William Leavitt, Theater Objects
Softcover, 148 pp., offset 4/4, 230 x 300 mm
Edition of 5000
ISBN 978-1-933751-18-4
Published by MOCA
$40.00 · add to cart
A pioneer of Conceptual art in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and 1970s, the painter, installation artist and theater director William Leavitt (born 1941) is above all an artist of narrative devices. Since 1969, his works in all the above media have employed abrupt fragments of popular and vernacular culture and depictions of modernist architecture to construct elusive narratives of cityscapes and environments. The culture and atmosphere of Los Angeles has played a significant role in Leavitt’s handling of these themes; classic southern Californian motifs of ever-present artifice and almost washed-out brightness recur throughout his work. Surveying the artist’s 40-year career, this volume includes sculptural tableaux, paintings, works on paper, photographs and performances from the late 1960s to the present. Leavitt has created a remarkable oeuvre that has influenced generations of artists, and this volume is both long overdue and highly anticipated.
Ann Goldstein, Annette Leddy, Art, Bennett Simpson, DAP, Elizabeth Hamilton, Erik Bluhm, Lisa Mark, Michael Worthington, William Leavitt
Betty Bright, No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America 1960-1980
Softcover, 320 pp., offset 4/1, 7 x 10 inches
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-1-887123-71-6
Published by Granary Books
$40.00 · add to cart
This important history of the artist’s book, a flourishing form which over the years has often been greeted with confusion by critics, collectors, historians and artists, aims to spell out its role in contemporary art and to claim for it a vital and heretofore unacknowledged status since the blossoming of the artform in the 1970s. Renowned scholar and curator Betty Bright takes an inclusive view of the varied field in order to redress its marginalization, identifying three distinct types: the fine press book, the deluxe book, and the bookwork. She covers crucial supporters of the form, like New York’s Center for Book Arts, Franklin Furnace, and the Visual Studies Workshop Press in Rochester, New York, as well as key organizations and figures in Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Bright examines how artist’s books have responded to specific movements, such as Pop, Fluxus and Conceptualism, and how the book arts’ own mini-art world of the 1970s was shaped by seminal exhibitions, fledgling nonprofit organizations and collectors.
Art, Betty Bright, DAP, Dieter Roth, Ed Ruscha, Emily McVarish, John Latham, Lucas Samaras, Marcel Broodthaers, Marcel Duchamp, Phillip Gallo, Richard Tuttle, Sol LeWitt
Mark Borthwick, Social documentaries amid this pist
Softcover, 240 pp., web offset 1/1, 210 x 270 mm
Edition of 250
Published by Mark Borthwick (2002)
$150.00 · add to cart
condition:
good, minor edge wear, binding intact.
A social documentary. An appropriation of distinctions between elements. Grey area. An essay in images that repeat themselves. An apparent way to dilute the importance of one over another. Black and white photographs, hand written texts, and xeroxed pages.
Aaron Rose, Art, Bernadette Corporation, Bless, Brendan Fowler, Claude Closky, Culture, Desiree Heiss, Elein Fleiss, Ines Kaag, Made in USA, Maria Cornejo, Mark Borthwick, Nakako Hayashi, Olivier Zahm, Photography, Purple, Susan Cianciolo, Used
Ann Woo, Sunsets & Other Colour Photographs
Softcover, 6 pp. tri-fold, offset 4/4, 300 x 230 mm [900 × 230 mm unfolded]
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-9813947-1-8
Published by Schnauzer
$10.00 · add to cart
Ann Woo is a photographer based in Hong Kong. S
unsets & Other Colour Photographs features a small collection of the artists work with a focus on her
Sunsets series. For this project, Ann created various colour fields out of a single negative; which was originally an image of the sun setting that developed as a pure tonal gradient. The front and back covers represent the possible environments that could surround these surreal sunsets and also show the viewer the diversity of Ann’s practice.
My photographic practice is grounded in an obsession to capture “reality.” I use standard documentary methods to photograph and analog methods to print, all the while working to eliminate judgment, imposed ideas, and preconceived meanings. Clearly, that is all rather naïve — can photographs ever present “truth?” Or can they only represent what is “remembered” as “truth?”
— Ann Woo
Ann Woo, Art, Cian Browne, Distribution, Photography, Schnauzer, Seth Fluker
Bjarne Bare, Hose Variations
Softcover, 40 pp., offset 4/4, 190 x 260 mm
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-82-998640-0-8
Published by Cornerkiosk Press
$26.00 · add to cart
Hose Variations is the first book by Bjarne Bare. This monograph, as the title suggests, consists of studies of hose variations. It is a study of time in between human interaction, where the dead moment, rather than the decisive, is in focus. The surroundings and placement of each hose reveal their owners character and is a light anthropological study of man, as well as a take on the traditional documentary genre of photography. It consists of Bares recent work from Berlin, Buenos Aires, Lodz, Los Angeles, and Oslo.
Anthropology, Art, Bjarne Bare, Cornerkiosk Press, Culture, Distribution, Los Angeles, Photography
Sowon Kwon, dongghab
Softcover, 48 pp., offset 4/2, 5.5 x 7 inches
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-9829524-0-5
Published by Vermont College of Fine Arts
$15.00 · add to cart
dongghab traces an online search in which the point of departure is the discovery that the publication of Edward Ruscha’s
Twentysix Gasoline Stations and the suicide of Sylvia Plath by oven gas both occurred in 1963, the year of Kwon’s birth. Cued by Ruscha’s seminal work, Kwon unveils an uncanny cosmology of events constellated by the convergence of “1963” with “gasoline” such as the assassination of Medgar Evers (after having lead a successful boycott of white-owned gasoline stations in Jackson, Mississippi) and the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc in Saigon (in protest of the oppression of Buddhists by the Catholic administration of then president Ngo Dinh Diem), among others. The Korean word
dongghab describes a social relationship between people born in the same year, so that the idea of a (self) portrait as socially contingent and historically determined as much as individuated, informs the book.
New York-based artist Sowon Kwon works in a range of media including sculptural and video installations, digital animation, drawing, and printmaking. Her recent work explores portraiture, perception, and historical memory as our bodies are increasingly submitted to and made accessible through technology. She has had solo exhibitions at The Kitchen in New York City, Matrix Gallery/Berkeley Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris (now Altria).
Aisha Burnes, Art, Berkeley Art Museum, Distribution, Ed Ruscha, Medgar Evers, Ngo Dinh Diem, Sowon Kwon, The Kitchen, Thich Quang Duc, Ulrike Müller, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Whitney Museum
Adolfo Doring, Nomenclature
Softcover, 64 pp., offset 4/4, 8 x 10 inches
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-1-4507-5604-4
Published by DM Art Books
$22.00 · add to cart
Adolfo Doring’s
Nomenclature is deceptively layered with meaning and contexts absorbent from his work in film. Sublime and poetic, Nomenclature is pictorial prose, a visual soliloquy, an imagistic dialogue of the human figure in a kind of call and response with a plethora of variegated environments including urban space as well as the natural world. Doring’s still photography is analogous to a single frame of a film; where he decides to point his camera, whether indoors or outdoors, is akin to a film’s locale; and the placement of images mapped within
Nomenclature is as much a directorial decision as it is of editing.
— Raul Zamudio
Adolfo Doring, Distribution, DM Art Books, Eugène Atget, Fashion, Film, Harold Pinter, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Michael Snow, Photography, Raul Zamudio, Robert Frank, William Henry Fox Talbot
Robert A. Robinson, Captured by the Norwegians
Hardcover, 168 pp., offset 3/1, 8.5 x 11 inches
Edition of 1500 in English
ISBN 978-82-998127-5-7
Published by Aki Books / Flamme Forlag
$50.00 · add to cart
The 1953 edition of
Captured by the Norwegians by Robert A. Robinson, has been re-published by Norwegian publishers Aki Books & Flamme Forlag. As well as reproducing the previous edition, this new book also includes new texts by David Campany, Frode Grytten and a personal interview with Robinsons long time friend Dan Young. This edition has also been published in Norwegian, under the title
Tatt av Norge.
Captured by the Norwegians was conceived in 1953. The publisher decided that no restriction of any sort should be placed upon the author. He therefore looked at Norway freely through impartial eyes, and the result is a volume of pictures by one who came as a stranger and stayed as a friend.
“Robinson’s photographs are also reminiscent of those included in the ‘Family of Man’ and it is tempting to see Captured by the Norwegians as a local expression of the same sentiments but the comparison is complex. Steichen aimed to subsume national identity in a new globalized oneness that skirted politics and ideology in favour of a utopian common round of experience. Many accused it of sentimentalism, political naivety and a deep Americanism that was actually far from international. By comparison Robinson’s book is a humble vision that makes so few claims for itself. I find it an honest, unpretentious and endearing account of one person’s experience and expression. But maybe it has taken that half a century to re-realise this.”
— David Campany
Aki Books, Culture, Dan Young, David Campany, Distribution, Flamme Forlag, Norway, Photography, Robert A. Robinson
IFS, Ltd. Futures Newsletter, Opportunity Amidst Uncertainty
Softcover, 28 pp., offset 4/4, 110 x 175 mm
Edition of 6000
Published by IFS, Ltd. / Graphic Magazine
free* · out of stock
*free copy with each order
IFS, Ltd. Futures Newsletter is, in non-equal parts: a corporate bulletin, a speculative trading instrument, an experiment in memetic and symbiotic publishing, an internal-external analysis of company performance (B. Critton, H. Gassel, B. Griffiths, Z. Klauck, M. Nguyen), a proposal for an allegorical Escape Act (
S. Dockray), a bid for a series of six activities (
D. Horvitz), an abridged catalogue of semi-fictional gemstones (
L. Francescone), a profile of independent art book distributor (
Textfield, Inc.), and a self-reflexive / -reflective cartoon caption contest (
R. Rozendaal).
Investment Futures Strategy, Ltd. (United States) in partnership with GRAPHIC magazine (Korea) is pleased to introduce Futures, a semi-official newsletter published as a stand-alone supplement to GRAPHIC #17 (”When Design Becomes Attitude”). In lieu of a traditional contribution, IFS, Ltd. has chosen to use the GRAPHIC platform to continue its experiments in trade and publishing.
The Book Trust Prospectus examined new possibilities for funding, trade value, and distribution by attaching a different kind of significance to the object, thus short-circuiting the expected monetary transaction. Production of the Prospectus, however, relied on labor-intensive methods that required hours of input for a relatively small output. With the Futures newsletter, IFS, Ltd. has hybridized the positive aspects of large-scale corporate publishing — economies of scale or large print-runs, distribution of labor, and maximum efficiency — with the dictatorial authorship afforded by self-publishing. This new model maximizes potential as authors and designers while minimizing the opportunity cost of production and distribution.
Within the logic of IFS, Ltd. Futures will also act as a form of currency: readers can use their copy of the newsletter to trade for a copy of the Book Trust Prospectus. These recirculated copies of Futures will then be re-made available as a way to generate revenue for a future, freely distributed, as-yet-undefined project thus continuing the self-sustaining eco-system of publishing and distribution, one in which readers and producers collaborate to generate and circulate content outside of the cost-prohibitive channels of traditional publishing.
Art, Benjamin Critton, Brendan Griffiths, David Horvitz, Design, Distribution, Futures Newsletter, Graphic Magazine, Harry Gassel, IFS Ltd., Interview, Jonathan Maghen, Lauren Francescone, Lim Kyung Yong, Mylinh Nguyen, Na Kim, Nanette Sullano, Phil Chang, Rafael Rozendaal, Sean Dockray, Textfield, The Book Prospectus, Zak Klauck
Mono.Kultur 26, Manfred Eicher — Recording ECM
Softcover, 42 pp., offset 1/1, 200 x 150 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur
$9.00 · out of stock
Born in 1943 in southern Germany, Manfred Eicher dedicated his life early on to music, learning violin as a child, and studying double bass and classical music at the Academy in Berlin. On parallel tracks, he pursued an equally traditional self-education in jazz: through relatives in America, records bought in G.I. stores,
The Voice of America, listening to Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard, playing double bass in German jazz bands and with visiting musicians including Marion Brown, Leo Smith and Paul Bley.
In 1969, a meeting with the American jazz pianist and composer Mal Waldron led to Eicher’s first impromptu production and official release, Free at Last. The immediate success of the record beckoned for more, encouraging Eicher to move backstage and from then on to dedicate his life to finding and producing new music rather than performing. On the outskirts of Munich, with little financial backing, less strategy and no experience in production or managing a record label, Manfred Eicher launched ECM Records as a platform for jazz, a primarily American phenomenon on its wane.
Bernd Kuchenbeiser, Bill Evans, Caroline Heuer, Cheryl Koralik, Culture, Design, Distribution, ECM Records, Eva Gonçalves, Graphics, Joel Alas, Kai von Rabenau, Leo Smith, Manfred Eicher, Mareike Dittmer, Marion Brown, Mono.Kultur, Music, Paul Bley, Renko Heuer, Urs Bellermann
Dear Reader, Vol. 1
Softcover, 36 pp., offset 2/2 + spot varnish, 210 x 297 mm
Edition of 500
ISSN 2211-1085
ISBN 978-94-90974-03-9
Published by Carvalho Bernau
$13.00 · add to cart
A collection of obsessions, oblique references and footnotes of design processes — though not necessarily texts about design. The layout is appropriately diverse and eclectic for the bandwidth of texts, layering different formats and texts, as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the design shtick of publications with different paper formats. Here we present three iconic formats in emphasized-as-fake three-dimensionality, on four different papers and more inks than you would think.
Dear Reader was created partly from a primordial graphic designers’ urge to publish something and to share texts that are dear to us, partly in celebration of Atelier Carvalho Bernau’s approximate fifth anniversary, and partly as a vessel to showcase our type design work in a manner that circumvents the conventions and the visual clichés of the type specimen.
Adolf Loos, AG Fronzoni, Barbara Wright, Carvalho Bernau, Design, Distribution, El Lissitzky, Frederico Duarte, John Cage, Kai Bernau, Morton Feldman, Raymond Queneau, René Hague, Susana Carvalho, Typography
C Magazine 109, Knowledge
Softcover, 56 pp., offset 4/1, 210 x 295 mm
Edition of 2200
ISSN 1480-5472
Published by C Magazine
$7.50 · add to cart
Issue 109 of C Magazine, Knowledge, includes an essay by Jen Kennedy, School’s In: Contemporary Art and the Educational Turn, that examines Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida’s #class, Anton Vidokle’s unitednationsplaza and Night School, and projects recently conducted at the Copenhagen Free University, and a feature article by Sholem Krishtalka, “You and Me and Her and Us and Them: A Conversation on Using and Being Used,” about collaborating with novelist Sheila Heti and painter and filmmaker Margaux Williamson. This issue also includes an interview by Mandy Ginson with Toril Johannessen, exploring some of the ways Johannessen engages scientific methods of analysis and models of classification and display in her work, as well as two artist projects; Summerhill, Revised, by Helen Reed and Hannah Jickling with an accompanying text by Stephanie Springgay, and Studies for Possible Futures by Maggie Groat. Issue 109 also includes reviews of the 29th Bienal de São Paulo and Manifesta 8, as well as book reviews and exhibition reviews from cities including Fredericton, Halifax, Hamilton, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver.
Anton Vidokle, Art, Distribution, Hannah Jickling, Helen Reed, Jen Kennedy, Jennifer Dalton, Maggie Groat, Mandy Ginson, Margaux Williamson, Sheila Heti, Sholem Krishtalka, Stephanie Springgay, Toril Johannessen, William Powhida
Dispatches and Directions: On Artist-Run Organizations in Los Angeles
Edited by Ronni Kimm and Jesse Aron Green
Softcover, 160 pp., offset 2/2, 9 x 9 inches [24 x 36 inches unfolded]
4 part book + poster
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-615-39970-6
Published by ART2102
$20.00 · add to cart
Over the past several years ART2102 has acted as a platform for artists and curators in Los Angeles to realize their projects and exhibitions. From its space in Boyle Heights, ART2102 hosted a vibrant program known for its open cultural discourse and flexibility of ideas, and for engaging both local and international artists at various stages in their careers. Gradually, ART2102 moved away from this physical site as its programming and initiatives engaged with the large network of other artists-run spaces across Los Angeles and Southern California.
Dispatches and Directions, the final publication and project of ART2102, does not simply document this history, but also emulates the organization’s role as a platform and a network by spotlighting a number of the artists-run collaborations that are currently active in Los Angeles, and that will continue to thrive as ART2102 recedes. The publication not only provides a space in which these organizations can describe their work, but will also look at the legacy of ART2102 in light of the diverse range of programming emulated by these groups.
The publication, edited by Ronni Kimm and Jesse Aron Green, features contributions from various artist-run projects, including, Artist Curated Project, ESL, Genesis Project, Los Angeles, MATERIAL, Monte Vista, Slab, Telic Arts Exchange, Wildness. Also included are thoughts and anecdotes from Kate Fowle, Rika Hiro, Songmi Huff, Thomas Lawson, Paul McCarthy, Yoshua Okon, Renaud Proch and Erlea Maneros Zabala; an essay by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer; a directory of over 60 artist-run and non profit organizations; and a specially commissioned “Star Chart” to help navigate the scene, by artist Jim Skuldt. The publication was designed in collaboration with Willem Henri Lucas.
Art, ART2102, Artist Curated Project, Distribution, Erlea Maneros Zabala, ESL, Genesis Project, Jesse Aron Green, Jim Skuldt, Kate Fowle, Los Angeles, MATERIAL, Monte Vista, Paul McCarthy, Renaud Proch, Rika Hiro, Ronni Kimm, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Slab, Songmi Huff, Telic Arts Exchange, Thomas Lawson, Wildness, Willem Henri Lucas, Yoshua Okon
