Lazar Lyutakov

Format: 24 x 17 cm

Details: Softcover, dustjacket, 80 pages

Series design concept: Sabo Day

Graphic design: Sabo Day, Rosen Eveleigh

Texts: Kristian Vistrup Madsen, Stephen Zepke

Languages: German, English

ca. 40 images

Secession 2023

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Köln

ISBN 978-3-7533-0470-0

Lazar Lyutakov’s works appropriate ordinary articles of our modern mass culture and simple industrial products in an effort to reflect on values, productivity, quality, and utility in a post-capitalist industrialized world. In his exhibition 1 Million Random Numbers, he arranges over a hundred different lava lamps on laboratory framework. This publication contains numerous views of the spectacular installation and two essays: Kristian Vistrup Madsen undertakes a critical reflection on the lava lamp as a screen onto which disparate emotions can be projected, highlighting numerous parallels in the history of ideas about art in the twentieth century; Stephen Zepke, meanwhile, zooms out from the use of lava lamps as random generators in internet encryption to shed light on the historical and political narratives from the counterculture of the 1960s to the technological utopia of Silicon Valley and the digital capitalism associated with it.

The book also includes a 12-page fanfold designed by the artist with design drawings for the series 1 Million Random Numbers (Secession Frieze).