The New Modern Hair: A Styling Chart
Silvia Prada, The New Modern Hair: A Styling Chart
Softcover, 32 pp., offset 1/1, 200 x 270 mm
Edition of 500, hand numbered
ISBN 978-0-615-66610-5
Published by cultureEDIT and Silvia Prada
$35.00 ·
The portraits — with names ranging from The Flat Top to Executive Contour — feature commentary and meticulous instructions on how to obtain each look in order to resemble the lifestyle pictured. The geometric drawings, all whimsical remixes of 20th-century art movements such as Bauhaus, De Stijl and Russian Constructivism, highlight the emphasis on the shape for each hairstyle and command a manifesto for the references that each portrait points to.
SIGN SHOW TRADE
Thomas Macker, SIGN SHOW TRADE
Hardcover, 88 pp., offset 4/4, 180 x 265 mm
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-615-76630-0
Published by In The Pines Books
$45.00 ·
In Macker’s work, the ‘seed’ — as altered commodity — locates the collision between the idea of the natural world as something outside and other than human, and the natural world as what we are (as animals who eat food grown from seeds, eat animals who have eaten plants grown from seeds, breathe air full of oxygen created by photosynthesis, and on and on). This space of collision and contradiction is where Macker argues we reside, and the photographic and sculptural pieces that bridge the two still life series in the exhibition offer a glimpse of the effects of that lived contradiction. Dog God | Man Camp | Big Piney, WY shows a coyote impaled by a pole and posed with its head up (as if howling), a scene Macker found and documented next to one of the “Man Camps” of trailers that have sprung up throughout the Gaslands of Wyoming, the Dakotas, Colorado and Iowa to house temporary gas line workers. Another shows the snow-filled landscape where Matthew Shephard was beaten and killed, the only marker of that moment of cultural mourning and instigator of progressive action now a gas company pole. Bumper stickers Macker stole from trucks in Wyoming and printed onto vintage glass tiles depict bikini-clad women alongside text that reads ‘Just Frack It’, and, a digitally rendered bust of a disembodied pregnant torso hangs next to a digitally rendered image of a Molatov cocktail. Reproduction, destruction, re-birth, identity, and verbal and physical languages of dominance comingle with cultural hope and yearning — a yearning that always seems to leave violence in its wake.
In the second still life series, the seed signs have been replaced by gas company signage. These signs, stolen by Macker during drives across the Gaslands, functioned as markers for the temporary roadways that crisscross the landscape where gas lines are in construction. In this series, the signs rest on top of a wooden crate instead of being placed in gravel, and the backdrop is now constructed of brown carpet. In front of the carpet, Macker has hung reproductions of 19th and 20th century artwork mythologizing woodcutters. Behind a Unit Drilling Company sign directing us towards Rig 24, we see Winslow Homer’s The Woodcutter, here featured on a living room wall as part of an interior design advertisement. In Der Holzfäller, Ferdinand Hodler, 1910, a Danger Benzene Cancer Hazard sign accompanied by a potted plant stands in front of Ferdinand Hodler’s Der Holzfäller. Co-opting these already-reproduced artworks, Macker highlights the historic glorification of human dominance over nature, as well as the problematic placement of the artist within this glorification, as a symbol and actor of these same problematic humanist ideals. The scenes are constructed to be visually satisfying, uncomfortable, humorous, claustrophobic, and unexpectedly personal, reflecting our continued desire to feel communal pride in our accomplishments, as well as the consequences of a system in which the structure for expansion we have created necessitates an unwillingness to recognize the fallibility or responsibility of power.
From the Cutting-Floor of the Public Poem
Alain Arias-Misson, From the Cutting-Floor of the Public Poem
Softcover, 80 pp., offset 4/1, 165 x 245 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-94-9069-315-2
Published by MER. Paper Kunsthalle
$32.00 ·
After Empire
Herman Asselberghs and Dieter Lesage, After Empire
Softcover, 256 pp., offset 1/1, 110 x 180 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-94-9069-394-7
Published by MER. Paper Kunsthalle
$20.00 ·
Frank Peter John Dick
K8 Hardy, Frank Peter John Dick
Softcover, 52 pp., offset 4/4, 230 x 300 mm
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-9822090-2-8
Published by Capricious
$25.00 ·
K8 Hardy (USA, b. 1977) is a New York-based artist who mines popular culture for material and has no regard for originality. She has no allegiance to any particular medium, but performance is a thread that weaves through her body of work. Hardy eschews virtuosity to craft and is currently exploiting photography. She believes in the power of flamboyant and bold gestures, and the conversations of play, which come across in her endeavors toward total expression. The surface is often used as a decoy in her work to address the political conditions of its production. She has recently been working on a series of photographs called the “Position Series” that employ the tropes of self-portraiture and abstract photography. Hardy is a founding member of the queer feminist journal and artist collective, LTTR. She has shown internationally at spaces including: Reena Spaulings Fine Art, NY; The Tate Modern, London; Artist Space, NY: Galerie BaliceHertling, Paris; Galerie Sonja Junkers, Munich; PS1 MOMA, NY; Higher Pictures, NY; Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts, Heerlen, NL; and the Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, NY.
Books & Co.
Ed Ruscha — Books & Co.
March 5 — April 27, 2013
Opening: Tuesday, March 5, 6-8pm
Organized by Bob Monk
Gagosian Gallery
980 Madison Ave.
New York, NY 10075
Tuesday-Saturday 10-6pm
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Ed Ruscha’s legendary artist books together with books and works of art by more than 100 contemporary artists that respond directly and diversely to Ruscha’s original project. Organized by Bob Monk, “Ed Ruscha Books & Co.” has been drawn from private collections, including Ruscha’s own. Most of the books are installed so that viewers can interact with them and browse their pages.
Inspired by the unassuming books that he found on street stalls during a trip to Europe, in 1962 Ruscha published his first artist book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations under his own imprint, National Excelsior Press. A slim, cheaply produced volume, then priced at $3.50, Twentysix Gasoline Stations did exactly what its title suggests, reproducing twenty-six photographs of gasoline stations next to captions indicating their brand and location. All of the stations were on Route 66, the road mythologized by the eponymous TV series and in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Ruscha’s book traveled more or less west to east, from the first service station in Los Angeles, where he moved as a young man, back to Oklahoma City, where he grew up.
Initially, the book received a poor reception, rejected by the Library of Congress for its “unorthodox form and supposed lack of information.” However, during the sixties it acquired cult status, and by the eighties it was hailed as one of the first truly modern artist’s books. Ruscha followed up Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) with a succession of kindred publications, including Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968), and Real Estate Opportunities (1970), all of which combined the literalness of early California pop art with a deadpan photographic aesthetic informed by minimalist sequence and seriality.
As the prolific and playful examples in the exhibition attest, Ruscha’s artist books have proved to be deeply influential, beginning with Bruce Nauman’s Burning Small Fires (1968), for which Nauman burned Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk (1964) and photographed the process. More than forty years later, photographer Charles Johnstone relocated Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations in Cuba, producing the portfolio Twentysix Havana Gasoline Stations (2008). The most recent homage is One Swimming Pool (2013) by Dutch artist Elisabeth Tonnard, who re-photographed one of the photographs from Ruscha’s Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968) and enlarged it to the size of a small swimming pool, consisting of 3164 pages the same size as the pages in Ruscha’s original book. The pages of this ‘pool on a shelf’ can be detached to create the life-size installation. Between these early and recent examples are a wealth of responses to Ruscha’s ideas by artists from all over the world, gathered here in this celebratory exhibition:
ABC Artists’ Books Cooperative, Noriko Ambe, Edgar Arceneaux, Eric Baskauskas, Luke Batten / Jonathan Sadler (New Catalogue), Erik Benjamins, Victoria Bianchetti, Doro Boehme, Jeff Brouws, Denise Scott Brown, Wendy Burton, Stephen Bush, Corinne Carlson, Dan Colen, Julie Cook, Jennifer Dalton, Bill Daniel, Claudia de la Torre, Joshua Deaner, Jen DeNike, Eric Doeringer, Stan Douglas, Harlan Erskine, Frank Eye, Kota Ezawa, Robbert Flick, Jan Freuchen, Jochen Friedrich, Thomas Galler, Anne-Valérie Gasc, Steve Giasson, Simon Goode, Oliver Griffin, Daniel S. Guy, Dejan Habicht, Marcella Hackbardt, Sebastian Hackenschmidt, Karen Henderson, Mishka Henner, Kai-Olaf Hesse, Taro Hirano, Marla Hlady, Dominik Hruza, Steven Izenour, Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson, Taly and Russ Johnson, Charles Johnstone, Rinata Kajumova, Henning Kappenberg, Jean Keller, Shohachi Kimura, Julia Kjelgaard, Joachim Koester, Sowon Kwon, Tanja Lažetic, Gabriel Lester, Jonathan Lewis, Jochen Manz, Michael Maranda, Scott McCarney, Mark McEvoy, Jerry McMillan, Daniel Mellis, Martin Möll, Dan Monick, Jonathan Monk, Simon Morris, Audun Mortensen, Brian Murphy, Toby Mussman, Maurizio Nannucci, Bruce Nauman, John O’Brian, Stefan Oláh, Performance Re-Enactment Society, Michalis Pichler, Tadej Pogačar, Susan Porteous, James Prez, Clara Prioux, Robert Pufleb, Joseph Putrock, Jon Rafman, Achim Riechers, David John Russ, Mark Ruwedel, Tom Sachs, Joachim Schmid, Andreas Schmidt, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, David Schoerner, Yann Sérandour, Travis Shaffer, Gordon Simpson, Paul Soulellis, Tom Sowden, Kim Stringfellow, Derek Stroup, Derek Sullivan, Yoshikazu Suzuki, Chris Svensson, Eric Tabuchi, Elisabeth Tonnard, John Tremblay, Marc Valesella, Wil Van Iersel, Louisa Van Leer, Robert Venturi, Reinhard Voigt, Alex Von Bergen, Emily Wasserman, John Waters, Henry Wessel, Keith Wilson, Charles Woodard, Theo Wujick, Mark Wyse, Hermann Zschiegner.
“Ed Ruscha Books & Co.” will coincide with the publication of MIT Press’s Various Small Books: Referencing Small Books by Ed Ruscha (2013), which documents ninety-one of the books inspired by Ruscha’s own, reproducing covers and sample layouts from each, along with a detailed description. Various Small Books also includes selections from Ruscha’s books and an appendix listing most of the known Ruscha book tributes.
Parties de voyant
Benoit Platéus, Parties de voyant
Softcover, 100 pp., offset 4/4, 210 x 280 mm
English and French
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-94-906-9337-4
Published by MER. Paper Kunsthalle
$28.00 ·
Neither Appearance Nor Illusion (’ni apparence ni illusion’)
Joseph Kosuth, Neither Appearance Nor Illusion (’ni apparence ni illusion’)
Hardcover, 164 pp., offset 4/4, 260 x 320 mm
English and French
Edition of 5000
ISBN 978-94-906-9303-9
Published by MER. Paper Kunsthalle
$65.00 ·
Texts by Henri Loyrette, Marie-Laure Bernardac and John Welchman and an interview between Joseph Kosuth and Jacinto Lageira.
I’m that angel
Tyler Coburn, I’m that angel
Softcover, 96 pp., offset 1/1, 6 x 9 inches
Book and performance
Edition of 500
Published by Tyler Coburn
$30.00 ·
Nodding to the defamiliarization strategies of Russsian formalists like Viktor Shklovskii, I’m that angel takes shape as a stony stone, a cut in the stream – a book. The format concretizes found quotes and other elements; and in every line, a pathology characteristic of our era. Call it inattentionality as method.
Designed by Eric Nylund, this book shores up the bibliographic and citational structures that underpin much of the Internet, as well as literary forms like the confessional and the epistolary that offer precedents for net vernacular. I’m that angel works to build an expanded form of the printed page that draws upon the computer screen’s predecessors: the exegetical framings of The Talmud, for example, and the columnar stutter of Derrida’s Glas. The work attempts, in short, to thread hypertext into a paraliterary matrix.
The second part of this project involves readings of the entire book, performed by actor Justin Sayre, at colocation centers worldwide. If the book sustains a material limit that belies the diffuse shape of the cloud, then these sited readings attempt to effect similar concretions by having author, actor and audience occupy a highly securitized, geopolitical and visual field that is rarely made available to the public. The first such performance occurred, over three nights in April 2012, in an all-glass, octagonal conference room, overlooking racks of servers, at Digital Realty in downtown Los Angeles.
MATERIAL 3
Ginny Cook and Kim Schoen, MATERIAL 3
Softcover, 96 pp. + insert, offset 2/1, 160 x 270 mm
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-9801441-2-3
Published by MATERIAL Press
$15.00 ·
Concatenation (c.1600, from L.L. concatenatus, pp. of concatenare “to link together,” from com- “together”+ catenare, from catena “a chain”) seemed an appropriate word for our editorial method. An unlikely assemblage of texts becomes connected through this process; uncanny linkages emerge. Wyeth appears twice. Performances interact. In this issue: voices that duel, voices that parrot, voices that hypothesize, translate, and meditate, voices that speak simultaneously. As Roland Barthes writes, we have assembled these textual events, as “pleasure in pieces; language in pieces; culture in pieces,” to build upon one another into something new.*
*Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 51
CONTRIBUTORS
Farrah Karapetian, Paul Zelevansky, Renee Petropoulous, Nate Harrison, James Welling, Natalie Häusler, Harold Abramowitz, Shana Lutker Stephanie Taylor, Alice Könitz, Frank Chang, and Emily Mast.
The Mexican Suitcase
Enrique Santos, The Mexican Suitcase
Softcover with flaps, 360 pp., offset 4/1, 200 x 240 x 32 mm
English and Spanish
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-607-7636-29-8
Published by Landucci
$45.00 ·
Santos’ work is a way of thinking about how contemporary art is produced, and at the same time it talks about the gaze, the interpretation of he/she who observes, the understanding and production that comes with every look. It reflects upon a single active spectator, who builds a discourse, appropriates all meanings and elaborates on them according to his life story, and his social, cultural and emotional capital. That gaze has a filter through which history is interpreted. It talks about and with the viewer without underestimating his capacity for understanding. From the very beginning, the book presents a relationship of shared complicity, discourse, codes and understandings, but demands a lucid and imaginative perspective.
Retaking film, journalistic, documentary and advertising language, Santos quotes and reinterprets the great thieves of the screen and some real criminals, in order to talk about lies, confusions, myths and misunderstandings, as well as an ever more violent and heartbreaking reality that crawls into our lives through trivialized and shallow images.
— Florencia Magaril
Eleven Minus One
Amir Zaki, Eleven Minus One
Softcover, 122 pp., offset 4/4, 9 x 9 inches [26 x 36 inches unfolded]
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-26172-2-9
Published by LAXART
$75.00 ·
The book is a complex foldout design that is quite difficult to describe in text. It is ten double-sided square pages. Each page spread unfolds into unique configurations of six squares that represent all sides of a cube. The images on each unfolded page spread depict 3D digital recreations of photographs from the series Equilibres by Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. When fully unfolded, the book opens up to approximately 27 x 36 inches. It is an interactive object, and can be folded and unfolded in multiple ways, creating grids, cubes, and unfolded boxes, each creating a unique experience and juxtaposition of images. It is important to recognize the book in terms of a limited edition or a multiple. It is also more of an object with sculptural qualities and a tactile nature than a ‘book’ in the traditional sense.
Z-Girl and the Snake Charmer
Doniella Davy, Z-Girl and the Snake Charmer
Edited and Designed by Daniel Wagner
Softcover, 44 pp. with inserts, mimeograph 2/2, 5.5 x 8.5 inches
Edition of 100, numbered
Published by The Kingsboro Press
$11.00 ·