Man Unraveling

TBW Books is pleased to announce the publication of Painting Photographs, a new book by Creative Growth Art Center artist Alice Wong. Wong's bold interpretation of vintage vernacular photographs breathes new life into family album kitsch and cliché shots of plants and landscapes, transforming them into a hyper-color plane of vivid abstraction. Using paint markers to enhance and obscure the formal qualities of appropriated imagery, Wong's hand brings energy to each underlying image, recalibrating the viewer's eye and sparking appreciation for otherwise still compositions. With fluid mark-making and a striking approach to color-blocking, Wong's craft merges with the photographic process to create work that feels at once of times past and completely contemporary.

Creative Growth Art Center is the oldest and largest nonprofit art studio for artists with developmental disabilities in the United States. Since 1974, Creative Growth has played a significant role in increasing public interest in the artistic capabilities and achievements of people with disabilities, providing a professional studio environment for artistic development, gallery exhibition and representation.

Le titre du livre « Index of operational and code names » reprend l'intitulé d'un document trouvé sur Internet constitué d'une liste de 437 mots anglais classés par ordre alphabétique et accompagnés de brèves indications concernant les opérations militaires pour lesquelles ces mots ont servi de noms de code.

Ce document a inspiré à Diane Guyot la série « Index War » réalisée selon un protocole simple consistant à produire un dessin pour chaque mot de la liste.

Composé de 86 dessins issus de cette série, certains reproduits pour le support du livre, d'autres présentés au sein d'un cahier photographique tels qu'ils sont aujourd'hui accrochés dans les intérieurs de leurs propriétaires, et d'une partie textuelle placée en fin de volume qui restitue l'intégralité du document source, le livre, comme le suggère la mention volume 1 qui accompagne son titre, ne marque pas le point d'achèvement de l'œuvre mais témoigne au contraire d'un processus en cours.

L'articulation des composantes de l'œuvre dans l'espace du livre en constitue en mème temps une nouvelle version, à la fois spécifique et autonome. L'activation du dispositif codex/index invite le lecteur à une méditation sur la notion de code, où s'entrecroisent sémiotique de l'image, technique de propagande et technologie de l'information.

For the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine a group of people/ performers memorize a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. After years of learning by heart and reciting for readers, some of the books have now been written down from memory to create new editions, versions resulting from this process. This book is one of those books, chosen by one person, learned by heart and recited many times, and now written down again from memory. This edition is not a re-edition of the original text. It is a re-writing of the text after the process of reading, memorizing and reciting, with all the alterations that might have occured in the course of this process.

For the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine a group of people/ performers memorize a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. After years of learning by heart and reciting for readers, some of the books have now been written down from memory to create new editions, versions resulting from this process. This book is one of those books, chosen by one person, learned by heart and recited many times, and now written down again from memory. This edition is not a re-edition of the original text. It is a re-writing of the text after the process of reading, memorizing and reciting, with all the alterations that might have occured in the course of this process.

Wind & De Wilgen (English/Dutch) was designed by Lawrence Weiner and published on the occasion of the execution of his work Wind & The Willows in the Openluchtmuseum voor beeldhouwkunst Middelheim, Antwerp.

Lawrence Weiner was an American artist and one of the central figures in the formation of conceptual art in de 60s. His work was strongly language-based and often took form in typographic texts, also visible in this artist book. 

Edition of 1000 copies

A monograph / artists' book that engages with the recent film installations of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Installation shots, research material, scripts, and film stills give an insight into the artists' investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound, and underground (drag) performances.

The book's title alludes to an interest in opaque events that are belated, left backstage or off-screen. A number of (fictitious) letters to friends and collaborators such as Sharon Hayes, Yvonne Rainer, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi, and Jack Smith place the work of Boudry & Lorenz in a context of debates around temporalities, activism, the archival, decolonizing practices, and queer histories. Published following the exhibition “Patriarchal Poetry” at the Badischer Kunstverein, September 27– November 24, 2013.