Book of the Day Posted Jan 22, 2021

Book of the Day > Raymond Meeks: ciprian honey cathedral

● Purchase ● Raymond Meeks is renowned for his use of photography and the book form to poetically distill the liminal junctures of vision, consciousness and comprehension. In ciprian honey cathedral, he brings this scrutiny close to home, delicately probing at the legibility of our material surroundings and the people closest to us.
 
Meeks has long been fascinated by the way we construct the world around us; how we carry our possessions, these accumulated comforts, inheritances, markers of material success; how we adorn homes with trees and shrubs, a mantle clock to count the hours. Stumbling across an abandoned house or unkempt lawn becomes a search for common clues to tiny hidden transgressions.
 
This question of knowledge and understanding is perhaps most drastic in our solipsistic reality. Meeks also photographed his partner, Adrianna Ault, in the early mornings before she awoke, on the threshold at which daily domestic life converges with the deepest state of sleep. This plight of supine trance is a place of reprieve beneath the surface of consciousness, free from the chaos and uncertainty of the sentient world above, and alludes to the veiled threat that, ultimately, we are utterly unknowable to one another.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 21, 2021

Book of the Day > African Ceramics: A Different Perspective.

● Purchase ● 'Purple Fashion' is the avant-garde reference for fashion, style, and contemporary culture with the usual big names. In the 'love issue kenzo' contributions by Camille Henrot, Virgil Abloh, Philippe Parreno, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Saint Laurent, and many more.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 20, 2021

Book of the Day > Ray Harryhausen: Titan of Cinema

● Purchase ● Special-effects superstar Ray Harryhausen elevated stop-motion animation to an art during the 1950s to 1980s. With material drawn from his incredible archive, his daughter, Vanessa, selects 100 creatures and objects, in chronological order, that meant the most to her as she watched her father make world-famous films that changed the course of cinema.
 
Ray Harryhausen's work included the Sinbad films of the 50s and 70s, One Million Years B.C. and Mighty Joe Young, as well as a wider portfolio including children’s fairy tales and commercials. He inspired a generation of film-makers such as Peter Jackson, Aardman Animation, Tim Burton, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and his influence on blockbuster cinema can be felt to this day. Some of the objects featured in the book, such as Talos from Jason and the Argonauts, are world famous, while others are less well known but hold special personal significance to Vanessa. Many newly restored works that have never previously been seen are included.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 19, 2021

Book of the Day > Richard Misrach on Landscape and Meaning

● Purchase ● In the sixth installment of The Photography Workshop Series, Richard Misrach—well known for sublime and expansive landscapes that focus on the relationship between humans and their environment—offers his insight into creating photographs that are visually beautiful and contain cultural implications.
 
Aperture Foundation works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches to, teachings on, and insights into photography—offering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers at all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Through images and words, in this volume Misrach shares his own creative process and discusses a wide range of issues, from the language of color photography and the play of light and atmosphere, to transcending place and time through metaphor, myth, and abstraction.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 16, 2021

Virgil Abloh. Nike. ICONS

Virgil Abloh. Nike. ICONS

PURCHASE YOUR PRE-RELEASE COPY NOW FROM ARCANA: BOOKS ON THE ARTS - CLICK HERE (ONE PER PERSON DURING PRE-RELEASE PERIOD! AVAILABLE FOR PICKUP/SHIPPING BEGINING 1/20/21.
The ICONS book is, in a way, the only revealing lens to understand that the catalog of the fifty-plus Nike shoes I have designed are in my mind "one shoe." One story. - Virgil Abloh
In 2016, sportswear manufacturer Nike and fashion designer Virgil Abloh joined forces to create a sneaker collection celebrating Ten of the Oregon-based company’s most iconic shoes. With their project The Ten - which reimagines icons like Air Jordan 1, Air Max 90, Air Force 1, and Zoom Vaporfly, among others—they reinvigorated sneaker culture.
Virgil Abloh’s new designs offer deep insights into engineering ingenuity and burst with cultural cachet. Drawing on the genius of the original shoe using lettering, ironic labels, collage, and sculpting techniques, Abloh plays with language and sculptural elements to construct new meaning. Inspired by the wit of Dadaism, architectural theory, and avant-garde happenings, he analyzes what makes each shoe iconic and deconstructs it into an artistic assemblage, making each shoe into a piece of industrial design, a readymade sculpture, and a wearable all at once.
ICONS traces Abloh’s investigative, creative process through documentation of the prototypes, original text messages from Abloh to Nike designers, and treasures from the Nike archives. We find Swooshes sliced away from Air Jordans and reapplied with tape or thread, Abloh’s typical text fragments in quotation marks on Air Force 1, and All Stars cut into pieces. We take a look behind the scenes and witness Abloh’s DIY approach, which gives each model in the Off-WhiteTM c/o Nike collection its own unique touch.
Texts by Nike’s Nicholas Schonberger, writer Troy Patterson, curator and historian Glenn Adamson, and Virgil Abloh himself frame the collaborative work within fashion and design history. A lexicon in the second part of the book explains the scene from which the project grew and introduces the people, places, objects, ideas, materials, and expressions that form the foundation of sneaker culture as a whole.
The book builds upon Abloh's printed matter practice — archiving, documenting and storytelling through books and ephemera in service of preserving important cultural stories. As an extension of this practice, ICONS will enjoy an initial early release period through select Black-owned bookshops and independent retailers, demonstrating a shared belief in the vitality of print and the importance of local bookstores as hubs of community, culture and civic memory.
Published by Taschen, Art directed by Virgil Abloh, and designed by  Zak Group, ICONS, as an object, honors the industrial DIY aesthetic of The Ten.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 15, 2021

Book of the Day > Jason Lee: In The Gold Dust Rush

● Purchase SIGNED COPIES available starting1/29/21! ● For the past 14 years, artist, actor and skateboarder Jason Lee has traversed America making quiet, reflective photographs detailing the landscape and its oft-overlooked and forgotten places.
 
His new book In The Gold Dust Rush draws together 84 never before published black and white photographs from the last 12 of those years into a meandering journey from the mountains to the city.
 
“Since my first photographic outings in my native California in 2006, where I explored a more rural, perhaps neglected face of the state, and the many subsequent outings zigzagging through the West Coast, the Southwest, and Texas, I remain fascinated by these American scraps, by evidence of cancellation and departure, and the environmental contradictions that make up our collective everyday view. These conflicts, at once strange and beautiful, this is where the questions are. It’s then and now splitting time, man and nature pushing up against each other, and progress forever forcing itself on the contented. And somewhere in the middle you make pictures.” Jason Lee
Book of the Day Posted Jan 09, 2021

Book of the Day > Cuba: Original Album Cover Art of Cuban Music

● Purchase ● ‘Cuba: Music and Revolution: Original Album Cover Art of Cuban Music: Record Sleeve Designs of Revolutionary Cuba 1959-90 ’ is a stunning new deluxe 250-page large format hardback book compiled and edited by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker (Soul Jazz Records) that features many 100s of stunning and unique Cuban record sleeve designs made since the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959. These album covers have rarely been seen (nor heard) outside of Cuba and show a rich previously hidden history of both music and design.
 
‘Cuba: Music and Revolution’ is the first ever book about Cuban record sleeve design and has been five years in the making, made in full co-operation with the Cuban government. The record sleeve designs reflect both the rich cultural Latin musical legacy of Cuba, as well as the political and aesthetic influence of revolutionary Communism, which manifests itself both in the music created on the island and the artwork of the designs included here.
 
Cuban music is the source of much Latin music in the 20th century. Salsa, the all-encompassing Latin music that came out of New York in the 1970s, and soon spread across Colombia, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere, owes all of its success to the Cuban music on which it is fundamentally based.
 
These record sleeves help document the dramatic change in Cuba’s identity from that of 1950s tourist paradise to socialist state. Following the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the United States imposed a trade embargo which exists to this day, and as a consequence the many 100s of Cuban records featured here have rarely been seen outside of Cuba.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 08, 2021

Book of the Day > Magnum Artists: Great Photographers Meet Great Artists

● Purchase ● Matisse and Picasso by Robert Capa, Takashi Murakami by Olivia Arthur, Warhol and de Kooning by Thomas Hoepker, Bonnard by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Kiki Smith by Susan Meiselas, and many more. For the first time, Magnum Artists brings together a collection of over 200 photographs that define the unique relationship between the world’s greatest photography collective and the world’s greatest artists.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 07, 2021

Book of the Day > Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979

● Purchase ● A massive, groundbreaking, international anthology of concrete poetry by women, from Mira Schendel to Susan Howe
 
This expansive volume is the first collection of concrete poetry by women, with artists and poets from the US, Latin America, Europe and Japan, whose work departs from more programmatic approaches to the genre. Their word-image compositions are unified by an experimental impetus and a radical questioning of the transparency of the word and its traditional arrangement on the page.
 
Owing, perhaps, to the fact that concrete poetry’s attempt to revolutionize poetry foregrounded the male-dominated channels in which it circulated, some of the women in this volume—Ilse Garnier or Giulia Niccolai, for instance—were active in the movement’s epicenters, yet failed to attain a visibility or ample representation in international anthologies such as Emmett Williams’s Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967) and Mary Ellen Solt’s Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968).
 
This anthology celebrates their legacy and recontextualizes word-image compositions by other figures working independently. It gathers work by over 40 writers and artists, including Lenora de Barros (Brazil), Mirella Bentivoglio (Italy), Amanda Berenguer (Uruguay), Suzanne Bernard (France), Tomaso Binga (Italy), Blanca Calparsoro (Spain), Paula Claire (UK), Betty Danon (Turkey), Mirtha Dermisache (Argentina), Ilse Garnier (France), Anna Bella Geiger (Brazil), Bohumila Grögerová (Czech Republic), Ana Hatherly (Portugal), Susan Howe (USA), Tamara Jankovic (Serbia), Annalies Klophaus (Germany), Barbara Kozlowska (Poland), Liliana Landi (Italy), Liliane Lijn (USA), Françoise Mairey (France), Giulia Niccolai (Italy), Jennifer Pike (UK), Giovanna Sandri (Italy), Mira Schendel (Brazil), Chima Sunada (Japan), Mary Ellen Solt (USA), Salette Tavares (Portugal), Colleen Thibaudeau (Canada), Rosmarie Waldrop (USA) and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt (Germany).
Book of the Day Posted Jan 06, 2021

Book of the Day > Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image

● Purchase ● A detailed account of Ant Farm’s 1975 Media Burn performance, a legendary act of consumerist critique
 
This book examines the complex set of cultural references and art-making strategies informing Ant Farm’s seminal 1975 performance Media Burn in which a customized Cadillac, dubbed the Phantom Dream Car, was driven through a wall of burning television sets.
 
Originally conceived as a conceptual architectural practice, Ant Farm evolved into a full-service art collaborative, culminating in such notable works as House of the Century (1971-73), Cadillac Ranch (1974) and The Eternal Frame (1975).
 
In Media Burn the artists flourished in a rich tumult of ideas that engaged contemporary media theory, an oddly complicated aesthetic spectacle, textual appropriation and an all-encompassing branding effort.
 
Written by Steve Seid (Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive), and drawing upon a rich visual documentation, this book delves into the little-known critical backstory to this influential performance (and video work) involving a massive effort to mount a subversive critique of media hegemony while continually re-imagining the crux of the performance itself.
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