Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972
This is a thorough catalogue produced on the occasion of the large retrospective dedicated to the Italian movement of Arte Povera and its main characters. The show was organized by the Tate Modern in London and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and is curated by Richard Flood and Frances Morris. There is an enormous amount of interesting photographic documentation of the works, as well as a collection of insightful texts in which the creators themselves discuss the way their art developed and how Arte Povera reached such a level of repute both nationally and internationally. The artists include: Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Piero Gilardi, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, and Gilberto Zorio. The volume opens with a critical texts by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (Thrust into the Whirlwind: Italian Art before Arte Povera), Robert Lumley (Spaces of Arte Povera), Corrina Pinkus (Italy in the 1960s: Spaces, Placet, Trajectories), and Francesco Bonami (Now we begin).

Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972, Walker Art Center (725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.walkerart.org), 2001, 366 pages, 20 x 25 cm.

Janine Antoni
This is the first monograph dedicated to the work and art of Janine Antoni, born in 1964 in the Bahamas, now a resident of New York, and winner of the 1999 edition of the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award. The book focuses on the documentation and analysis her most important work produced during the '90s, which deal with the importance of her own body, its absence, and its visible and material presence. For example, illustrated here are drawings made with her eyelashes, “paintings” with made with her pigment-laden hair (Loving Care, 1993), blocks of white lard and chocolate “sculpted” with her teeth. Critical essays concentrate on specific works; texts are by Nancy Spector (Slumber: A Fairytale), Dan Cameron (Parts and Whole), Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (äntoni’s Difference), Marina Warner (Child’s Play), Amy Cappellazzo (Mother Lode), and Rosa Martínez (Conjunctions and Disjunctions).

Janine Antoni, INK TREE Edition (Seestrasse 21, Küsnacht, Switzerland), 2000, 161 pages, 23 x 28 cm.

Art and Feminism
Art and Feminism is the fifth and most recent addition to the series “Themes and Movements” from this London-based publishing house. It is also the first fully illustrated and comprehensive survey of art and feminism from the ’60s to today. The volume is edited by Helena Reckitt, scholar and researcher of feminist artistic movements and performances, and co-author with Joel Oppenheimer of Acting on AIDS: Sex, Drugs, and Politics, published in 1998. Among the many artists included are: Laurie Anderson, Vanessa Beecroft, Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Coco Fusco, Nan Goldin, Mona Hatoum, Jenny Holzer, Rebecca Horn, Barbara Kruger, Yayoi Kusama, Shirin Neshat, Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper, Pipilotti Rist, Jenny Saville, Carolee Schneemann, Rosemarie Trockel and Gillian Wearing. The text by Peggy Phelan creatively surveys the history and criticism of feminist art and opens up new perspectives for study. As with other volumes in the same series, the final section of the volume, Documents, collects hitherto unpublished thoughts and statements by the leading artists, critics, and scholars of feminist history from the last forty years.

Helena Reckitt, Art and Feminism, Phaidon Press (Regent’s Wharf, All Saints Street, London), 2001, 304 pages, 290 x 250 cm.

Terraferma
Terraferma is the catalogne of the group show that bore the same name. The show was curated by Riccardo Caldura, and it inaugurated the Centro Culturale Candiani di Mestre, that was originally planned twenty-five years ago by the architects Cappai and Mainardis. The book gathers together a number of images for each of the artists and these are accompanied by an introductory text and the relative biographical notes. The artists represented are: artway of thinking, Gabriele Basilico, Bianco-Valente, Loris Cecchini, Marco Cingolani, Interno Tre, Armin Linke, Marcello Maloberti, Luca Pancrazzi, Michelangelo Penso, Perino & Vele, Sara Rossi, Bernhard Rüdiger, Luca Vitone e Italo Zuffi. Testi critici di Riccardo Caldura, Marco Belpoliti, Elio Grazioli, Franco La Cecla, Piero Zanini, and Roberto Ferrucci.

TerraFerma, Charta Press (Via della Moscova 27, Milan, www.chartaartbooks.com), 2001, 205 pages, 17 x 23 cm.

Hearing things
The artist and writer Aaron Williamson explores the methods of computer-generated texts by means of a speech-recognition software program that interprets the sounds of his performances, based on ancient methods of augury and divination. The images collected in this volume are photo documents of a spiritual flavor, bound to magic and the supernatural. It is also important to note that the artists is indeed deaf and the silence of the ancient Greek oracles became ritualized as the silence of the modern mind. Williamson has produced a number of performances and installations in Europe, Japan, and North America. More recently, his video installation Obscure Display was presented at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Aaron Williamson, Hearing things, Book Works (19 Holywell Row, London, www.bookworks.org.uk), 2001, 59 pages, 15.5 x 20 cm.