Book of the Day > Viviane Sassen: Hot Mirror. Published by Prestel in conjunction with The Hepworth Wakefield. “Published on the occasion of the exhibition Viviane Sassen: Hot Mirror at The Hepworth Wakefield, a survey of work by the internationally renowned Dutch artist and photographer Viviane Sassen (b.1972). This mid-career retrospective volume is a creative collaboration between Sassen and designer Irma Boom and is published by Prestel. It includes an insightful interview with the artist, a contextualizing essay by The Hepworth Wakefield curator, Eleanor Clayton and Sassen’s own thoughtful writings.

This publication focuses on Sassen’s fine art photography, revealing a surrealist undercurrent in her work. Sassen recognizes Surrealism as one of her earliest artistic influences, seen in the uncanny shadows, fragmented bodies, and otherworldly landscapes she captures in her work.

In addition to the images from the acclaimed series ‘Umbra’, this volume drawes form the series ‘Flamboya’, in which Sassen returned to Kenya, ‘Oarasomnia’, a dreamlime exploration of sleep, ‘Roxane’ a mutual portrait created with her muse, Roxane Danset, and the ‘Pikin Slee’ series, a journey to a remote village in Suriname. Selected by Sassen herself from across the last ten years, the images draw on the surrealist strategies of collage and unexpected juxtapositions to give a survey of her practice.”

Book of the Day > John Waters: Indecent Exposure. Published by University of California Press in conjunction with the Baltimore Museum of Art. “It has been more than fifty years since John Waters filmed his first short on the roof of his parents’ Baltimore home. Over the following decades, Waters has developed a reputation as an uncompromising cultural force not only in cinema, but also in visual art, writing, and performance. This major retrospective examines the artist’s influential career through more than 160 photographs, sculptures, soundworks, and videos he has made since the early 1990s. These works deploy Waters’s renegade humor to reveal the ways that mass media and celebrity embody cultural attitudes, moral codes, and shared tragedy.

Waters has broadened our understanding of American individualism, particularly as it relates to queer identity, racial equality, and freedom of expression. In bringing “bad taste” to the walls of galleries and museums, he tugs at the curtain of exclusivity that can divide art from human experience. Waters freely manipulates an image bank of less-than-sacred, low-brow references—Elizabeth Taylor’s hairstyles, his own self-portraits, and pictures of individuals brought into the limelight through his films, including his counterculture muse Divine—to entice viewers to engage with his astute and provocative observations about society.

This richly illustrated book explores themes including the artist’s childhood and identity; Pop culture and the movie business; Waters’s satirical take on the contemporary art world; and the transgressive power of images. The catalogue features essays by BMA Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Kristen Hileman; art historian and activist Jonathan David Katz; critic, curator, and artist Robert Storr; as well as an interview with Waters by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans.”

Book of the Day > Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein. Published by MIT Press. "In the early twentieth century, influenced by advances in science that included Einstein's theory of relativity and newly powerful microscopic and telescopic lenses, artists were inspired to expand their art—to capture a new metareality that went beyond human perception into unseen dimensions. In 1936, the Hungarian poet Charles Sirató authored the Dimensionist Manifesto, signaling a new movement that called on artists to transcend “all the old borders and barriers of the arts.” The manifesto was the first attempt to systematize the mass of changes that we now call modern art, and was endorsed by an impressive array of artists, including Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, César Domela, Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, László Moholy-Nagy, Ben Nicholson, Enrico Prampolini, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Dimensionism is the first book in English to explore how these and other “Dimensionists” responded to the scientific breakthroughs of their era.

The book, which accompanies a traveling exhibition, reproduces works by the manifesto's initial endorsers and by such artists as Georges Braque, Joseph Cornell, Helen Lundeberg, Man Ray, Herbert Matter, Isamu Noguchi, Pablo Picasso, Kay Sage, Patrick Sullivan, and Dorothea Tanning. It also offers essays by prominent art historians that examine Sirató's now almost-forgotten text and the artists who searched for a means of expression that obliterated old conceptions and parameters. Appearing for the first time in English is Sirató's own “History of the Dimensionist Manifesto,” written in 1966. The book brings aa long-forgotten voice and text back into circulation."

For over twenty years, our friend and trusted store manager Steve Kilfoy toiled in the fields of Arcana,  all the while maintaining his own bookstore, Bookfinger, at The Brewery. In 2017 Steve suffered life-threatening health issues that made it necessary him to leave us. Following a bone-marrow transplant, a lengthy period of enforced semi-isolation while his immune system rebuilt itself, and a stagnant period in the book business, he finds himself in the unenviable position of requiring financial assistance. Steve is an unforgettable individual and part of our history -- please click here and consider supporting his efforts to keep his book business and his home. Thank you.

The Culver City Arts District and Arts District Residents Association are proud to present this year’s Art Walk and Roll Festival on Saturday, October 6th from 12-6pm. "The Festival will feature distinguished artists, live music, eclectic food trucks, wine and beer gardens, tastings, fun kid’s activities, interactive art experiences and so much more! Grab a map and take a self-guided stroll and visit our local galleries, restaurants and retail. Events will take place throughout Culver City Arts District, including our first ever designated street closure that stretches along the Arts District, (Washington Blvd will be closed between McManus and Caroline Ave). Visit established art galleries with special installations; explore the popup marketplace featuring arts and crafts vendors."

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At Arcana we'll be hosting Zine-making workshops run by our friends at LA Zine Fest!  All workshops will include instruction on how to fold an 8-page zine. Scissors, glue, pens/writing implements, and magazines will be available for all participants at each workshop.

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12:00-1:30 - “'This is a Photo Zine. Please bring photos and images, in any medium you prefer, to piece together your photo story in zine form. (Magazines will be on hand for those who forget their photos.) If you feel so inclined you can even bring some kind of instant film camera to take snaps during the workshop to also include in your zine."

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2:30-4:00  - “'Grids and Gestures: A Diary Comic. Draw a comic, even if you have no prior drawing experience! The 'grids and gestures' technique, created by cartoonist Nick Sousanis, instructs participants to rely on drawing shapes and straight or scribbled lines in various ways to tell a story. You’ll use this technique to create a comic that tells stories about the maker’s week and the events within that time frame—a sort of diary comic. This technique is a great way to break through a creative rut or get over your fear of drawing!"

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4:30–6:00 pm - "Going Home. This workshop is intended to explore through writing a personal notion of home as both a physical place and a feeling or state; and how a home can be altered, whether through the passage of time (as in, "You can't go home again"), neighborhood change, or the physical loss of a home.

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Learn more at culvercityartwalk.com

Book of the Day > Jenny Saville. Published by Rizzoli. “Thirteen years after her first Rizzoli monograph, British artist Jenny Saville, an original member of the Young British Artists, releases her most definitive book, including never-before-published paintings from her most recent exhibition at Gagosian in New York. This much-anticipated volume unites new work with many of Saville's paintings and drawings to date, accompanied by essays that explore Saville's continuing fascination with the human body within a broad art-historical context. The book also features Saville in an extensive conversation with acclaimed American photographer Sally Mann. An illustrated chronology of Saville's career completes this elegant volume. This beautifully produced monograph is an important addition to the library on one of the world's most influential and enduring living painters.”

Book of the Day > Masahisa Fukase. Published by Editions Xavier Barral. "Among the most radical and original photographers of his generation, Masahisa Fukase was famous for The Solitude of Ravens (1991), in which these birds of doom, in flocks or alone, blacken the pages of the book in inky, somber, calligraphic clusters; in 2010 it was voted the best photobook of the past 25 years by the British Journal of Photography. Fukase also has a lesser-known corpus of collages, self-portraits, photographs reworked as sketches, black-and-white prints, Polaroids and more. This book brings together all of his work for the very first time.

Its editors, Simon Baker, director of the Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris, and Tomo Kosuga, director of the Masahisa Fukase Archives, Tokyo, have assembled 26 series from Fukase's oeuvre, including Memories of Father; The Solitude of Ravens; his portraits of cats; his famous self-portraits taken in a bathtub with a waterproof camera; and many previously unpublished works. Fukase tried his hand at everything, and this essential volume, at more than 400 pages, at last reveals the full breadth of his imagination in an English-language publication.

Born in 1934 on the island of Hokkaido, in the north of Japan, into a family of studio photographers, Masahisa Fukase began a career as a freelance reporter in the late 1960s. In 1971 he published his first photography book, consisting of group portraits of his family. In 1974, he cofounded the Workshop Photography School with Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Noriaki Yokosuka, Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama; that same year, MoMA in New York dedicated a milestone exhibition to them (New Japanese Photography). In 1992, at the age of 58, following a fall, Fukase was maintained on life support until his death in 2012."

This week I learned of the passing of beloved restaurateur, philosopher, and iconoclast Kenny Shopsin. While we at Arcana are friends and fans of the work of his talented daughter Tamara, it wasn't until a decade ago that I discovered the legacy of her family's long-lived Greenwich Village eatery - and its idiosyncratic menu and dining rules - through the Jason Fulford-illustrated book "Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin". The true revelation though came with catching Matt Mahurin's captivating 2008 documentary film about Kenny and the Shopsinverse, "I Like Killing Flies." It is a must-see, best viewed anywhere other than on Amazon.com... Faced with moving his cozy-bordering-on-claustrophobic establishment of three decades with little warning, he reacts with equal parts bravado, panic, and denial - all the while dispensing his no-nonsense accumulated personal wisdom and professional ethos as his family and the viewer are equally held in the thrall of his sublime, suspender-ed maelstrom. Often when I've found the expression of my passion for Arcana's environs and books misinterpreted by visitors here during the course of the day - more often than I can count - I've thought of Kenny Shopsin and the sheer force he displays in the film preserving his vision for his establishment irrespective of the consequences. Mind you, this was prior to the rise of the Yelp review, but to understand anything of him from his book and documentary is to know that would have mattered not one iota to the man. I bow to his humanity and curmudgeoness, and will rue the fact that there is one fewer fighters of the good fight among us.

This Saturday, September 29th from 3:00 to 5:00 PM, Tamara Shopsin and Jason Fulford will be having a local booksigning for their slew of new books oriented towards readers both young and old!

Lee Kaplan

Book of the day > Andy Burgess: Modernist House Paintings. Published by Nazraeli Press. “Nazraeli Press is proud to announce the publication of Andy Burgess: Modernist House Paintings. Representing over ten years of work by contemporary painter Andy Burgess, this exquisite monograph highlights the artist’s significant paintings in oil and acrylic completed since his move to the American Southwest from his native London in 2009. Representing an extensive exploration of modernist and mid-century homes, such as The Stahl House and The Kaufmann House, these colorful and abstracted works allow Burgess to reinterpret iconic buildings with a heightened, dream-like intensity. Printed on luscious warm-toned paper with exceptionally high quality reproductions, this crisp, clean book sequences an impressive body of work, curated like a mid-career retrospective. A foreword by gallerist Cynthia Corbett and a comprehensive essay by Tucson Museum of Art curator Julie Sasse, Ph.D. complement the artist’s images and lend insight and perspective into his creative process."