A collection of essays on book design by Catherine de Smet, James Goggin, Jenni Eneqvist, Roland Früh, Corina Neuenschwander, Sarah Gottlieb, Richard Hollis, Chrissie Charlton, Armand Mevis.

The Master Builder: Talking with Ken Briggs by Sara De Bondt and Fraser Muggeridge, is a slim (28 pp. plus covers) volume, the size (and look and feel, with coated and uncoated stocks) of a typical Briggs NT programme. It comprises an interview with Briggs, a short biography and portrait, plenty of pictures (24 in colour) of his pioneering posters and programmes for the theatre in the 1960s and 70s, and a detail of Briggs’ slide archive, carefully labelled with Dymo tape.

When asked about his structured, asymmetrical booking forms for the theatre, Briggs claims ‘I didn’t care about beauty or the lack of it. They are purely typographic,’ then goes on to explain his colour system: ‘from warm colours in winter to cool colours in summer: red, ochre, purple, bright blue and so on.’ Which is why he was known as the colourist.

Why did Art in Ruins, a once prominent art collective, suddenly fall off the art world map? Did they run out of ideas, move on to other territories or simply withdraw in disgust? During brief lulls in their frenetic peregrinations around the glittering international art circuit, a loose group of artists, curators, critics and other art professionals discuss the mysterious disappearance of Art in Ruins, maintaining a sober tone of inquiry even as they encounter herds of bison, anomalous Richard Serra walls and security personnel steeped in art theory. Using actual dialogue from interviews with art professionals who knew Art in Ruins, Eva Weinmayr constructs a hypothetical play as an anti-documentary or anti-biography.

This book features a selection of documents from the personal archive of the late British artist John Latham (more information here), presently maintained in his last home and studio in Peckham, South London. Through reproductions of letters, invitation cards, exhibition reviews, performance scripts and images, the publication retraces Latham’s pioneering practice over six decades, from the late 1940s to his death in 2006. Published on the occasion of John Latham: Anarchive in association with Whitechapel Gallery, the book also includes an interview by Charles Harrison from 1968 and a glossary section.

Edited and introduced by Antony Hudek and Athanasios Velios.

In the painting and sculpture for which he is best known, Latham’s primary materials included glass, books, canvas and the spray gun. Developing alongside this concise visual language, from the mid-1950s onwards, was a cosmological theory, formulated through his art-making discoveries, that considered time and event to be more primary than the established means of understanding, based on space and matter. Termed Time-Base Theory (sometimes Flat Time Theory or Event Theory) it offers an ordering and unification of all events in the universe, including human actions, and allows an understanding of the special status of the artist in society.

Latham looked at the way in which human knowledge has become fragmented over time; split by divergent religions, ideologies and world-views. He identified the way in which the fields of science and art, despite emerging from a common root, have become separate and operate in isolation of one another: even within a field such as physics, there exist a large number of schisms and specialisations that further fragment our knowledge and understanding of the universe. John believed that this endless division would eventually lead to a kind of entropy and from that state, to a disintegration of society.

45 graphic designers, 90 photographs, 10 years of books on contemporary art.

This book is based on an invitation to graphic designers to choose two books on contemporary art from the past decade whose design they think is particularly pertinent to the content, to photograph one double-page spread from each book and, if they wish, to comment on their choices.

Double Page provides a selection of recent art publications as viewed by graphic designers who are internationally known for their contribution to that field, and offers a glimpse at the role of book design today in our knowledge and understanding of contemporary art.

Shedding light on this prevalent relationship between art and graphic design by means of photography, Double Page constitutes an unprecedented document of how graphic designers see the work of their peers and their own practices as an essential part of the editorial process.

This booklet is published as part of I Wonder What The Silence is About, a body of work, speculating on the (temporary?) disappearance of Art In Ruins. This English collaborative art practice was formed in 1984 and created a radical stance towards the art world, based on critical post-modern thinking. They have been for a short period omnipresent in the London/Berlin art scene before they fell silent in 2001. I contacted Art In Ruins and asked for permission to reprint one of their publications as part of my project. This they rejected but suggested to publish this interview instead, which was initially written for Frieze Magazine in 1994. It has not been printed until today.

—Eva Weinmayr

A collection of essays on book design by Catherine de Smet, James Goggin, Jenni Eneqvist, Roland Früh, Corina Neuenschwander, Sarah Gottlieb, Richard Hollis, Chrissie Charlton, Armand Mevis.