Monday, April 30, 2012

[Untitled]






[No title]. By Christine Karlsson. INGASVAR, 2012. 36pp., illustrated throughout, 10x14,2cm.

I bought quite a lot of zines and work bordering on the artist book-side of things at Stockholm International Comics Festival this weekend.

The fair was a really good mix actually - I was happy I made it there on the last day...

This (untitled) zine, by Christine Karlsson (her flickr here), I really liked for its fairly old-school, photocopier-feel (albeit in (faded) colour, rather than black and white).

It's her first photo zine and will be part of a larger project with the working title INGASVAR (which means no answers/no replies in Swedish) - more info here.

[updated post]

Friday, April 27, 2012

The Box.


The Box. Book in a Day (17 April). By Catherine Cartwright. Catherine Cartwright / Prt Scr Press, 2012. 10pp., illustrated throughout, 11x14,5cm. Limited and numbered edition of 50.

Artist and printmaker Catherine Cartwright made 'The Box' as a one day project on 17 April, Palestinian Prisoners' Day, to raise awareness of men, women and children imprisoned under inhumane actions throughout the world.

All proceeding from the sale of this artist book is donated to Amnesty International. You can read more here and here.


Book description:

"On Tuesday 17th April 2012 I am making a book in a day. This artist book is being created from scratch and a limited edition of 50 will be printed, in the same day. The artist-run risograph Prt Scr Press is being very helpful in this my first venture into multiple book-making.

Why Tuesday 17th April?
There is a call for this day to be International Prisoners Day, particularly regarding prisoners unlawfully imprisoned or political prisoners. It is already a day to mark the detention of Palestinian Prisoners. It also marks for two prisoners in Louisiana, 40 years of solitary confinement. Forty years in solitary confinement in a cell measuring 2m by 3m. Amnesty International are campaigning for the Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, to end their ordeal. Find out more here."

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

SP67.




SP67. La strada della Tramontana Scura / The road of the Dark North Wind. By Roberto Schena. Text by Paolo Caredda. Punctum Press, 2012. 112pp., illustrated throughout, 21,4x28,6 cm.

Beautiful, haunting images by Roberto Schena that creates a poetic journey through a dreamlike and almost spellbound or otherworldly landscape.

Much more than "just" a road trip captured, it's a journey into your soul.


Book description:

"SP67: 13 kilometers of a provincial road from Apparizione, a neighbourhood on the borderline of Genoa, to Calcinara, four houses in the inland.

Around here, 'Dark Nord Wind' is the name given to the North Wind when it carries rain and storms.

The author spent three years to cover these 13 kilometers. More or less, it is the right amount of time if someone wants to catch the mysteries of a Place.
His car parked, he descended deep into the woods, uninvited. Expecting to retrace someone else’s steps, studying the plants, amidst the fog, in the night.


Three years of following his subjects, climbing, meeting the local inhabitants. Eating fast before the storm arrives.

These are memoirs of an explorer who desires to extract the sublime where others wouldn’t think to look for it: in a stretch of road, in an encounter with a wild pig, in a frozen night.

Two short stories by Paolo Caredda form the prologue and the epilogue.

A map of the territory provides a geographical reference to those who are interested, with their imagination, in reconstructing the author’s journey.

And for those who live in Genoa, this visual essay becomes an inspiration for discovering all the hidden places portrayed in these photographs."

Monday, April 23, 2012

Tangente.






Tangente. By Laurent Chardon. Text by Isabelle Tessier. Les Editions Poursuite, 2010. 40 pp., illustrated throughout, 13,5x18,5cm. Edition of 800.

Book description:

"In January 2002, eager to break away from the daily humdrum, Laurent Chardon decided to go out on a limb, bound from Moscow to Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia, final stop on the Trans-Mongolia Railway.(... )

Exploring his chosen city provides a standpoint that is, as it were, rudderless, a 'situationist' process of moving about the city along the lines of 'a technique of passing rapidly through different atmospheres' (cf. Guy Debord in Bulletin number 2 of L’International situationniste, December 1958).

This approach means ignoring the usual reasons for taking a journey, doing away with notions of travelling, strolling around, or just wandering about aimlessly.

The aim is to draw up a 'psycho-geography' of a city by studying people’s emotional behaviour in the context of their geographical milieu.

What face does the cityscape present? How do its inhabitants experience it? What are the undercurrents, the meeting-points, the breaking-points? (...)"

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

In the Land of Punctuation.





In the Land of Punctuation. By Christian Morgernstern. Illustrated by Rathna Ramanathan, translated by Sirish Rao. Tara Books, 2009. 32pp., illustrated throughout, 23,5x16,5cm. Images from here.

I really love this book, it sort of intersects in many of the areas that really matters to me. It's pretty astonishing the original poem was written in 1905...

The translation - and resulting English verse - by Sirish Rao is very, very good, and the typographic illustrations (or "visual translation", language into image) by Rathna Ramanathan are pretty sensational.


Book description:

"Written in 1905 by the German poet Christian Morgenstern, 'In the Land of Punctuation' is a darkly comic linguistic caprice that holds a resonant mirror to our times.

Situated at the crossroads of language, design, and politics, this illustrated edition is a unique picture book for adults.

Translated faithfully by Sirish Rao, with typographic illustrations by Rathna Ramanathan, this is a brilliantly inventive dance of text and image.

[extract:]

The peaceful land of Punctuation
is filled with tension overnight

When the stops and commas of the nation
call the semi-colons ‘parasites’ "

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Oooo!






Oooo! By Gay Wegerif. Éditions MeMo, 2009. 28pp., illustrated throughout, 17x23cm.

I first came across Gay Wegerif's work when I bought one of her books (Marigold) about 6-7 years ago at the (sadly now no-more) London Artist Book Fair.

It's still one of the happiest books I own! (Happy Birthday E...)


Book description:

"A sucession of special delivery vans arrive to create a wild garden."

Monday, April 16, 2012

JFL: What Does "Why" Mean?






JFL: What Does "Why" Mean? By Octavian Esanu. J&L Books. 200p., 18,3x13 cm. Edition of 1500. Images from here.

Book description:

"Hilarious and profound. In 2001, while residing at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, artist and curator Octavian Esanu read hundreds of interviews and essays by artists and art critics.

He then formed a new text out of questions about art, that he culled from his readings. Each question is duly footnoted.

Originally published in 2002 in Germany by Edition Solitude, 'JFL: What Does "Why" Mean?' is now available in North America, re-typeset and printed by J&L.

Octavian Esanu is a Moldovan artist and a Ph.D Candidate at Duke University.

_________________________

[excerpt]

Foreword:
JS: Exactly what does that mean? LR: What do you mean? RS: I mean what's the meaning of that? PG: [...] “what kind of meaning?”... JS: What does it mean to you? RI: And what does it mean to me? NJ: You know what I mean? SL: What did she mean by that? YM: What it means? AZ: What does this mean? Q: What does that mean? HC: What do they mean? LB: Some people will say “What do you mean by that? [...]” PC: [...] “Do you know what I mean?”

__________
JS: Jeanne Siegel, “Multi-Media: Painting, Sculpture, Sound” (panel with Lukin, Rauschenberg and Rivers on November 21, 1966), in Jeanne Siegel, Artwords: Discourse on the 60’s and 70’s, (De Capo Press, 1992), p. 151, LR: Larry Rivers, ibid., p. 165, RS: Robert Smithson, “Four Conversations between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,” (1969-1970), Edited and annotated by Eva Schmidt in Jack Flam, (ed.), Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1996), p. 214, PG: Philip Guston see “Philip Guston Talking” (1978), in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, (eds.), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: a sourcebook of artists’ writings, (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 249, JS: Joan Simon, “Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Bruce Nauman” interview by Joan Simon, in Gabriele Detterer (ed.), Art Recollection: Artists’ Interviews and Statements in the Nineties, (Florence: Danilo Montanari & Exit & Zona Archives Editori, 1997), p. 180, RI: Robert Irwin, “Being and Circumstance: Notes Toward a Confidential Art” (1985), in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, (eds.), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: a sourcebook of artists’ writings, (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 573, NJ: Neil Jenney, “Earth” (1969), (Symposium at White Museum, Cornell University) in Jack Flam, (ed.), Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1996), p. 185, SL: Susan Lipper in Trip, see John Slyce “Reading Susan Lipper’s ‘Trip’” in Camera Austria, 72/2000, p. 44, YM: Yves Michaud, “Joan Mitchell, Interview with Yves Michaud” (1986), in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, (eds.), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: a sourcebook of artists’ writings, (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 33, AZ: Andrei Zhdanov, “Speech to the Congress of Soviet Writers,” 1934, in Charles Harrison & Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory 1900-1990: an anthology of changing ideas, (Oxford, Malden: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1992), p. 409, Q: Question in “An Introductory Conversation, Arthur C. Danto” see L&B volume 11, p. 54, HC: Harry Cooper, “On Über Jazz: Replaying Adorno with the Grain” in OCTOBER no. 75, (Winter, 1996), p. 132, LB: Louise Bourgeois, “Louise Bourgeois Interview with Donald Kuspit” (1988) in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds.), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: a sourcebook of artists’ writings, (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 41, PC: Paul Cobley, Semiotics for Beginners, by Paul Cobley, illustrated by Litza Jansz (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1997), p. 148.
"

Friday, April 13, 2012

Utkantsliv






Utkantsliv. For Udkant/On the margins, Doverodde Book Arts Festival 2012. Book by Sara Elgerot / Rare Autumn, 2012. 26pp., illustrated throughout, 20,5x15,5cm.

Book description:

'Utkantsliv' (Swedish for life on the outskirts or life on the margins), is an exploration of an unknown entity for me in my home town of Stockholm - a place now strangely unfamiliar to me after years abroad.

I started discovering these anonymous areas on the outskirts of the city, mainly just houses/housing blocks sprung up in close proximity to public transport. I got very interested in these "hinterlands", their strange, careless mix of nature and industrial elements.

This book is the result of walks through one of these areas. The photographs are purposefully anonymous and up-close, void of people and wider context, a highly personal view and examination of somewhere strangely impersonal and interchangeable.


This book was made for Doverodde Book Arts Festival 2012 (17-21 May 2012) on the theme of Udkant/On the margins. The Book Arts exhibition 'Udkant/On the margins', of which this book is part, will be on until August 5th, 2012.

Materials: photographs printed with inkjet on matte, double-sided, coated paper (175gsm). Hand-folded, hand-trimmed and hand-sewn, with a soft cover.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Still Life. Killing Time.






Still Life. Killing Time. By Ed Clark. Dewi Lewis, 2007. 72 pp., illustrated throughout, 31x24,7cm. Images from here.

Book description:

"Taken over the course of more than a year of exclusive access, this work applies large format still life photography to the context of a unique prison community, E Wing at Kingston Prison in Portsmouth. For eight years this was Britain’s only wing dedicated to holding elderly lifers: murderers, rapists, paedophiles and other violent criminals aged from their late 50s to over 80 years old.

'Still Life: Killing Time', is not simply a reportage about a particular prison.

Elements of metaphor, abstraction and documentary explore the experience of long term incarceration and the passage of time, and touch on how ageing and physical decline affect the prison environment.

The claustrophobia of these close up, deliberate and regular compositions reflects both the nature of the place and the experience of working in E Wing.

The recurring motifs - bars, squares, boxes, grids - show the segmentation and ordering of time and space that is fundamental to prison life, while the details of the inmates’ possessions, notice-boards, walls, tables and bedsides suggest their state of mind and how they adapt to long term incarceration and getting old in an institution.

Edmund Clark has built a reputation for combining strong ideas with an ability to work in sensitive situations and with people on the margins of society.

His work combines still life, portrait and landscape to explore the relationship between environment, memory and the passage of time."

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

House of Coates.






House of Coates (second edition). By Brad Zellar with photos by Lester B. Morrison. Designed by Hans Seeger. Little Brown Mushroom Books, 2012. 118pp., illustrated throughout, 6,75x8,75”. Edition of 1000 copies.

Book description:

"In 'House of Coates', writer Brad Zellar pieces together the story of legendary recluse Lester B. Morrison.

Working from a handful of encounters and contradictory conversations, a sketchy paper trail and often confounding interviews with individuals who may or may not have been 'associates' of Morrison (including Morrison’s former collaborator Alec Soth), Zellar attempts to reconstruct one episode from Morrison’s decidedly episodic life.

In the winter of 2011, Zellar finally crossed paths with his evasive subject, and was - with Morrison’s permission - granted access to the results of an MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) test that Morrison submitted to in August of 2009, along with the administrating psychiatrist’s copious notes. Finally, in late December of last year, Zellar received in the mail a duct-taped shoebox - marked 'PERISHABLE' - containing almost two hundred photographs that Morrison termed 'disposable documents of the approximate period in question'.

From these raw materials designer Hans Seeger has assembled a book that Morrison himself has pronounced, 'Probably close enough to what might or might not have happened, and that’s as much as I’ve learned to expect from the so-called 'real world' '."

Saturday, April 07, 2012

Glad Påsk & Happy Easter




Vintage Easter cards (origins unknown).

Glad Påsk and Happy Easter!

Wednesday, April 04, 2012

Love and Hats.






Love and Hats. By Andy Rementer. Nieves, 2012. 24pp., illustrated throughout, 14x20 cm. Edition of 150 copies.

Book description:

" 'Love and Hats' is a romantic story of two young lovers brought together by a chance autumnal breeze.

The delicate ink drawings depict the couple's entangled web of love, doubt and regret.

Through the characters' wandering limbs and hefty curls Rementer tries to convey such concepts as the passage of time, internal struggles and fear of commitment.


Andy Rementer is a creative person from the US. He currently divides his time between drawing, painting and animating."

Tuesday, April 03, 2012

Landscapes.






Landscapes. By Marina Gadonneix & Marcelline Delbecq. RVB Books, 2011. Book + audio CD. 88p., illustrated throughout, 32x26cm. Edition of 500 numbered copies.

Book description:

" 'Landscapes' presents a previously unpublished series by Marina Gadonneix who, over years of research, has brought together a collection of singular images: blue or green overlays, used as neutral backgrounds for special effects in cinema and on television.

Images between abstraction and figuration, place and non-place, fullness and emptiness, these landscapes, once subtracted from their matrix, may only be considered as images in their abstract representation.

And these are indeed landscapes in the accompanying fiction, 'Blackout', a text written for the series of images by Marcelline Delbecq.

Between fiction and reality, real landscapes and mental landscapes, vision and drifting, the text, in its written form as well as in its form as a soundscript, may either add to or take away from the images, whose visual impact appeals to what’s happening off screen as well as to what is beyond consciousness."

Monday, April 02, 2012

alleverythingthatisyou.






alleverythingthatisyou. By Doug + Mike Starn, with a poem by Vincent Katz. Baldwin Gallery, 2006. 52 pp., illustrated throughout, 9,5x12". Limited edition of 1000 copies.

Book description:

"[T]his catalog brings together images from a portfolio of images of snowflakes, many of them isolated against stark backgrounds that reinforce the intricate structure of the flakes themselves.

Exploring issues of individuality, memory, ephemeral experiences, and on some level the transitory nature of life itself, the Starn twins provide a framework for readers to ponder big questions while considering the tiny jewels of snow preserved in these pages.

Each book is finished with a unique ink-jet cover featuring one of several different images of snowflakes, all of which were printed, taped and numbered at the Starns' studio in Brooklyn, NY."