UH-OH: Frances Stark 1991-2015
Edited by Frances Stark and Ali Subotnick
Published by the Hammer Museum (2015)
Companion to an exhibition that documents Stark’s 25-year long career, this book contains 125 works in which Stark employs words and images to create provocative and self-referential works that speak to the complexities of daily life. This book includes full-page detailed images that provide an insight into the highly tactile and complex nature of Stark’s work. Also included are newly commissioned essays, and a collection of brief reflections by a variety of prominent artists and writers whom Stark asked to revisit specific topics they’ve discussed or written about previously. Filled with high-quality reproductions and thoughtful commentary, this book is the definitive resource on Stark’s accomplished, varied, and affecting body of work. [source]
Available from the Hammer Museum.
Parkett Vol. 93: Carron / Stark / Villar Rojas / Vo
Parkett Vol. 93 (2013)
Accompanied by Parkett editioned work Dishonest but Appealing, 2013
Frances Stark uses her own diaristic reflections and sexual encounters on the Internet as material for drawings, videos, performances, and PowerPoint presentations. Christoph Gurk and Alex Kitnick reflect on the breadth of her work, and Dieter Roelstraete and Monika Szewczyk conduct a conversation over e-mail. Frances Stark’s edition for Parkett, Dishonest but Appealing, is a stash book—a hand-bound hardcover hollowed out to hold whatever you hope to hide away. “The artist has to make a change, define the times. Stark does this…by returning to the epic—but a homemade epic, an almost-epic, virtually opera buffa, but actually also basic desktop design.” – Monika Szewczyk. [source]
Available from Artbook.
My Best Thing
Published by König Books (2012)
This intimate publication focuses on Frances Stark’s pivotal feature length video My Best Thing, a digital video animation, which traces the development of two sexual encounters that progress into conversations about film, literature, art, collaboration and subjectivity. British curator Mark Godfrey captures the density of this recent work by Stark with an in-depth essay considering the artist’s use of online sex-chat rooms as vehicles for her creative process. Godfrey addresses Stark’s resolve in representing her broad and at times clashing interests from her recently found enthusiasm for the controversial dancehall musician Beenie Man to her homage for the highly respected feminist painter Sylvia Sleigh. In conveying the complexity of her interests Stark manages to imbue these commonly disparaged internet sites, as well as their users, with positive, productive and social characteristics. In Stark’s depiction, as Godfrey states, ‘strangers meet, communicate, share ideas rather than brand preferences, and change how each one sees the world.’ This publication focuses on Frances Stark’s pivotal feature-length video My Best Thing, capturing the complexity of her work with an in-depth essay by British curator Mark Godfrey, who considers the artist’s use of online sex-chat rooms as vehicles for her creative process. [source]
Frances Stark: This could become a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of the mind
Edited by João Ribas and Frances Stark
Published by the MIT List Visual Arts Center (2010)
Los Angeles-based artist and writer Frances Stark (born 1967) addresses the doubts and anxieties of creative labor, in self-portraits that she elaborates into cross-disciplinary explorations of language as both subject matter and material. The elliptical, digressive style that typifies her writing is echoed in the experience of her installations, in which themes emerge across brief citations from pop music and literature. Interlinked works, often hand-drawn, or hand-inscribed, are executed with a formal vulnerability and fluency of composition that affirms the observation posed in this volume’s title: This Could Become a Gimick [sic] or An Honest Articulation of the Workings of the Mind. Published on the occasion of an exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, this anthology offers a selection of the Los Angeles-based artist’s writings from 1997 to 2010, including important out-of-print and hard-to-find texts. [source]
But what of Frances Stark, standing by itself, a naked name, bare as a ghost to whom one would like to lend a sheet?
Edited by Alex Farquharson, Jim Waters, Abi Spinks and Fiona Parry
Published by Nottingham Contemporary (2009)
Published on occasion of the exhibition But what of Frances Stark, standing by itself, a naked name, bare as a ghost to whom one would like to lend a sheet?
Available from Nottingham Contemporary.
A Torment of Follies
Edited by Annette Südbeck
Published by Secession, Vienna (2008)
This exhibition catalogue disguised as an artist’s book presents recent work by the Los Angeles artist, writer and all-around favorite, Frances Stark. Taking as her starting point the novel Ferdydurke by the esteemed Polish author Witold Gombrowicz, Stark explores two key aspects of the novel, according to Andras Palffy, President of the esteemed Viennese exhibition space, Secession — “the individual’s right to uncertainty or immaturity and all possible forms of masquerade” and “deception towards one’s environment.” Whereas Gombrowicz took on the sinister political developments of 1930s Poland, Stark aptly and humorously attacks the hierarchies, systems and pigeon holes of the contemporary commercial art world. Of special note are the very effective optical illusions embedded in the images reproduced here. [source]
Frances Stark, The Collected Works
Published by Walther König (2007)
The Los Angeles-based artist and art writer Frances Stark has gathered an international cult following for her prolific prose and her smart, honest and intimate artwork. This engaging artist’s book is conceived as a companion piece to Stark’s Collected Writings 1993–2003, fashioning itself as a graphic counterpart that draws from the artist’s paintings, collages, drawings, videos, poetry and more, from 1993 to the present. Through provocative and diaristic text notes printed alongside Stark’s sometimes humorous, often self-scrutinizing images, The Collected Works addresses the paradox of reproducing visual art that is essentially non-photogenic by nature—because of its tactility, detail or scale. The book formally addresses how verbiage flows in and out of the work(s), and leaves no space for the legitimizing language of the critic or curator. Neither a typical catalogue nor monograph, it pushes for a third form, a new art work constructed from existing pieces. [source]
For Some Perverts the Sentence is a Body: On the work of Frances Stark
By Mary Leclère
Published by the Glassell School of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2007)
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Structures that Fit my Opening and Other Parts Considered in Relation to Their Whole at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, December 15, 2006–February 11, 2007.
Collected Writing: 1993–2003
By Frances Stark
Published by Book Works (2003)
Collected Writing: 1993–2003 brings together many of Frances Stark’s texts for the first time, including essays on artists and artist’s [sic] text pieces. Stark’s writing is not specifically sited in visual art, but is rooted in the condition of contemporary life encountering along the way the literary tradition, music and philosophy. These provide the backbone to much of her thinking, as do the problems faced by being both an artist and writer today. These themes are presented through a pseudo-autobiographical style which frequently presents itself as poetic musings, that create meandering, off-centred texts that are often humorous and at the same time highly readable. This book also includes facsimiles of ‘The Unspeakable Compromise of the Portable Work of Art’ as well as specially designed pages by Stark, making this anthology a fascinating insight into the artist’s practice. The book includes a forward [sic] by Matthew Higgs. [source]
The Architect & The Housewife
By Frances Stark
Published by Book Works (1999)
This book unfolds as a sequence of interrelated texts that consider, among many other things, the varying roles that gender acts out in contemporary art practice. Stark’s wry, humane and often playful text examines the inherent tensions—both emotional and social—that operate at the juncture where the private and the public meet. She indexes a bewildering, seemingly infinite range of cultural references, that includes: Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist, Danish “Modern” furniture, domesticity, the studio, loneliness, consumerism, Ikea, the family, friendships, the spectacle, modernism, the avant-garde, Romanticism, architecture, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, home economics, public art, Daniel Buren, marriage, tattoos, R. M. Schindler, E.H. Gombrich and—perhaps most significantly—scatter cushions. [source]