The Line

Saul Steinberg, The Line

Saul Steinberg, The Line
Leporello Foldout, 30 pp., offset 1/1, 195 x 255 mm [5850 x 255 mm unfolded]
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-3-905714-80-7
Published by Nieves

$24.00 · out of stock

The hallmark of Saul Steinberg’s art is the inked line, always drawn with a spare elegance that expresses the semiotic richness of the line itself. As it shifts meaning from one passage to the next, Steinberg’s line comments on its own transformative nature.

The Line, the original a 10-meter-long drawing with 29 panels that unfold, accordion fashion, is Steinberg’s manifesto about the conceptual possibilities of the line and the artist who gives them life. His drawing hand begins and ends the sequence, as the simple horizontal line that hand creates metamorphoses into, among other things, a water line, laundry line, railroad track, sidewalk, arithmetic division line, or table edge; near the end, the curlicues etched by the iceskater’s blade remind us of the role calligraphy plays in Steinberg’s art.

The Line was designed for the Children’s Labyrinth, a spiraling, trefoil wall structure at 10th Triennial of Milan, a design and architecture fair that opened in August 1954. The drawing, photographically enlarged and incised into the wall, was one of four Steinberg conceptions used on the labyrinth.

Medium 1

Medium 1, Poetry

Medium 1, Poetry
Softcover, 64 pp., offset 4/4, 165 x 240 mm
Edition of 500
Published by Nieves

$14.00 ·

Today there was a guy leaning the wrong way in the tube. It was not immediately noticeable. There was no one else sitting nearby. No other passengers to compare him to. But then I did notice that every time the carriage came to a stop, he leaned away from the direction we were moving. Very slightly. Think about it. You’re supposed to lean forward. In the direction you were moving toward. Toward the point which the weight of your body was expecting to reach. Now this guy, he leans the other way. Just slightly. As a friend of mine would put it, he has a great sense of irony. Definitely. That’s important in life. They say that Rothko, he killed himself because he met the people who bought his art. No sense of irony. Me neither I don’t have any sense of irony. I like to take things at face value. Your wife she once told me that what led to the demise of the Black Panthers, aside from the absence of trust, and a murderous governmental incarceration campaign, it was their complete lack of a sense of humor. It was only much later that I realized she meant a murderous governmental incarceration campaign is actually a lot worse than not having a sense of humor. But these ironies are lost on me. Your sister and your wife they both say so. When I tell them things I find funny, they rarely laugh. I’m not even going to mention this guy in the tube to them. I recently told them about my bathroom sink in this hotel room. Real bad design. Flat. Which meant the liquid always accumulated in the corners. Instead of flowing down the drain. You had to use your fingertips to fish out the shaved hair stubble from the corners of the sink. Or it would just lie there. Waiting. You know what’s even funnier: you had to try and propel what you spat out when you brushed your teeth towards the center of the sink. Or you’d have mounds of mucus and toothpaste. Just drying in small heaps, here and there. Hilarious. And speaking of heaps of mucus. Another thing I’ll keep to myself – this was the funniest thing in years: I saw an old couple smooching in the street the other day. How often do you see that. Teenagers, yes. Or oldies arm in arm. But here you had oldies with their tongues down each other’s throats. Right there in the pedestrian zone. Eighty years old maybe more. Couldn’t believe it. I just stood there laughing. These oldies have no sense of humor either. They pretended not to hear me. But I could tell they heard me perfectly well. So now the carriage starts moving again, and I stand up, knowing I’ll exit at the next station. You see there are things I’m less sure about. Are they funny or just poetic. Lately my eyeballs scrunch as I close my eyes. A crunching sound. Brief, almost imperceptible. The sound is a bit like high-tech mechanics when they start aging. Wearing out. A whispering scrunching sound. Funny, or lyrical? Now as I exit the carriage, I notice there’s vapor in the air as I breathe, despite the high temperatures. It’s been like this all week. Again, very odd and almost funny. In a tiny, barely noticeable kind of way. Like the guy leaning the wrong way back there. As the doors slam shut, I turn around to look for him. I want to see which direction he’s leaning in as the train departs. Before I can assess his movements, he smiles and waves. I wave, but I fail to smile back. It’s just not funny anymore.

Condiment 2

Condiment 2, Questionable Taste

Condiment 2, Questionable Taste
Softcover, 90 pp., offset 4/4, 165 x 230 mm
Edition of 1000
ISSN 1837–8226
Published by Condiment

$18.00 ·

This issue of Condiment has reminded us of the simple truth that we are living with food, not living for food. In this context, the aim shifts from accomplishment to a need for further exploration. Ideas and approaches to food have never seemed so evolved and exaggerated. Yet, as the focus on the meal continues to increase, we risk forgetting about all the hours of living that exist in between. Rather than only being an object of desire, food needs also to be a subject of discussion—approached not as a statement about politics, provenance or proficiency, but as an open-ended question mark. In some form or another, we hope that each page of this issue raises questions —not just about what food is, but about what it can be. After all, each meal is both an outcome and a new beginning.

Produced in collaboration with BLESS. Images from their collection BLESS N° 42, Plädoyer der Jetztzeit appear on each page of the publication.

Ad Hoc Project

Rafaela Drazic, Ad Hoc Project

Rafaela Drazic, Ad Hoc Project
Softcover, 140 pp., offset 1/1, 155 x 220 mm
English and Croatian
Edition of 100
Published by Rafaela Drazic

$10.00 ·

Secret Exhibitions project sheds a light on the complicated mechanisms of censorship and destruction within the context of visual arts, which were developed as a part of the processes of post-socialist transformations. The project functions as an interdisciplinary platform of curators, artists, historians and art historians who dealt with the topic of censorship or faced it directly. Project has an emphasized arbitrary nature.

Benzanoe 64

Benzanoe 64, Graphic Dasein

Benzanoe 64, Graphic Dasein*
Newspaper, 12 pp., web offset 1/1, 12.5 x 18 inches
Edition of 100
Published by Benzanoe

$8.00 ·

*Dasein is the German vernacular term for existence, it is derived from da-sein, which literally means being-there.

“The printed artifact always carries with it belief; under pinned by a historic and cultural rela­tionship between print and truth. Issue 64 deals directly with this concept through a series of install tions, representing the pages of the magazine. The content is delivered through playing with perspective, perception, resolution, view point and production.“

IFS, Ltd. Futures Newsletter

IFS, Ltd. Futures Newsletter

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 (see: the Prospectus, left). 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.

The 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).

Wholesale Schedule

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The Serving Library

Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt, The Serving Library

The Serving Library is a collectively-built archive. It consists of three parts: 1. an ambitious public website; 2. a small physical library space; 3. a publishing program which runs both through the website (#1) and through the space (#2). This is a long-term project being developed by Stuart Bailey, Angie Keefer and David Reinfurt. Together we are just beginning so we need your help to build our library and construct a new model for this old institution.

The first libraries were built on an Archiving model. In the Archiving Library, information and artifacts were collected, concentrated and protected in one central place. On July 1, 1731, Benjamin Franklin established the first Circulating Library in Philadelphia. Books were quite expensive, so by pooling resources many volumes could be shared among contributing members, and, the books moved around. Now, we propose a new model that joins the Archiving Library to the Circulating Library — The Serving Library.

The Serving Library is an archive assembled by publishing. Publishing and archiving have always been either end of a continuous loop, but now on an electronic network like the Internet, the two activities are both simultaneous and indistinguishable. This makes particularly small public libraries increasingly redundant. It’s time to reconsider what kind of library makes sense right now, and suggest one possible way forward.

The Serving Library follows directly from ten years of independently publishing Dot Dot Dot (www.dot-dot-dot.us), a biannual arts journal printed in a run of 3000 copies, with broad international distribution co-founded by Stuart Bailey in 2000. Dot Dot Dot then led to establishing Dexter Sinister (www.dextersinister.org) in 2006, a self-described “Just-in-Time Workshop and Occasional Bookstore” run from a modest basement on the Lower East Side of New York City. Evolving from a publication to a bookstore, we now want to expand from these relatively private activities to a more properly public sphere by developing a new library where materials are collectively produced, assembled and pooled to maintain a body of shared information that serves the committed community who helped make it.

We will build our library by publishing. Bulletins of the Serving Library will be a hybrid electronic / printed publication offered first as PDF files freely available, released in serial form on www.servinglibrary.org. Twice a year, these concise booklets will be collected, printed, bound and distributed. We’re ready to publish the first collection of Bulletins now. This first set directly addresses libraries, archives and collections and includes “An Octopus in Plan View” by Angie Keefer, an 8-part text on communication organized around the anatomy of an octopus; “From O-1: Information on Libraries & From 1-0: Information on Recording” by Rob Giampietro & David Reinfurt, on the paradox of contemporary archiving in the face of the Internet; and “The Life and Death of Media” by Bruce Sterling, an out-of-time plea for compiling an exhaustive list of outdated media formats.

We are asking for your support to help us develop the website, publish the PDFs, print, bind and distribute the first hard-copy issue of the Bulletins and to begin assembling The Serving Library.

www.servinglibrary.org

Book as Artwork 1960-1972

Germano Celant, Book as Artwork 1960-1972

Germano Celant, Book as Artwork 1960-1972
Softcover, 104 pp., offset 1/1, 5.5 x 7 inches
Edition of 800
ISBN 978-0-9829694-0-3
Published by 6 Decades Books

$20.00 ·

Nearly three decades after its first printing, Book as Artwork 1960-1972 remains a widely-cited landmark in the critical literature on artists’ books. Penned by the critic and curator Germano Celant to accompany an exhibition at Nigel Greenwood Gallery in London, it was the first critical consideration of the artist’s book. A bibliography lists over 300 historic artist-produced publications from this golden age of the medium.

The book is a medium that requires no visual display, other than to be read, and the active mental participation of the reader. The book imposes no information system but the printed image and the word; it is a complete entity in which both public and private documents are reproduced. The book is a collection of photographs, writings, and ideas — it is a product of thought and of imagination. It is a result of concrete activities, and serves to document, and to offer information as the means and the material of art. It is considered an object of study and of testimony and does not appear esoteric or unreal, but fits into the daily communications system without any aesthetic or artistic pretension. It is only another space… and can therefore be considered an art work.

— Germano Celant

Nothing Nothing Nothing Nothing 2004-2007

Asher Penn, Nothing Nothing Nothing Nothing 2004-2007

Asher Penn, Nothing Nothing Nothing Nothing 2004-2007
Softcover, 494 pp., offset 4/4, 6.75 x 9 inches
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-0-982100-60-8
Published by An Art Service

$35.00 ·

In the style of Wolfgang Tillmans and Roe Ethridge, New York-based Asher Penn, born in Vancouver in 1982, captures the quotidian. As an anthology of artist books self-published by Asher Penn between 2004 and 2007 — an anthology that is effectively an artist book itself. Made between Providence, New York, Philadelphia and Vancouver, these ‘zine-like publications are rephotographed page by page on top of painted works that Penn was producing at the time of their re-publication. In rephotographing these original editions on the surface of recent work, Penn cleverly illustrates the creative vertigo capable of creeping up on artists while they look back at the artist that they have become. The artist books collected in this anthology include the following: 1. Just Say Maybe; 2. Go Fuck Yourself With Your Atomic Bomb; 3. Bad Hound, Buddha; 4. School; 5. Asher Mixtape Hell; 6. Elisa Penn Hero One; 7. Institutional Critique; 8. The Heart Wants What The Heart Wants; 9. Before And After; and 10. (Untitled).

Douglas Blau

Ingrid Schaffner, Douglas Blau

Ingrid Schaffner, Douglas Blau
Softcover, 88 pp., offset 4/4, 8.5 x 10 inches
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-0-884541-15-8
Published by the Institute of Contemporary Art

$30.00 ·

Douglas Blau, who originally emerged as a critic and curator in tandem with the Pictures Generation, offers up a series of picture epics and episodes from uniformly framed collages of printed matter like postcards, film stills, images of paintings and photographs. Pictures of all kinds are cut and pasted into individual collage elements.

97,5 Mhz

Christopher Williams, 97,5 Mhz

Christopher Williams, 97,5 Mhz
Softcover, 24 pp., offset 4/1, 320 x 235 mm
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-3-905829-04-4
Published by JRP|Ringier

$25.00 ·

Los Angeles conceptualist Christopher Williams, born in 1956, studies the conditions of presentation and representation in order to call into question spoon-fed perceptions, “realistic” reproductions, communication mechanisms and aesthetic conventions that influence our perception and understanding of reality. This volume presents works from 2003-2007.

Zeitungsphotos

Hans-Peter Feldmann, Zeitungsphotos

Hans-Peter Feldmann, Zeitungsphotos
Softcover, 48 pp., offset 4/4, 150 x 210 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-3865601-77-3
Published by Walther König

$22.00 ·

Hans-Peter Feldmann’s idiosyncratic field research investigates the momentum of human perception and the processing of images. This tight collection includes found images of an erupting volcano, a red-eyed ape, a competitive swimmer and celebrity shoes, among others–all taken from journalistic sources.