Textfield, Inc.

Issue b like büroklammer (paperclip)

Textfield — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:23:23 +0000

der:die:das:, Issue b like büroklammer (paperclip)
Softcover, 96 pp., offset 4/4, 200 x 270 mm
English and German
Edition of 1000
ISSN 1663-2508
Published by der:die:das:

$22.00 · add to cart

Some words on, and images of, the büroklammer (paperclip).

Issue a for apple

Textfield — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:12:56 +0000

der:die:das:, Issue a for apple
Softcover, 96 pp., offset 4/4, 200 x 270 mm
English and German
Edition of 1000
ISSN 1663-2508
Published by der:die:das:

$22.00 · add to cart

Some words on, and images of, the apple.

La Photographie N’Est Pas L’Art, 12 Photographs

Textfield — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:54:03 +0000

Man Ray, La Photographie N’Est Pas L’Art
Softcover, 64 pp., offset 4/1, 160 x 245 mm
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-3-902675-30-9
Published by Fotohof Editions

$39.00 · add to cart

Photography is not art, proclaims Man Ray in the essay re-published here as an impeccable facsimile edition of the 1937 original. A pamphlet of loose sheets and 12 images, this publication re-visits an issue that was hotly controversial during the first half of the 20th century — Is Photography Art? — as examined in the influential Paris magazine L’Art. Despite the fact that Man Ray’s provocative works were among the photographs generally agreed by critics to be, in fact, art, Man Ray himself seems barely interested in considering the question. “There’s no point trying to find out if it’s an art,” he said. “Art is a thing of the past. We need something else. You’ve got to watch light at work. It’s light that creates. I sit down in front of my sheet of photographic paper and I think.”

Rock/Music Writings

Textfield — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:04:33 +0000

Dan Graham, Rock/Music Writings
Softcover, 224 pp., offset 4/1, 5.5 x 8.25 inches
Edition of 3000
ISBN 978-0978869-73-1
Published by Primary Information

$18.00 · add to cart

As admired for his writing as for his work in art, photography and architecture, Dan Graham was one of the first contemporary artists to embrace Punk, Postpunk and No Wave, becoming a figurehead for those movements, and an early supporter of (and friend to) Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth among many others. Rock/Music Writings collects 13 of Graham’s most influential writings, on bands ranging from The Kinks to Bow Wow Wow, first published in art journals such as Real Life, Open Letter and ZG between 1968 and 1988, and in the now rare volume Rock My Religion. It includes such landmark essays as “Punk as Propaganda,” which explicates the self-packaging and media critique of The Ramones, Devo, the Sex Pistols, the Desperate Bicycles and others; “Rock My Religion,” in which Graham traces themes of ecstatic reverie in rock performance (with a focus on Patti Smith), through a beautiful composite of quotation, commentary and photography; and “New Wave Rock and the Feminine,” which discusses the onstage personae of Lydia Lunch, Debbie Harry and Siouxsie Sioux, and the gender politics of all-female groups such as The Slits, The Raincoats, Bush Tetras and others. Throughout Rock/Music Writings, Graham’s appraisals are clear-eyed, sophisticated and poetically constructed, a genre of their own within artists’ writings.

A for Alibi

Textfield — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:51:55 +0000

Mariana Castillo Deball and Irene Kopelman, A for Alibi
Softcover + dust jacket, 240 pp., offset 2/2, 160 x 240 mm
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-1-933128-33-7
Published by Sternberg Press

$29.00 · add to cart

A for Alibi explores the boundaries of scientific practice and art. The Uqbar Foundation invited a group of artists to perform research and develop projects using the impressive collection of historical instruments and optical devices. Fully illustrated, this book documents the artists’ projects as well as a symposium of the same name, where scientists and art historians lectured on the origins of modern visual culture.

Portable Document Format

Textfield — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:42:12 +0000

Dexter Sinister, Portable Document Format
Hardcover, 200 pp., offset 4/1, 4.25 x 6.75 inches
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-1-933128-85-6
Published by Sternberg Press

$20.00 · add to cart

Over the past few years, Dexter Sinister has been interested in exploring contemporary publishing in its broadest, most exploded sense. The first part of this book consists of pieces of writings written since the conception of their New York basement workshop and bookstore in the summer of 2006. These writings were previously published online as PDFs in the Library at www.dextersinister.org. They were primarily written by Dexter Sinister or by one of a circle of regular collaborators, often for their house journal Dot Dot Dot, or as supplements to other books or exhibitions.

The second part consists of reproductions of a series of lithographic proof prints. Accompanying these prints are extended captions individually produced for different exhibitions in 2008. Each caption was composed in line with the manner of its accompanying image. Although never intended as a set, a number of generic themes emerged, such as abstraction, mathematics, logic, and cooperation. The book intends to demonstrate how ideas from the first part have been rechannelled in the second.

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.

Traducing Ruddle / Two Connected Houses

Textfield — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 02:57:21 +0000

Mark Manders, Traducing Ruddle
Newspaper, 16 pp., web offset 1/1, 350 x 480 mm
Insert, 48 pp., offset 1/1, 215 x 280 mm
Edition of 3000
ISBN 978-0-9738133-7-1
Published by Fillip Editions, Roma Publications

$15.00 · add to cart

Traducing Ruddle is the fifth in a series of “fake” newspapers by Dutch artist Mark Manders. Using a nonsensical combination of English words, Traducing Ruddle creates a pretense of legibility that dissolves upon closer inspection. The newspaper is supplemented by Two Connected Houses, a 48 page insert developed in conjunction with the exhibition Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum.

Sheets from Manders’ Traducing Ruddle form the central element of the artist’s Window with Fake Newspapers project, a site-specific public work on view through March 28th.

Some British Birds

Textfield — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 02:45:36 +0000

Edwyn Collins, Some British Birds
Softcover, 72 pp., offset 1/1, 210 x 297 mm
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-1-907071-07-2
Published by Mörel Books

$18.00 · add to cart

Foreword by Edwyn Collins and Vivienne Gaskin. Illustrations of native British Birds by Collins, after suffering two cerebral hemorrhages.