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Roxy Paine: Second Nature by Roxy Paine, Gregory Volk, Lynn M. Herbert ( Contemporary Arts Museum : DAP) Essay by Gregory Volk. Interview by Lynn M. Herbert. Introduction by Joseph D. Ketner. Foreword by Marti Mayo. Roxy Paine is best known for his meticulous representations of flora and fungi, and his SCUMAK and PMU machines, which automatically create original works of paintings and sculpture. Solo exhibitions of Paine's work have most recently been mounted at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston , SITE Santa Fe , and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami .

Roxy Paine's conceptual works are provocative, challenging our perceptions and biases through a combination of complex layering, serious humor, romanticism, and a touch of irony. Second Nature examines Paine's monumental art-making machines and his naturalistic, botanical environments, exploring how they illustrate a reversal between the artist, whose repetitive processes are machinelike, and machines, which are programmed to emulate human art making.

Naughty by Nature: Not Because I Hate You by Erik Van Lieshout (artist), commentary by Dominic Van Den Boogerd, Xander Karsten (NAi Publishers) Erik van Lieshout (1968) is one of the most prominent young Dutch artists at this time. His work is characterized by a fierceness that is evident in his videos and installations, as much as in his drawing and painting style. The work of Van Lieshout is inspired by the subcultures that evolve in the modern metropolis. His visual material is drawn from these immediate surroundings, from newspa­pers, cartoons or directly off the streets themselves. Van Lieshout subjects this source material to his highly idiosyncratic, harsh idiom. His work is often explicitly pornographic and violent, but is also unadulterated humor. He tackles sex and viol­ence with pleasure.

 Naughty by Nature is the first comprehensive overview of Erik van Lieshout's work. Four essays discuss a whole range of ideas and sources of inspiration and consider them in new constellations, completed by a survey of Van Lieshout's exhibitions and a bibliography.

Up until the 1980s the world appeared to be quite comprehensible. There was the West, the East Block and the Third World, and art also consisted of surveyable movements foun­ded in art history, according to which artists could also be classified. With the disappearance of the major ideologies and the advent of a new generation, the division of art into streams and movements also seems to have become redundant.

The latest generation of artists apparently do not allow themselves to be restricted by existing codes or the notions of the estab­lished order. They go their own way, speak their own language, choose their own forms, and have their own humour. Erik van Lieshout is an artist that typifies his generation and these times par excellence.

 With this book and the exhibition Naughty by Nature in the Groninger Museum, we are allowed the opportunity to participate in this generation's language, expressions, and the experiential world that has arisen after the era of ideologies and movements. Van Lieshout transcends these movements, makes use of all possible media and, in doing so, succeeds in captivating us.

In contrast to a first impression that Van Lieshout' s work might have on the viewer, his oeuvre displays a social engagement that is clearly manifested by his reaction to what is happening all around him. His installations of scrap material and everyday objects that he uses to fabricate saunas, Jacuzzis and solaria produce an amused response to all these hedonistic indulgences with which we are glad to sur­round ourselves. It is food for thought without an overload of morality. When Erik van Lieshout goes to Africa, picks up the text of an information leaflet for an anti­malaria medicine (Lariam), and gets us to crawl through a life-size medicine box to view a video, then he forces us literally to be a component of his work of art.

In Van Lieshout's work we see a backlash to the beauty that is presented in glossy magazines and to the moral values of regimes under which women are compelled to wear a burqa. In an unparalleled way, Van Lieshout manages to link both worlds by creating larger-than-life drawings of voluptuous models from such magazines, dressed in a burqa or with the head of Bin Laden. These drawings are subsequently treated with coloured adhesive plastic to emphasise the hypocrisy of these worlds to an even greater degree. With his drawings, collages, installations and paintings, Van Lieshout adds a personal dimension to contemporary art.

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