Textfield, Inc. » Monographs

Four Over One

Textfield — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:25:20 +0000

Phil Chang, Four Over One
Hardcover, 64 pp., offset 4/1, 240 x 320 mm
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-087588720-4-9
Published by LACMA

$39.00 · add to cart

In Four Over One, the Los Angeles based artist Phil Chang employs the format of an artists book to explore ideas of economy and obsolescence. In collaboration with designer Jonathan Maghen, Four Over One is structured around Chang’s interest in how new outcomes arise from an antagonism between perceived and actual forms of value. The photographs that appear in the book were created using expired photographic materials exposed by an archival book scanner. Through a sparse display of color, black and white, and half-tone photographs, in conjunction with a restrained typographic treatment, Four Over One employs an economy of scale in order to consider the roles of abstraction, methods of art production, and modes of distribution in our contemporary culture.

Wolfgang Tillmans

Textfield — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:47:03 +0000

Wolfgang Tillmans, Wolfgang Tillmans
Hardcover, 80 pp., offset 1/1, 218 x 305 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-3-905829-36-5
Published by JRP|Ringier

$35.00 · add to cart

This publication is a reprint of the first book realized by Wolfgang Tillmans in 1995. A very atmospheric, if measured, compilation of black and white images, it combines portraits of youth culture with landscape, city scenes with slogans, clippings from newspapers, and book illustrations. Released now into a different context from its first appearance, the book is emblematic of the new approach and the energy Tillmans has developed since the end of the 1980s to the present in terms of genres, quality, and the status of photography as a medium.

Of two minds, simultaneously

Textfield — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:36:50 +0000

Richard Hawkins, Of two minds, simultaneously
Softcover, 164 pp., offset 4/1, 215 x 280 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-3-86560-425-5
Published by Walther König

$59.00 · add to cart

This monograph on Richard Hawkins is published on the occasion of his first institutional overview exhibition with works from 1993 to now: starting with his collages from the 1990s — intriguing because they show how a powerful artwork can originate from very few visual means – right up to his recent dolls houses transformed into brothels that herald another completely new direction in Hawkins heterogeneous oeuvre. In his work Hawkins looks both critically and appreciatively at social, cultural and historical phenomena, mixing these with autobiographical motives to create a multiform body of work linked by countless internal references in ideas, material and style. These formal and internal links resonate throughout the whole book as components of themes that range from male desire, gender issues and pop star idolization to the struggle of mixedrace Native Americans or the function of hermaphrodite statuary in the Roman era.

The Seconds Pass

Textfield — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 18:47:52 +0000

Ed Templeton, The Seconds Pass
Hardcover, 154 pp., offset 4/4, 11 x 7.75 inches
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-0-9825936-1-5
Published by Seems

$52.00 · add to cart

There is a scribble of asphalt and meandering ribbons of concrete tangled all over North America in a contiguous line of material that connects each of us to whomever else is also in contact. I sometimes marvel at this, walking from my front door and standing on the asphalt looking down at its grimy blackness, wishing I could rest my ear down on it and hear everything like the Indians in an old western film. The pavement I’m standing on is connected to other pavement, concrete, or steel to almost anywhere I can think of. Certainly everywhere you can drive to. Someone in Burnt Church, Tennessee is standing on gravel that is connected by touch to my street, just like someone is in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I can be in New York City in 3 days from my home in the suburban sprawl of Orange County, California without ever touching the earth.

—Ed Templeton

Sandy Kim

Textfield — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:42:03 +0000

Sandy Kim, Sandy Kim
Softcover, 80 pp., offset 4/4, 10 x 8 inches
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-615-32175-2
Published by Unpiano Books

$20.00 · add to cart

Sandy Kim utilizes a highly self-referential style of photography which peers into the tiny microcosm of one woman’s life. Reminiscent of the casual documentary style popularized by Nan Goldin in the Eighties, the photographs in Sandy Kim highlight her life at one particular moment and the people who are revolving in and around it.

—Jesse Pollock

Sandy Kim is pretty short, has a ton of hair, a broken orange backpack and always loses her camera. When that happens, she just gets a disposable and keeps taking pictures. It’s this lackadaisical tenacity that translates into her photos, how they always looked kind of busted but warmly worn in and comfortable. Like many young photographers, she’s made her friends her subjects — landscapes of young women, tattoos and San Francisco fog. But she never lays a soft hand, as if anything flattering in her photos is accidental. That’s not to say her photos are purposefully unappealing or harsh, but simply that they are so often just really gross — honest portraits of much of her daily life. But Sandy’s grossness is completely malleable, sometimes funny, sometimes horrific, sometimes unbelievably lush. Sandy is such a brazen and unafraid woman and that power continually streams strongly in her photos, across all spectrums of feeling and subject. Throughout Sandy Kim, there is a lot of blood, but that blood is never the same — blood on her sheets after sex, blood from a dead body covered in a sterile white sheet, blood on the hand of a friend after an unknown accident. He’s smiling, looking straight at the camera, at Sandy. They both know it will heal.

—Matthew Schnipper

The Josephine Meckseper Catalogue

Textfield — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:24:24 +0000

Josephine Meckseper, The Josephine Meckseper Catalogue
Softcover, 64 pp., offset 4/4, 240 x 240 mm
English and German
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-1-933128-00-9
Published by Sternberg Press

$24.00 · add to cart

“Politics and aesthetics morph seamlessly in a world where politics confuses itself with representation, where all attention is swallowed in the communication of a message rather than in the intensity of an event. … In Meckseper’s gallery installation, where fashion images share space with protest documentation, where an idea of relational space rubs shoulders with an idea of lifestyle or boutique design, where an idea of the social morphs into an idea of the commodity relation, many of the elements on display also double as mechanisms of display: shelves, rugs, windows, magazine covers, and wallpaper are the products here. Here, display displays itself. Covers and wrappings conceal nothing, they only reveal themselves. And, reappropriating the very mechanisms of commodity transmission in this way, and in particular by conflating politicized symbols with such functions … , by relocating non-art in art and vice versa, by this orgiastic displacement, this diabolical Feng Shui of signifying forms and materials, the artist also goes to work (like the peasant in her field, the posing model) in the production of her anti-world.”

—John Kelsey

Billy Apple

Textfield — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:54:02 +0000

Zoë Gray, Nicolaus Schafhausen and Monika Szewczyk, Billy Apple
Softcover, 112 pp., offset 4/1, 125 x 200 mm
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-90-73362-89-5
Published by Witte de With

$15.00 · add to cart

Billy Apple was created in 1962 as a work by the New Zealand-born artist Barrie Bates, who changed his name to become a living brand after graduating from London’s Royal College of Art. For this volume, four writers combine to discuss the brand, providing a chronology, a contextualization of Apple’s practice within institutional critique and his enduring significance for younger generations.

Untitled

Textfield — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 02:36:03 +0000

Jonnie Craig, Untitled
Softcover, 72 pp., offset 4/4, 210 X 286 mm
Edition of 750
ISBN 978-1-907071-05-8
Published by Mörel Books

$15.00 · add to cart

Foreword by Andy Capper.

Capp Street Project

Textfield — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 00:13:54 +0000

Mario Ybarra Jr., Capp Street Project
Softcover, 48 pp., offset 4/2, 6.5 x 9.25 inches
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-0-9725080-7-0
Published by CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art

$12.00 · add to cart

When referred to as a Chicano artist in the Los Angeles Times, Mario Ybarra Jr. once protested, “I make contemporary art that is filtered through a Mexican-American experience in Los Angeles.” Filled with graffiti, restaurant signage and stills from music videos, with sweeping graphic lines and lyric abstractions, his outrageous, multicolored murals speak about his particular experience as an artist and a Mexican-American, both politically and aesthetically. Compactly designed by Jon Suede/Stripe, this slim, dynamic catalogue with paper changes features an essay on the artist’s entire oeuvre by Jens Hoffmann, along with an engaging text by Claire Fitzsimmons. Produced to accompany Ybarra’s installation at San Francisco’s Capp Street Project, this volume is the artist’s first monograph, as well as a thorough document of the mural he produced over the course of his residency there.

Summer Nights, Walking

Textfield — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 02:55:54 +0000

Robert Adams, Summer Nights, Walking
Softcover, 84 pp., offset 1/tritone, 8.75 x 9 inches
Edition of 2000
ISBN 9781597111171
Published by Aperture

$50.00 · add to cart

In this exquisitely produced book, the influential American photographer Robert Adams revisits the classic collection of nocturnal landscapes that he began making in the mid-1970s near his former home in Longmont, Colorado. Originally published by Aperture in 1985 as Summer Nights, this new edition has been carefully reedited and resequenced by the photographer, who has added 39 previously unpublished images. Illuminated by moonlight and streetlamp, the houses, roads, sidewalks and fields in Summer Nights, Walking retain the wonder and stillness of the original edition, while adopting the artist’s intention of a dreamy fluidity, befitting his nighttime perambulations. The extraordinary care taken with the new reproductions also registers Adams’ attention to the subtleties of the night, and conveys his appeal to look again at places we might have dismissed as uninteresting. Adams observes, “What attracted me to the subjects at a new hour was the discovery then of a neglected peace.”