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Graphic Novels

Part 1

A number of the staff at Artwords are passionate about graphic novels, so I’ve put together a list of the recent books we’ve had.

Despite being dominated by superhero publishers such as Marvel and DC, the medium of comic books and graphic novels lends itself to every genre, telling an endless array of stories and channelling the talents of some of the world's most imaginative creators.

We stock a wind range of graphic novels, and related books, as our listing here I hope demonstrates. As to advice on how to read them, the only guidance I have is to take your time. Just because they seem "text light" doesn't mean they are to be raced through and disposed of.

The lower word count of comics means you can spend time soaking in the carefully thought-of art that accompanies the text. And as with 'real' books, one of the principle joys of a good graphic novel is that you might want to, or even have to, re-read certain passages or flick back a page or two, to really get what the author and illustrator are saying.

There is something really special that can happen when you bring together images and words in the way comics do, and when it comes to the kinds of difficult subject matters that can feel abstract in text, graphic novels can make those issues feel distinctly tangible.

to be continued...

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Our top 10 selling Children's books

Here’s a list of out top 10 kids’ books which we hope will cheer up any youngster’s day.

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We are making free weekly (Monday, Wednesday & Friday) deliveries in the following postal areas EC1, EC2, EC3, EC4, E1, E2, E3, E8, E9, E10, N1, N5 & N16. If your postal address is in one of these postcodes, type in the code 'FreeDel' when processing your online order and the cost of £6.00 p&p will be deducted from the total. There is no maximum to the number of times this code can be used - however it will only deduct £6.00 per order.

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We’ve expanded our FREE DELIVERY SERVICE: we’re now running it three days a week - Monday, Wednesday & Friday, and we’ve expanded the free delivery area to include the following postal areas EC1, EC2, EC3, EC4, E1, E2, E3, E8, E9, E10, N1, N5 & N16. If your postal address is in one of these postcodes, type in the code 'FreeDel' when processing your online order and the cost of £6.00 p&p will be deducted from the total. There is no maximum to the number of times this code can be used – however, it will only deduct £6.00 per order – so, if you want to order more than one item, either make multiple orders, or if not let us know and we’ll refund any delivery costs that may have charged.


To the left, some of the new magazine issues due in next week…

Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War: Hito Steyerl

One of the many positives of working in a bookshop is that I occasionally get advance copies of new books, page proofs, to give them the book trades insider jargon. Usually they arrive as a paperback version of what will be released as a hardback a few months down the line. Annoyingly, for, pedant that I am, these books actually feel like bastardised versions – knock-offs of the genuine article: the publication ‘hacked’; “Uncorrected Page Proofs” blazoned across the cover image; the publishers’ logo not-quite fitting on the spine – I could go on but I won’t.

 

One such book is Hito Steyerl’s forthcoming collection of essays Duty Free Art to be published by Verso later this year. And like my proof copy her writing addresses everything hacked in this world, or how the world is hacked and how the hacked world informs her understanding of visual culture.

 

Her subject matter reminds me of reading Paul Virilio, particularly War and Cinema, and Pure War but this isn’t to say her writing is at all derivative – more that she like Virilio, is able to take the technologies of war, information and media, and apply them to visual arts culture. Steyerl writes snappily and immersively – the reader is there with her as she data-mines WikiLeaks; the War on Terror; tax avoidance and what she terms Freeport art storage and impossibly wealthy art collections; Smartphones and Big Data.

 

Duty Free Art is not a detailed analysis of new technologies, nor is it dry and academic, and it is all the better for it in my opinion; I feel that by the time Steyerl had had the time to research it to the hilt the technologies she investigates would have moved on. What we have in her book is a compelling critique of the media-world today, a rich, idea-filled, collection of texts that will engage anyone interested in contemporary visual culture.

The Lonely City: Olivia Laing

David Wojnarowicz: Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Times Square), 1978-79

 

What drives an artist to do what they do? What compels them? What are the underlying factors?

 

Do, what we consider ‘great’ painters, writers and performers produce because they are driven by some unseen internal forces, or, are they engaging creatively as the result of pragmatism: Create - rather than criticise? Olivia Laing would probably have us believe in the former and I would tend to agree with her. Her excellent book The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone has plenty to say on the matter.

 

Although her title doesn’t really offer a way into the main subjects of this book, it nonetheless ‘drives’ her output and provides a framework for her investigation; her own loneliness, which she expertly reveals to us, acknowledging all its inherent shamefulness. Laing describes herself as a writer and critic and she writes for amongst others Frieze, The Guardian and New Statesmen.

 

Whilst living in New York, where she had relocated to live with a lover, who subsequently changed his mind, she found herself instead “clinging hopelessly to the city itself”, and began to look for her mood reflected in images both of the city, and produced in, New York.

 

Laing has an enviable ability to write both well, interestingly and engagingly so, whilst also following her own notions of what it is that an artist does and produces. Fascinated with the image of isolation within the city, and happy not to follow the accepted wisdoms of the art history she is obviously educated in Laing looks at a number of artists and asks of their output – what is it that they do? Mixing biography whilst interrogating works themselves, her writing ranges easily between the social (and sex) lives of her artists, whilst analysing how their output deals with the uneasy subject of how they relate to others; how we feel personally inadequate in the image of the constantly ‘active’ and busy city.

 

Laing is also critical of gentrification, and worries that the city will suffer immeasurably due to the ‘blandification’ authorities impose on our streets as they stifle anything that transgresses accepted ‘normalities’ – how this cleaned, ‘acceptable’ image of the city ultimately make us all feel lonely: how it says nothing to us about our lives.

Forthcoming Books Seen This Week 28 August 2015

Art

                   Known widely as a Catholic nun with an avant-garde flair, Corita Kent (1918–1986) has a personal legacy that has tended to overshadow her extensive career as an artist. This handsomely illustrated catalogue places Kent in her rightful position among the foremost figures of pop art, such as Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and Roy Lichtenstein. Although Kent has been largely excluded from the academic and critical discourses surrounding 1960s American art, this publication re-evaluates her importance and highlights how her work questioned and expanded the boundaries of the pop art movement. Four essays and nearly 90 catalogue entries pull together a variety of topics—art history, religion, politics, linguistics, race, gender, mass media, and advertising—that influenced Kent’s life and work during the 1960s. Eminent pop scholars delve into the relationship between her art and that of her contemporaries, and explore how her art both responded to and advanced the changes in modern-day Catholicism stemming from Vatican II. More than 200 vibrant images showcase Kent’s ingenious screenprints, which often combine handwritten text and commercial imagery. Offering an unparalleled, rigorous study of an artist who has been largely overlooked, this book is an important contribution to scholarship as well as a fascinating presentation of Kent and her work to a wider audience.

                  Exploring the relationship between public art and its role within urban regeneration, this new title by graphic designer and artist Scott King brings together a series of works inspired by government ideologies in post-industrial Britain. Works include Long Live Death, in which the artist places Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North atop Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, London, A Balloon for Britain, a series of photographs in which King imagines the current Conservative government offering him millions of pounds to devise a scheme that would regenerate Britain’s ten poorest towns and cities, as well as Infinite Monument, an ongoing sculpture based on Superstudio’s seminal Il Monumento Continuo from 1969, a gridded superstructure that covers the surface of the entire planet.

                  Andy Warhol (1928–1987) and Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) are well known for significant work in portraiture and self-portraiture that challenged gender roles and notions of femininity, masculinity, and androgyny. This exciting and original book is the first to consider the two artists together, examining the powerful portraits they created during the vibrant and tumultuous era bookended by the Stonewall riots and the AIDS crisis. Several important bodies of work are featured, including Warhol’s Ladies and Gentlemen series of drag queen portraits and his collaboration with Christopher Makos on Altered Image, in which Warhol was photographed in makeup and wigs, and Mapplethorpe’s photographs of Patti Smith and of female body builder Lisa Lyon. These are explored alongside numerous other paintings, photographs, and films that demonstrate the artists’ engagement with gender, identity, beauty, performance, and sexuality, including their own self-portraits and portraits of one another Essays trace the convergences and divergences of Warhol and Mapplethorpe’s work, and examine the historical context of the artists’ projects as well as their lasting impact on contemporary art and queer culture. Firsthand accounts by the artists’ collaborators and subjects reveal details into the making and exhibition of some of the works presented here. With an illustrated timeline highlighting key moments in the artists’ careers, and more than 90 color plates of their arresting pictures, this book provides a fascinating study of two of the most compelling figures in 20th-century art.

 

Graphic Design

                   This A to Z survey of typographic design by leading typographers A2/SW/HK showcases over 100 carefully selected contemporary designers, including the best examples of their current work, and also features an introduction by Rick Poynor. Featured designers include M/M (Paris), David Pearson, Philippe Apeloig, Anthony Burrill, Marion Deuchars and Non Format, among others. There are also essays by acclaimed design writers Emily King, Paul Shaw, Monika Parrinder and Colin Davies that explore the past and future of type design. This book will encourage and inspire the next generation of designers as well as provide a sourcebook for seasoned designers and educators.

 

Design

                  Featuring 60 recipes, each introduced with an insightful historical anecdote and accompanying image sourced from original Soviet recipe books. As the Soviet Union struggled along the path to Communism, food supplies were often sporadic and shortages commonplace. Day to day living was hard, both the authorities and their citizens had to apply every ounce of ingenuity to maximize often inadequate resources. The stories and recipes contained here reflect these turbulent times: from basic subsistence meals consumed by the average citizen (okroshka), to the extravagant banquets held by the political elite (suckling pig with buckwheat), and a scattering of classics (beef stroganoff) in between.

                  Adolf Hitler’s makeover from rabble-rouser to statesman coincided with a series of dramatic home renovations he undertook during the mid-1930s. This provocative book exposes the dictator’s preoccupation with his private persona, which was shaped by the aesthetic and ideological management of his domestic architecture. Hitler’s bachelor life stirred rumors, and the Nazi regime relied on the dictator’s three dwellings—the Old Chancellery in Berlin, his apartment in Munich, and the Berghof, his mountain home on the Obersalzberg—to foster the myth of the Führer as a morally upstanding and refined man. Author Despina Stratigakos also reveals the previously untold story of Hitler’s interior designer, Gerdy Troost, through newly discovered archival sources. At the height of the Third Reich, media outlets around the world showcased Hitler’s homes to audiences eager for behind-the-scenes stories. After the war, fascination with Hitler’s domestic life continued as soldiers and journalists searched his dwellings for insights into his psychology. The book’s rich illustrations, many previously unpublished, offer readers a rare glimpse into the decisions involved in the making of Hitler’s homes and into the sheer power of the propaganda that influenced how the world saw him.

                  Coinciding with the new edition of the bestseller Designing Design, Kenya Hara's latest book, Ex-formation, searches for the beginning of design in the unknown. For Kenya Hara, design begins with comprehension of the unknown. In contrast to "information," "exformation" describes how little we really know and thus becomes the starting point for any type of design. Based on a range of projects the book describes what "exformation" can look like in design practice and how this concept alters ur classic understanding of information design. Following the path embarked on in Designing Design (2007) and its successor, White (2010), Ex-formation continues to explore the void, absence, and indeterminacy in contemporary design.           

 

Photography

                   Alec Soth’s reputation as one of the leading lights of contemporary photographic practice is largely predicated on the books he has published. This unusual catalogue accompanies a touring exhibition which uses the four major bodies of work which Soth has published as books since 2004 as the structural basis for both a mid-career retrospective and an investigation of Soth’s prescient understanding of the various and distinct applications of photography as a tool for storytelling across diverse media. The title of the exhibition comes from Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself [1855] and references both the pages of his books gathered for consideration and the notion that his work is also a story about Soth himself. Soth's meteoric rise to international acclaim began with his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, published by Steidl in 2004. The book has sold through numerous print runs and has long been out-of-print. It embodies not only a moment in which a new and original voice emerged with an unusual ability to transpose subtle and highly personal stories of local American life, but also marked a significant early event in the photo-book publishing boom we are currently experiencing. The success of his two subsequent volumes, Niagara [2006] and Broken Manual [2010], combined with the hugely influential exploration of self-publishing under his Little Brown Mushroom imprint, have all reinforced Soth’s position as a master of the book form. The recent success of Songbook [2015] has seen a return to the mainstream of book publishing.

                   Photographer Christopher Herwig has covered more than 30,000 km by car, bike, bus and taxi in 14 former Soviet countries discovering and documenting these unexpected treasures of modern art. From the shores of the Black Sea to the endless Kazakh steppe, these extraordinary bus stops show the range of public art from the Soviet era and give a rare glimpse into the creative minds of the time. The book represents the most comprehensive and diverse collection of Soviet bus stop design ever assembled from: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Abkhazia, Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Belarus. With a foreword by writer, critic and television presenter Jonathan Meades.

 

Theory

                   Renowned poet and conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith collects a massive assortment of quotations about New York City in the twentieth century. This kaleidoscopic montage from hundreds of sources is a literary adoration of New York as the capital of the world, and was inspired by Walter Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece, The Arcades Project, a compendium of quotations about nineteenth-century Paris. Goldsmith brings together an immense archive of quotations about modern New York from novels, histories, newspapers, memoirs, letters, advertisements and more unlikely sources, all organized into lyrical and philosophical categories. The result is a magisterial and poetic history of New York in the twentieth century, and an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind book of experimental literature.

                   Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror. Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it. Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms “abject,” “archival,” “mimetic,” and “precarious.

Forthcoming Books Seen This Week 22 May 2014

Theory
                  Since the decidedly bleak beginning of the twenty-first century, art practice has become increasingly politicized. Yet, few sustained defenses of the avant-garde have been put forward. Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde is the first book of its kind to look at the legacy of the avant-garde in relation to the deepening crisis of capitalist non-reproduction. An invigorating revitalization of the Frankfurt School legacy, Roberts’s book is unique in its penetrating definition and defense of the avant-garde idea, providing a refined conceptual set of tools that critically engages with the most advanced art theorists of our day, such as Hal Foster, Andrew Benjamin, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Paolo Virno, Claire Bishop, Michael Hardt, and Toni Negri.

 

Art
                  Artists have utilized walking as an autonomous form of art, a subject in their work, and as social practice since the early 20th century. Today walking continues to offer a salient means for artists to challenge social, political, and economic orders through a radical remapping of civic space. Walking Sculpture 1967–2015 is an engaging and original book, in which Lexi Lee Sullivan traces the history of walking as an aesthetic action from the Dadaists to contemporary ramblers. Titled after Michelangelo Pistoletto’s performance Walking Sculpture, the catalogue features 50 colour illustrations ranging from photographs of Yvonne Rainer’s street actions to Francis Alÿs’s fantastical processions, poems by Cole Swensen, and a new project by artist Helen Mirra, who produces poetic meditations on landscape, ecology, and locomotion. Sculpture, film, video, photography, and performance converge to address the multi-disciplinary practice of ambulation through the cityscape and the countryside. For those who hike; march in fundraisers, protests, or parades; walk the dog; stroll in the park; or commute daily, this catalogue will invite new thought into basic human movement.
                 László Moholy-Nagy became notorious for the declarations he made about the end of painting, encouraging artists to exchange brush, pigment, and canvas for camera, film, and searchlight. Even as he made these radical claims, he painted throughout his career. The practice of painting enabled Moholy-Nagy to imagine generative relationships between art and technology, and to describe the shape that future possibilities might take. Joyce Tsai illuminates the evolution of painting’s role for Moholy-Nagy through key periods in his career: at the German Bauhaus in the 1920s, in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in the early 1930s, and as director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago in the last decade of his life. The book also includes an introduction to the history, qualities, and significance of plastic materials that Moholy-Nagy used over the course of his career, and an essay on how his project of shaping habitable space in his art and writing resonated with artists and industrial designers in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

Graphic Design
                  The period between the First and Second World Wars is well known for the flowering of German culture. With Berlin as its epicentre, the period was replete with advanced science, passionate politics, and ground-breaking literature, philosophy and art. Amid the fervour of intellectual and creative activity, German publishers produced some of the most outstanding book designs in modern history. Book Covers of the Weimar Republic assembles 1,000 of the most striking examples from publishing of this period. Based on the remarkable collection of Jurgen Holstein and his rare collectible Blickfang, it combines an unparalleled catalogue of dust jackets and bindings with Holstein's introduction to Weimar publishing and profiles of key publishing figures of the time. Expert essays discuss the aesthetic and cultural context of the period. From children's books to novels in translation, bold designs for political literature to minimalist artist monographs, this is a dazzling line-up of typography, illustration, and graphic design at its most energetic and daring. Part reference compendium, part vintage visual feast for the eyes, this very particular cultural history is above all a celebration of the ambition, inventiveness and beauty of the book.
                  Modernist aesthetics in architecture, art and product design are familiar to many of the creatively inclined. In soaring glass structures or minimalist canvases we recognize a time of vast technological advance which affirmed the power of human beings to reshape their environment and to break, radically, from the conventions or constraints of the past. Less well-known, but no less fascinating, is the distillation of Modernism in logo design. With the creation of clean visual concepts, graphic designers sought to move away from the mystique they identified with the commercial artist, and to counterbalance an increasingly complicated world with clarity. Logo Modernism authored by Jens Müller, brings together approximately 6,000 trademarks, focused on the period 1940–1980, to examine how Modernist attitudes and imperatives gave birth to corporate identity. Ranging from media outfits to retail giants, airlines to art galleries, this sweeping survey of the logo is organized into three design-orientated chapters: Geometric, Effect, and Typographic. Each chapter is then sub-divided into form and style led sections such as alphabet, overlay, dots and squares. Alongside this comprehensive catalogue resource, the book features an introduction from Jens Müller on the history of logos, and an essay by R. Roger Remington on Modernism and Graphic Design. Eight designer profiles and eight instructive case studies are also included, with a detailed look at the life and work of such luminaries as Paul Rand, Yusaku Kamekura, and Anton Stankowski, and at such significant projects as Fiat, The Daiei, Inc., and the Mexico Olympic Games of 1968. An unrivalled, encyclopaedic resource for graphic designers, advertisers, and branding specialists, Logo Modernism is equally fascinating to anyone interested in social, cultural and corporate history, and in the sheer persuasive power of image and form.

 

Design

                  “You voluntarily assume the risk of serious injury or death by attending”
100 miles from the gambling town of Reno, in the wilderness of northern Nevada, lies a vast, hostile plain known as the Black Rock Desert. The region has been an empty and windswept dry lake bed for most of the past 10,000 years. Except, that is, for one brief week at the end of the summer, when a temporary city rises out of the barren clay. This is the Burning Man festival, one of the most remarkable gatherings on the planet. Baked by the sun, and blinded by dust, the event acquires different meanings for different people: temporary community, spiritual adventure, performance stage, desert rave, social experiment. It’s also the incubator of some of the most pure site-specific outdoor art ever made. A mechanized fire-breathing octopus. A towering wooden temple 15 meters tall. And the eponymous Man himself—a skeletal sculpture set ablaze at the festival’s conclusion. In their sun-scorched desert location, these huge installations and happenings exist for no clearer purpose than because someone wanted to express something. Participatory, collective, and often designed to last only for the festival duration, their value resides far beyond the ego, commerce and power play of common cultural output. This book assembles fifteen years of Burning Man images from writer and photographer NK Guy. Epic, awe-inspiring, even reality-shifting, the pictures are a testimony to one of the most uninhibited and expressive centres of our time.

 

Photography
                  From the banks of the ancient Ganges River to the glamor of Beverley Hills, from living saints to Hollywood celebrities, Michael O'Neill's quest to capture the essence of yoga spans time, space, and peoples. His stunning images in Yoga: The Architecture of Peace celebrate how the age-old discipline of asanas has developed into a modern global community of 30 million practitioners, united in physical, spiritual, and mindful practice. A yoga instructor in his own right, O’Neill’s own knowledge of yoga informs and inspires his stunning photography of the intricate positions, the rituals, the festivals, the meditations, and the symbols of yoga. He photographs some of the most important yogis of our time including Eddie Stern, Rodney Yee, Dharma Singh Khalsa, B.K.S. Iyengar, as well as those famed for integrating yoga into their high-profile lives, such as Christy Turlington and Sting and Trudie Styler. The images are accompanied by illuminating captions and insightful essays from leading yogis H.H. Swami Chidanand Saraswatiji and Eddie Stern, who together discuss the history of yoga, its dissemination into popular culture, and its health and healing capacities as a way of life.

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Forthcoming Books Seen This Week 24 April 2015

Art

                Go to reception and ask for Sara in red felt tip by Holly Pester. Using anecdote as a method to generate a collection of poetry, critical fictions and literary fragments this book performs a response to the history and function of the Women’s Art Library. The stories segue through the archive of personal correspondence, artists’ slides and administrative papers, as well as a poster archive documenting exhibitions, parties and activism in 1980s Feminist art movements. Anecdotal, gossiped and mistreated histories form aberrant narratives as a result of an inverted mode of archival research.

                Portland has been shaped and hollowed out over centuries by convicts and quarrymen to provide stone for some of London’s best-known buildings – one million square feet of Portland stone is said to have been quarried for St Paul’s Cathedral alone. Katrina Palmer has undertaken her own excavations into this elemental island, marked by unsettling absences, deviant goings-on and a writer who has gone missing. End Matter accounts for the loss of Portland's stone, through the mysterious work of The Loss Adjusters, based on Portland, and responsible for accounting and balancing the material and historical shifts of the island’s being. Reporting these losses in the form of reports, their work overlaps, and becomes disrupted by, the presence of a writer and her production of unreliable narratives set in the tunnels, paths and hollowed out quarries of the island, and presented – like the stone itself – as absences from the narrative; end matter, whose body is missing.

                In the early 2000s, Saul Leiter came to the fore as one of the most accomplished and surprising colour photographers of the 20th century. Books were published, films made and exhibitions launched. While it was never a secret, few of those who are familiar with Leiter's photography are aware that over the years he created, in his own unhurried way, a yet-to-be appreciated and equally formidable body of paintings and painted photographs. As the first ever publication dedicated to this largely unknown part of Leiter's oeuvre, Painted Nudes offers a selection of more than 70 painted photographs - intimate, brilliantly coloured pieces that marry Leiter's two artistic passions. Produced over the course of four decades, these fiercely expressive nudes are a testament to Leiter's intuitive sense of colour and composition, and showcase a great 20th century artist at his resplendent best. Painted Nudes seeks not only to celebrate, but to illuminate this unique body of work by juxtaposing the painted nudes with a selection of quotes from works of literature. Taking its cue from Leiter's own work, the book straddles the boundaries between genres, inviting readers to discover their connections and resonances. Lush, evocative and associative, Painted Nudes is as stimulating to the eye as it is for the mind.

                Since the 1970s Raymond Pettibon has created a vocabulary of symbols that reappear consistently if enigmatically across his oeuvre. These range from baseball players, vixens, light bulbs and railway trains to the cartoon character Gumby and infamous murderer Charles Manson. But the most poetic and revealing of Pettibon's symbols may be the surfer, the solitary longboarder challenging a massive wave. In his "surfer paintings," viewers ride along with a counterculture existentialist hero who perhaps is the artist's nearest proxy. Almost all of the works included in this volume depict an ocean roiling with chaotic swells, accompanied by nonsequiturs, quotations and bits of poetry in the artist's handwriting. Among these works are early small-scale, monochrome India ink paintings; numerous paintings from the 1990s when the artist introduced color to his work; and a group of rare, large-scale paintings.

 

 

Design

                Jasper Morrison has the ability to bestow things with a distinctive style. His signature style is evident in many of the everyday objects that surround us. His repertoire of essential designs is characterised by simplicity yet complexity, as well as a sense of poetry and humour. Morrison works on a global scale and is one of the most influential product designers in the world today. A Book of Things is a collection of products and projects across the broad spectrum of his activities and demonstrates the continuity of his interests and methods, which he describes in succinct texts. Following on from Everything but the Walls, A Book of Things is a continuation of Morrison’s intense examination of the world of things that accompany our lives and shape our environment.

 

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Forthcoming Books Seen This Week 17 April 2015

Architecture

                 Chandigarh, built in the 1950s to a scheme by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret with their team of international and Indian architects, until the present day is regarded an icon of modernist urban design. Austrian artist Werner Feiersinger has recently travelled to the legendary capital of India’s federal state Punjab. Inspired by Ernst Scheidegger’s book Chandigarh 1956, he has put together a vast pictorial account of the city’s famous architecture today. This new book features some 300 of Feiersinger’s photographs. With the keen eye of a sculptor, he shows the expressive sculptural qualities of the buildings. He captures the place’s vivid atmosphere and virtuosity and illustrates its continuous topicality. This artistic approach clearly distinguishes this book from previous publications on Chandigarh, most of which are of merely documentary character. The essay by Austrian architect Andreas Vass reflects on Chandigarh’s history, its architectural qualities, and its future development.

                Japanese houses today have to contend with unique factors that condition their design, from tiny plots in crowded urban contexts to ever-present seismic threats. These challenges encourage their architects to explore alternating ideas of stability and ephemerality in various ways, resulting in spaces that are as fascinating as they are idiosyncratic. Their formal innovation and attention to materials, technology and measures to coax in light and air while maintaining domestic privacy make them cutting-edge residences that suggest new ways of being at home. Contemporary Japanese architecture has emerged as a substantial force on the international scene ever since Kenzo Tange won the Pritzker Prize in 1987. This overview of 50 recent houses powerfully demonstrates Japans enduring commitment to design innovation.

                This provocative book argues that it is high time the practice of architecture moved away from the ego-fuelled grand visions of starchitects to a networked, collaborative, inclusive model inspired by 21st-century trends such as crowd-sourcing, open access and mass customization. But how can collaborative design avoid becoming design-by-committee? Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel deftly navigate this and other vital questions, considering along the way the applications of open-source architecture not only conceptually, but also in practice. Open Source Architecture is a rallying cry to students and open-minded professionals seeking new perspectives on a profession that the authors passionately believe to be moribund.

 

Photography

                Leipzig-born photographer Margret Hoppe is a promising new voice in European photographic art. This new book features her series Après une Architecture, a photographic perspective of Le Corbusier’s architecture that refers to his concept of a modern architecture laid-out in the book Vers une architecture (Toward an Architecture) of 1923. Hoppe’s images show Le Corbusier’s use of exposed concrete, the clarity of his geometric shapes and the emblematic polychrome surfaces as symbols of his buildings. She investigates what remains today of these visions of architectural modernism, now that its legacy in many cases is adored as a monument rather than actually used and appreciated as a functional piece of architecture. The photographic image transforms the buildings into signs of a highly pictorial and sculptural aesthetic, enabling manifold views at Le Corbusier’s work in the present day. The book also presents a selection of Hoppe’s photographs of international modernist buildings, alongside two essays and a conversation with the artist. It is published to coincide with a solo exhibition at the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig.

                In his second book for Rizzoli, Ryan McGinley focuses on the work that he has become best known for since he first rose to prominence ten years ago: the summer road trips. Since the earliest days of his unparalleled career, every summer McGinley has gathered up a group of thirty college-age kids, rented a bus, and set out on a cross-country trip. These trips—now legendary among the artist’s large coterie of friends and collaborators and the art world at large—and the photographs created during them have established him as the most consequential photographer of his generation. In the photos, McGinley documents the summertime explorations and exploits of a group of twentysomethings but also renders something much more fleeting and ineffable: the freedom and abandon of youth. Whether hiking on peat-covered mountains, swimming in crystalline lakes, rolling around in vast fields of tall grass, or squatting in derelict countryside barns, the artist’s photographs of young, naked bodies in pastoral scenes have been his signature, and his triumph has been his ability to evoke innocence and nostalgia with flashes of sexual brio. McGinley’s work has continued to deliver on the promise it made nearly a decade ago—that he is the most influential and important chronicler of his generation.

 

 

Art

                In 1960, Eberhard Fischer had the opportunity to accompany his father, the art ethnologist Hans Himmelheber, on a major expedition to West Africa. He was actually only meant to film the Dan mask carvers as they worked, as well as their festive performances. Yet the strong personalities of these sculptors impressed the young man deeply and he began to document their life stories, record their artistic work methods in detail, and also to collect their works. The biographies and many of the photographs shown in the book of four mask carvers from the Liberian hinterland are unique in the study of African art, as masks are carved in secret in many of these cultures. Until recently, the works were recognized by art ethnologists and collectors, but rarely the people who created them. The new book presents Fischer’s essay, originally published in German in 1963, for the first time in English. For the new edition the text is supplemented by additional images and an epilog. A DVD with the historic film recordings of the artists at work rounds out the book.

                The act of drawing has long been considered the foundation of an artistic education, and the life class essential to the formation of an artists style and technique. Yet in the contemporary art world drawing is increasingly regarded as a medium in its own right, and the figure as a subject for ongoing exploration well beyond the sketchbook. Drawing People is a thoughtful and beautifully illustrated survey of the most compelling and inventive drawings of the human form being produced today. An introduction places the medium of drawing in its historical context, discussing its intersection with photography, painting, collage and illustration. Five chapters Body, Self, Personal Lives, Social Reality and Fictions include short introductions outlining each theme, followed by commentaries on individual artists exploring their style, ideas and techniques, accompanied by finely reproduced images of their recent work.

                Over the course of a career that spanned fifty years, Agnes Martins austere, serene work anticipated and helped to define Minimalism, even as she battled psychological crises and carved out a solitary existence in the American Southwest. I paint with my back to the world, she claimed; when she died at ninety-two, in Taos, New Mexico, it is said she had not read a newspaper in half a century. Nancy Princenthal tells her whole story chronologically from Martins birth in Saskatchewan and her early years as an artist, living in derelict Manhattan shipping lofts as neighbour to Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and others of their ilk; to the seven years she stopped painting, just as her career was taking off; the months she spent roaming the country in a pick-up truck; and her last thirty years, in Taos, in an adobe house she built with her own hands. Nancy Princenthal has written the essential Agnes Martin biography; a must-read for anyone interested in abstract painting or the history of women artists in America.

 

Graphic Design

                Here is a an overview of the exceptional work produced and championed by over fifty of the leading illustrators, printmakers and designers from the sphere of independent, print-based design. People of Print is split into three sections: Part 1 features essays by journalist Andrew Losowsky; Danielle Pender, curator at KK Outlet; and Lawrence Zeegen, Professor of Illustration at University of the Arts London. It includes interviews with Heretic, a London-based illustration and screen-printing studio, and Jeremy Leslie, Creative Director at magCulture; and a site visit to St Cuthberts Mill, a paper manufacturer in Somerset. Part 2 consists of profiles on such creatives as Brazilian illustrators Bicicleta Sem Freio, Melbourne-based screen-printers Dangerfork, Portland-based letterpress KeeganMeegan & Co., and New York-based design firm Sagmeister & Walsh. Part 3, the Directory, lists a wide selection of print-based websites.

 

Design

                The international touring exhibition Die gute Form was conceived by Max Bill on behalf of the Swiss Werkbund and was shown for the first time in 1949 at the Basel Mustermesse trade fair. The exhibition consisted of 80 display panels, designed by Bill, presenting a selection of consumer goods from all over the world, chosen by Bill as examples of good design. The show caused some upset in Switzerland and fuelled heated debates abroad. But it also exerted a wide-reaching influence – for example, upon the way in which consumer goods were perceived. This publication documents Bill’s initiative in reproductions of the original display panels and layout plans for the venues visited by the exhibition, and places Die gute Form in a theoretical context that considers its reception and impact within the history of design.

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Forthcoming Books Seen This Week 27 March 2015

Architecture

                  The retro-futuristic epoch is one of the most visually spectacular in architecture's history. The utopian buildings of the 1960s and 1970s never go out of style. This book compiles radical ideas and visionary structures. The notion of utopia proves as diverse as it does universal. From exuberant master plans to singular architectural expressions, the rise of the utopian architectural movement in the 1960s and 1970s represents a critical shift in ideology away from mid-century traditionalism. This period shakes off the conformity and conventions of the 1950s in favour of a more experimental post-war agenda. Marked by ground-breaking reinterpretations of both the single family house as well as more large scale developments, the embrace of utopian and generally progressive thinking mirrored the cultural revolution of the times. These daring, charming, futuristic, and hopeful designs were not isolated to a particular part of the world. Visionary voices longing for a fresh approach to architecture began appearing across France, Japan, the United States, and beyond.

                 The life of urban nomads places new demands on cities, buildings, residences, and working spaces. This book presents temporary architecture, flexible room and furniture concepts, and the fitting tools for a generation that feels at home in every corner of the globe. Today’s internet generation no longer needs a home. It is mobile. It works six months in a shared office in Berlin, spends the summer in a caravan in Chile, and shows up just in time for the next project at a temporary desk for a client in New York. Growing up with the internet and digital tools means living and working differently. Aside from a functioning wireless connection and good coffee, web developers, designers, musicians, journalists, and other creative entrepreneurs need, above all, inspiration, new ideas, contacts, and international exchange. So they travel from one co-working space to the next, alternating countries and continents, as well as accommodation, friends, and cultures. The New Nomads documents this trend, in particular showing the architecture, interior design, modular furniture, and multi-functional tools that this nomadic generation has developed for its own specific needs. Divided office floors with flexible uses, temporary living and working spaces that move with the nomads, multi-functional objects that are at once chair and storage space, table and bed, or cupboard and desk are all featured in the book. The necessary infrastructure is not hidden away but becomes the distinguishing design feature. Compactness and functionality meet a high standard for aesthetics, sustainability, and material.

 

Photography

                Landscape in my Mind is a pictorial journey through the landscapes of current art photography. The exhibition covers the whole gamut of current positions in international landscape photography from Hamish Fulton to Andreas Gursky. Always a network of connections between man and nature landscape presents itself as a mental projection level of the perception of our surroundings – both close and distant. The works of art function as 'distorted' mirrors of perceived reality; they are not pure documentations produced at the click of a camera but hybrid tableaus between fiction and abstraction, metaphors of the view of the world and beyond. Typically, the photographs are 'pictures painted with the camera' in large format, which exude the self-confidence of New Photography. Blurring effects and compositional qualities enhance the tableau’s painterly and pictorial value. Consequently, artists such as Elger Esser or Jörg Sasse, for example, see themselves more as 'picture composers' rather than photographers. Rather than the objective perception of landscape as found in say Thomas Struth, these images elicit emotions in the observer, including feelings of being overwhelmed, melancholy, disquiet and dread.              

 

 

Theory

                What is the function of style today? If the 1970s were defined by Stop curating! And think what curating is all about. This book starts from this simple premise: thinking the activity of curating. To do that, it distinguishes between 'curating' and 'the curatorial'. If 'curating' is a gamut of professional practices for setting up exhibitions, then 'the curatorial' explores what takes place on the stage set up, both intentionally and unintentionally, by the curator. It therefore refers not to the staging of an event, but to the event of knowledge itself. In order to start thinking about curating, this book takes a new approach to the topic. Instead of relying on conventional art historical narratives (for example, identifying the moments when artistic and curatorial practices merged or when the global curator-author was first identified), this book puts forward a multiplicity of perspectives that go from the anecdotal to the theoretical and from the personal to the philosophical. These perspectives allow for a fresh reflection on curating, one in which, suddenly, curating becomes an activity that implicates us all (artists, curators, and viewers), not just as passive recipients, but as active members. As such, The Curatorial is a book without compromise: it asks us to think again, fight against sweeping art historical generalizations, the sedimentation of ideas and the draw of the sound bite. Curating will not stop, but at least with this book it can begin to allow itself to be challenged by some of the most complex and ethics-driven thought of our times.

                By the time Umberto Eco published his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, he was one of Italy’s most celebrated intellectuals, a distinguished academic and the author of influential works on semiotics. Some years before that, in 1977, Eco published a little book for his students, How to Write a Thesis, in which he offered useful advice on all the steps involved in researching and writing a thesis—from choosing a topic to organizing a work schedule to writing the final draft. Now in its twenty-third edition in Italy and translated into seventeen languages, How to Write a Thesis has become a classic. Remarkably, this is its first, long overdue publication in English. Eco’s approach is anything but dry and academic. He not only offers practical advice but also considers larger questions about the value of the thesis-writing exercise. How to Write a Thesis is unlike any other writing manual. It reads like a novel. It is opinionated. It is frequently irreverent, sometimes polemical, and often hilarious. Eco advises students how to avoid “thesis neurosis” and he answers the important question “Must You Read Books?” He reminds students “You are not Proust” and “Write everything that comes into your head, but only in the first draft.” Of course, there was no Internet in 1977, but Eco’s index card research system offers important lessons about critical thinking and information curating for students of today who may be burdened by Big Data.

                The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s documents a tectonic change in the way women portray themselves in art. Historically, women were depicted as a projection of male fantasies, prejudices, and relationships. However in the 1970s, for the first time, female artists began collectively to investigate visual representations of their own selves. They studied their own bodies and created the prospect of determined feminine identities. Editor Gabriele Schor explores the Feminist Avant-Garde to emphasize the role that these artists played for the last four decades. The works are provocative, radical, poetic, ironic, angry, cynical and heartfelt. The artists shared a collective consciousness that reassessed, and even rejected, what came before, turning to new ways of expression in the fields of photography, performance, film, and video. The collection SAMMLUNG VERBUND founded in 2004 in Vienna focuses on the feminist art movement of the 1970s as one of the main areas and is with 500 works the largest collection with this emphasis. Included are works by Eleanor Antin, Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta, Nil Yalter, Ketty La Rocca, Birgit Jürgenssen, Renate Bertlmann, Francesca Woodman and others. This important book emphasizes the accomplishments of women artists who have made a name for themselves while encouraging the young generation.

 

Art

                The Enjoyment of Photography presents a broad selection of Josephine Pryde's work from 1990 to 2014. In photographic works that encompass the full range of the medium's historical and current genres, styles, and techniques, but also through sculpture and writing, the Berlin- and London-based artist (*1967) offers incisive, often ironic, and provocative commentary on the values, hierarchies, and economies subtending the field of contemporary art against the backdrop of larger societal shifts. Estranging the familiar or conversely expressing the common in a radically unforeseen manner, Pryde's ingenuous choice of subject matter, unusual formal solutions and surprising juxtapositions continue to capture international exhibition audiences. Prefaced by art historian André Rottmann, the volume features new essays by scholar Rhea Anastas and artist/critic Melanie Gilligan that insightfully survey Pryde's work over the last two decades, providing in-depth discussions of the artist's continuous engagements with photographic imagery, visual culture, social and artistic conventions, as well as political issues associated with feminism (among other concerns). An illustrated exhibition chronology and detailed bibliography provides further information on the artist's career.

 

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Forthcoming Books Seen This Week 6 March 2015

Art

                 The Petrified Forest National Park in Northeast Arizona protects one of the largest deposits of petrified wood in the world. Despite stern warnings, visitors remove several tons of petrified wood from the park each year, often returning these rocks by mail (sometimes years later), accompanied by a "conscience letter." These letters often include stories of misfortune attributed directly to their theft: car troubles, cats with cancer, deaths of family members, etc. Some writers hope that by returning these stolen rocks, good fortune will return to their lives, while others simply apologize or ask forgiveness. "They are beautiful," reads one letter, "but I can't enjoy them. They weigh like a ton of bricks on my conscience. Sorry…" Bad Luck, Hot Rocks documents this ongoing phenomenon, combining a series of original photographs of these otherworldly "bad luck rocks" with dozens of facsimiles of intimate, oddly entertaining letters from the Park's archives.

 

Design

                It is not easy to translate into English the Italian word autoprogettazione. Literally it means auto = self and progettazione = design. But the term ‘self-design’ is misleading since the word ‘design’ to the general public now signifies a series of superficially decorative objects. By the word autoprogettazione Mari means an exercise to be carried out individually to improve one’s personal understanding of the sincerity behind the project. To make this possible you are guided through an archetypal and very simple technique. Therefore the end product, although usable, is only important because of its educational value. A project for making easy-to-assemble furniture using rough boards and nails. An elementary technique to teach anyone to look at present production with a critical eye. The first edition of the book was compiled by the Duchamp Centre and printe for the exhibition at the Galleria Milano in 1974.

 

Photography

                Tones of Dirt and Bone: Mike Brodie. The images in Tones of Dirt and Bone were made between 2004 and 2006, with a Polaroid camera and Time Zero film. Brodie used the characteristics and limitations inherent to this type of camera and film to his advantage. The portraits he made are further enhanced by the peculiar colour palette of the film. Due to the restriction of manual focus and expensive film, that came only ten sheets to a box, each image feels deliberate and precious.

                Photographer Friso Spoelstra has visited numerous traditional folk festivals in sixteen different European countries during the past ten years and recorded the traditions in his photos. Devils & Angels brings these stories together and shows individuality as well as surprising similarities between the various different cultures of ever-growing Europe.

                Three iconic series of photographs by Juergen Teller. Woo (2013) was made after the exhibition of the same name at the ICA, London, in 2013. Debunking the status of both art and fashion photography, the works were all placed on the same level, assembled to form wallpaper covering o ne room of the art centre. This combination of images was like a pin board of family pics, a tangled retrospective of his work as fashion photographer and artist. For this series, Teller has isolated certain parts of this wallpaper, once again changing the way we look at the images: the representation of a representation of a representation. Another series, Masculin (2013), has never been shown before. It was made after Teller visited the exhibition Masculin/Masculin at the Musée d'Orsay (2013), which featured one of his self-portraits. The images answer each other, with each photo from the Orsay exhibition being echoed by a Teller self-portrait. The latter show the artist in a gym, dressed in shorts and trainers and doing exercise, hefting barbells and sweating profusely in poses that evoke nudes in classical painting and sculpture, humorously and self-mockingly recalling all the effort—and grotesqueness—that lies behind attainment of those ideal muscular bodies. The last series of photographs, Irene im Wald (2012), is undoubtedly the most intimate and personal of the three. These small-format photos follow Irene, Juergen's mother, on a walk through the forest of Erlangen, a place familiar to him since childhood. Evoking the balmy mood of an afternoon with the family, each image expresses the photographer's tender vision of his mother, seen in the forest on a sunny winter's day. The words accompanying the images are like voice-overs, the voice of the photographer and also the walker, as the rhythm of walking engenders an introspective mood.

               

Theory

                  The Shape of Evidence examines the role and use of visual documents in contemporary art, looking at artworks in which the document is valued not only as a source of information but also as a distinctive visual and critical form. It contends that for artists who use film, photography or written sources, adopting formats derived from specific professional, industrial, scientific of or commercial contexts, the document offers a way to develop a critical reflection around issues of representation, knowledge production, art and its history. The book invites viewers to reflect upon the production and interpretation of seemingly straightforward images, and proposes that some artists can show us through their practice how to turn these deceptively simple images inside out. It addresses several issues that are key both in art and in general culture today: the role of the museum and the archive, the role of documents and the trust that is placed in them, the circulation of such images and the historical genealogies that can be drawn in relation to images. Its uniqueness, however, also derives from its method: it is based on a close reading of a select number of works of art (e.g. Christopher Williams, Fiona Tan, Jean-Luc Moulène), which makes it approachable and engaging with the reader (the book will be illustrated). It is through looking at a select number of artworks that the reader is led to consider greater issues concerning visual documents. Moreover, the book is unique in its interdisciplinary approach: while being about contemporary art it discusses objects and ideas drawn from a wide spectrum of areas including literature, history, photography history, scientific representation, surrealism, conceptual art, commercial photography and so forth. Ultimately the book invites viewers to reflect upon the production and interpretation of seemingly straightforward images, and proposes that some artists can show us through their practice how to turn these deceptively simple images inside out.

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Forthcoming Books Seen This Week 27 February 2015

Theory

                  Recounting art dealer Karsten Schubert’s recuperation from major surgery in the famous Claridge’s Hotel in London, this idiosyncratic novel interweaves reality with fantasy. Room 225–6 follows the author-character ‘The Protagonist’ around London’s Mayfair as he hosts endless art world gatherings, tea parties for twenty and visits a multitude of local galleries and stores. Incorporating multi-layered voices and devices, the distinctive narrative introduces the reader to a memorable host of characters – from the ‘The Political Prisoner’ to ‘The Little Mondrian’ – in a tale filled with humour of observation and incident. Bringing to life this frightening yet extraordinary period in one man’s life, it is at once honest, satirical, idiotic and bold.

 

Art

                  Accompanying a major traveling exhibition, this first-ever survey of the rarely seen notebooks of Basquiat features the artist’s handwritten notes, poems, and drawings, along with related works on paper and large-scale paintings. With no formal training, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) succeeded in developing a new and expressive style to become one of the most influential artists in the postmodern revival of figurative during the 1980s. In a series of notebooks from the early to mid-1980s, never before exhibited, Basquiat combined text and images reflecting his engagement with the countercultures of graffiti and hip-hop in New York City, as well as pop culture and world events. Filled with handwritten texts, poems, pictograms, and drawings, many of them iconic images that recur throughout his artwork—teepees, crowns, skeleton-like silhouettes, and grimacing masks—and these notebooks reveal much about the artist’s creative process and the importance of the written word in his aesthetic. With over 150 notebook pages and numerous drawings and paintings, this important book sheds new light on Basquiat’s career and his critical place in contemporary art history.

                  Shit and Die is an editorial project by Maurizio Cattelan, Myriam Ben Salah and Marta Papini, published as part of the homonymous exhibition in Torino (November 6th 2014 - January 11th 2015). The publication is not a mere comment on the exhibition; it could be seen as an extension of it, a missing room. As the show, it is conceived as the most subjective, obsessive and irrationally non exhaustive composition. Several local stories, unpublished archival material, exclusive contributions by artists and theorists incorporate into a consistent and unique narration through seven deadly chapters that readers can comprehend as a whole tale. The list of artists on show is composed of established names from the international art scene as well as emerging artists, including among others: Davide Balula, Guy Ben Ner, George Condo, Martin Creed, Stelios Faitakis, Rokni and Ramin Haerizadeh, Petrit Halilaj, Dorothy Iannone, Yan Pei Ming, Aldo Mondino, Carol Rama, Roman Signer, Alexandre Singh, Jim Shaw, Andra Ursuta, Francesco Vezzoli, Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, Carlo Mollino. The list of contributors to the publication comprehends the artists included in the show and artists and theorists specifically invited for the publication.

 

Graphic Design

                This book is an investigation into the design and history of British magazines over the past 170 years. It identifies turning points and new directions in one of the most sensitive barometers of mass-market design taste, from the advent of two periodicals - Punch and the Illustrated London News - that changed publishing fundamentally, through to the beginnings of digital distribution. A magazine flourishes or folds according to its audience's response to its look and feel - sometimes more so than its written content - and this study of a developing history encompasses discussion of graphic design, typography, photography and innovative print technology. It explores why magazines have looked how they do. Published with full access to the National Art Library's unparalleled archive of periodicals, British Magazine Design is a definitive history.

 

Design

                Nas on language, Cat Power on looking inward, Spike Jonze on loving what you do, and Kim Gordon on feeling the flow. These are just a few of the indie stars and surprising insights collected in this gorgeous book by Huck magazine. Since launching in 2006, Huck has been at the vanguard of London's thriving independent publishing scene and has grown into an internationally distributed bi-monthly, with editions available on newsstands in 20 countries worldwide. Bringing together the best insights from over 60 of the most inspiring people Huck has spoken to over the years—along with exclusive photography and art that has come to embody Huck's distinct aesthetic—this book presents a diverse range of truths, creative wisdom, and life lessons from those who paddle against the flow.

 

Architecture

                  Despite the ever-growing sophistication of synthetic and digital tools, it's the natural world that captures the imaginations of today's vanguard designers. By looking to nature as a teacher rather than simply as a source for raw materials, pioneers in the emerging biomimicry movement are developing design methods and materials to create intelligent buildings that emulate life itself. In Hypernatural architecture and material experts Blaine Brownell and Marc Swackhamer present an international collection of forty-two case studies that illustrate astonishing new applications possible in this rapidly growing field, from Echoviren, a botanical pavilion that was designed to wilt into its surrounding redwood forest in Northern California, to the MIT Media Lab's Silk Pavilion, constructed by the threads of silkworms as they passed over scaffolding. Together, these projects show that by looking to nature, design can be a tool that makes our built environment more efficient, sustainable, and, most of all, livable.   

 

Photography

                A celebration of the eclectic and daring personal style of the actress and contemporary fashion icon Chloë Sevigny—famous for looking cool without looking like she’s trying. Chloë Sevigny has been a muse in the downtown creative scene for over three decades, beginning in the early ’90s when she modeled for Sassy, appeared in a Sonic Youth music video, and then starred in the controversial independent movie Kids (1995). Her quirky and avant-garde fashion sense was quickly noticed by indie magazines and the world’s top photographers. Since then, she has starred in dozens of films and television series, in addition to starting a fashion label with the trendy global boutique Opening Ceremony. This volume is a deeply personal illustrated chronicle of the evolution of Sevigny’s unique style throughout her career: from a teenage skater girl to award-winning film actress and fashion designer. The book includes early personal photos of Chloë taken by her high school friends; film stills; modeling appearances for brands such as Miu Miu and Chloé; magazine editorials for Purple, i-D, and The Face by top photographers such as Mark Borthwick, Terry Richardson, and Juergen Teller; and homages by artists such as Elizabeth Peyton and Karen Kilimnik. Additionally, Sevigny shares some of her treasured personal memorabilia, such as casting fliers, Polaroids, zines, and pages from her day planners. This volume will appeal to the legions of global Chloë fans and fashion industry followers, as well as a mainstream audience who will find this book an inspirational style bible.      

 

Fashion

                'Fashion is a big bubble, and sometimes I feel like popping it. 'Alexander McQueen, 2009. This definitive publication on Alexander McQueen (1969 - 2010) invites you into the creative mind of one of Britain's most brilliant, daring and provocative designers. Accompanying the V&A's landmark exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, this comprehensive catalogue features 28 ground-breaking essays from expert fashion commentators and cultural scholars which examine the richness and complexity of McQueen s visionary fashion. The publication includes over 440 striking images, from intimate backstage portraits and editorials by leading fashion photographers to previously unpublished sketches and research boards from the McQueen archive. At the centre of the book is a Cabinet of Curiosities gatefold with a specially commissioned photo shoot that showcases McQueen s breath-taking attention to detail. The book closes with an encyclopaedic survey of all of McQueen's London collections, from his 1992 MA graduate collection to his final collection, posthumously presented in March 2010.

                “For the third instalment in our collaboration with TOILETPAPER for our advertising campaigns, we worked with Maurizio, Micol and Pierpaolo to take people on a mysterious journey to an unfamiliar world. A place where the ordinary is slightly distorted, mirrors lead to other dimensions and the strange and beautiful coexist in singular harmony. We love that David Lynch’s (the inspiration for our collections) skewed and somewhat disruptive sense of storytelling seamlessly fits with how the TOILETPAPER approach image making and the final results speak for themselves. Needless to say we’re delighted with the outcome and hope everyone else enjoys the images as much as we do.” Carol Lim & Humberto Leon.

                   Pradasphere is not about the past; it is a snapshot of a single moment: now. In this comprehensive collection of Prada's work, Pradasphere llustrates the house's unique place in contemporary culture and explores the outside forces that shape its vision. From Prada's origins and the clothing, accessories and films made to the creative input of collaborators and the insights drawn from disciplines such as art, film and architecture, this book shows Prada's unique vision and wide influence. Pradasphere is more than a collection of Prada ephemera; it's an exploration of the way Prada uses design to explore ideas about the world. Through clothing, film, architecture, and more, Prada shows that design is about the joy of working and creative exploration and how that spirit finds its way into all that is made.

 

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Forthcoming Books Seen This Week 28 January 2015

Architecture

                 Extreme innovation: From the Arabian desert to the Finnish tundra, the immense possibilities of adaptive architecture. BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group presents HOT TO COLD, an odyssey of architectural adaptation. The book coincides with the HOT TO COLD show at the National Building Museum in Washington DC and presents 60 case studies in harsh climate conditions in order to examine where and how we live on our planet. As we travel from one end of the spectrum to its opposite we will see that the more harsh the climate gets, the more intense its impact on the architecture. The central challenge is to mitigate the climatic extremes for hospitable human life, while finding solutions that can be both economically and environmentally profitable. Architecture is the art and science of accommodating the lives we want to live. Our cities and buildings aren't givens; they are the way they are because that is as far as we have gotten to date. They are the best efforts of our ancestors and fellow planetizens, and if they have shortcomings, it is up to us to continue that effort, pick up where they left off. HOT TO COLD stays true to BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group's grand mission to find a pragmatic utopia, shaping not only a particular structural entity, but the kind of world we wish to inhabit. 

 

Photography

                Archipelago is a journey into an interior, upriver, towards an enigmatic hinterland. At any one instance, Matthew Porter sets up correlations between disparate images, configured on each page like islands in an archipelago, clusters which form their own, indigenous subjects. Short texts, placed at intervals, reveal the connective tissue binding varied subjects – Jane Fonda and the Vietnam War, the Hawaiian Island of Kaua'i and Hollywood. What interests Porter is the legacy of the photographic image, and its capacity reach across history, to make intelligible to us what we already know, or, encountered at the right moment, that which we could not otherwise know. “Porter’s stills function like portals”, writes Lindsay Caplan, “obliquely suggestive of historical events, modernist styles, and codified genres, sometimes all at the same time… this very contemporary condition in which knowing too much and knowing too little invoke the same visceral state”.

 

Art

                NOW LEAVES by Michael Dean presents itself as a block. Physically it adopts the scale of a human hand, its weight present, its structure flexible, almost human. The pages fall loosely apart to reveal dense black graphics – letters shaped as tongues, twisted to form barely legible words. Each page inscribed, playing on repetition, the word ‘leaves’ repeatedly tongued. The successive pages form statements, occasionally benign – it starts LEAVES FOR LEAVES – but as the pages turn a more visceral violence exudes from the pages – SLAVE LEAVES HAPPY LEAVES, FUCKING LEAVES LOST LEAVES KILL LEAVES, BLOODY LEAVES POSITION LEAVES. Whilst visually arresting, the experience of reading Dean’s book reduces reading to the physical intimacy of your own mouth; as you to attempt to read the barely decipherable words to take pleasure in the babble, you feel your eyes contort as your own tongue does trying to shape the words, tempted to twist, stretch or replicate the graphic tonguing on the page.

                The Bedouin workers were settling down in the field for the night. They didn’t sleep in a building but on the road that runs around the edge of the olive grove. It was really striking; the contrast with their colourful blankets and the prison and the olives and the beautiful light of the setting sun. I stood at the point where the picture was eventually taken and I could see the whole scene and I thought, maybe this could be a picture. From Daybreak by Jeff Wall. During his first visit to Israel in October 2010, Jeff Wall came upon a scene of Bedouin olive pickers sleeping on a farm near Mitzpe Ramon, which sits in the shadow of a large prison. Struck by the encounter between priison and orchard, between the freedom of those sleeping under the sky contrasted against those who are not visible, sleeping in cells underground, Wall resolved to return and recreate the scene. The image was meticulously restaged during the next harvest in October 2011. Setting up camp at a nearby hotel, with the laundry room converted into a makeshift lab, Wall worked with a team of Israeli assistants, following the same routine each day: waking before dawn, photographing just as the sun rose, making several exposures over a 10 minute spell. The image was sought over three weeks.

                 A sculptural species…,  a new  life-form in its own right? For the past seven years, photographer and artist Lena Herzog has followed the evolution of a new, kinetic species. Intricate as insects, but with bursts of equine energy, the  Strandbeests  or  beach creatures, are the creation of Dutch artist Theo Jansen, who has been working for nearly two decades to develop a new life-form that moves, and even survives, on its own. Set to roam the beaches of Holland, the Strandbeests pick up the wind in their gossamer wings and spring, as if by metamorphosis, into action. As if it were blood, not the breeze, running through their delicate forms, they quiver, cavort, and trot against the sun and sea, pausing to change direction if they sense loose sand or water that might destabilize their movement. Coinciding with a travelling exhibition, Herzog's photographic tribute captures Jansen's menagerie in a meditative black and white, showcasing Jansen's imaginative vision, as well as the compelling intersection of animate and inanimate in his creatures. The result is a work of art in its own right and a mesmerizing encounter not only with a very surrealist brand of marvellous, but also with whole new ideas of existence.

               

Graphic Design

                The anatomy of letters. Everything you could ever want to know about printing letters and numbers. Looking back as far as man's first efforts to communicate with visual signs and drawings, Letter Fountain is a completely unique typeface handbook: in addition to examining the form and anatomy of every letter in the alphabet (as well as punctuation marks and special characters), the book cross-references type designs with important works of art and art movements from Gutenberg's times until today. Further attention is given to the esthetics of the digital age and the choice of the right typeface for a job. Rounding out the guide are an in-depth comparison between sans-serif and serif typefaces, an essay about measuring systems and indications. advice about typographic rules, plus a manual for developing digital fonts. Over 150 typefaces, their origins, and font characteristics are discussed in detail, visually explained by full page tables including scale, weight, and useful alternatives. The extensive appendix contains a general index, a typeface index (more than 300 are depicted in the book), an index of over 250 type designers, an exhaustive index of type foundries, a graphical dictionary, and a bibliography for further reading. The original Dutch edition Letterfontein received a Certificate for Typographic Excellence from Type Directors Club New York (TDC) in 2010, and a red-dot design award from the Design Zentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany.

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Forthcoming Books Seen This Week - ending 23 January 2015

Design

                Spatial Strategies for Interior Design: This inspirational and practical guide to organizing and planning interior spaces is packed with photographs, diagrams, models, case studies and step-by-step instructions. It provides useful information on finding ways to start the design process, analyzing existing buildings, using planning diagrams, developing three-dimensional spatial compositions, designing in section, how to communicate your design ideas and much more.

                What was once considered incomplete and in need of repair, is chic and hip today: in new office buildings copper pipes are no longer hidden, but are exposed and artfully displayed against the raw formwork pattern of a concrete wall with ingenious lighting. Likewise, the unplastered, cracked walls of a restaurant in a former factory building are creatively altered with translucent modern textile materials. Rough Style presents buildings and spaces by architects and interior designers who work out expressive and most rigorous design concepts. Refraining from the accustomed ideals of beauty and perfection is the new approach. The uncompromising and exciting relationship in the encounter of innovative design schemes and raw unfinished states or traces of the past opens up new aesthetic horizons, creating new standards of value.

               

Architecture

                Cylinders, spheres and cubes are a small handful of shapes that can be defined by a single word. However, most shapes cannot be found in a dictionary. They belong to an alternative plastic world defined by trigonometry: a mathematical world where all shapes can be described under one systematic language and where any shape can transform into another.  Morphing: A Guide to Mathematical Transformations for Architects and Designers is a visually striking guidebook clearly and systematically lays out the basic foundation for using these mathematical transformations as design tools. It is intended for architects, designers, and anyone with the curiosity to understand the link between shapes and the equations behind them.              

 

Photography

                Due to his age and failing health, the prolific photographer Nobuyoshi Araki believes death is catching up with him, and titled this photobook, published in conjunction with a solo exhibition at three Japanese museums, accordingly: Photography For The Afterlife. Presented here are 300 pages of colour and black-and-white images he produced throughout his career, a chronicle of life’s melancholy journey. In diverse ways, Araki captures the mundane scenes, urban landscapes and intimate portraits for which he is best known, his filter of the world around him expressed in both nuance and frank candour. With texts by Mario Perniola and Masaru Hamada, plus a conversation between Araki and Kaori Fujino.

 

Fashion

                London 1996: Alexander McQueen took over the Hawksmoor masterpiece Christ Church in London’s East End for what was quite possibly the greatest fashion show on earth. A candle-lit, cruciform catwalk with a backdrop of stained-glass windows set the tone for an extraordinary collection. Lace sat against chiffon and rubbed shoulders with couture and club-culture clothing and digital print. Dante was the seminal collection that would resonate throughout Alexander McQueen’s career. Inferno features unique photographs shot behind the scenes, with raw, unseen pictures of the designer, models and clothes. The fashion creatives who worked with McQueen to make the show such a success recall this pivotal time in the designer’s career and reflect on what made 'Dante' truly groundbreaking. Newly created imagery of clothes shown on the catwalk gives an insight into why this collection was so special.

 

Art

                Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971 examines the beginnings of Ono’s extensive career, demonstrating her pioneering role in visual art, performance and music during the 1960s and early 1970s. The exhibition begins in New York in December 1960, where Ono initiated a performance series with La Monte Young in her Chambers Street loft. Over the course of the decade, Ono earned international recognition, staging Cut Piece in Tokyo and Kyoto in 1964, exhibiting at the Indica Gallery in London in 1966, and launching her global War is Over! campaign in 1969. Ono returned to New York in the early 1970s and organized an unsanctioned one woman show at The Museum of Modern Art. Over forty years after Ono’s unofficial MoMA debut, the Museum will present its first exhibition dedicated exclusively to the artist’s work. The publication evaluates the broader cultural context of Ono’s early work and features five sections reflecting her geographic locations during this period and the corresponding evolution of her artistic practice. Each chapter includes an introduction written by a guest scholar, artwork descriptions, new interviews with key figures from the time, and a selection of primary documents culled from newspapers, magazines and journals.

                Through radically restricted means, On Kawara’s work engages the personal and historical consciousness of place and time. Kawara’s practice is often associated with the rise of Conceptual art, yet in its complex wit and philosophical reach, it stands well apart. Organized with the cooperation of the artist, On Kawara—Silence will be the first full representation of Kawara’s output, beginning in 1964 and including every category of work, much of it produced during his travels across the globe: date paintings (the Today series); postcards (the I Got Up series); telegrams (the I Am Still Alive series); maps (the I Went series); lists of names (the I Met series); newspaper cuttings (the I Read series); the inventory of paintings (Journals); and calendars (One Hundred Years and One Million Years). The exhibition will also present numerous drawings produced in Paris in 1964, which are fascinating proposals for unrealized works; and Kawara’s only two extant paintings of 1965, Location and Title, which herald the Today series.

               

Graphic Design

                Start Me Up! is a compendium of innovative corporate design for a new generation. Brimming with imaginative business ideas that range from a turban tailoring house to an artistically ambitious mattress manufactory, it presents brands that break away from stereotypes through their visual identities. The book also shows that entrepreneurship today is more personal than ever before. It features outstanding work that results when young founders turn to creative agencies that then transform their business ideas into personalized narratives through visual storytelling strategies. From a beauty parlour in Singapore to a whisky distillery in Finland, from cutting-edge logotypes to high-quality packaging, Start Me Up! truly showcases the best in branding from around the world.

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Forthcoming Books Seen This Week - ending 16 January 2015

Architecture

                Brick is a celebration of the basic building blocks of Architecture: collating fascinating and beautiful images of brick structures from the ancient remains of Tepe Sialk ziggurat in Iran, dating from 3,000 BC to the functional solidity of Battersea and Bankside power stations in London, Brick will engage anyone interested in architecture and encourage them to think about the sculptural qualities of buildings. Familiar 20th century icons by Mies van der Rohe and Louis Kahn are featured alongside vernacular structures such as the conical grain silos of central Mexico, the sublime Bagan Temples in Myanmar and the world-famous Great Wall of China.    

 

Photography

                Suzanne Perrottet (1889–1983) grew up in Geneva, studied rhythmics with Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and taught in Hellerau, where Mary Wigman was one of her pupils. In 1912, she met the dancer, choreographer, and theorist Rudolf von Laban, moved with him to the Monte Verità artists’ colony near Ascona and later to Zurich, where she performed at the Dada soirées. The summer of 1913 was a great turning point on Monte Verità! Along with Laban, Wigman, and others, Perrottet discovered the expressive power of natural movements and gestures, of sounds and words. It was the birth of modern dance. Everyone was to benefit from the spirit of natural movement; the goal was to liberate body and mind. In 1920 Perrottet founded a school in Zürich. There she not only taught dancers, actors, children, and adults, including the physically and mentally impaired, but also devoted herself to intense, ongoing research. To compensate the lack of literature available in this new field, she started cutting pictures of movements, gestures, and physical expressions out of magazines. In the course of 60 years, she amassed an archive of over 10,000 pictures, which she classified by categories. Suzanne Perrottet continued working until she was 89 years old. After she died, her banana boxes of clippings were forgotten. Rediscovered in this book, they give an insight into a unique collection—a visual archive of movement.

                Muhammad Ali, Zurich, 26.12.1971 shows the iconic American smooth-talking rhymester-boxer before and during his prize fight in Zurich against German heavyweight Jürgen Blin on December 26, 1971. Hans-Ruedi Jaggi, a Swiss hustler and promoter, succeeded in bringing the champ to Zurich for the fight. At Zurich’s Playboy Bar, Jaggi made a bet with Jack Starck, a society reporter for the Swiss tabloid Blick, for a bottle of Ballantine’s that, after having already got Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones to give concerts in Zurich, he would now lure the mighty Muhammad Ali to town for a fight. He subsequently flew to the States three times but couldn’t get an “in” with Ali. Eventually he made it through to Ali’s Black Muslims. When asked by the clan’s spiritual leader Herbert Muhammad, “What’s with the dough?” he pulled $10,000 — pretty much all the money he had at the time — out of his silver ankle-boots and a preliminary deal was promptly signed and sealed on a sheet of hotel stationery. Zurich photographer Eric Bachmann accompanied Ali during his ten-day stay, on his winter jog through Zurich’s woods or buying shoes in a working-class neighborhood, going through his training drills and, finally, during the big fight, which rapidly climaxed in the seventh round when he knocked out the blond German giant Jürgen Blin. Muhammad Ali, Zurich, 26.12.1971 documents the events in brisk chronological order, as befits a boxer who “floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee,” in a rapid-fire succession of impressively intimate and humorous shots against the placid urban backdrop of mid-’70s Zurich. The book is richly illustrated with a great many facsimiled boxing match program pages and newspaper clippings.

                 This self-published second part of his "Diary" by Quentin de Briey proposes photographs from his daily life and travels between 2012 and 2014 and includes portraits of friends and celebrities such as Claudia Cardinale, Stephen Jones, Caroline de Maigret, Mos Def, etc… Each picture is accompanied by a handwritten note indicating the place and date of the shooting.

                Winslow Arizona features a selection of images Stephen Shore presented in contemporary artist Doug Aitken’s project “Station to Station.” For the project, which Aitken calls a “nomadic happening,” he rented a train, which departed from New York and traveled to nine cities, including Minneapolis, through the southwest, and finally arriving San Francisco in a three-week journey. He invited artists, writers, filmmakers, and performers to participate, and staged a “happening,” which involved exhibitions and performances, at each stop. The images in Winslow Arizona, which Stephen Shore shot in a day while revisiting Winslow, Arizona, where he made his seminal work American Surfaces, are presented unedited, in the order that he shot them, making it an improvisational work.

 

Art

               Painting, with its endless capacity for reinvention, continues to occupy a privileged position in Western art. Since the mid-20th century, new practices have pushed art into territories such as performance and installation, leading some critics and artists to declare painting irrelevant or even finished. But these developments have, in fact, driven painting to new heights of innovation and interest, making these seventy years arguably the most lively in its history. Morgan Falconer tells the story beginning with Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists on both sides of the Atlantic, proceeds through postwar abstraction in France, social realism in East Germany, the end of geometric abstraction in Europe, American post-painterly abstraction, the handmade ready-mades of Rauschenberg and Johns, Pop's rise in Britain and the US, painting's confrontations with photography in the 1960s and beyond, the return of expressionism in the 1980s, new approaches to Pop in the 1990s and 2000s, and the continued variety of some of the most recent paintings to be made by a younger, 'post-medium' generation of artists.

                Long overdue, Non Stop Poetry: The Zines of Mark Gonzales is a comprehensive presentation of the zines made by Gonzales from the early-’90s to the present day. Gonzales, thought by many to be the greatest skateboarder of all time, is revealed by this significant book to deserve equal recognition as an artist and poet. His extraordinary production of more than 145 zines (the exact number is unknown since Gonzales kept no records of his output), is a remarkable artistic achievement worthy of the careful analysis and documentation provided by this book. Gonzales zines are made spontaneously using an argot all his own and demonstrate a remarkable gift for verse and drawing. Misshapen, hastily scribbled and collaged into brilliantly drawn and colored ephemeral pamphlets, these handmade zines continue a notable tradition of artist-made publications from Ed Ruscha to Raymond Pettibon. Upon critical contemplation of the aesthetic and philosophical contents of the zines, Gonzales’ creative genius becomes evident. From child-like drawings of playful characters scribbled over snapshots Gonzales took on his travels, to emotional poems about the mendacity of life with words scratched out creating complex and outré koans, Gonzales’s zines have a simplicity that showcases his whimsical and poignant mind. But most of all, there’s a freedom in the ephemeral nature of these thin paper volumes: Gonzales isn’t manacled to rules of any sort, and the results that he pours onto the page reflect that unbridled joie de vivre. Introduction by Kim Gordon and contributions from Rita Ackermann, Maurizio Cattelan, Cameron Jamie, Harmony Korine, Aaron Rose, Steven Salardino, Tom Sachs, Jocko Weyland, and others.

                One of the most popular Chinese artists exhibiting internationally and the first female Chinese artist to be exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Yin Xiuzhen is one of the most intriguing artistic chroniclers of modern life in China, and of the massive changes its economic boom has wrought upon the urban landscape. Perhaps her best known work is her Portable City series, for which she reconstructs world cities inside suitcases, using clothing recycled from residents of the city. Conjuring both fairy tales and thrift stores, these pieces originated in Xiuzhen's witnessing the urban transformations of her native Beijing. Fabric and recycled clothing are recurrent materials throughout her sculptures. This substantial, 308-page catalogue is the first broad retrospective of her work to date, with 300 colour illustrations and numerous reviews and interviews.

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Forthcoming Books Seen This Week - ending 9 January

Graphic Design

               While magazines such as Spin and The Face have disappeared from newsstands and mailboxes, non-traditional periodicals with names like Boneshaker, Lucky Peach, Anorak, WRAP, and Kinfolk are taking their places on shelves and coffee tables everywhere. Print is Dead. Long Live Print is an eye-opening look into the explosion of independent, creatively led magazines that are currently shaping the future of print journalism. It showcases over 50 examples of innovative magazines from around the globe. The book divides the magazines into genres, including art and culture, travel, sports, and style. Each periodical is represented by selected spreads and newly commissioned photography, along with a brief introductory text. Interviews with editors, art directors, and founders from each magazine offer background information as well as insight into why they decided to start their publications and the challenges they face. A directory at the back lists dozens more magazines worth investigating. This paean to the printed word is filled with creativity and innovation as well as hope for the future of print media. Request email when in stock

               On Display: 50 Posters Designed for the Hayward Gallery is a large format collection of highlights from the Hayward Gallery’s archive of exhibition posters. The archive acts as both a who’s-who of contemporary art and a compilation of some of Britain’s finest exhibition poster design. Focused on a golden age of British typography, this collection brings together designs by the likes of Neville Brody, Theo Crosby, Richard Hollis and Roger Huggett - designers who would go on to define contemporary British graphic design. On Display is both a collection of highly desirable posters to tear out and frame, as well as a fascinating insight into art and graphic design in the second half of the twentieth century. Catherine Flood, Curator of Posters and Prints, V&A, introduces her selection with an essay placing them within the context of twentieth century graphic design. Each poster is further accompanied by an individual text by writer Hettie Judah illuminating the related exhibition and the work of the designer. A3 in format with perforated pages, each of the posters have been carefully re-scanned and colour-corrected to the highest possible standard, ready to be read, framed and displayed. Designed by Claus Due at Designbolaget. Request email when in stock

 

Sound

               Which mechanisms and logics of decision making and choice lie at the basis of the selections made by people working in the pop music circuit? Which general frames of thinking and evaluating do pop music professionals apply? Almost as a rule, these people will talk about the same bands, those that make the crossover to the outside world – the ‘hypes’. What are the origins of these hypes? How is it possible that everybody talks about the same bands? What makes people talk about some, yet the same bands, while remaining silent about other bands? And why is it that only a small percentage of the legion of bands that stand at the gates get ample airplay, concerts, press coverage and, as a result, a sufficiently large audience? Alternative Mainstream deals with the music segment that lies between the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘underground’. This segment includes genres that range from hip hop to rock and from folk to electronic music. Gert Keunen attempts to uncover which aesthetics and ideologies lie at the basis of the cultural construct that is the alternative mainstream and embeds his findings in a broader socio-economic context. Doina Petrescu, Precarias a la deriva, Simon Sheikh, Stavros Stavrides, Maiko Tanaka, Marina Vishmidt, Sarah van Walsum, et al. Request email when in stock

 

Design

               The Grand Domestic Revolution Handbook is a compendium of living research developed by artists, designers, theorists, neighbours, and activists who investigate and expand the status of the home outside the narrow lens of private concerns, but in consideration of the great potential in supporting a privacy that revitalizes and allows for other forms of sociality. It offers numerous entries that include case studies, project documentation, ephemera, analysis, and theory in the form of artistic, collective, and spatial design operations. This collection of texts and images is thereby unusual, complex, and fascinating, yet as constructive as any home interior catalogue. The book provides tools for building a domestic commons where private and public merge and are thereby redefined. GDR is informed by neo-Marxist, post-structuralist, and late nineteenth-century material feminist views on domestic labour, issues, actions, and research. Inhabiting the structure of a 1960s home economics design manual, the book investigates existing domestic regimes and divides materials into the following key categories: Home Apparatus, Accommodations, Work at Home, Properties and Oikos, and Neighbouring (Organizing). Many projects are woven throughout these chapters. They constitute a diverse and sometimes conflicting tapestry of domestic tactics, apparatuses of disruption, and political entanglements to spark your imagination and catalyse your own GDR practices.  Whether you are a flexible worker, domestic worker, house husband, elderly caregiver, mother, activist, or student intern, this book aims to provide an evocative — if not useful — resource for an artistic, political, social, or personal "revolution" from the very place where you eat, sleep, and work. It brings together relations and tools being forged between the private and public spheres, and across multiple fields, in the interest of (in)forming society from the very inner but common sphere of the domestic realm. Contributors: Agency, Sepake Angiama, Ask!, Ruth Buchanan, Binna Choi, Doris Denekamp, Silvia Federici, Katherine Gibson, Arend Groosman, Shannon Jackson, Dolores Hayden, Christina Kiaer, Margaret Kohn, Gabriele Kunsch, Emily Pethick. Request email when in stock

                The Complete Designers’ Lights II (1950–1990). Clémence and Didier Krzentowski – the founders and directors of the leading contemporary design Galerie kreo – have been collecting lights for 30 years. Focusing particularly on Italian and French design, their collection is the most important of its kind today, spanning creations from the 1950s to the 1990s. It includes large groups of works by Paulin, Guariche, Castiglioni, and the biggest collection of Sarfatti. Conceived as a catalogue raisonné of nearly 500 lights, this book also includes a discussion between Didier Krzentowski, the design historian and Director of the Bordeaux Musée des Arts décoratifs et du Design, Constance Rubini, and the journalist and design critic Pierre Doze. Also featured is an essay by the design and art critic Alex Coles focusing on the relationship between light design and light art, mainly through a parallel study of Gino Sarfatti’s and Dan Flavin’s works. Request email when in stock

 

Architecture

                Cedric Price Works 1952-2003: A Forward-minded Retrospective.  This anthology brings together for the first time all of the projects and articles & talks by British architect Cedric Price (1934-2003).  A chronological arrangement places Price in the context of postwar England, illuminating how cultural, social and political factors conditioned his work from the outset, and then subsequently shaped its development as his practice changed from the 1960s-90s. Full project descriptions are set alongside illustrations, many previously unpublished. Content material is drawn from the original work. Edited by Samantha Hardingham, the books present the munificence of Price: thinker, philosopher, artist and unparalleled raconteur – a thoroughly modern traditionalist. Request email when in stock

                Small Architecture/Natural Architecture: Kengo Kuma. This book combines two extended essays by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, which together provide an overview of his key built works and a summation of his ideas about architecture, developed over the course of his career to date. Originally published as two smaller books, and until now only available in Japanese, this edition comprises a lucid theoretical manifesto for humble, sustainable architecture sensitive to materials and to place. Request email when in stock

 

Theory

                The Czech Files is a result of visits and discussions carried out by Hans Ulrich Obrist in artists’ studios in Prague around 2001 and 2008. Interviews with Milan Grygar, Jirí Kovanda, Karel Malich, and many others, map the historical events as well as unknown stories of the actors of the Czech ‘second avant-garde’. The artists and intellectuals of this generation were born in between 1920–1945. They lived through the 1960s cultural upheaval known as the Prague Spring, and witnessed the ‘normalization’ of the 1970s when censorship was re-introduced. This series of interviews contextualize a generation of Czech artists within the historical events that marked their lives and careers, and draw attention to their urgency to resist historical events while keeping their artistic practices sustained, radical, and vital. Published with tranzit.cz, this publication is a unique encounter with key artistic figures and moments of history, which created a complex landscape of artistic practices under socialism, as well as after the changes. Request email when in stock

                (Curating) From A to Z offers a summary of the development of curatorial practice over the last two decades seen through the eyes of curator Jens Hoffmann. In this publication each letter of the alphabet evokes a particular word related to the world of exhibition making: From A (as in Artist) and B (as in Biennial) to R (as in Retrospective) and W (as in White Cube). Employing a diarist style, the curator presents his personal curatorial alphabet with a similar transparency and the same idiosyncratic character revealed in many of his exhibitions. The entries are not only stimulating and intellectually rigorous, but also emotionally engaging. Request email when in stock

 

Art

                The Island: London mapped. A masterpiece of imaginative cartography, artist Stephen Walter’s detailed maps of London reveal much more about the city than its winding streets and historic buildings. London’s streets, built up over more than two thousand years, are a maze of history, cultures, and stories. In his fantastically detailed maps of the city, Stephen Walter translates these elements into a tangle of insightful yet humorous words and symbols that make up a complex of hidden meanings and wider contradictions. Testament to Walter’s skill and importance as a cartographer, his ground-breaking, oversized map The Island was one of only two contemporary works to feature in the seminal Magnificent Maps exhibition held at the British Library in 2010, the other by Grayson Perry, alongside hugely important historical maps, such as Pierre Desceliers's 1550 world map. The work, which reimagines London as an insular body of land surrounded by water, has been reconfigured and turned into Walter’s own version of a London street atlas, with readers able to explore his unique vision of the city by flicking through the pages. A grid at the front of the book lets readers navigate their way through the map and the large-scale reproductions allow for close examination of his witty depictions. Walter’s maps have a cult following and now a wider audience will be able to immerse themselves in his personal vision that both celebrates the art of cartography and pokes intelligent fun at the city he calls home. Request email when in stock

                Ulay has been a pioneer of Polaroid photography and one of the central figures of performance art since the 1970s. A singular presence among the artists of his generation, his radically innovative work, partly known for his twelve-year partnership with Marina Abramović, has received critical acclaim worldwide. This generous volume Whispers reveals an extremely innovative oeuvre, coherently rooted in a personal life philosophy guided by strong ethical principles. Contributors: Marina Abramović, Laurie Anderson, Timea Lelik, Tevz Logar, Thomas McEvilley, Charlemagne Palestine, Lena Pislak, Silvio Wolf.  Request email when in stock

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