Piero Golia founded in 2005, with his long-time friend Eric Wesley, the Mountain School of Arts, an educational structure that rapidly became a new spot on the cultural map of the city of Los Angeles.

This book, composed of discussions between artists, presents a kind of report on this unique “institution:” teaching methods, academic syllabus, and students’ selection are here explained with metaphors, compared with artistic interaction, and equaled to performances. Not unlike Golia’s work itself, the development of the school and its program follow a poetic of the gesture, of the instant, and of actions recalling Fluxus, Gino de Dominicis’ or Paul McCarthy’s works.

As a career’s start, Piero Golia successfully convinced a woman to have his portrait and the words “Piero My Idol” tattooed on her back (tattoo, 2001); soon after, following an invitation to the Tirana Biennale, he rowed across the Adriatic Sea in the opposite direction to migratory movement to reach Albania (”Going to Tirana,” 2000). And, on January 14, 2005, Golia vanished from New York City leaving no documented proof of his whereabouts; he traveled from a place to another, crossing borders without a trace, for resurfacing only on the morning of February 7 at the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen for a unique lecture about his adventurous trip. He now lives in Los Angeles, a place that blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, making it the perfect setting for his exploration into the process of myth-making and his ironic outlook on contemporary society.

condition: good, edge wear, worn cover/spine, interior discolored, very good reference copy.

We can’t put it together. It is together.

The Whole Earth Catalog is an American counterculture catalog published by Stewart Brand between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. Although the WECs listed all sorts of products for sale (clothing, books, tools, machines, seeds — things useful for a creative or self-sustainable lifestyle), the Whole Earth Catalogs themselves did not sell any of the products. Instead the vendors and their prices were listed right alongside with the items.

The title Whole Earth Catalog came from a previous project of Stewart Brand. In 1966, he initiated a public campaign to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite photo of the sphere of Earth as seen from space, the first image of the “Whole Earth.” He thought the image might be a powerful symbol, evoking a sense of shared destiny and adaptive strategies from people. The Stanford-educated Brand, a biologist with strong artistic and social interests, believed that there was a groundswell of commitment to thoroughly renovating American industrial society along ecologically and socially just lines, whatever they might prove to be.

Function
The Whole Earth Catalog functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting. An item is listed in the Catalog if it is deemed:

1. Useful as a tool
2. Relevant to independent education
3. High quality or low cost
4. Not already common knowledge
5. Easily available by mail

Catalog listings are continually revised according to the experience and suggestions of Catalog users and staff.

Purpose
We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory — as via government, big business, formal education, church — has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing — power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by The Whole Earth Catalog.

At once a philosopher, educational and medical reformist, mystic and artist, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was the founder of a spiritual movement he dubbed Anthroposophy, and of the famous school system that bears his name. Anthroposophy combined elements of German philosophy with Theosophical theory, and also made use of architecture, dance (Eurthymy), painting and sculpture to illustrate his ideas. Steiner’s artworks occupy a fascinatingly ambiguous status as both pedagogical and aesthetic entities, and served as springboards for the early work of Mondrian and Kandinsky among others; they have continued to influence artists down the generations. In 1992, Steiner’s panel drawings were exhibited at the Galerie Monika Sprüth in Cologne, renewing their efficacy for contemporary artists. Published for the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg’s 2010 exhibition, this book is the first assessment of the influence of Anthroposophical thought on contemporary art.

The classic, and essential, book on home birth. First section details the stories of parents and midwives during the home birth experience. Second seciton is a technical manual for midwives, nurses, and doctors. Includes information on prenatal care and nutrition, labor, delivery-techniques, care of the new baby, and breast-feeding.

Ina May Gaskin is one of the Founders and the current president of the Midwives’ Alliance of North America. She is a powerful advocate for a woman’s right to give birth without excessive and unnecessary medical intervention.

Her clinical midwifery skills have been developed entirely through independent study and apprenticeship with other midwives around the world. Ina May and fellow Farm midwives were instrumental in the development of the rigorous Certified Professional Midwife (CPM) certification process.

The Farm is an intentional community in Lewis County, Tennessee, near the town of Summertown, Tennessee, based on principles of nonviolence and respect for the Earth. It was founded in 1971 by Stephen Gaskin and 320 San Francisco hippies; The Farm is well known amongst hippies and other members of similar subcultures as well as by many vegetarians. The Farm now has approximately 175 residents.

In the original manifestation of The Farm, all members were believers in God and smoking marijuana was a sacrament, though Farm members did not accept alcohol or other drugs. Also there was no private property, no leather products, no harming of animals and no consumption of meat.

The Farm was established after Gaskin and friends led a caravan of 60 buses, vans, and trucks on a speaking tour across the US. Along the way, they checked out various places that might be suitable for settlement before deciding on Tennessee. After buying 1,064 acres (4.1 km2), the Farm began building its community in the woods alongside the network of crude logging roads that followed its ridgelines. Another adjoining 750 acres (3.0 km2) were purchased shortly thereafter.

From its founding through the 1970s, Farm members took vows of poverty and owned no personal possessions, though this restriction loosened as time passed. During that time, Farm members did not use artificial birth control, alcohol, tobacco, man-made psychotropics, or animal products.

condition: good, shelf wear, excellent reading copy.

If you don’t think the title of this book is Whole Parent / Whole Child, then you are the exception. Most people do. Implied is that if the parent is whole, then the child will be whole. If the parent knows how to do it, then the child will turn out okay. But then — oh, horrible thought and worse experience! — if the child seems not to be whole, then the parent must not be whole either.

So we seek diagnoses, explanations for what’s wrong with the child. If we can’t take credit for our children, then at least please excuse us from the blame. I thought it was my fault. I thought he was stupid, lazy. Indeed, recognition of our children’s special differences, limitations, styles of learning, and so forth can be very helpful. But there is another side as well. Secretly we are almost grateful to think that there is something really the matter with him, something only mechanical, something wrong with him rather than with us. So in a strange way, the very thing we started out in favor of (rearing a whole child) turns out to be something we are somehow also against.

This book stands out as one of the first resources to link the teachings of mystics and the world’s religious traditions to the present-day practice of child-rearing. Polly Berrien Berends’s second intention is “to bring to light the far-reaching spiritual significance of even the meanest momentary details of our experience.

For more than two decades, Whole Child / Whole Parent, the first spiritually oriented book on parenthood and the first to address the value of parenthood for the parent as well as for the child, has provided a sound, practical, psychological and spiritual footing for parenthood and family life.

condition: good, shelf wear, excellent reading copy.

You Are Your Child’s First Teacher: What Parents Can Do With and For Their Chlldren from Birth to Age Six.

The importance of what our children learn in the home and through their relationship with us forms the irreplaceable foundation of all that comes later. Mother, childbirth educator, midwife, and Waldorf educator, Baldwin aims to deepen our understanding of the nature of the young child as a whole being — body, mind, emotions, and spirit — so enabling us to meet their needs for balanced development.

In a society which values intellectual development above all else, we tend to ignore other aspects of development. We reason with our children as if they were grown ups and teach them with techniques appropriate for much older children. Distrustful of natural processes, we believe we have to do something in order to ensure our child’s development. Milestones of the first three years — walking, talking, thinking, and memory — occur by themselves, according to their own timetable. Trusting natural processes does not mean that we do nothing, but that the things we do need to be consonant with the child’s own developmental stages.

The world of the young is critically endangered, as more and more children are placed in daycare in infancy, and academic pursuits are pushed onto younger and younger children. The hurried child syndrome is apparent in all spheres of activity. We try to speed their development with baby walkers and gymnastics, and reason with five-year-olds as if their ease with words ought to translate into control of their actions in the future. Problems arise when we fail to realize how different a three year old is from a child of nine, or a teen from an adult. Children do not think, reason, feel, or experience the world the way an adult does.

She advocates nurturing babies’ development through the first year by touching, carrying, talking, singing, contact with nature, nursery rhymes, and movement games. She cautions against baby bouncers, baby walkers, playpens, and baby gymnastics, and believes that one of the greatest gifts parents can give a child between birth and first grade is time and materials for the creative play which helps her work her way into earthly life by imitating all she experiences. The very young do not need playgroups (though their parents might!), gymnastics, educational tools, nor fancy toys. They need circle and movement games, songs, musical and artistic activities, and examples of real work for imitation. They need contact with nature, nourishing images from stories, and simple toys they can complete with the imagination. We learn, for example, that the beautiful doll and the anatomically correct doll are a hindrance to the child’s inner development, leaving nothing for her imagination to supply, and providing more than she can hold in awareness. Toys based on TV and movie characters (therefore with fixed personalities) leave little room for creative imagination. Baldwin urges that we consider not only the safety, but aesthetic quality of a toy. Is it beautiful? How does it feel to the touch? What pictures of the world does it offer the child?

She cautions us against providing rational and scientific answers before our children are ready. Because their verbal skills far outweigh their conceptual knowledge, we tend to answer at a level of abstraction far beyond their comprehension. Calling directly on the intellect and memory of the child during the first seven years, not only takes him away from movement and valuable play, but accelerates his change of consciousness and robs him of valuable years of early childhood — years vital to later physical health and mental development. At this age, children learn best through direct life experiences and imitation.

The young child accepts us as perfect and good; once he becomes older and sees our imperfections — the most important thing is that the child sees we are striving to do better. Our desire for inner growth (or our complacency) is perceived by the child and has a very deep impact.

Something to Put Something On poses direct questions about art-making to and for young readers. Generously endowed with its maker’s legendary wit, it is also, appropriately, the first title in the Little Steidl program. Neither storybook nor autobiography, Something to Put Something On is rather a “questioning book” for children, at once moving and intriguing in its candor:

I WAS A CHILD & AS MOST CHILDREN I DID MAKE THINGS
I TRIED TO FIND A PLACE TO PUT THE THINGS I HAD MADE
AGAIN & AGAIN I FOUND THAT THE SUPPORT OR PLINTH OR TABLE
ALL RESTED UPON THE EARTH & I REALIZED THAT ALL PEOPLE OF ALL AGES
WHO HAD MADE SOMETHING HAD TO FIND A PLACE TO PUT
WHAT THEY HAD MADE
THOSE PEOPLE WHO ASK THE QUESTION & THOSE PEOPLE WHO TRY
TO ANSWER THE QUESTION ARE FUNCTIONING AS ARTISTS.
I WAS A CHILD & DECIDED TO BE AN ARTIST.

—Lawrence Weiner