, then saturated it with water or milk. By singing into the device, the vibrations of her voice would etch out patterns onto the disc: an artistic rendering of the scientific principle of standing-wave resonance. Her "Voice Figures," as she called them, ranged from primitive patterns to designs resembling flowers, seashells and other natural phenomena. While Hughes valued her discovery for both its scientific and spiritual implications, leaders of the Theosophical movement saw her work as a means of making visible the invisible world.
Sound May Be Seen presents selections from Hughes' original 1891 publication of the "Voice Figures" and a rare surviving set of her glass slides, alongside contemporary reactions to her captivating and ultimately enigmatic work.

Thomas Wilfred: Clavilux and Lumia Home Models

by Andrew Lampert, Christine Burgin

Wilfred's pioneering and strangely prescient musical instrument predates television, video art and psychedelia

Inventor, designer, artist and musician Thomas Wilfred (1889-1968) devoted his life to the creation of a new art form--"Lumia," or the art of light. He invented his own version of a color organ (a term he disliked) and dubbed it the Clavilux, from the Latin meaning "light played by key." After a successful international tour in the 1920s, Wilfred reinvented these large-scale performances as self-enclosed light shows for domestic entertainment. While they enjoyed a short commercial life, Wilfred's aesthetically elegant and interactive Clavilux and Lumia home models soon found their way into storied collections. His work was included in the Museum of Modern Art's 1952 exhibition 15 Americans, where it was seen by many artists who would work with light as their medium in the 1960s and '70s.
Clavilux and Lumia Home Models presents a stimulating collection of archival material culled from the Wilfred archive at Yale University and other sources, including Wilfred's never-before-published sketches.