Forbidden Dreams

Rebecca Blake, Forbidden Dreams

Rebecca Blake, Forbidden Dreams
Hardcover, 132 pp., offset 4/4, 11 x 13 inches
Edition of 10,000
ISBN 0-7043-2475-X
Published by Quartet Books

$40.00 ·

condition: very good, with dust jacket, shelf wear, first edition, excellent reference copy.

Forbidden Dreams (1984) is the first monograph by Belgian-born, New York-based photographer Rebecca Blake. Elegant and darkly alluring fashion photography/erotica from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Möhren in Athen

Erik Steinbrecher, Möhren in Athen

Erik Steinbrecher, Möhren in Athen
Softcover, 16 pp., offset 4/4, 112 x 178 mm
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-3-905714-83-8
Published by Nieves

$8.00 ·

For his show Wind in Athens/Möhren in Athen Erik Steinbrecher left Berlin for Athens, his suitcase packed with carrots. The artist’s art odyssee began. His chosen site for an intervention was the National Archaeological Museum. It is considered one of the great museums of the world and contains the richest collection of some of the most important artifacts from Greek antiquity worldwide. During his visit, Steinbrecher installed single carrots in the exhibition spaces; close to sculptures and artfacts, on bases and behind walls.

This sculptural and performative intervention has been photographed by the artist himself. For this publication Steinbrecher overworked these documents.

Anonymous Engravings on Ecstasy Pills

Frédéric Post, Anonymous Engravings on Ecstasy Pills

Frédéric Post, Anonymous Engravings on Ecstasy Pills
Hardcover, 544 pp., offset 1/1, 154 x 232 mm
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-2-940409-02-0
Published by Boabooks

$68.00 ·

The patterns used in Anonymous Engravings on Ecstasy Pills were designed by unknown people who abandoned them. In this book of drawings, Frédéric Post offers a piece of research worthy of a modern-times archaeologist. He collected and re-created these figures, conferring thus value to an underground iconography of over 500 signs.

The classification of the drawings into three groups (figures, typography, symbols) was carried out with Izet Sheshivari. The collection shows elements of a visual folklore that hints at popular figures. The book implicitly describes our societies’ ambiguities: “Nowadays, with drug use, we want to experiment this unconstrained pleasure, disrupt the humdrum routine, make love longer; we want to party even though we are tired (…). At the end of the day, this is in line with the whole idea of work, profitability and performance”. Is ecstasy therefore an excessive metaphor of the market economy?

The Portable John Latham

Antony Hudek and Athanasios Velios, The Portable John Latham

Antony Hudek and Athanasios Velios, The Portable John Latham
Softcover, 112 pp., offset 2/1, 170 x 250 mm
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-0-9562605-5-0
Published by Occasional Papers

$22.00 ·

This book features a selection of documents from the personal archive of the late British artist John Latham (more information here), presently maintained in his last home and studio in Peckham, South London. Through reproductions of letters, invitation cards, exhibition reviews, performance scripts and images, the publication retraces Latham’s pioneering practice over six decades, from the late 1940s to his death in 2006. Published on the occasion of John Latham: Anarchive in association with Whitechapel Gallery, the book also includes an interview by Charles Harrison from 1968 and a glossary section.

Edited and introduced by Antony Hudek and Athanasios Velios.

In the painting and sculpture for which he is best known, Latham’s primary materials included glass, books, canvas and the spray gun. Developing alongside this concise visual language, from the mid-1950s onwards, was a cosmological theory, formulated through his art-making discoveries, that considered time and event to be more primary than the established means of understanding, based on space and matter. Termed Time-Base Theory (sometimes Flat Time Theory or Event Theory) it offers an ordering and unification of all events in the universe, including human actions, and allows an understanding of the special status of the artist in society.

Latham looked at the way in which human knowledge has become fragmented over time; split by divergent religions, ideologies and world-views. He identified the way in which the fields of science and art, despite emerging from a common root, have become separate and operate in isolation of one another: even within a field such as physics, there exist a large number of schisms and specialisations that further fragment our knowledge and understanding of the universe. John believed that this endless division would eventually lead to a kind of entropy and from that state, to a disintegration of society.

Pretty Telling I Suppose

Samuel Hodge, Pretty Telling I Suppose

Samuel Hodge, Pretty Telling I Suppose
Hardcover, 72 pp., offset 4/4, 203 x 266 mm
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-9806516-0-7
Published by Rainoff Books

$45.00 ·

Foreword by Gert Jonkers.

Wear 2010 (Cultural Exchange)

Wear Journal 2010

Elaine W. Ho, Wear 2010 (Cultural Exchange)
Hardcover, 80 pp. + 28 pp. insert, offset 4/4, 185 x 250 x 28 mm
Edition of 500
ISSN 2078-8691
Published by HomeShop

$25.00 ·

This issue and the second season of HomeShop are marked by a more cynical bent, whereby the pointedness of quotation marks, as in “cultural exchange”, invite investigation into the deeper multiplicities and ambivalence hidden within this overwrought term. Continuing its documentation of daily life in the hutong, Wear number two intertwines HomeShop’s series of exercises in cultural exchange with commentary, imagery and special projects on the topic by contributors such as Carol Yinghua Lu, RAQS Media Collective, Meiya Lin and Michael Eddy. A special 28-page insert has also been created especially for the journal by artist Reinaart Vanhoe.

Wear is the independently published journal of HomeShop, an artists’ initiative located in one of the hutong alleyways in the centre of Beijing. Aiming to be an annual project, WEAR combines an artist book, theoretical reader and social research in printed form. The journal documents the public activities, discussions and interventions organised at HomeShop, also serving as a broader platform from which to gather contributions from artists, writers and the folks in the neighbourhood for a local dialogue and everyday reflection upon the contradictions and dynamism of a fast-changing China.

Pink/Brown Stool/Stool

Misha Hollenbach, Pink/Brown Stool/Stool

Misha Hollenbach, Pink/Brown Stool/Stool
Softcover, 64 pp., offset 4/4, 4.5 x 7 inches
Edition of 250
ISBN 978-0-9825936-3-9
Published by Seems

$24.00 ·

Born last century. Based in Melbourne, Australia. Misha Hollenbach lives and works in many languages, times and places. Hollenbach is one half of the brand Perks and Mini (P.A.M.) a multi media excursion encompassing art, design, fashion, and publishing. He is also part of The Changes, music and art collective.

Hollenbach is influenced by energy, as his work moves through various mediums including sculpture and painting, printed media and collage. Rather than shy away from objects deemed useless, or unwanted, he embraces their meaningless meanings to create an unfamiliar language containing familiar objects. By employing found objects and pairing them with wit and humor, he continues the narrative of the Dada and Pop artists.

In a lineage that extends through Jim Shaw, Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, the rallying around the already readymade repositions things for freer symbolic enterprises. In the re-presentation of shit, Misha touches upon the etymological origins of faeces, which derives from faex, the Latin for dregs. He is using the dregs, things humans have casted away; shit becomes a metaphor for the unwanted.

By putting these outcasts back together with ready mix, the images of the objects do not return to us as they normally should; they lose their original function. With this method, he is breaking our own need to put the image back together in a fixed or familiar way. He strips back the structure of meaning — and this brings about a danger: the readymades return as phantasms and representations of abstract ideas. A Hush Puppy becomes a Push Poopy. Doodoo becomes Dada.

—Timothy Moore

Iranian Tales

Olaf Knarvik, Iranian Tales

Olaf Knarvik, Iranian Tales
Softcover, 16 pp., offset 4/1, 150 x 210 mm
Edition of 500
Published by Aki Books

$9.00 ·

Aki Book No. 3

Cloudbuster Project Maroc

Christoph Keller, Cloudbuster Project Maroc

Christoph Keller, Cloudbuster Project Maroc
Softcover, 192 pp., offset 2/4, 110 x 170 mm
French, English, German, Arabic
Edition of 250 for each language
Published by Christoph Keller

$15.00 ·

In 2008, German artist Christoph Keller traveled through Morocco with his own version of Wilhelm Reich’s cloudbuster machine to engage local people in the age-old process of conjuring rainstorms. This artists book, which combines cinematic flip-book elements with more straightforward photo documentation, is a record of Keller’s project. Small color photographs depict the cloudbuster machine being built and used to make rain in four different locations. The only explanatory text appears on the book’s cover, which in this case is printed in English.

In The Softest Grey Petals of the Bomb, Lay Your Finger Across My Lips

Dash Snow, In The Softest Grey Petals of the Bomb, Lay Your Finger Across My LIps

Dash Snow, In The Softest Grey Petals of the Bomb, Lay Your Finger Across My Lips
Softcover, 32 pp., digital 4/1, 5.25 x 8.25 inches
Edition of 300
Published by Peres Projects

out of print

Handmade saddle stitched booklet/zine of the artists photographs.

Smoke Bath

Peter Sutherland, Smoke Bath

Peter Sutherland, Smoke Bath
Softcover, 328 pp., offset 1/1, 5.25 x 8 inches
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-98259360202
Published by Seems

out of print

Smoke Bath is a collection of photographs and art work loosely based on the theme of camping, nature, and exploring.

The goal of Smoke Bath is to showcase the work of artists that are inspired by nature and raise money for freshair.org in the process. The Fresh Air Fund (freshair.org) is an independent, not-for-profit agency that provides free summer vacations to New York City children from low-income communities.

Five Points

Georg Gatsas, Five Points

Georg Gatsas, Five Points
Softcover, 48 pp., offset 4/1, 195 x 255 mm
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-3-905714-72-2
Published by Nieves

$24.00 ·

What makes Georg Gatsas’ work particularly significant is that it is a historical document. This approach puts the art back into artifact. Now we are looking at his images much in the way others must have looked at images of people in the same places over one hundred years ago. I enjoy imagining someone like Georg Gatsas in one hundred years looking at the book you are reading now, I wonder what they might have to say or might be able to learn about these places, people and things.

—James Fuentes

The Seconds Pass

Ed Templeton, The Seconds Pass

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 ·

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