Creatures of Comfort New York is pleased to present No More Reality, a temporary bookshop and exhibition organized by Textfield, Inc. The bookshop and exhibition will take place in Creatures of Comfort’s adjacent project space at 205 Mulberry St.

In conjunction with the bookshop, which will feature current and archived titles from Textfield Distribution, there will be an exhibition of work by artists that Jonathan Maghen has collaborated with through Textfield to realize various publishing projects. The exhibition will feature the works of Phil Chang, Arthur Ou, Eduardo Sarabia, and Anna Sew Hoy.

The bookshop and exhibition title have been appropriated from the Philippe Parreno work, No More Reality (the demonstration), 1991, which is a four-minute video of children demonstrating, and chanting the slogan and title (“No More Reality”).

New York Times Tmagazine.

In an attempt to celebrate how we find ourselves doodling while on the phone, testing pens in stationery shops, our belief in folklore, the need to misuse technology or whose idea it was to fly aero planes in formation to write messages across our skies.

The research notes selected from the archive A Recent History of Writing & Drawing hopefully provide references to things old, new and maybe forgotten which together can offer an alternative understanding of our habit to document thoughts and ideas. Upending assumptions that any one kind of communication is more authentic, more direct or more valid that any other, A Recent History of Writing & Drawing finds meaning, texture and poetry in the most unlikely places.

The Speed-i-Jet, a mobile pen-printer manufactured by Reiner (Germany), is a device built around an industrial inkjet cartridge / printing head. With its clumsy user interface and 30 character maximum capacity, this charming parasitical product prompted the discussion of possible uses for such a device. Together with the curatorial staff of the institution, daily news headlines were selected and transferred onto the devices. Holding and moving the device like a pen, visitors could experience the writing of texts to which the author is ambiguous.

The headlines were collected during Things to Say at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland, 14 February — 12 April, 2009.

Ari Marcopoulos’s unique style of raw immediacy has made him one of the most important contemporary photographers. For thirty years, photographer Ari Marcopoulos has been pioneering contemporary photography by documenting subcultures such as skateboarders and graffiti artists, as well as landscapes and his own family and friends. Since his days printing photographs for Andy Warhol, he has amassed a huge body of work marked by its arresting and unsentimental intimacy that has been influential to the worlds of art, fashion, and photography. Bound to mimic a phone book, Ari Marcopoulos, Directory presents a collection of approximately 1,200 photographs, with curator and critic Neville Wakefield providing insightful commentary on some of Marcopoulos’s singular images. Copublished with Rizzoli, each book in this limited-edition series includes a print signed by the artist.

The hallmark of Saul Steinberg’s art is the inked line, always drawn with a spare elegance that expresses the semiotic richness of the line itself. As it shifts meaning from one passage to the next, Steinberg’s line comments on its own transformative nature.

The Line, the original a 10-meter-long drawing with 29 panels that unfold, accordion fashion, is Steinberg’s manifesto about the conceptual possibilities of the line and the artist who gives them life. His drawing hand begins and ends the sequence, as the simple horizontal line that hand creates metamorphoses into, among other things, a water line, laundry line, railroad track, sidewalk, arithmetic division line, or table edge; near the end, the curlicues etched by the iceskater’s blade remind us of the role calligraphy plays in Steinberg’s art.

The Line was designed for the Children’s Labyrinth, a spiraling, trefoil wall structure at 10th Triennial of Milan, a design and architecture fair that opened in August 1954. The drawing, photographically enlarged and incised into the wall, was one of four Steinberg conceptions used on the labyrinth.

Today there was a guy leaning the wrong way in the tube. It was not immediately noticeable. There was no one else sitting nearby. No other passengers to compare him to. But then I did notice that every time the carriage came to a stop, he leaned away from the direction we were moving. Very slightly. Think about it. You’re supposed to lean forward. In the direction you were moving toward. Toward the point which the weight of your body was expecting to reach. Now this guy, he leans the other way. Just slightly. As a friend of mine would put it, he has a great sense of irony. Definitely. That’s important in life. They say that Rothko, he killed himself because he met the people who bought his art. No sense of irony. Me neither I don’t have any sense of irony. I like to take things at face value. Your wife she once told me that what led to the demise of the Black Panthers, aside from the absence of trust, and a murderous governmental incarceration campaign, it was their complete lack of a sense of humor. It was only much later that I realized she meant a murderous governmental incarceration campaign is actually a lot worse than not having a sense of humor. But these ironies are lost on me. Your sister and your wife they both say so. When I tell them things I find funny, they rarely laugh. I’m not even going to mention this guy in the tube to them. I recently told them about my bathroom sink in this hotel room. Real bad design. Flat. Which meant the liquid always accumulated in the corners. Instead of flowing down the drain. You had to use your fingertips to fish out the shaved hair stubble from the corners of the sink. Or it would just lie there. Waiting. You know what’s even funnier: you had to try and propel what you spat out when you brushed your teeth towards the center of the sink. Or you’d have mounds of mucus and toothpaste. Just drying in small heaps, here and there. Hilarious. And speaking of heaps of mucus. Another thing I’ll keep to myself – this was the funniest thing in years: I saw an old couple smooching in the street the other day. How often do you see that. Teenagers, yes. Or oldies arm in arm. But here you had oldies with their tongues down each other’s throats. Right there in the pedestrian zone. Eighty years old maybe more. Couldn’t believe it. I just stood there laughing. These oldies have no sense of humor either. They pretended not to hear me. But I could tell they heard me perfectly well. So now the carriage starts moving again, and I stand up, knowing I’ll exit at the next station. You see there are things I’m less sure about. Are they funny or just poetic. Lately my eyeballs scrunch as I close my eyes. A crunching sound. Brief, almost imperceptible. The sound is a bit like high-tech mechanics when they start aging. Wearing out. A whispering scrunching sound. Funny, or lyrical? Now as I exit the carriage, I notice there’s vapor in the air as I breathe, despite the high temperatures. It’s been like this all week. Again, very odd and almost funny. In a tiny, barely noticeable kind of way. Like the guy leaning the wrong way back there. As the doors slam shut, I turn around to look for him. I want to see which direction he’s leaning in as the train departs. Before I can assess his movements, he smiles and waves. I wave, but I fail to smile back. It’s just not funny anymore.

When someone as peaceful as Emanuel Halpern (Zurich, 1948) draws an apocalypse, things must be pretty bad with the world. His fifty large-scale coloured pencil drawings telling the story of the destruction of Dieselbrugg confirm this prediction. This is his comic version of Dürrenmatt‘s valley of confusion. Reality, which is usually slouching towards tragedy, can be described only by comic means. Both talented storytellers subscribe to this truism. They give us solid citizens with image and text collages that are almost excessively artistic and hypertrophic. But the images underline the fact that this is the only way that we can tackle and escape from the mess.

In the Dieselbrugger Apokalypse, Halpern manages to move between pilgrimage and the misery of refugees with the sure-footedness of a somnambulist. “You can‘t really be as dozy as that” he seems to be muttering. “Come into my yurt In here you will hear peace bells ringing, you‘ll see bathing towels fluttering. This is Dieselbrugg.”

— Guido Magnaguagno

A Curious Catalogue is a skateboard product catalogue of pencil drawn anti-graphics, spin-art wheels, and slalom gemstones. It was designed to take a romantic and fantastic vision of a skateboard company and make it ‘real’. Michael Leon was inspired by the naïve wonder he experienced as a young skateboarder, which he juxtaposes with an elegant, yet dry, catalogue sales format. The result is a carefree and poetic narrative carried by a range of imagined products.

Michael Leon was raised in late 80s, early 90s skateboard culture. His work lives in a unique place between the worlds of art and art direction. He often uses the language of graphic design to create meaning through sculpture, paintings, videos, and editions. While still in high school, Michael designed his first pro model skateboard for New Deal Skateboards. 19 years later, he continues to design for his skateboard company Stacks, as well as creating artwork and art directing collaborative projects.

In the olden days — when Europeans still thought the earth was flat — the universe was sometimes compared to the inside of a human skull. This was our notion of the infinite that lies beyond the world we live in, as a reflection of the infinity of our powers of thought and perception. This comparison, and the discovery of the most far-flung corners of the universe using the Hubble Space Telescope, are the basis of Ultra, Ultra Deep Fields by Brooklyn artist Maya Hayuk.

Round the Way is a collection of paintings from the last two years leading up to Ultra, Ultra Deep Fields, Maya Hayuk’s exhibition at MU. Next to Round the Way Maya Hayuk also compiled the double CD soundtrack Inside Spaces, that will be available in a limited edition through MU.