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Cover of Better Living Catalog

Primary Information

Better Living Catalog

Pippa Garner

€19.00

Pippa Garner’s Better Living Catalog, originally published in 1982, takes the form of a mail order catalog featuring clever and whimsical inventions that parody consumer goods while simultaneously critiquing America’s obsession with ingenuity, efficiency, leisure, and comfort. These works, which were made as prototypes and photographed for the publication, take the form of improbable accessories, clothing, footwear, home appliances, and office gadgets.

For example, the “Reactiononometer,” a portable wristband, instantly measures social success, while the “Digital Diet Loafers” display the wearer’s weight with every step. If the “Munch-o-Matic” reduces deskwork interruptions by flinging a snack right into the user’s mouth, other items promise financial solvency (the controlled cash flow “Autowallet”), sustainable waste management, or mess-free companionship (the “Pet-a-Vision” TV console). The artist asserts that all of the products in the book are “absolute necessities for contemporary survival.”

The Better Living Catalog was a pop hit when it was published, earning Garner spots on nighttime TV talk shows and attention from magazines like Vogue and Rolling Stone. In a meme-filled culture, the works still resonate today, finding their analog in widely-circulating consumer products, and—in the case of the “High Heel Skates”—even appearing unattributed in the runway collection of a major luxury fashion brand.

A few years after the Better Living Catalog was published, Garner began her gender transition, which she has characterized as an artistic project that draws conceptual parallels to the altered consumer goods she has continued to create since the 1970s. The artist’s practice has always been about hacking—gender hacking, she stated, was “an excellent premise for maverick conceptual art and diametrically opposed to anything I’d ever done.”

Many of the prototypes Garner created for the publication were repurposed or recycled, making this previously rare gem of an artist book one of the artist’s few works to now be widely available.

Born in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, Pippa Garner (formerly known as Philip Garner) began her practice in the late sixties as a member of the highly regarded Transportation Design department at ArtCenter, California, with plans to become a car stylist, and was drafted to Vietnam to serve as a combat illustrator. In the mid-80s, Garner began her gender transition, which she considers a conceptual artwork, marking an extension of her practice from twenty years of altering cars, garments, and consumer products to using her own body as raw material. Garner appeared on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and other talk shows, showcasing her satirical consumer product inventions, and her artwork has been featured in Car & Driver, Rolling Stone, Arts & Architecture, and Vogue, among other publications. In the 1980s, her performance, design, and video work was exhibited in institutions including the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; since 2015, she has had exhibitions at STARS, O-Town House, Redling Fine Art, and Parker gallery in Los Angeles; Jeffrey Stark in New York; JOAN, Los Angeles; Kunstverein München; 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, Metz; Kunsthalle Zurich; and Art Omi, Ghent, New York. She is the author of three other books: Utopia… or Bust! Products for the Perfect World (1984), Garner’s Gizmos & Gadgets (1987), and the zine Beauty 2000 (1992/2021).

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Cover of Notebooks 1967-70

Primary Information

Notebooks 1967-70

Lee Lozano

This publication is a compilation of Lee Lozano’s notebooks from 1967 to 1970. The three notebooks included here contain her seminal “Language Pieces” and drawings for her paintings, including 12 studies for her 11-panel masterpiece, “Wave Series.”

Lee Lozano (1930-1999) was an enigmatic artist making a diverse body of drawings, paintings, and conceptual works. While prolific, her production was limited to her time in New York from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. She was very actively engaged with other artists in New York until she decided to leave the art world in 1972. Until recently, much of her work has been difficult for the public to access. From the time of her boycott of the art world until her death, Lozano was an artist working conceptually even though she did not participate actively in the commercial art world for the last three decades of her life.

The pages of the notebooks contain notes and sketches related to her abstract paintings and also contain her texts, which were known as “Language Pieces.” The artist’s work in the books reveal her desire to live and create art within a structured system. Lozano considered the individual pages of her notebooks to be drawings, and they were sometimes separated and exhibited. Twenty-five years ago, the notebooks were photocopied and it is that record which serves as the basis for this book.

Notebooks 1967-70 was first published by Primary Information in 2010. This is the second printing.

Cover of The All Night Movie

Primary Information

The All Night Movie

Mary Heilmann

Monograph €24.00

Created by Mary Heilmann in 1999, The All Night Movie beautifully wraps a memoir inside of a monograph, creating an artist book in which each page is designed as though it were a painting. The artist delicately utilizes color, text, candid photographs, reproductions of paintings, and song lyrics that unfold seamlessly to create an immersive visual experience. Heilmann has described the book as “the story of my life, told in words, painted images and photographs.”

Across eight chapters, Heilmann recounts her life, from childhood in California through New York in the 1990s, providing intimate insight into the development of her work, friendships, and formative life experiences. Snapshots by the artist and others provide a portrait of Heilmann’s evolving artistic community, which included Gordon Matta-Clark, Pat Hearn, Dicky Landry, Jack Pierson, Keith Sonnier, Pat Steir, William Wegman, and Jackie Winsor, among others. And this is just the first half of the book. Included with the artist’s memoir is an essay by Jutta Koether and a survey of paintings from 1972-1999. This highly revered and extremely scarce publication was co-designed with Mark Magill and is reproduced here as a facsimile edition. The All Night Movie was originally published by Hauser & Wirth and Offizin Verlag.

Mary Heilmann was born in San Francisco in 1940. She studied at the University of California at Santa Barbara, San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley before moving to New York in 1968. Heilmann began her career creating sculpture before quickly pivoting into abstract painting once on the East Coast, experimenting with bright colors and unusual geometries that bridge two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements. She has been the recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award as well as a Guggenheim Foundation award.

Cover of Fia Backström: COOP: A-Script

Primary Information

Fia Backström: COOP: A-Script

Fia Backström

COOP documents Swedish artist Fia Backström's (born 1970) performances of two recent scripts, continuing her exploration of language, marketing, disorders and performance. The first script operates according to two distinct logics: a four-part linear base structure and text material that was chosen and read during the performance through chance movement of the performer's body across a grid.

This publication was especially designed to reflect this type of unpredictable and spontaneous movement. Mathematical symbols have been embedded into the text and these symbols link to ones on the upper corner of pages with nonlinear material. These indicate where the text could be inserted during a performance, thus incorporating the form of performance into the book. The second script serves as an epilogue to the first and was performed by four voices, reading from beginning to end without assigned lines, sometimes simultaneously.

Cover of Salvation

Primary Information

Salvation

Jimmy DeSana

Salvation is a previously-unpublished artist book by Jimmy DeSana that he conceptualized shortly before his death in 1990. The publication contains 44 of the artist’s late photographic abstractions that quietly and poetically meditate on loss, death, and nothingness. Depicted within the works are images of relics, body parts, flowers, and fruits that DeSana altered using collage and darkroom manipulations to create pictures that are both intimate and other-worldly. Salvation provides a nuanced and sophisticated counterpoint to the prevailing work around HIV/AIDS at the time, which tended to favor bold political statements.

Variations of many of the works in this book were first presented at DeSana’s last show with Pat Hearn Gallery in 1988. Shortly thereafter, the artist began assembling a maquette of Salvation, using black and white images as place holders for the color works that he intended to comprise the final layout of the publication. Sadly, he was unable to fully realize Salvation in his lifetime, but on his deathbed, he dictated instructions to his longtime friend Laurie Simmons for completing the work; instructions which she noted on each page of the single-copy maquette. With these notes, Simmons was able to match extant slides  and sequencing. Simmons’ studio chose color gels from DeSana’s archive for each corresponding black and white image in the assembly of the publication. Thankfully, due to this recuperative work, Salvation—long-considered to be DeSana’s last major work—is now available for the first time, with every step taken to honor and embody DeSana’s original vision.

Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) grew up in Atlanta, GA, and received his bachelor’s degree from the Georgia State University in 1972 before relocating to New York’s East Village in the early 1970s. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include The Sodomite Invasion: Experimentation, Politics and Sexuality in the work of Jimmy DeSana and Marlon T. Riggs, Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada, 2020, and Remainders, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY, 2016. DeSana’s work can be found in numerous public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. A major retrospective of DeSana’s work was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2022, accompanied by a catalogue co-published by the Brooklyn Museum and DelMonico Books.

Cover of Le Chauffage #3 - Day Job

Le Chauffage

Le Chauffage #3 - Day Job

Francesca Percival, Felix Rapp and 1 more

Periodicals €20.00

The third issue of Le Chauffage is an inquiry into the relationship between the practices of artists/ writers and their day jobs. This subject stems from a question fundamental to the existing mandate of Le Chauffage: 'how do you keep warm?' and subsequently, 'how do you pay the bills?' As these perennial concerns occupy our everyday lives, we ask artists/writers to consider the influence that their day jobs, side hustles, creative or non- creative forms of employment have on their respective practices.

This issue tries to account for the significant ways in which complex economic realities come to shape the art we produce, look at, and discuss. How do we deal with limited time and resources? How do we reclaim and steal time back? How do our day jobs shape and influence what we make? How do we subvert the means of production of the workplace? Can the constraint of a day job also be a way to alleviate the pressure of professionalising?

With contributions by Daniel Bozhkov, Nathan Crompton Pippa Garner, Chauncey Hare Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes, Garrett Lockhart, Jannis Marwitz Reba Maybury, Tiziana La Melia, Dan Miller, Ragen Moss, Jean Luc Moulène, Jean Katambayi Mukendi Paul Niedermayer, Sophie Nys, Megan Plunkett, Chris Reinecke, Jacquelyn Zong Li Ross On Gabrielle L Hirondelle Hill Margaux Schwarz, Eleanor Ivory Weber James Welling, Werker, The Wig.

Cover of Studio Visit

Inventory Press

Studio Visit

Sara Greenberger Rafferty

Studio Visit collects two decades of work by Brooklyn-based artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty (born 1978), known for her material transformation of photographs and her use of comedy as an artistic strategy. Organized by material sensibilities around paper, plastic, glass, metal, fabric scraps, and "garbage," Studio Visit rethinks the monograph format, revealing Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s practice through intimate studio documentation, sketches, notes, and other ephemera, punctuated by full-color case studies of major works. 

With image descriptions by art historian Kate Nesin and new writing by Kristan Kennedy and Oscar Bedford, as well as reprinted texts by poet Lisa Robertson and media scholar Shannon Mattern, among others, Studio Visitsurveys Sara Greenberger Rafferty's cultural commentary through dynamic and conceptually rigorous art. 

Cover of Untitled

Capricious

Untitled

Sasha Phyars-Burgess

Monograph €40.00

Sasha Phyars-Burgess’ first monograph, Untitled. Spanning three bodies of work, this 200-plus page monograph includes poems by Ser Alida and Aurora Masum-Javed, a conversation between Sasha Phyars-Burgess, Juliana Huxtable and Carolyn Lazard, and essay by Bill Gaskins. Designed by Studio Lin.

As recipient of the second annual Capricious Photo Award, Sasha is a vital, emerging voice in contemporary photography, engaging the charged line between documentary and fine art. Her work ranges from affecting studies on diaspora, family and place to revolving social phenomenons in which energy, beauty and power meet.

The second annual jury panel was helmed by Capricious Founder and Publisher Sophie Mörner and Associate Publisher Anika Sabin alongside Lauren Cornell, Katherine Hubbard, JOFF, Matt Keegan, Guadalupe Rosales, Ka-Man Tse, and Lyndsy Welgos.

Cover of As If They Had A Spirit: the practice of Pontus Pettersson

Galerie

As If They Had A Spirit: the practice of Pontus Pettersson

Pontus Pettersson

Monograph €25.00

As If They Had A Spirit is the first comprehensive monograph of artist Pontus Pettersson. Using drawing and narration, the book expands on Pettersson’s sculptural, poetic and choreographic practice through the accounts and fabulations of long term collaborators. As If They Had A Spirit centers the acts of re-membering, re-telling and re-tracing as situated  methods for documenting and studying the protracted and evolving nature of process-based artistic practices.

Recounted and drawn by Linnea Hansander, Robert, Malmborg, Diana Orving, Karina Sarkissova, Sandra Lolax, Stina Nyberg, Anna Koch, Peter Mills, Anna Efraimsson and Galerie (Simon Asencio & Adriano Wilfert Jensen)

Edited and redrawn by Galerie (Simon Asencio & Adriano Wilfert Jensen)
Editing assistance Izabella Borzecka
Published by Galerie, Int
Co-publisher & Distibribution: PAM, Stockholm

As If They Had A Spirit was made possible with generous support by the Swedish Arts Council, Weld, MDT and PAM