Empty Words

Jürg Lehni and Alex Rich, Empty Words

Jürg Lehni and Alex Rich, Empty Words
Softcover, 24 pp., cut paper, 195 x 255 mm
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-3-905714-93-7
Published by Nieves

$24.00 ·

News

Jürg Lehni and Alex Rich, News

Jürg Lehni and Alex Rich, News
Softcover, 24 pp., offset 1/1, 195 x 255 mm
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-3-905714-94-4
Published by Nieves

$14.00 ·

The Speed-i-Jet, a mobile pen-printer manufactured by Reiner (Germany), is a device built around an industrial inkjet cartridge / printing head. With its clumsy user interface and 30 character maximum capacity, this charming parasitical product prompted the discussion of possible uses for such a device. Together with the curatorial staff of the institution, daily news headlines were selected and transferred onto the devices. Holding and moving the device like a pen, visitors could experience the writing of texts to which the author is ambiguous.

The headlines were collected during Things to Say at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland, 14 February — 12 April, 2009.

Mono.Kultur 27

Mono.Kultur 27, Ryan McGinley

Mono.Kultur 27, Ryan McGinley
Softcover, 44 pp., offset 4/4, 150 x 200 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur

$10.00 · out of stock

Light, space and time. Those are the classic ingredients for photography, which have been reinvented, rediscovered and rearranged again and again for almost 200 years. And just when you thought that the subject might have exhausted itself, that nothing new could be done, someone comes along and interprets them in a way that hasn’t been seen before, not quite like that. As it happens, this latest someone is called Ryan McGinley.

Ryan McGinley’s steep ascent within the world of photography appears almost as effortless as his images: Born in 1977 in New Jersey, he moved to New York in 1996 to study graphic design at Parsons School of Design, where almost by accident he discovered his love for photography. Incessantly shooting his friends and surroundings, McGinley inadvertently documented the microcosm of youth culture in New York at the turn of the millennium in a body of work that stood out for its energy and optimism, despite the grit and rawness of the images — a style that should later draw comparisons to the work of Nan Goldin, Larry Clark and Robert Frank. In the meantime, McGinley befriended a group of local artists and creative types — among them his close friends Dan Colen and the late Dash Snow — that would soon be hyped as a ‘new movement’ by the press, a label based more on the excessive lifestyle the three had in common than their actual and quite disparate work.

And so for the past ten years, McGinley has continuously been one step ahead, and is already taking the next corner of his young career — like the teenagers in his images, like youth itself, always on the run, always looking for the next thing, but always with the unmistakable energy and optimism and lightness that ultimately characterizes all of his work. Because no one these days sculpts light, space and time quite in the same way as Ryan McGinley.

The Kingsboro Press 7

The Kingsboro Press 7

The Kingsboro Press 7
Softcover, 160 pp., offset 1/1, 8.5 x 11 inches
Edition of 500
Published by The Kingsboro Press

$20.00 ·

Founded in 2007 in Brooklyn, Kingsboro is a critical and engaged look at young art, design, literature, and approach every new issue as an artists print or unique edition, an entirely self-produced object with its own inherent visual language.

No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America 1960-1980

Betty Bright, No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America 1960-1980

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 ·

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.

Social documentaries amid this pist

Mark Borthwick, Social documentaries amid this pist

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 ·

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.

Sunsets & Other Colour Photographs

Ann Woo, Sunsets & Other Colour Photographs

Ann Woo, Sunsets & Other Colour PhotographsAnn Woo, Sunsets & Other Colour PhotographsAnn Woo, Sunsets & Other Colour Photographs

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 ·

Ann Woo is a photographer based in Hong Kong. Sunsets & 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

Hose Variations

Bjarne Bare, Hose Variations

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 ·

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.

dongghab

Sowon Kwon, dongghab

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 ·

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).

Nomenclature

Adolfo Doring, Nomenclature

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 ·

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, Nomenclature
Adolfo Doring, Nomenclature
Adolfo Doring, Nomenclature

Captured by the Norwegians

Robert A. Robinson, Captured by the Norwegians

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 ·

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

Directory

Ari Marcopoulos, Directory

Ari Marcopoulos, Directory
Softcover, 1200 pp. + signed print, offset 1/1, 215 x 275 x 70 mm
First edition
ISBN 978-0-8478-3532-4
Published by Nieves

out of print

Ari Marcopoulos’s unique style of raw immediacy has made him one of the most important contemporary photographers. For thirty years, photographer Ari Marcopoulos has been pioneering contemporary photography by documenting subcultures such as skateboarders and graffiti artists, as well as landscapes and his own family and friends. Since his days printing photographs for Andy Warhol, he has amassed a huge body of work marked by its arresting and unsentimental intimacy that has been influential to the worlds of art, fashion, and photography. Bound to mimic a phone book, Ari Marcopoulos, Directory presents a collection of approximately 1,200 photographs, with curator and critic Neville Wakefield providing insightful commentary on some of Marcopoulos’s singular images. Copublished with Rizzoli, each book in this limited-edition series includes a print signed by the artist.

A Book About A Book About Death

Ray Johnson and Bill Wilson, A Book About A Book About Death

Ray Johnson and Bill Wilson, A Book About A Book About Death
Softcover, 58 pp., offset 1/1, 160 x 200 mm
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-94-90629-01-4
Published by Kunstverein

$15.00 · out of stock

Ray Johnson wrote poetic texts and letters and integrated language and a unique system of cryptic signs into his work. Considered by many the ‘father of Mail Art’, as early as 1953 Johnson began sending highly conceptual images/texts to friends, often encouraging the recipient to ‘add to’ the work, or ‘please send to’ someone else, or ‘return to Ray Johnson’. Forming the ‘New York Correspondence School’ in 1962, Johnson established an enormous network of participants throughout the world — one that remains active even after his death. Between 1963 and 1965, Ray Johnson printed thirteen pages of his book about death with the Pernet Printing Company, 120 Lexington Avenue at 28th Street. His title, which designated the thirteen unbound pages as a book, is A Book about Death, yet also A Boop about Death and A Boom about Death.

In “A Book About A Book About Death” close friend and author Bill Wilson elaborates on each of the pages of “A Book about Death”.