Book of the Day
Posted Mar 18, 2015
Book of the day > Paul Kooiker: Nude Animal Cigar. Art Paper Editions. “Paul Kooiker is among the most interesting conceptual photographers currently working in the Netherlands. Although his work consists of photographic images, he is not so much a photographer as a sculptor and installation artist. His fascination with intriguing themes like voyeurism, innocence and clichés leads him to construct fictive collections of images that are of extremely uncertain origin, subject and significance. In his latest installation, 'Nude Animal Cigar', Kooiker looks back over his twenty-year career. The result is a bewildering array of photographic works, in which images of nudes and animals are interspersed with close-ups of the countless cigars he has smoked in his studio over the years.”
Book of the Day
Posted Mar 17, 2015
Book of the day > Homegrown: Austin Music Posters 1967 to 1982. University Of Texas Press. “Before Austin became the “live music capital of the world” and attracted tens of thousands of music fans, it had a vibrant local music scene that spanned late sixties psychedelic and avant-garde rock to early eighties punk. Venues such as the Vulcan Gas Company and the Armadillo World Headquarters hosted both innovative local musicians and big-name touring acts. Poster artists not only advertised the performances—they visually defined the music and culture of Austin during this pivotal period. Their posters promoted an alternative lifestyle that permeated the city and reflected Austin’s transformation from a sleepy university town into a veritable oasis of underground artistic and cultural activity in the state of Texas.
This book presents a definitive survey of music poster art produced in Austin between 1967 and 1982. It vividly illustrates four distinct generations of posters—psychedelic art of the Vulcan Gas Company, early works from the Armadillo World Headquarters, an emerging variety of styles from the mid-1970s, and the radical visual aesthetic of punk—produced by such renowned artists as Gilbert Shelton, Jim Franklin, Kerry Awn, Micael Priest, Guy Juke, Ken Featherston, Danny Garrett, and NOXX. Setting the posters in context, Texas music and pop-culture authority Joe Nick Patoski details the history of music posters in Austin, and artist and poster art scholar Nels Jacobson explores the lives and techniques of the artists.”
Book of the Day
Posted Mar 14, 2015
Book of the day > Mina Stone: Cooking for Artists. Kiito-San. “Chef Mina Stone has been cooking delicious lunches at Urs Fischer's Brooklyn-based art studio for the past five years and producing private gallery dinners in the New York art world since 2006. Cooking for Artists presents more than 70 of Stone's family-style recipes inspired by her Greek heritage and her love of simple, fresh, seasonal food. The book is designed by Fischer and includes drawings by Hope Atherton, Darren Bader, Matthew Barney, Alex Eagleton, Urs Fischer, Cassandra MacLeod, Elizabeth Peyton, Rob Pruitt, Peter Regli, Josh Smith, Spencer Sweeney and Philippos Theodorides-all members of the community of artists that delights in Stone's cooking.”
Book of the Day
Posted Mar 13, 2015
Book of the day > Stephen Shore: Survey. Aperture/Fundación MAPFRE. “Stephen Shore has had a significant influence on multiple generations of artists and photographers. Even for the youngest photographers working today, his work remains an ongoing and indisputable reference point. This book copublished with Fundación MAPFRE in conjunc¬tion with the first-ever retrospective exhibition, includes over 250 images that span Shore’s impressive and productive career. The images range from 1969 to 2013, with series such as Early Works, Amarillo, New York City, American Surfaces, and Uncommon Places, among others. Stephen Shore: Survey elucidates Shore’s contributions, as well as the historiographical interpretations of his work that have influenced photographic culture over the past four decades. Both the exhibition and the narrative of the catalogue are conceptualized around three particularly revealing aspects of Shore’s work, including his analysis of photographic and visual language, his topographical approach to the contemporary landscape, and his significant use of color within a photographic context.”
Book of the Day
Posted Mar 12, 2015
Book of the day > Architecture/Astrology: By Dan Graham and Jessica Russell. Koenig Books. “Artist Dan Graham and writer Jessica Russell's playful Architecture/Astrology considers some of the most important and innovative figures in the world of architecture from an angle few would expect: their star signs. Originally published as a column for Domus magazine, Graham and Russell's book integrates critical analysis with astrology and mythology to offer alternative perspectives on the work and personalities of artist/architects including Frank Gehry (a restless, dreamy Pisces), Frank Lloyd Wright (a romantic Gemini with one foot in the past and the other in the future), Eero Saarinen (a dynamic, dramatic Leo) and Le Corbusier (a logical, balanced Libra). With accompanying illustrations by Mieko Meguro, Architecture/Astrology itself resembles the best sort of architect, one who is at once rigorous and whimsical, with his feet on the ground and his head in the clouds.”
Book of the Day
Posted Mar 11, 2015
Book of the day > On Kawara — Silence. Guggenheim. “Because of his recourse to language, photography and systems of information, On Kawara is often described as a key figure in the history of Conceptual art. Yet his work stands apart in its devotion to painting and its existential reach. On Kawara — Silence is published in conjunction with a major exhibition of Kawara's post-1964 work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Like the exhibition itself, the structure of the book was devised in close collaboration with the late artist. The exhibition catalogue contains essays on Kawara's work by leading scholars and critics in various fields, including art history, literary studies and cultural anthropology. It also includes substantial, authoritative descriptions of every category of his production—the first time such comprehensive information has appeared in print. Richly illustrated, On Kawara — Silence reproduces many examples of the Date Paintings (Today), calendars (One Hundred Years and One Million Years), postcards (I Got Up), telegrams (I Am Still Alive), news cuttings (I Read), maps (I Went) and lists (I Met) that comprised the artist's practice beginning in the mid-1960s. Among other groups of works, the book includes images of the 97 Date Paintings (accompanied by their newspaper-lined storage boxes) that Kawara produced during a three-month run of daily painting in 1970. The catalogue also contains reproductions of paintings and drawings produced in Paris and New York in the years that precede the works for which Kawara is best known, as well as rare images of materials related to his working process. “
Book of the Day
Posted Mar 06, 2015
Book of the day > Fullmoon: Darren Almond. Taschen. “Lunar lens: Darren Almond’s nocturnal nature series
In Fullmoon, the conceptual meets the poetic: in more than 260 photographs, British artist Darren Almond catches landscapes around the globe, under the particular light of a full moon.
With the shutter kept open for over a quarter of an hour, rivers, meadows, mountains, and seashores are illuminated almost like daybreak, but the atmosphere is different: a mild glow emanates even from the shadows, star-lines cross the sky, and water blankets the earth like a misty froth. The enhanced moonlight infuses the landscapes with a sense of the surreal or the sublime, and with haunting ideas of time, nature and beauty.
The series circles around the possibility of Romantic themes today: majestic American mountains, austere Arctic ice fields, picturesque rocks by the seashore in Japan, and, most intimately viewed, the nature of Britain, whose painterly subjects are closest to home.
This book covers all parts of Almond's fullmoon series from the turn of the century up until today. It features an introduction by Sheena Wagstaff, head of the Modern and Contemporary Art Department of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and an in-depth essay by writer and critic Brian Dillon.”
Book of the Day
Posted Mar 05, 2015
Book of the day > Don’t Take These Drawings Seriously by Nathalie Du Pasquier. powerHouse Books. “Nathalie Du Pasquier started drawing as soon as she met her husband George Sowden in 1979 in Milan. She was introduced to the world of design and shortly after, in 1981, became a founding member of the iconic postmodern design movement Memphis.
From 1981 to 1987 she didn’t stop drawing. Every day she would draw a whole new modern world, from very small items like jewelry to entire cities. This world only existed in her head but would eventually be developed into real pieces for the Memphis exhibitions. This unique book is the first and definitive compilation of all the unpublished drawings from those years, which had been sitting in the drawers of Nathalie’s studio for over 30 years.
Organized by the smallest objects to the biggest and divided into chapters, each with a text by Nathalie, the book has been carefully edited and designed by Apartamento magazine’s co-founder Omar Sosa together with Nathalie Du Pasquier. Don’t Take These Drawings Seriously is an excellent reference for future generations and a welcome document of an important period in modern design.”
Book of the Day
Posted Mar 04, 2015
Book of the day > Dressing Up: Fashion Week NYC – Lee Friedlander. Yale. “Lee Friedlander is one of the most renowned photographers of his generation. Through Friedlander’s lens, people in their everyday environments are transformed into arresting portraits, and the banal features of roadsides, storefronts, and city streets become vivid scenery. In Dressing Up, Friedlander ventures into new territory, turning his eye to the rarefied world of fashion and revealing precisely what is commonplace about it: behind the glamorous spectacle of the runway are many people hard at work.
The photographs, commissioned by the New York Times Magazine, were taken in 2006 during New York Fashion Week, when the artist spent time backstage at the Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Zac Posen, Oscar de la Renta, and Proenza Schouler shows. The resulting images, many of which are published here for the first time, depict a flurry of toiling stylists, dressers, makeup artists, photographers, and models—all of them preparing, but not quite prepared, for an image to be taken. Lovers of photography and high-end fashion will be surprised and intrigued by this inside glimpse into the world of runway design.”
Book of the Day
Posted Feb 07, 2015
Book of the Day > Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment. Both the 1952 First Edition and 2014 Steidl facsimile reprint available – pick your poison!
“Within the canon of European photography books it would be difficult to find one more famous, revered and influential as Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment, wrote Jeffrey Ladd in Time LightBox, in a feature on Steidl's new edition of this ultimate photobook classic. Originally published in 1952, this collection of Cartier-Bresson's best work from his early years was embellished with a collage cover by Henri Matisse. The book has since influenced generations of photographers, while its English title defined the notion of the famous peak in which all elements in the photographic frame accumulate to form the perfect image—not the moment of the height of the action, necessarily, but the formal, visual peak. This new publication—the first and only reprint since the original 1952 edition—is a meticulous facsimile of the original book that launched the artist to international fame, with an additional booklet on the history of The Decisive Moment by Centre Pompidou curator Clément Chéroux.” - Steidl.