Artists' Books

Hell’s Gates II Retribution
Tim Coghlan
Perimeter Editions - 29.00€ -  out of stock

Melbourne designer and publisher Tim Coghlan has built his output around the results of both wayward and strategic Google Images searches. Amidst the morass of images that drown the digital present – not to mention the cloud of desensitisation that rises in its wake – some photographs still hold the acute charge and resonance they always did.

Filled with lo-res, amateur, and public domain photographs of burning churches found online, including screen captures from TV news broadcasts, this second volume of Coghlan’s investigative project continues to pose questions of iconography, typology, and the implications of images.

And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
Lucy Cordes Engelman
Self-Published - 17.00€ -  out of stock

The topics in this publication circle around watery submerged knowledge; including the drowned land between the Netherlands and Britain (called Doggerland), the Neolithic marine goddess, Nehalennia, and the timber ritual circle referred to as Seahenge.

‘And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper’ focuses on how the ancient peoples of the Netherlands related to the ocean and surrounding waters. The publication consists of resources and notes the author took in her journal during the research process, a series of prints she made while in residence Frans Masereel Centrum and a fictionalized reflection on her own personal relationship to water while living in such a wet wet land.

Our Silver Lining
Maite Vanhellemont
Self-Published - 20.00€ -

Our Silver Lining is an ongoing collection of everyday observations by Maite Vanhellemont.

"All film stills and photos collected in this publication were unstaged and shot between the spring of 2018 and the winter of 2020 using a iPhone 8. A selection of the film stills was previously shown during a digital pop-up exhibition in Amsterdam's subway network in the context of Museum Nacht 2019.

The text ‘Wat Niemand Ziet’ is also part of Jan Zwaaneveld’s collection of short stories of the same name, which was published in the spring of 2021. The title of this publication refers to a text I came across above a house in Ostend (BE), during a family weekend in the autumn of 2018. Perhaps according to some a cliché, but I experienced this as a piece of poetry, which you sometimes just stumble upon."

Why Do Hoodie Strings Taste So Good?
Ignacy Radtke
Self-Published - 35.00€ -  out of stock

This text is an attempt to explain the importance of comfort regulation, through sensory stimulation. Whether that be from fidgeting, through masturbation to cuddling and other activities. This thesis is about self-regulation and the objects which visualise that need. From the Freudian psychoanalysis idea of child development through transitional objects introduced by Donald Winnicot to Dakimakura phenomena in otaku culture in a Japanese society that seeks closeness to cute pastelle vibrators which are overflowing the sex toys market. The attempt to answer this question: “Why do hoodie strings taste so good?” seeks to answer the overarching need for constant adjustment to the environment we live in.

I’m intrigued by the need for biting, sucking, and tapping random objects. The fidgeting era is here! We are overwhelmed by all kinds of spinners, popping toys, anti-stress devices, dopamine booster, etc. What is it all about and why have fidget spinners became such a hype in the recent years? Have you ever considered why your hoodie strings taste so good? Have you caught yourself while compulsively sucking them in the metro or at the bus stop? This thesis will endeavour to answer these questions. The answer might be much easier and more pragmatic than we think. In contradiction to my deep analysis in the following sections, one of the reddit users wrote in response to the above question: Why do hoodie strings taste so good?

“Just don’t do it! After sucking them a few times, they become bacteria factories/colonies, so taste (and probably smell) evolves over time. Don’t suck and chew them!! They do, however, work as good, reachable things to practise finger dexterity – to tie knots into and practice rope binding”

Dreams of a Dreamless Night
Ali Cherri
Lenz Press - 30.00€ -  out of stock

The publication is the first institutional monograph on the multimedia practice of artist and director Ali Cherri. It aims to highlight the constellation of ideas, themes, and formal concerns running through his most recent, highly significant projects.

Edited by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi, with Bianca Stoppani, this book provides an overview of the artist's output over the past three years, teasing out both new strands for interpretation and formal links between his films, videos, sculptures, drawings, and installations.

Texts by: Cecilia Alemani, Erika Balsom, Étienne Bernard, Leonardo Bigazzi, Ali Cherri, Lorenzo Giusti, Stefanie Hessler, Priyesh Mistry, Alessandro Rabottini, Stefan Tarnowski.

Video and visual artist Ali Cherri (born 1976 in Beirut, lives and works in Paris and Beirut) received a BA in graphic design from the American University in Beirut in 2000, and an MA in performing arts from DasArts, Amsterdam, in 2005. His current project looks at the place of the archaeological object in the construction of historical narratives.

A history of images / Une histoire d'images
Antoine de Galbert, Guy Tosatto, Noëlig Le Roux, e.a.
Éditions Empire - 35.00€ -

Through more than 500 images by 95 photographers, the Musée de Grenoble's collection of photographs from Antoine de Galbert's collection and his foundation offers an impressive panorama of our times and the decisive role played by photography in shaping our perceptions and contemporary mythologies.

Works by Aalam, Bani Abidi, Antoine d'Agata, Lucien Aigner, Pilar Albarracín, Yolanda Andrade, Sammy Baloji, Ion Bîrlădeanu, Eric Baudelaire, Philippe Bazin, Guillaume Binet, Alain Bizos, Antoni Campana, Mario Carnicelli, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, Chieh-Jen Chen, Roman Cieslewicz, Christian Courrèges, David Damoison, Philippe De Gobert, Luc Delahaye, Bernard Descamps, Jean-Marie Donat, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Sandra Eleta, Fouad Elkoury, Charles Fréger, Alberto García-Alix, Laurence Geai, Agnes Geoffray, Julien Gester, Stephan Gladieu, David Goldblatt, Hengameh Golestan, Cosmin Gradinaru, Guillaume Herbaut, Chester Higgins, Kati Horna, John Isaacs, Olivier Jobard, Alain Keler, Yevgeny Khaldeï, Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Oleg Kulik, Olivier Laban-Mattei, Stéphane Lagoutte, Dorothea Lange, Le Tiers Visible, Arthur Leipzig, Alexandre Lewkowicz, Pascal Maître, Yuri Mechitov, Davood Maeili, Edouard Méhomé, Georges Melet, Lívia Melzi, Boris Mikhaïlov, Lisette Model, Etienne Montes, Yan Morvan, Genevieve Naylor, Vladimir Nikitin, Martin Parr, Paolo Pellegrin, Mathieu Pernot, Gilles Raynaldy, Marc Riboud, Sophie Ristelhueber, Hugo Schmölz & Karl Hugo Schmölz, Chantal Stoman, Paul Strand, Mikhael Subotzky, Barthélémy Toguo, Tomasz Tomaszewski, James-Iroha Uchechukwu, Alex Van Gelder, Erwan Venn, Weegee, Where dogs run, Sue Williamson, Wiktoria Wojciechowska, Pavel Wolberg, Tom Wood, Patrick Zachmann, Miron Zownir.

Texts by Antoine de Galbert, Guy Tosatto, Noëlig Le Roux, Antoine Champenois, Joséphine Givodan.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the musée de Grenoble from December 2023 to March 2024.

Lava Lines
Naïmé Perrette (ed.)
Self-Published - 16.00€ -

Lava Lines explores the life forms, contemporary myths and geopolitical powers that shape volcanic landscapes. It gathers poetry, role play's transcription, film scripts and visual works of several artists, to touch on collective memory, non-human agency and myth-making.

The art works presented in the publication are by Leïla Arenou, Francisca Khamis, Naïmé Perrette, Camille Picquot, Rachel Pimm, Francisca Khamis, Juliette Lizotte, Riar Rizaldi and Arif Kornweitz 

It also archives live performances/screenings by Francisca Khamis, Arif Kornweitz, Mika Oki, Chooc Ly Tan, Adán Ruiz, Ana Vaz, and Rieko Whitfield.

God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin
Hilton Als (ed.)
Dancing Foxes Press - 40.00€ -  out of stock

Baldwin's life and legacy as remembered by a pantheon of artists and writers: from Jamaica Kincaid and Barry Jenkins to Richard Avedon and Alice Neel.

When author James Baldwin died in 1987, he left behind an extraordinary body of work: novels, poems, film scripts and, perhaps most indelibly, essays. A friend and supporter of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, Baldwin was a critical voice in the civil rights movement. After reaching acclaim in his early career as a writer, he struggled to retain the author's "I," while taking on the "we" of the people.

Edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hilton Als and growing out of his landmark exhibition at David Zwirner in 2019, God Made My Face brings together an impressive assembly of contributors, ranging from Baldwin biographer David Leeming to novelist Jamaica Kincaid and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, to create a memorial mosaic: one that not only mirrors Baldwin's various tones but also closely examines his singular contributions to cinema, theater, the essay and Black American critical studies. These essays are illustrated by artwork from modern and contemporary artists who were either personal contemporaries of Baldwin or directly inspired by his work. In each piece assembled here, the authors speak from a personal, informed perspective, illuminating Baldwin's deeply anguished and enlightened voice and his belief that, ultimately--because we are human--we share the potential to love, connect and live together in all our glory.

Artists include: Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Richard Avedon, Don Bachardy, Alvin Baltrop, Anthony Barboza, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Beauford Delaney, Marlene Dumas, Glenn Ligon, George McCalman, Alice Neel, Elle Pérez, Cameron Rowland, Kara Walker, James Welling, Larry Wolhandler.

Authors include: Stephen Best, Daphne A. Brooks, Teju Cole, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Barry Jenkins, Jamaica Kincaid, David Leeming, Darryl Pinckney.

DEARS No. 3 RE.SONATE
Nicole Bachmann, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Robert Steinberger (ed.)
A Winning Cake - 10.00€ -  out of stock

DEARS is a print magazine for transversal writing practices at the crossroads of art, poetry and experimental writing. It brings together authors and writers from different backgrounds and constitutes a dedicated platform for texts escaping the usual genres and disciplinary boundaries.

DEARS promotes the exploration of new forms of language as a way to foster new forms of living together, and emphasizes the growing relevance of trans- versal writing practices in this respect.

Issue no. 3 / Winter 2021 / RE.SONATE 

With texts by Meloe Gennai, Livia Johann & Anne Sylvie Henchoz, Rahel Kraft, Sanna Marander, Dominic Oppliger, Dominique Petitgand, Sarah Riggs, Cia Rinne, Axelle Stiefel & Sanna Helena Berger, Niklas Tafra, Salomé Voegelin and an epigraph by Frantz Loriot.

Editors are Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Nicole Bachmann and Robert Steinberger

Primetime Contemporary Art: Art by the Gala Committee as Seen on Melrose Place
Mel Chin
Primary Information - 20.00€ -  out of stock

A facsimile of the GALA Committee's mock auction catalog for an artistic intervention into the props and plots of Melrose Place.

Originally published in a limited run in 1998, Primetime Contemporary Art documented In the Name of the Place, a radical two-year intervention by a group of artists, initiated by Mel Chin and known as the GALA Committee, on the primetime television show Melrose Place. This extremely rare artist's book is reproduced for the first time as a facsimile edition.

The artists comprising the GALA Committee worked with the producers of Melrose Place to develop a series of political works that were used as props and plot devices across two seasons of the show, providing surreptitious commentary on reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS, the Gulf War, domestic terrorism, corporate malfeasance and substance abuse. Some of these topics were banned by the FCC at the time, and the group's works allowed for the artists and the show to create political commentary that went unnoticed by censors. The artworks they produced were exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1997 and then sold at an auction at Sotheby's to support several charities. Primetime Contemporary Art was created by Mel Chin and Helen Nagge as a mock auction catalog documenting the artwork made for the show and the conceptual framework of the GALA Committee.

Épopées Célestes / Epopee celesti
Gustavo Giacosa, Barbara Safarova
Éditions Empire - 28.00€ -

A veritable panorama of Art Brut at an international level, through 180 works selected from Bruno Decharme's collection.

Art brut has never ceased to shake up the history of art and nourish minds resistant to norms as it questions classic notions of art and creation as well as those relating to the normal and the pathological. But who are they, these artists of a special kind, witnesses to another world, strangers to stylistic trends and influences? They stay—or are kept—away from the culture of fine art as well as the codes and places that constitute it such as schools, academies, museums, art fairs, etc.

Featuring A.C.M., Noviadi Angkasapura, Anselme Boix-Vives, Marie Bodson, Giovanni Bosco, Gustavo Enrique Buongermini, Aloïse Corbaz, Fleury-Joseph Crépin, Egidio Cuniberti, Henry Darger, Fernand Desmoulin, Janko Domsic, Dong-Hyun Kim, Jaime Fernandes, Eugen Gabritschevsky, Pietro Ghizzardi, Madge Gill, Paul Goesch, Jorge Alberto Hernández Cadi, Paul Humphrey, Zdeněk Košek, Joseph Lambert, Gustave Pierre Marie Le Goarant de Tromelin, Augustin Lesage, Pascal Leyder, Alexander Pavlovitch Lobanov, Ramon Losa, Dwight Mackintosh, Lázaro Antonio Martínez Durán, Mettraux, Edmund Monsiel, John Bunion Murray, Iwona Mysera, Koji Nishioka, Masao Obata, Jean Perdrizet, M. Pierron, Photographies Spirites, Miloslava Ratzingerová, Marco Raugel, Achilles G. Rizzoli, Leopold Strobl, Harald Stoffers, Mose Tolliver, Melvin Way, Scottie Wilson, Adolf Wölfli, Anna Zemánková, Carlo Zinelli, Unica Zürn.

Martin Wong: Footprints, Poems, and Leaves
Martin Wong
Primary Information - 20.00€ -

Self-published in 1968, Footprints, Poems, and Leaves collects dozens of poems written by Martin Wong between 1966 and 1968. Hand-written in a signature calligraphic style that he was just beginning to develop, the poems ebb and flow visually across the page, much like the fluctuating characters, scenes, and moods that inhabit them. This was Wong’s first book of poetry and it contains a double cover showcasing intricate drawings of skeletal angels and other tableaux, as well as a folded, looseleaf broadsheet containing two poems and a drawing of a boney leaf.

The poems were written during a relatively free period for the artist, shortly after he dropped out of Berkeley and began exploring San Francisco at the height of the hippy movement. The poems range from surrealist and pastoral descriptions of the urban subculture that surrounded him to downtrodden, travel-weary biographical entries that are both lonely and tender. Footprints, Poems, and Leaves functions like a journal capturing Wong’s tumultuous life in this period, which included being arrested at a queer, drug-fueled house party (along with Rudolf Nureyev and Dame Margot Fonteyn) and a stay in a mental institution in late 1967 and early 1968. Around the time of the book’s publication, Wong enrolled in Humboldt State University to finish his degree, beginning a new chapter for the artist.

Despite the dark backdrops of many of the works, the writing displays a playfulness with form and language and a sense of humor that can be seen throughout Wong’s later work as well. Altogether, Footprints, Poems, and Leaves creates a rich tapestry of visual poetry that is both a product of its time and the budding artistic mind of a young Martin Wong.

Martin Wong: Das Puke Book
Martin Wong
Primary Information - 10.00€ -  out of stock

Das Puke Book is a small chapbook self-published by Martin Wong in 1977. Written in the early 1970s, the publication contains thirteen chapters of handwritten micro-fictions filled with cringeworthy stories unfolding in San Francisco and beyond.

Subtitled Da Otto Biography of Otto Peach Fuzz, the publication is populated with a cadre of colorful characters, some of who are obscure underground figures such as George “Hibiscus” Harris from the Cockettes and Angels of Light and Rodney Price and Debra “Beaver” Bauer from Angels of Light, while others such as Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and God, are more well known. Although lighthearted, Wong paints unforgettably vivid scenes, such as Van Gogh attacking Gauguin with a razor, Beaver eating so many hot dogs she explodes, and God coming to San Francisco only to find a notebook that makes him so sick to his stomach that he vomits endlessly until the world ends. Written during his days working on the flyers and theatrical backdrops for the Angels of Light Free Theater and published just before his move to New York, these stories capture Wong’s playfulness and the absurdist, kaleidoscopic milieu of the moment in which they were written.

Teeth Surrounding a Flower in the Meanings
Reinier Vrancken
Self-Published - 40.00€ -

In ‘Teeth Surrounding a Flower in the Meanings’ a compilation of texts from the critical discourse surrounding his work, written by various authors between 2016 and 2023, serves as source material for a series of erasures.

Through retro- and introspectively reading into the works and the practice at large from poetic angles, these poems investigate the relation between art and its discourse, the words used, and their edges.

Walking loaves
Luca Trevisani
Nero Editions - 25.00€ -  out of stock

An artist book by Luca Trevisani, overwriting in the mode of a palimpsest Piero Camporesi's Bread of Dreams, an Italian cult classic of "food" anthropology.

Walking loaves is a cannibalization of and tribute to Bread of Dreams, the masterpiece by Italian philologist, anthropologist, and literary critic Piero Camporesi. Originally published in 1980, Bread of Dreams is a book about bread as a cultural entity, about the baking practices and the rituals of the humans we have been, and the way we used to feed ourselves.

Seeking to crystallize in his sculptures the act of walking and the metamorphosis of the body, Luca Trevisani has dedicated several shoemaking exercises to bread—emphasized as a collective glue, material history, and biological writing.

After three years of plastic and editorial research on bread, Trevisani pays homage to Camporesi, grafting images of his works and handwritten notes onto its anastatic replica: a mutation grew in the crevices of another book with a gentle-aggressive gesture.

Luca Trevisani (born 1979 in Verona, lives and works in Berlin and Bologna) is one of the young Italian artists who came to prominence at the international level. His research ranges between sculpture and video, and cross border disciplines such as performing arts, graphics, design, cinema of research or architecture.

Reality (Dark) Fragments (Light)
Art & Language
Château de Montsoreau - 27.00€ -

This monograph covers more than fifty years of creation by Art & Language, whose artists are at the origin of conceptual art. Through unpublished texts by Matthew Jesse Jackson and Art & Language, a transcript of their opera libretto Victorine, and an interview with the artist collective, this publication questions their journey, and more broadly, the relationship between contemporary art and conceptual art.

The permanent collection of the Château de Montsoreau – Museum of Contemporary Art has grown to include 800 works from Art & Language. To celebrate this event, the museum produced a major exhibition and a publication titled Reality (Dark) Fragments (Light). The monograph and exhibition look back at 50 years of creation by these critical, provocative, subversive, punk art collective. They question the main issues involved in Art & Language's work: conversation as an artwork, description, transdiciplinarity, crisis in the relationship between the artist, the museum and the art gallery.

Edited by Marie-Caroline Chaudruc.
Foreword by Marie-Caroline Chaudruc.
Text by Matthew Jesse Jackson, interview with Art & Language by Victorine Meurent.

Birthday
Bridget Mullen
Zolo Press - 50.00€ -

Bridget Mullen is the ruler of an unruly roost. Between 2021 and 2023, she gave birth to forty-seven paintings, each twelve-by-nine inches: kin ugly and cute, monstrous, fleshy, repulsive, droopy-eyed, and sneering as they cross the universal threshold into the no less frightening world that awaits. Birthday reunites Mullen's uncanny litter alongside a conversation between the artist and Lucas Blalock.

The paintings in New York-based artist Bridget Mullen's Birthday series utilize two distinct parameters to guide the creation of the iterative works: a vertical orientation at an intimate scale of 12 x 9 inches and a visualization of perhaps the ultimate creative act—the moment of birth. Through this consistent scale and thematic hyper focus, the artist employs endless formal variations in composition, color, and paint application. The result is a series of paintings that share a common structure yet champion individuality.

Contrasting colors provoke a visible tension, one that is at times compressed and, in other moments, elastic. Suddenly, abstract shapes come into focus as human anatomies, capable of expressing emotion. Undulating lines of various thicknesses and layered colors squeeze together, revealing peculiar faces and gestures that emerge from a central point. The repetition of thin lines creates a visual stutter of pigment, alluding to the passage of time or rapid movement.
The works in Birthday build on Mullen's practice, combining color, decisive mark-making, intuition, and experimentation to conjure psychedelic configurations. Sculptural dimensionality and flatness, representation and abstraction, and solidity and fluidity, serve not as dichotomies within these works, but as two complementary halves of a whole. Together, the forms and figures of the Birthday series are imbued with a sense of life, pregnant with agency and potential.

Lavskrift
Knut Stahle
Self-Published - 20.00€ -  out of stock

Lavskrift is an edition written using signs collected from script lichen (graphis scripta). The species grows in shady deciduous forest and has small, black structures that resemble writing characters.

In the book Stahle explores asemic writing: writing where the signs have no reference to a known sound or meaning.

Edition: 300 numbered copies
Printed in Sweden by ByWind
Letterpress printed cover
Open spine binding with black thread

Meriem Bennani: Life on the Caps
Meriem Bennani
The Renaissance Society - 45.00€ -  out of stock

Meriem Bennani's Life on the CAPS is the final chapter in her film trilogy of the same name. Set in a supernatural, dystopian future surrounding a fictional island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it is rooted in Bennani’s research and reflections on the histories of island societies, biotechnology, and vernacular music. Layering live-action footage and computer-generated animation, Bennani intuitively adapts editing techniques that evoke documentary film, science fiction, phone footage, music videos, and reality TV. Her one-person exhibition at the Renaissance Society marked the debut of this personal, electric yet melancholic consideration of what it is to live in a state of limbo, and this accompanying book captures the film through a combination of still images and selections from a transcript of the film.

This volume includes essays by Emily LaBarge and Elvia Wilk and transcripts of conversations between Meriem Bennani and: Omar Berrada; Fatima Al Quadiri, Negar Azimi, and Tiffany Malakooti; Amal Benzekri; and Aziz Bouyabrine.

Cecilia Vicuña: Word Weapons
Cecilia Vicuña
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts - 42.00€ -

This book brings together the Palabrarmas series by the artist, poet, and activist Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Santiago, Chile). A neologism that translates to “word weapons” or “word arms,” Palabrarmas imagine new ways of seeing language. By taking the form of collages, silkscreens, drawings, poems, fabric banners, cut-outs, mixed media installations, and street actions, Vicuña brings together many aspects of her practice in poetry, activism, and visual art, allowing new meanings to emerge. This book presents a range of palabrarmas, created over the past four decades, in color for the first time.  

Cecilia Vicuña is an artist, poet and activist currently based between New York and Santiago.

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