Book of the Day Posted Apr 10, 2019

Book of the Day > Martin Parr: Beach Therapy

Book of the Day > Martin Parr: Beach Therapy. Published by Damiani. "During his long career as a photographer, Martin Parr has always photographed beaches, particularly in the UK. The beach is more than just a common subject for Parr; he has often used the beach as a laboratory to experiment with new cameras and techniques. For example, when Parr switched from working with black-and-white film to medium-format color in the early 1980s, he tested out his new approach on the beaches of New Brighton, a run-down seaside resort near Liverpool. In recent years Parr has started exploring the beach with the aid of a telephoto lens. This lens is rarely used in the world of art and documentary photography, and Parr has experimented to find new ways to use its unique visual qualities, for example by incorporating the vegetation on the perimeter with the beach as a backdrop, both in and out of focus. Martin Parr: Beach Therapy focuses on this new body of work, the latest in his long experimental engagement with beaches and their users. "
 
Events Posted Apr 07, 2019

KRAFTWERK: DANCE FOREVER EXHIBITION + DANCE PARTY

 
Come to Arcana: Books on the Arts at the Helms Bakery this Saturday evening (4/13, 5:00 - 9:00) to experience the West Coast premiere of "Kraftwerk: Dance Forever" – a graphically dazzling exhibition drawn from the Mott Collection of rare and compelling visual material from the German electronic music pioneers and those they influenced. Documenting Kraftwerk's aesthetic output from the early 1970s to the present, on display will be promotional material, sheet music, obsolete recorded media, posters, photos, and musical toys charting Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider's highly influential machine music aesthetic, which inspired dance music and specifically Detroit Techno. The evening will feature Kraftwerk-themed musical sets by Rose Knows and Sean Horton, Kraftwerk shirts and bags designed by Arcana favorite Alex McWhirter, and Toby Mott signing copies of the limited edition catalogue to the show. If you cannot attend, place your order for a signed copy here!

 

Events Posted Apr 07, 2019

2019 LA ART BOOK FAIR

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For the sixth time, Arcana: Books the Arts will be exhibiting at the Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair at the Geffen Contemporary at MoCA! This year we are bringing hundreds - yes, hundreds - of artworks, posters, announcements, and other forms of ephemera that have been slumbering in our flat file drawers for the past thirty-five years. We will feature an exciting selection of rarities from the realms of contemporary, Pop, and Conceptual Art, Photography, Design, Architecture, Music, Cinema, and Fashion; including signed works by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, James Turrell, Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, Edward Gorey, and many, many more. We'll also have a vintage wire spinning rack featuring an amazing selection of Art-related postcards for sale. We will be restocking with fresh merch each day, so come early and often for the best selection!
 
The Grey Organisation was a London-based artist collective active between 1983 and 1991. Showing in London, New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo, members Toby Mott, Tim Burke, Daniel Saccoccio (nee Clegg), and Paul Spencer worked in the mediums of painting, sculpture, film, and video. Most infamously, in the dead of night on the 21st of May, 1985 The Grey Organisation staged an "art terrorist action" vandalizing the establishment art galleries on Cork Street in central London with buckets of grey paint to protest their lack of support for emerging artists. Limited to one hundred copies only, this Alex McWhirter-designed book presents Andrew Catlin's documentary photographs of the "Cork Street Attack" along with texts by Mott, Neal Brown, and Stewart Home. On Friday at 4:00 PM author and Grey Organisation member Toby Mott will be signing copies of this soon-to-be-rarity at our booth at the Book Fair. If you cannot attend, place your order for a signed copy here!
 
 

 

 

 

Book of the Day Posted Apr 06, 2019

Book of the Day > Extraordinary! Unknown Works From Swiss Psychiatric Institutions Around 1900

Book of the Day > Extraordinary! Unknown Works from Swiss Psychiatric Institutions Around 1900. Published by Scheidegger & Spiess.
"There has been a rapid rise in interest in recent years in art created by people suffering from mental illness, with new museums dedicated to it, major surveys, and attention from the media and public. Yet there has been little research undertaken to systematically examine this body of art.
Extraordinary! presents the results of an exceptional research project undertaken at the Zurich University of the Arts that documented and examined art produced in asylums and mental hospitals throughout Switzerland around 1900. Varied in style and media, the works often mark long periods of dedicated and passionate work and reveal remarkable technical and artistic prowess. They serve, the editors show, as both an expression of their creators’ ideas and an act of compensation for, and their own ciriticism of, the dull and often hard life at the institutions they treaded.
Featuring a diverse selection of previously unpublished works, Extraordinary! questions our contemporary understanding of art, encouraging the reader to engage with these artists and their work and thereby revisit the very idea of what constitutes art."
Book of the Day Posted Apr 05, 2019

Book of the Day > Kenzo Takada

Book of the Day > Kenzo Takada. Published by ACC Art Books.
"In 1970, the young Japanese designer Kenzo Takada opened his first boutique, Jungle Jap, in Paris and revolutionized the fashion world. His colorful, ethnic, and nomadic- influenced collections, made with luxurious and vibrantly patterned textiles, tweaked the conventions of haute couture while maintaining the quality of traditional European clothing houses. He was influenced by Parisian fashion and Japanese kimonos, boldly mixing colours and prints, cuts and materials. His vibrant palette and pattern combinations were joyful and whimsical, and very different from the subtle tailoring of the traditional Paris couturier. In his inspired blend of the opulent and the exotic, he developed a signature style and found early success.
With stunning photography, and over 300 sketches from Kenzo's private collection, this book traces more than forty years of his creative output. It includes photographs from his high-energy runway shows, in addition to personal photographs, and a behind-the-scene look at the creation of a spectacular wedding dress, opening a window on the creative process and capturing Kenzo's energy, vision, and presence. Superbly illustrated throughout with pencilled and hand colored sketches, swatched drawings, and previously unpublished archival photographs, the authors explore Kenzo's career, tracing the evolution of his cult label in a look-book of visual exuberance."
Book of the Day Posted Apr 04, 2019

Book of the day > I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating - Alec Soth

Book of the day > I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating - Alec Soth. Published by @MACK_books. (purchase here).  

“Taking its name from a line in the Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Gray Room,” Alec Soth’s latest book is a lyrical exploration of the limitations of photographic representation. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren’t about any particular place or population. By a process of intimate and often extended engagement, Soth’s portraits and images of his subject’s surroundings involve an enquiry into the extent to which a photographic likeness can depict more than the outer surface of an individual, and perhaps even plumb the depths of something unknowable about both the sitter and the photographer.
 
 “After the publication of my last book about social life in America, Songbook, and a retrospective of my four, large scale American projects, Gathered Leaves, I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year I stopped traveling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures at all.
 
When I returned to photography, I wanted to strip the medium down to its primary elements. Rather than trying to make some sort of epic narrative about America, I wanted to simply spend time looking at other people and, hopefully, briefly glimpse their interior life.
 
In order to try and access these lives, I made all of the photographs in interior spaces. While these rooms often exist in far-flung places, it’s only to emphasize that these pictures aren’t about any place in particular. Whether a picture is made in Odessa or Minneapolis, my goal was the same: to simply spend time in the presence of another beating heart.” – Alec Soth @littlebrownmushroom.

 

Book of the Day Posted Apr 03, 2019

Book of the Day > Albarrán Cabrera: Remembering the Future

Book of the Day > Albarrán Cabrera: Remembering the Future. Published by Editorial RM. "For years, Barcelona-based Angel Albarrán (born 1969) and Anna Cabrera (born 1969) have been the preferred printers for museums and world-renowned photographers. Recently they have branched out as artists themselves, experimenting with new and traditional print techniques and exhibiting worldwide. In addition to mastering traditional techniques such as platinum prints and cyanotypes, they have developed a unique print technology: printing photographs with pigments on thin Japanese paper, which is then placed over gold leaf, imbuing the images with an otherworldly quality. One of the most gorgeously produced volumes of recent years, Albarrán Cabrera: Remembering the Future demonstrates the extraordinary beauty of the duo's masterful photographic and printing techniques. Frequent trips to Japan inform the content of these photographs, which are often beautifully abstracted by their print treatment."
Book of the Day Posted Apr 02, 2019

Book of the Day > A History of America in 100 Maps

Book of the Day > A History of America in 100 Maps. Published by University of Chicago Press.

"Throughout its history, America has been defined through maps. Whether made for military strategy or urban reform, to encourage settlement or to investigate disease, maps invest information with meaning by translating it into visual form. They capture what people knew, what they thought they knew, what they hoped for, and what they feared. As such they offer unrivaled windows onto the past.

In this book Susan Schulten uses maps to explore five centuries of American history, from the voyages of European discovery to the digital age. With stunning visual clarity, A History of America in 100 Maps showcases the power of cartography to illuminate and complicate our understanding of the past."

In the News Posted Apr 01, 2019

Frame Magazine 03 Spring Summer 2019

"Local bookstores are becoming harder and harder to find, but it's not too late to rediscover the unique charms of touching, skimming, and smelling hile you browse. There's no place better to do so than Arcana Books, the Los Angeles institution which specializes in art books. Originally located in Santa Monica, Arcana shines in its larger Culver City space, which better accomodates their 100,000 title collection. And if that weren't enough, Arcana is the best bookstore in Los Angeles (or possibly the country) to source rare, out-of-print gems, like R. Crumb's Dream Diary of Ed Ruscha's Metro Mattresses."

Book of the Day Posted Mar 31, 2019

Book of the Day > Andrey Tarkovsky: Life and Work: Film by Film, Stills, Polaroids & Writings

Book of the Day >  Andrey Tarkovsky: Life and Work: Film by Film, Stills, Polaroids & Writings. Published by Schirmer/Mosel.
"With luscious film stills and superb essays by the director and his admirers, this is the essential Tarkovsky compendium
Between 1962 and 1986, Andrey Tarkovsky (1932–86) directed seven feature-length films, all acclaimed as masterpieces of cinema: Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Mirror, Stalker, Nostalgia and Sacrifice. Evading censorship and mounting pressure by Soviet authorities, Tarkovsky decided not to return to the Soviet Union after completing Nostalgia in Tuscany, three years before his death; his final film, Sacrifice, was shot in Sweden in 1985.
This new smaller-format edition of a 2012 publication was compiled and edited by Tarkovsky's son Andrey Jr., along with film historian and critic Hans-Joachim Schlegel and Lothar Schirmer. Beautifully designed and printed, Andrey Tarkovsky: Life and Work pays homage to a great visionary who produced poetic and sometimes disturbing images of near biblical intensity through his films. Featuring stills from each of his films, a selection of his influential writings, private photographs from the family album, as well as Polaroids from Russia and Italy, it is buttressed with comments from prominent voices who have commented on Tarkovsky's work and personality, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Ingmar Bergman and Aleksandr Sokurov."

 

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