Book of the day > A Little History: Nick Cave & cohorts, 1981-2013 by Bleddyn Butcher. “A stunning record of the amazing career of Nick Cave, one of the world's coolest musicians, by one of the world's most celebrated rock photographers . When Bleddyn Butcher first saw The Birthday Party play, back in 1981, he was astonished. And then enthralled. He set about trying to catch their lightning in his Nikon F2AS. That quixotic impulse became a lifelong quest. A little history got made on the way. Collected here for the first time, A Little History is an extraordinary document, tracing Nick Cave's creative career from the apoplectic extravagance of The Birthday Party to the calmer disquiet of 2013's Push The Sky Away via snapshots, spotlit visions, and sumptuous, theatrical portraits. It mixes the candid and uncanny, the spontaneous and the patiently staged, and includes eyeball encounters with Cave's baddest lieutenants, men for the most part who long since burned their own bridges down. Butcher's Nikonic eye defines moment after arresting moment in Cave's glorious, sprawling story: it's a splendid testament to two brilliant careers.”

Book of the day > Agnes Martin. D.A.P. / Tate. “Agnes Martin was one of the preeminent painters of the twentieth century, whose work has had a significant influence both on artists of her own time and for subsequent generations. A contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists though often identified with Minimalism, Martin was one of the few women artists who came to prominence in the predominately masculine art world of the late 1950s and 1960s, and she became a particularly important role model for younger women artists. This groundbreaking survey provides an overview of Martin's career, from lesser-known early experimental works through her striped and gridded grey paintings and use of color in various formats, to a group of her final pieces that reintroduce bold forms. A selection of drawings and watercolors is also included. With essays by leading scholars that give a context for Martin's work—her life, relationship with other artists, the influence of South-Asian philosophy—alongside focused shorter pieces on particular paintings, this beautifully designed volume is the definitive publication on her oeuvre.”

PLEASE JOIN US SUNDAY, JULY 26th, 4:00 - 6:00 PM FOR A BOOK SIGNING AND DISCUSSION

AN EAMES ANTHOLOGY: ARTICLES, FILM SCRIPTS, INTERVIEWS, LETTERS, NOTES, AND SPEECHES
WITH DANIEL OSTROFF

Book of the day > Marc Ferrez & Robert Polidori: Rio. Steidl. “Housed in a slipcase, Rio contains the work of two photographers who portray Rio de Janeiro in a visual dialogue spanning the centuries. Book One showcases nineteenth-century photographer Marc Ferrez's classical work on the city where he spent his five-decade career, from the mid-1860s to the early 1910s, while Book Two presents a project of Robert Polidori's from the past five years, in which he photographed Rio, emphasizing its contemporary dynamic and dense urban configuration. Polidori contextualizes today's Rio within the natural settings from which the city grew, and which have defined its iconic international profile throughout history. This tension between the natural and built environments, also significant in Ferrez's work, is a defining reference for Rio's inhabitants and is here beautifully documented in its historic and present variations.”

Book of the day > The Minaj Book. Woodpecker Projects, Malmö. “The Minaj Book is about the American rapper Nicki Minaj. In a new body of work presented in this book Ditte Ejlerskov investigates feminism and the gaze of the white middle-class pop consumer, with American rapper Nicki Minaj as the focal point. Minaj has climbed to the top of a male-dominated business and, in the artist’s view, critiques sexuality, power relations, racial stereotypes and patriarchal hierarchies through her acts and lyrics. In order to convey a deeper understanding of Minaj’s unconventional feminist methods, THE MINAJ BOOK unpacks the contemporary mainstream through a body of work which appropriates the rapper’s aesthetics and lyrics.

The book endeavors to highlight the gap between pop culture’s feminist efforts and an academic feminism. Primarily via the act of painting, Ejlerskov aims to support the rapper in the mission of spelling out, enhancing and superimposing loaded images. She reuses Minaj’s method of challenging race and gender stereotypes. But since the artist is a white European middle-class consumer and not the Afro-American producer of the material, the focus of the show is twisted. As well as exploring elements of Minaj’s logic, Ejlerskov also explores her own consumption, her gaze, her body, her appropriation, and even her own role as an art practitioner.”

Save the date: July 25^th (4-6) for a book signing with Tom Adler and special guests C. R. Stecyk III and Jeff Divine!

Book of the day > An Uncommon Archive: Collected Images from Projects, Books and Saved References by Tom Adler. T. Adler Books.

“This unusual volume is a selection of images from the projects, books and saved references found in the hard drives, stored files and archives of T. Adler Books. The collection draws from the seemingly disparate worlds of surfing, fashion and style, fishing, music, fine art, rock climbing, travel and adventure. The photographs, paintings, ephemera, illustrations and contact sheets are arranged in pairs and sequences suggesting subtle connections and parallels. Iconic historical images, works by well-known contemporary artists and photographers, and beautiful outdoor photographs blend and share page space with found paintings, incidental vacation snapshots and NASA imagery; works by classic photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Jacques Henri Lartigue share space with contemporary photographers Craig Stecyk, Ed Templeton, Tim Barber, Dewey Nicks and Thomas Campbell; a portrait of JFK seated in a sailboat eating an ice cream cone is paired with a 1905 photograph of the launch of the steamer Frank J. Hecker; formal portraits of John Muir and Duke Kahanamoku and open ocean photos (above and below the surface) by Wayne Levin and Corey Arnold are scattered throughout the volume, alongside paintings by Maynard Dixon and Robert Overby, nineteenth-century Cyanotypes by Anna Atkins and a handpainted sign by Stephen Powers. Iconic surfing photographs by Don James, Ron Church, Steve Wilkings, Leo Hetzel, Jeff Hornbaker, Art Brewer, Jim Russi, Jeff Divine and Jim Driver are mixed with dramatic climbing images from Glen Denny, Mike Graham, Allen Steck, Johannes Mair and Jeff Johnson. But it is the editor's imaginative sequencing and pairing of these photographs that provides the unique pleasure of this book. A fresh, blue-sky and water-drenched elegance carries the volume along, resulting in a melding of tone and composition, gestures and cultures, associations and connections that reinforce the individual images.”

Buy the book here

UPCOMING EVENTS AT ARCANA: BOOKS ON THE ARTS

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Saturday, July 25^TH, 4:00 -6:00 PM

TOM ADLER: AN UNCOMMON ARCHIVE
WITH GUESTS C.R. STECYK III AND JEFF DIVINE

Get stoked about meeting our friend Tom (and about buying his book) by reading this great New York Times article about him!

Sunday, July 26^TH, 4:00 - 6:00 PM 

DANIEL OSTROFF: AN EAMES ANTHOLOGY

Saturday, August 22^nd, 4:00 - 6:00 PM

RYAN SCHUDE: SCHUDE

COMING SOON (date TBD)
ETHAN RAFAL: SHOCK AND AWE WITH WHISKY AND PIE!

Happy birthday week to the Dalai Lama! Book of the day > Infinite Light: A Photographic Meditation on Tibet by Marissa Roth with a Foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Marquand Books. "A visual poem of seventy-two color photographs of her impressions of Tibet, arranged in a continuous sequence reflecting the colors of Tibetan prayer flags. The photographs were shot with some of the last available Kodachrome film, producing deep saturated color. Limited to an edition of 400, each slipcased book is signed and numbered by the artist. Says Roth, ‘This project is my love letter to Tibet. It is the reflection of my inner and outer journeys to this land and a very personal impressionistic view of what it feels like to be in Tibet. It is also a social and political statement and another cry for awareness about what is being irrevocably lost.’”

 

Buy the book here

Book of the day + book signing tonight, 6-8! > Jonas Wood and Shio Kusaka: Blackwelder. Gagosian/Rizzoli with Karma, NY. “A fully illustrated look into the world of artists Jonas Wood and Shio Kusaka, published in conjunction with the artists’ debut exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, Hong Kong. Both Kusaka’s porcelain vessels and Wood’s drawn and painted interiors are depicted within this new book in vibrant color plates and photographs. Wood and Kusaka draw from each other’s work as painter and potter to probe the tensions between representation and expression, precision and chance, and  influences from art history and life.  
An insightful new text by art critic Chris Wiley accompanies color images of Wood and Kusaka at their shared studio on Blackwelder Street in Los Angeles, where they work alongside one another to create works that draw from personal memory and their shared existence as a married couple.