Book of the Day Posted Aug 12, 2021

Book of the Day > Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty

● Purchase ● Featuring newly commissioned essays and photography of rarely exhibited works, this book highlights the radicalism of Jean Dubuffet, who was one of the most provocative voices of the postwar avant-garde.
 
In 1940s occupied Paris, Jean Dubuffet began to champion a progressive vision for art; one that rejected classical notions of beauty in favor of a more visceral aesthetic. Taking a pioneering approach to materiality and technique, the artist variously blended paint with sand, glass, tar, coal dust, and string. At the same time, he began to assemble a collection of Art Brut–work that was made outside the academic tradition of fine art–even visiting psychiatric wards from 1945 to collect work by patients. This book features texts from leading scholars and is accompanied by images that illuminate Dubuffet’s attempts to move beyond the artistic expectations of his time. The works are grouped into six thematic sections that focus on specific series, from his graffiti-inspired “Walls” and his notorious portrait series, “People are Much More Beautiful Than They Think” to the “Corps de dames,” a controversial series of “female” landscapes, and his anthropomorphic sculptures, “Little Statues of Precarious Life.” Exquisitely produced, this celebration of Dubuffet’s work embraces his world view that art is for everyone, not just the elite.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 11, 2021

Book of the Day > Led Zeppelin Vinyl

● Purchase ● A tribute to the world’s greatest rock band through a kaleidoscopic collection of vinyl, from obscure international records to handmade albums of historic performances
 
Led Zeppelin released only eight studio albums and no singles over the course of their 12-year career, but to date there are more than 1,000 singles and 2,000 LPs in the market.
 
This definitive volume illustrates in full color some of the rarest and most interesting vinyl releases, including one-of-a-kind rarities, bizarre regional variations, official albums and historic recordings of legendary concerts, sometimes featuring handmade artwork or colored vinyl. The vinyl, labels and covers have been documented by photographer Ross Halfin in superb detail and are annotated with details of their release.
 
In addition, the book includes over forty pages of the most up-to-date comprehensive discography ever compiled on the band, with forensic detail. All known album and single vinyl releases from around the world are listed with catalogue numbers, release or recording dates and additional notes.
 
A labor of love, Led Zeppelin Vinyl is a must-have for fans of the group and vinyl enthusiasts. It is a paean of praise to vinyl artwork and graphic design: The illustrations are explosive and surreal, playful, experimental and subversive, interpreting multiple artistic disciplines with flair and wit.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 10, 2021

Book of the Day > David Wojnarowicz, Marion Scemama: A Slow Boat To China

● Purchase ● While working as a reporter photographer in the mid-1980s, Marion Scemama was sent to New York. There she met David Wojnarowicz at the Christopher Street Pier, where he was painting his first frescoes. He introduced her to his friends, gave her access to the New York underground scene she wanted to document. From that moment on, until David's death in 1992, they maintained a passionate friendship that took the form of artistic collaborations on several occasions, with Marion taking pictures or making films that David Wojnarowicz used in his work.
 
In 1991, David was invited to San Francisco for the launch of his book, Close to the Knives. He wanted to get there by land, traveling through the desert, which he had already done alone several times. He loved those landscapes, the extreme loneliness they made him feel, the physical enjoyment and excitement he felt on the road, feeling weighed down by the sun.
 
When David wrote his long-time friend and asked her to join him that trip, he had known for several years that he was HIV-positive and sensed that this trip may very well be the last one he would ever have the strength to take. The photographs show what this trip meant to the two friends. Like a silent farewell, but in a moment when the knowledge of his impending death, no matter how clear and profound, never suppressed the heightened life force that grew within David in the midst of these desert landscapes.
 
During this weeks-long journey, Marion took about one hundred photographs that have been kept hidden until now. The book follows the two friends on the roads, from shabby motels to deserted villages, against the backdrop of the Death Valley's shadowless landscapes, amidst the white rocks of Zabriskie Point, where the old emblems of American mythology live on.
 
To accompany the account of this journey and tie it to David Wojnarowicz's life and oeuvre, two texts, one written by Thibault Boulvain and Elisabeth Lebovici, will close the collection. The contribution of these researchers, who are in France two important figures in the current research in queer studies, will make it possible to introduce David Wojnarowicz's work in France, where there has only been a translation of Close to the Knives —albeit out of print now—and where no major exhibition of his work is yet to be announced.
Events Posted Aug 10, 2021

Book Show & Tell with Burnt Sienna Research Society

Tomorrow, Wednesday 8/11/21, please tune in to Instagram (@arcanabookss) at 5:00pm for the latest and greatest Show & Tell with Jason EC Wright of @BurntSiennaResearchSociety !
 
Gather up your art books, design books, coffee table books or rare magazines and come nerd out with Jason!
 
Here’s how it works: Jason will be live @arcanabooks sharing some of his favorites with you. Raise your hand to share and he will tap you in. Chat about your most influential book or bookshop. Enjoy the hour, meet some interesting people, and support your local bookstore. There’s nothing like a little book fun in the middle of the week. If there's something in the discussion that piques your interest and we have it in stock, we'll even give you a 10% discount for mentioning that you participated!
 
Jason E.C. Wright is the Founder of http://www.burntsienna.org/, a critical-thinking research consultancy for design histories, intangible culture, and reference materials. Jason is Indiana born and raised, who now considers Los Angeles home. He is an accomplished designer, researcher, writer, with 20+ years as a retail and fashion professional, who takes his love of books seriously, serving as librarian-in-residence at home in Treehouse Hollywood.
 
Thanks to Frances Anderton & Angela Anthony / @HelmsBakeryDistrict.

 

Book of the Day Posted Aug 07, 2021

Book of the Day > Organic Music Societies

● Purchase ● Archival documents and new writings on the intermedia collaborations of avant-garde jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and textile artist Moki Cherry
 
Don Cherry and Moki Karlsson met in Sweden in the late ’60s. They married and began to perform together, dubbing their mix of communal art, social and environmental activism, children’s education and pan-ethnic expression “Organic Music.” Their home in Tågarp became a locus of artistic production, attracting free-spirited musicians, poets, actors and artists with the promise of collective life. There, Keith Knox assembled Tågarp Publication Number One to document the collectivistic practices blooming under the Cherrys’ guidance. Reproduced here, the text includes interviews with Terry Riley and Cherry, a piece on Pandit Pran Nath, a report on the Bombay Free School and a survey of the esoteric Forest University by Bengt af Kintberg. This book explores Don Cherry’s work of the period through additional interviews by Knox, a piece on his Relativity Suite and an essay by Fumi Okiji. Moki’s writings on her workshops are featured alongside full-color reproductions of her tapestries, used as performance environments by Don’s ensembles. Cherry collaborators Bengt Berger and Christer Bothén contribute travelogues from the era.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 06, 2021

Book of the Day > Robert Crumb. Sketchbook Vol. 6. 1998–2011

● Purchase ● “Silly Fool Comics” fills the final page in this final volume, with a devilish creature telling the anguished Crumb, “YOU Will Soon Be DEAD!” He was a mere 67, but in his self-absorbed Crumbish way was obsessing about death, when not making intimate and loving portraits of his wife Aline and all the other women who’d tormented his libido since boyhood. Most impressive in this book are his historic tableau, some single page, others multi-page strips, including Piers the Ploughman of 14th century England, My Secret Life by “Walter,” Rough Women of the Dark Ages and The Apache Dance, from a 1930s Parisian postcard. His Rapidographed cross hatching is superb as ever and we are treated to long screeds displaying his undimmed brilliance at analyzing the human condition, in a morbid but nonetheless amusing way.
 
One could say there are no surprises in content, as Crumb has produced a consistent body of work over the last 40, if not 50, years, yet each page is also jarringly different from the one before, due to his personal juxtaposition of images. So much is packed in you can spend an hour and find you’re only a quarter of the way through, with Crumb bemoaning his mortality, while continuing to prosper, every few pages. A fine stand-alone volume, and must-have completion for the sketchbook set.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 04, 2021

Book of the Day > David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968–1979 (Expanded and Revised 2nd Edition)

● Purchase ● The first book dedicated to these pivotal early works on paper, David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968–1979 brings together the monoprints and collages in which the artist used the body as both a drawing tool and printing plate to explore performative, unconventional forms of image making. Hammons created the body prints by greasing his own body—or that of another person—with substances including margarine and baby oil, pressing or rolling body parts against paper, and sprinkling the surface with charcoal and powdered pigment. The resulting impressions are intimately direct indexes of faces, skin, and hair that exist somewhere between spectral portraits and physical traces. Hammons’ body prints represent the origin of his artistic language, one that has developed over a long and continuing career and that emphasizes both the artifacts and subjects of contemporary Black life in the United States.
 
More than a half century after they were made, these early works on paper exemplify Hammons’ celebration of the sacredness of objects touched or made by the Black body, and his biting critique of racial oppression. The 32 body prints highlighted in this volume introduce the major themes of a 50-year career that has become central to the history of postwar American art.
 
This edition features a conversation between curator and activist Linda Goode Bryant and artist Senga Nengudi, as well as a photo essay by photographer Bruce W. Talamon, who documented David Hammons at work in his Los Angeles studio in 1974. The publication is expanded from its first edition to include reproductions of a selection of rarely-seen body prints that Hammons added from his personal collection to the exhibition during its final weeks. The publication also features a revised introduction by Laura Hoptman to mark the unique expansion of the exhibition.
Book of the Day Posted Aug 03, 2021

Book of the Day > David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring in Normandy, 2020

● Purchase ● An uplifting celebration of spring and the power of art against lockdown: Hockney’s new iPad drawings, in an intimate sketchbook format
 
At the beginning of 2020, just as global COVID-19 restrictions were coming into force, David Hockney was at his new house, studio and garden in Normandy. From there, he witnessed the arrival of spring, and recorded the blossoming of the surrounding landscape on his iPad, a method of drawing he has been using for over a decade.
 
Drawing outdoors was an antidote to the anxiety of the moment for Hockney; “we need art, and I do think it can relieve stress,” he says. This uplifting publication—produced to accompany a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts—includes 116 of these new iPad drawings and shows to full effect Hockney's singular skill in capturing the exuberance of nature. The book begins with an interview with the show's curator, Edith Devaney, in which Hockney discusses his heralding of the spring. It also features augmented reality, an exciting technology that enables smartphones and tablets to recognize printed images and play a related film or animation.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 31, 2021

Book of the Day > Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography and the Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante, 1946–1964

● Purchase ● How a small photography club gave birth to modernist photography in Brazil
 
Published in conjunction with the first major museum exhibition of Brazilian modernist photography outside of Brazil, Fotoclubismo presents the groundbreaking creative achievements of São Paulo’s Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante, a group of amateur photographers founded in 1939 that is essentially unknown today to European and North American audiences. The vast majority of FCCB members pursued photography outside of their day jobs as lawyers, businessmen, accountants, journalists, engineers, biologists and bankers, but they were nonetheless quite serious about their artistic ambition. Their radical experimentations with process and form and their determination to distill inventive compositions from everyday life contributed to their esteemed reputation within an active international postwar scene—a status that has been all but forgotten.
 
This richly illustrated publication assembles a robust selection of photographs to introduce the FCCB’s photographic experiments to an international audience. Six chapters highlight individual achievements nestled between thematic groupings that suggest the breadth of the club’s talent. Curator Sarah Meister’s essay situates the FCCB within the broader contemporary art scene in Brazil as well as a dynamic network of photographers around the world, and offers fresh insight into the status of the amateur then and now. This is the first non-Portuguese-language publication to grapple with these photographs that were widely heralded at the time of their creation.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 29, 2021

Book of the Day > Polaroid Now: The History and Future of Polaroid Photography

● Purchase ● Polaroid Now celebrates new work created by contemporary artists working with Polaroid cameras and film today, and discusses the history, and evolution of the first instant imaging camera system that became a household name.
 
This curated selection of images is diverse aesthetically and geographically, and embraces the world-wide community of Polaroid artists. The book celebrates the unique, one-of-a-kind, and instantly gratifying qualities of Polaroid imagery. Additionally, Polaroid photographs by renowned luminaries such as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Chuck Close are included, as well a section on the 20x24 Polaroid camera.
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