Kassel Fotobook Festival 2010

This may be a bit of old news by now since my travels have prevented me from my usual postings but I wanted to mention the fun happenings at the 2010 Kassel Photobook Festival. This year Dieter Nuebert and crew changed the venue to the main hall where Documenta takes place every 5 years. The building is twice the size of the art school where the festival has been the last two years but the place drew a great crowd - about double the attendance of last year. There were more booksellers, better exhibition spaces for the visiting artists and, most importantly, more scenic views for the smoking convention which has now become another event in itself.



After a free ride to Kassel with the Schaden crew and briefly helping them set up their tables I scoped out the other booksellers. Dirk Bakker was present and had some great stuff including a 'newspaper' for the Becher's Anonyme Skulpturen. A stand from Vice Versa manned by Kurt Salchli offered up a few really cool books (a new Richard Prince book Four Cowboys and Car Crash Studies 2001-2010 by Raffael Waldner). Schaden had the largest set up and many good things as usual, including a new book of Yutaka Takanashi (Photography 1965-1974) from Only Photography books. Takanashi is currently enjoying a nice exhibition of many vintage prints at Galerie Priska Pasquer in Koln.



Yannick Bouillis of Shashin Books in Amsterdam had many nice titles. He is now specializing completely in Dutch photo and art books and his prices are very good. Last year when I visited his shop, I picked up a couple titles from him and even though some were in Parr/Badger, he still had them on the shelf for regular price. This year he had a couple perfect copies of Why Mister Why for around 60 euros each for instance. Check out his online store, I wasn't familiar with half of the books he had at the festival.

One set of books I missed out on seeing fast enough to get myself were by the artist Ferdinand Krivet. It is a set of three individual books published in 1971 by Verlag Kiepenhevert in Koln. I think the title of the set is Stars: A lexicon in three chapters. Reminiscent of Klaus Staeck's Pornografie, they are completely made from appropriated imagery. Thanks to Walther Zoller and Cecilia for letting me see what I missed.

Another surprise was taking a second look at Nico Krebs and Taiyo Onorato's book The Great Unreal from Editions Patrick Frey (2009). I hadn't liked it much on my first leafing last year but now I am dragging it home. Also a big surprise was Viviane Sassen's Flamboya from Contrasto. Once I got past what I think is a horrible cover (too cutesy and trite), the inner book is pretty wonderful. Her book Sol y Luna from Libraryman was released last year but wasn't much my cup of tea. Also, there is a retrospective of Michael Schmidt taking place in Hamburg at the Haus der Kunst so they published a very nice hardcover catalog of work from 1989/1990. That comes home with me as well. I was trying to show restraint the whole festival but you know how things work.

Of the other tables, there was one for my favorite bookmakers and schools, the Institut fur BuchKunst in Leipzig. It was a real pleasure to sit and talk with Gunther Karl Bose,one of the instructors there and a great bookmaker himself. I featured two of his books on 5B4 last year. They only hasd a few books for offer but he showed me a few out-of-print titles which blew my mind. One which I must get my hands on, published just recently and already OOP, is XX-: The SS-Rune as a special Character on Typewriters by Elisabeth Hinrichs, Aileen Ittner and Daniel Rother. It is an examination of fascism presented through a history of the typewriters used during the Third Reich and the special lead type characters they invented. According to Gunther, this book was made mainly as a response to Steven Heller's Iron Fists, a book which they thought was a little too one dimensional in dealing with the subject. As I mentioned it is OOP partly due to the small print runs of their books (around 250 - 400 copies each) but also because the main newspaper in Frankfurt wrote a full article about it because it is a design and research masterwork. I somehow will get one and write about it.



In between many hours browsing titles, lectures took place with Paul Graham, Alec Soth, Rinko Kawauchi, Rob Hornstra, Joachim Schmid, Leiko Shiga, Niels Stomps, Sybren Kuiper, Lesley Martin speaking on Aperture's history, Ferdinand Brüggemann talking about Japanese books, a presentation about Soviet photobooks, Dr. Bettina Lockmann on the outsider view of Japan, and many others. I didn't see all of them but was amazed at the rock-star status of Alec who started his lecture with an old drive-in movie style pre-film ad "Show time with Alec Soth (rhymes with 'both'.)." Surprising with all of the lectures was how few questions were asked after each presentation. Maybe the hall is intimidating but I remember last year there were many more.



The exhibition for the Best Photobooks of the Year was fascinating as Stanley Greene's newest book Black Passport garnered THREE nominations. I was pleasantly surprised that Darius Himes of Radius Books nominated my Books on Books study of Yutaka Takanashi's Toshi-e as his pick. Thank you Darius! Like last year, a nice catalog of the choices was produced and is available for sale.



The other main attraction was the book dummy show. Each year the festival has a call for entries for unpublished photographers to submit a book. This year over 400 books were entered and the best 50 were put on display. This year's winner was the photographer Werner Amann and his book American.



After three and a half days of books and hotel bar marathons even I was so sick of photobooks that I needed refuge and left after one last post-game beer with Dieter and the clean-up crew - catching a ride to Amsterdam with Yannick Bouillis and Sebastien Girard. I drew the short straw and wound up crammed into the back of a van with boxes of left over books crushing me, my spine being readjusted with ever bump of the highway on the four hour ride. We unloaded the van at 2:00am and after a sleepless night listening to Girard start snoring not 4 minutes after laying down, I did the best thing possible the next morning - search out the bookshops in Amsterdam.

H.B-D.S.

How to travel with books...dont!

I will be doing a recap of the Kassel Photobook Festival plus a look into the 40 pounds of books I shipped home from Europe. I was going to give a preview but I packed them before I snapped a few photos.

In Berlin now scoping out the bookshops, then onto Prague, then London for the Self-Publish Be Happy show at the Photographer's Gallery. Final stop is Dusseldorf Germany for Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber's Ant!Foto Festival starting on Thursday June 10, at 7:00pm located at the Kunstraum. There will be several guest speakers: Wassinklundgren, Taiyo Onorato, Nico Krebs, Joachim Schmid, Jason Lazarus and many more including myself. Those talks start on June 12th at 1:00pm. More info is available below.

Until I return or have another moment to write, be well and check out the Ant!Foto Festival...

Mast: a new used bookstore in NYC

The third year anniversary of 5B4 passed last month without me even noticing until now. I haven't been posting much lately, partly because I am finding it harder to sit down to write, partly because I am about to leave for Europe for 5 weeks (get ready for complete silence...maybe), but mostly because I spent every day of last month helping my friend Bryan and his wife James build a bookstore. Yes, a fucking used book store...where you buy, you know, used books.

The store is called Mast and it is on Avenue A between 4th and 5th streets in Manhattan. Today was the opening and the crowds braved the blustery winds and filled the store for over ten hours. The first sale of the day just five minutes after he opened was Brion Gysin and William Burroughs's The Third Mind. My purchase was a copy of The World from Here: Treasures of the Great Libraries of Los Angeles. Of course, a book about books.

Mast is a decent sized but smallish space so the stock has to be a bit curated. If you're into really good 20th century art, photography, philosophy, film or literature, you'll want to stop by. His prices are well below retail and it is a place where you may come in looking for photobooks but leave with a bag full of killer academic film books (the cinema book section is the best you will find in the city. Hands down). So check out this new spot. Buy a book. They make you smarter.

The Infidels by Marcel Dzama

Almost nothing about the booksigning for Marcel Dzama (and Spike Jonze) at David Zwimmer Gallery seemed normal. The gallery assistants selling the books were kind and attentive (even allowed me to bring in two of my own books). They said 'Thank you' with sincerity and asked my name in case I wanted my books personalized. I wore a smile from their show of kindness.

Being early, I took some time to look at the few huge Stan Douglas prints that lined the main gallery walls when another perky assistant approached me and asked if I was there for the signing. "Oh Great!" she replied as if I had just offered to buy her a new car. She shuttled me into the back rooms of the gallery where a small arrangement of Dzama paintings were on display, "We'll be starting soon. They are still setting up. Thanks for being patient!" Patient? It was only 4:55 and the signing was scheduled to start at 5:00.

I wound up being at the head of the small line that was gathering near the darkened entranceway of one of the larger galleries - a different gallery assistant apologized for the delay (5:02) with even more sincerity than the first. It was as if the closer you got to the area of the event, you were entering into a zone of infectious childlike happiness. I was soon to discover why. Upon being allowed to enter the signing - only one or two people at a time (Lisa Kereszi was my partner) - we were met in the darkened hallway by one of Dzama's 6 foot tall snowmen and a smaller childlike figure whose paper-mache head wore no discernible emotion. These two led us into a nearly pitch black space where off in the distance you could just make out a dimly lit table upon which rested four arms holding a couple of Sharpie markers.

Marcel and Spike took their time cheerfully drawing and signing. They personalized each book by completing the drawings each other started. They told us, "If we take too long you can watch our bear," off in the corner, a bear could be made out swaying to the rhythm of the light music, a beer can rested on the floor. After several minutes of signing and chatting (about Spike's amazing slow-motion pyrotechnical intro piece to the Lakai Fully Flared skate video) and thank you's (from them) we reentered the lit world (with the snowman and child showing us the way) and saw that the line had grown to dozens.

I had imagined the signing was going to be the usual white table affair shuttled along by impatient assistants which is a rational expectation, but for an artist like Dzama who creates not just drawings and paintings but entire worlds seemingly complete with history and mythology why would I expect a booksigning to step out of that world? A new book called The Infidels from Sies + Hoke Galerie and Druck Verlag Kettler is the latest offering of his recent work.



Dzama's world is populated with an expansive cast of hooded women, military men, snowmen, monsters, tree people, bats, and deer that appear in his paintings, drawings, films, dioramas and sculptures. Its basic language is that of a primitive children's TV show - that is, if children were allowed to be exposed to violence, sexuality and the savage fantasies common to his prolific output.

His watercolor paintings often appear as choreographed panoramas of states of war. In The Infidels, his balaclava hooded women (that might remind us of a blend of Hamas and Cossacks) seduce with their sexuality and wage war while pirouetting as if in a Busby Berkeley film. Acts of violence and grace are acted out on plain fields of paper where gravity is upset and history and fantasy collide.

Throughout the work there are ties to great Dadaists like Duchamp, Picabia, and Hoch. His bizarre fetishes, sardonic political commentary and dark humor are presented in vignettes which confuse how we respond. An act of violence is waged with a smile or a victim wears an expression of nonchalance. It is hard to determine in Dzama's work who are the allies and who are the foes. One drawing will belie the alliances of another. His skewed emotional dynamics seem to hint that within the chaos of violence, everyone is to blame - victim and perpetrator alike. Mob mentality rules.

As with most of Dzama's books, The Infidels is elegant. He often combines his watercolors with pages from his sketchbooks which are stream of consciousness collage, some of which working diagrams of new characters, dioramas, and ideas. Rarely are his books simply a presentation of plates but beautifully designed works which draw you into his world through experimental forms. His book The Course of Human History Personified is half plates and an essay and half a double-sided, fold-out panormama which stretches to several feet. His book from David Zwirner from 2008 Even the Ghost of the Past is two books attached by the same covers making two entry points to the work and process.

Reducing Dzama to simple metaphors does an injustice and the work itself seems to resist such readings as much as inspire them. His dream-like scenes feel like part of a larger narrative just out of our reach as if its own history has not yet been written. With these books, Dzama is piecing together his own printed history, a record where he is free to play and create. With childlike enthusiasm I follow along, and fondly remember the day I saw a drunken bear dancing in a darkened corner.

David Goldblatt In Conversation April 29th at Howard Greenberg Gallery

Errata Editions and Howard Greenberg Gallery are pleased to invite you to an evening with the South African photographer David Goldblatt in conversation with writer Joanna Lehan on Thursday April 29th. The opening of David's exhibition of the work from his landmark book Particulars will happen that same evening starting at 6pm at 41 East 57th Street Suite 1406. The conversation on both Particulars and In Boksburg will start promptly at 7pm.

Pre-signed copies of the Errata Editions study of In Boksburg will be available for sale.

Gone? by Robert Adams

If there is a single notion that links several of Robert Adams's recent books, it is that of walking. Of course walking with a camera slung over shoulder or around our necks is usually the case with any photographer but how many make 'the walk' felt in their pictures?

Anyone who knows Robert Adams' photographs is aware of he is a steadfast conservationist. He also seems to be a pessimist pining to turn back time so we as a world, could chart the right course in regard to our treatment of our surroundings. His new book Gone? is a walk through the landscape of his home region of Colorado made in the mid-1980s where a balance seems to have been struck between civilization and nature.

Adams starts us off within a suburban development where foliage on the tree-lined streets dwarfs the homes and cars of the residents. His vantage point is of a pedestrian, looking forward, our path clearly laid by the road ahead stretching off into the distance. On our periphery, things get our attention; an alder in a yard, some small brush scrub in an undeveloped lot, and most dramatically, the sky of a near perfect afternoon.

Within several pictures we have moved away from civilization and into the hills discovering streams and secluded spots that feel relatively untouched. Here Adams basks in the sunlight allowing his lens to be flared - a reminder that a living being is behind this point of view and not simply a recording device.

His 35mm multiple frames - sometimes slight variants of the same picture - 'walk' us through the book which is a strategy of bookmaking he explored in Listening to the River. Adams writes in a brief statement about the work, "In middle age I revisited a number of marginal but beautiful landscapes that I have taken for granted when I was a boy. As I walked through them I sometimes asked myself whether in the coming years they would survive overpopulation, corporate capitalism, and new technology. On those days when I was lucky, however, my questions fell away into the quiet and the light."

There is a comfortable loneliness about the pictures as if all one would hear is a slight breeze and the repetitive footfalls on loose soil. Towards the end of the book we return to the outskirts of town - our trance shaken but perhaps calmed by the presence of a white steepled church. The last triptych stretches the road in front of us in a straight line towards a far away tree dominating the horizon. Within the three pictures, our progress feels slowed, perhaps we are just exhausted or maybe intentionally dragging our heals perhaps to avoid the inevitable return to those disturbing questions of where we are going.

Gone? was published by Steidl and is one of three recent Adams books including Summer Nights, Walking by Aperture and Tree Line which celebrates Adams winning the 2009 Hasselblad Award.

Here...Half Blind by John Gossage

The headline for the January 27th Post-Bulletin newspaper out of Minnesota declares; New Life for Old Landfill. The Olmsted Country garbage dump will be turned into Minnesota's first "solar farm." Other articles cover a state delay in funding education, and sadly that a Rochester man was killed in a 40-car pile-up. The frontpage "Factoid" reports that Thomas Edison owned the Edison Portland Cement Company, and although they supplied concrete for Yankee Stadium, they went out of business trying to manufacture cement pianos. In the upper left corner, sharing space with the masthead is a tiny triptych of pictures - they announce an exhibition by the photographer John Gossage.

Working off a commission from the Rochester Art Center from the Summer of 2009, Gossage photographed Rochester and some of its inhabitants resulting in an 80 page newspaper supplement that went out to some 40,000 customers on the Post-Bulletin's subscriber rolls.

The work itself is identifiably Gossage. He explores the foundations, pathways and community of Rochester, making known the insignificant details often disregarded by the casual passerby; a plank of wood holding up a small boat, a silhouette of a squirrel traversing power-lines, a handle-less shovel balanced against a tree stump, the last piece of bright concrete at the end of a sidewalk. New Life for Old Landfill. I can't think of a better summation of Gossage's accomplishments over his long career.

The final exhibition and supplement is called Here...Half Blind. The exhibition, as described by Kris Douglas the Chief Curator at the Rochester Art Center in the introduction, mentions Gossage's photographs accompanied by postcards and archive material that "packaged" stereotypical views of Rochester for visitors. The supplement publication does not have this material but instead a single line of newscrawl-type text at the bottom of the page regurgitating banal facts about Rochester's history.

As a book maker, Gossage has explored many forms - none of which have had this mass distribution. One imagines those 40,000 copies stacked in convenience markets, on newsstands, on kitchen tables and resting in the sun on porch steps. The headlines inform and infuriate (school funding delayed!), the human interest stories give hope, and what could this supplement invoke? No doubt a few were interested in looking a little closer at their community through the eyes of an outsider but certainly some would cry out "My four-year old takes better pictures than these!"; Gossage isn't what art looks like for most.

Of those 40,000 copies, maybe 2000 will survive, the rest will be discarded without thought and recycled. My hope is that a single copy will escape pulping and scatter across the Olmsted landfill before the solar farm takes root.

Esopus Magazine

I don't collect magazines. I have some friends who could build houses out of dog-eared stacks of them; they could clothe their kids with the blow-ins. The only magazine I have kept and actually store happily on my bookcases somewhere between Van der Elsken and Evans is Esopus - Tod Lippy's twice annual pub that delivers all of my favorite things; original art, paper ephemera, ideas, found objects, history, and each issue is loaded with the unexpected and previously unseen.



Esopus is named for a river that originates in the Catskill Mountains and supplies much of New York City with water but unlike that tributary, Esopus is not polluted with advertisements or PR driven material. Its waters are pure, unfiltered, eclectic - the ecosystem flourishing and diverse.



The first thing one notices cracking open a copy is that it seems physically full of stuff; inserts, gate folds, pop-up sculptures, separate pull-out booklets. The paper stock varies determined by the content. The design is brilliant, often using photographs of original material presenting them as objects. Each issue comes with a CD of audio material on the inside back cover as eclectically curated as the magazine itself.



In issue two William Christenberry's Ghost Form (2004) is a gatefold within which pops-up a paper sculpture of a southern barn. Issue 4 reproduces a series of 15 rejection letters from prospective employers to an inquiry from a woman named Zola C Shirley in 1930. Issue 5 has a removable poster by Richard Misrach. Issue 9 includes long excerpts from a journal kept by a man who spent 15 months in a WWII German prison camp. Issue 11 has a section of pages from the Museum of Modern Art guestbook listing visitors famous and unknown. I could go on and on but I just realized that just picking a few things to mention is a futile exercise. Each issue has on average about a dozen contributions which range so widely that I am not really doing this justice at all.



Esopus is a non-profit organization. Each issue costs far more to produce than the 14 dollars cover price and quickly you see why. The quality and inventive presentation sets the gold standard for all magazines.

Note: I realize after photographing some spreads for my composites that they are heavily weighted to the older visual paper ephemera that Esopus has featured. Keep in mind that each issue is a range of different material, much of which is contemporary projects from recent artists.

Dieter Roth Advertisements 1971/72

Dieter Roth was known to tell friends that he saw himself as primarily a writer and that creating art was simply a "pleasant means" to pay the bills. It might seem to be a tongue in cheek declaration for an artist of his stature but his Swiss passport did list his profession as "writer" first, and then "painter". From the mid-60s onward he wrote poetry, aphorisms, free associations and texts governed by their sound more than meanings. His first book of poetry published in 1966 was called Scheisse. Neue Gedichte von Dieter Roth (Shit. New Poems by Dieter Roth). It was the free-spirited 60s, but that title stood little chance to win over the literary circles of the day. His follow up volume published two years later wouldn't have either, it was called Die Gesamte Scheisse (The Complete Shit).

In the early 70s he expanded his literary aspirations by publishing aphorisms twice a week in the Anzeiger Stadt Luzern und Umgebung, a free local advertising newspaper. In an interview he remarked that those pages of ads were "...so brutal, they're like a gigantic junkyard. So I thought I'd just stick a little tear in them." He sent his friend Erica Ebinger in Lucerne his handwritten or typed missives which she would send along to the paper. He made it clear early into the running of the ads that the paper was not to correct his odd spellings, grammar or punctuation.

Week after week between March '71 and September '72 sentences like; "A good cry is a good night's sleep", "A tear is as mean as a kind word", Cows have served us most fillet steaks", "Fear of 13 is something", "A Coca-Cola is a stone and a tear", and "Can a being see something without being what it sees?", appeared in the paper signed with a simple D.R. The paper terminated the ad contract after running 114 of his intended 248 advertisements citing complaints by readers who were fearful that these were a sort of subversive code, and above all, they seemed to advertise nothing.

Later in '73 Roth would compile these ads using the real newspaper pages into an artist book called Das Tanenmeer (The Sea of Tears). A new book called Dieter Roth Advertisements 1971/72 has just been published by Edizioni Periferia. It reproduces Roth's aphorisms as they appeared surrounded by ads for products and services. Each is translated from German into English.

Sex Objects by Eric Kroll - Sex Theaters by Andre Gelpke

You know, Eldon (Eldon Hoke aka. El Duce, drummer and front-man for The Mentors)... his starting line when he worked at The Ivar Theater as the film man was "Gentlemen, pitch your tents!" and the guys would pull their jackets up over their crotch. - Carlos Guitarlos

You cannot blame porn. When I was young I used to masturbate to Gilligan's Island. - Ron Jeremy

We'll have this room fumigated when you're out of it! - Kathleen Howard to Barbara Stanwyck from Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941)

To pursue an intellectual discourse is not usually the first response one has when seeing a person naked. The debate has heard a billion opinions whether women who get paid to expose their bodies are in positions of power, or being exploited. Photographers have loved nude bodies. Old camera clubs would mask the perversity of group photo-gangbang sessions by having the models pose "artistically" in the woods or perched on rocks near an ocean as if they were just stumbled upon frolicking around, communing with nature - mother nature as fuck toy. The two books in this post, each calling themselves "a documentary" delve into the world of camera clubs, massage parlors and sex theaters.

The first is Eric Kroll's Sex Objects: An American Photodocumentary published by Addison House in 1977. I first saw this book at Paris Photo in the booth of a dealer who assigned it a hefty price tag. I figured it was rare (I had forgotten to look it up online) but a copy turned up at The Strand Bookstore for 35 dollars so I grabbed it.

Kroll, who had been photographing women since he "was 16" became interested in women who made money through their bodies. Whenever he traveled for a commercial job he would search out massage parlors, nude shows and sex shops and engage in another commercial activity - paying women to allow him to photograph them. Sex Objects is the result of photographing 50 and interviewing over 100 women in 30 different US cities.



Make no mistake, Kroll's photography in this book isn't much beyond the expected. He frames the women posing in their workrooms or against studio seamless in a matter of fact way. He offers two or three photos of about 30 models, shooting them in both black and white and color.

What is good is the way the book is put together. It has a surprisingly playful design for a book from the late 70s with multicolor paper stock for the text pages and contrast between the color and b+w pictures. Large horizontal color images are oriented as verticals, their palette seems to mimic the glossy girly mag spreads from the time period. In some ways the women could be seen as a parade of possible choices within the context of this "documentary." In the interviews the women express a range of attitudes towards what they do for a living. Kroll's own notes include a variety of price lists and ways in which these establishments avoid charges of prostitution by skirting local state law.

Time will tell as to how this book stands after a few readings. I sense that the funky 70s color has much to do with the appeal.



Andre Gelpke's Sex-Theater made its appearance a few years later in 1981 published by Mahnert-Lueg.

Shot entirely in black and white 35mm, Gelpke's approach isn't really much better nor dynamic than Kroll's. In fact, both have very similar sensibilities to arranging their frames - many of which are center weighted images that feel repetitive.

Gelpke starts by alternating images of women painted onto strip club windows with portraits of the real performers. Once inside, the theater's stage is mostly a bare-bones affair with the performers going about their act; fucking, stripping or trying their talents as acrobats. One familiar with Garry Winogrand's pictures in the Ivar Theater in LA will have an idea of the sometimes dreary atmosphere made all the worse by Gelpke's evenly lit flash. In the glaring light of the exposure we see the grime and wear and tear of the stage curtains and walls.



There are some good pictures here but most get treated as if shot from the same vantage point from the audience. Rarely do we see any other audience members other than a hint of them by random disembodied arms stretching into the frame. In the last couple images the stage is filled with a variety of characters as if for a grand finale. Those two pictures become a bit more interesting with potential but sadly they just end the book. Maybe Gelpke is hinting that these places are always a bit of a let down. Surely a stretch but how else does it all manage to look so mundane.

Weavings Performance #2 by Corin Hewitt

Dear Friends: I am obviously distressed by the jury's verdict but I take comfort in knowing that I have done nothing wrong and that I have the enduring support of my family and friends. I believe in the fairness of the judicial system and remain confident that I will ultimately prevail. - Martha Stewart, March 5, 2004

Reading the materials list from Corin Hewitt's Weavings Performance #2 one might start conjuring the image of a una-bomber type hidden away in a shack (in Portland? Maybe outside of Portland), assembling his devices partly by plan and partly by instinct. The "four turkey feather balls" or "photograph of Ed and Nancy Kienholz's Sollie 17" on the list were items added obviously to aid with the insanity defense.

Corin Hewitt might actually share working habits of such a recluse. He constructs a work space, locks himself away in it for days on end, works with a variety of tools (some not conceived for the tasks at hand), and creates objects which are partly about transformation. Only, if Hewitt's objects exploded, you'd probably start laughing while wiping the beat-juice stained pasta from your forehead. He uses mostly food stuffs; fruits, vegetables, pastas, juices, and makes sculptures out of it. He ingests his material and spits it out, cooks it, lets it rot, photographs it, paints it, leaves it alone, or, as the book's title suggests, weaves it. A FANTASTIC new book (yes I was shouting) from J+L called Weavings Performance #2 is itself an artist book documenting (maybe not) one of Hewitt's performances.

While in the midst of his performances, Hewitt has many mimetic devices (4X5, 35mm, polaroid and digital cameras) at hand to shoot the still lifes he creates within his studio. Not so much for strict documentation as his polaroid pictures sometimes appear within the still lifes not only complicating the picture plane but our sense of image purpose. Is this a procedural? (no). Is this even a representation of the performance? (I doubt it, as a viewer could not look at this stuff so closely). It is an object put together with intuition much like the piece itself - hunter/gatherer-style.



I haven't seen one of Hewitt's performances but from what I read, his constructed studio/workspace is only accessible for the viewer through hinged trap doors and tiny windows, through which you can see him working. These set perspectives (one is described as a lens making the box into a metaphoric camera obscura) would provide our human viewpoint where the images he shot which make up this book are mostly close-up and reductionist. We have little sense of scale, nor lay of the land around the studio. Our faces are thrust into his creations while Hewitt, the performer, stays mostly out of the way. Or perhaps this is his vantage point we are seeing, through the looking glass peering outward. His presence appears in only four pictures - three really, in the fourth he is felt by the blue flame of a torch which is burning the meristems on a head of purple cauliflower (or, at least it looks like cauliflower - could be a severely rotten piece of fruit).

I keep thinking of Fischli and Weiss. Art-making is a serious business so let there be whimsy. A half-eaten plasticine apple sits next to its real, also half eaten, counterpart. Pasta is woven into a partial basket (or is it an Aztec toupée?). Throw some discarded shavings, some straw and a torn up photo into the garbage - photograph it as a discovery. Pay attention, just putting a 5 litre pot on the shelf has potential. As Beckett said, "To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now."

The book is pitch perfect from the layout to the bellyband that graces the cover. Each book is unique, the bellybands were stained by hand with dye made from cherries and cabbages at the printer's facility in Korea. Three inserts are hidden away in a flap on the back cover board. An essay by Marisa C. Sanchez, a conversation between Hewitt and Michael Brenson, and a materials list broken into two categories: Local and Historical. After sitting with Weavings for while, you'll never look at your compost heap the same again.

Douglas Blau ICA Catalog

Douglas Blau is a curator, writer, artist, and obsessive scavenger of images. His exhibition Fictions: A Selection of Pictures from the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries from 1987 presented a wide swath of images from contemporary painters alongside historical artworks in addition to film stills and photographs that all express a visionary or romantic sensibility. The highs and lows sitting in relation to each other were reduced to dark, bluish-hued monochromes. It was a curatorial feat to create narratives and fictions through the multitude of possible picture connections. For Blau, art's object is to make the relationship between reading and looking, depiction and meaning - accessible and engulfing. A new catalog of his latest work from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Pennsylvania breaks Blau's last ten years of self-induced silence in the art world.

The exhibition and catalog brings 16 works from 2008 and one larger work (188 frames) from 1993-95. Each work is a grid of images collaged and grouped under titles which might hint at the narrative being explored. The work Playtime (2008) offers on first glance a game of hide and seek between two girls that slowly reveals itself to be a larger narrative set in the Gilded Age. The 'stage' is a series of images that toss us between ornately decorated drawing rooms, vast staircases, libraries and theaters. You can enter the grid at any point, become the film's editor and piece together your own inspired narrative. The departure in strategy for Blau's recent work is these groupings hold to one particular moment in history instead of his usual sweep across time.

In many of the works, Blau finds multiple copies of each image reproduced through various types of techniques from letterpress to four-color, etchings to photographs so each grid is in its own way an homage to the history of printed matter. It holds to what the digital age is discarding.

The design of this volume is worth noting as printed catalogs are always an important aspect of Blau's work (one might assume due to its long lasting accessibility as opposed to the exhibitions). Each framed grouping was photographed as installed in the ICA and interspersed are detailed close-ups of one section of each piece. These further crop and dissect the individual pictures, zooming in and out the way one might navigate the exhibition. Mostly these detail spreads are designed to break the repetition of just seeing grid after grid since the individual pictures can appear too small to fully investigate. Because of this, one gets the basic gist of each piece but to become fully engulfed is simply not possible. His catalog from the Fictions exhibitions I remember suffered from this same dilemma, we are held back from falling into these worlds as he does in meticulously assembling this work.

As a side note, I highly recommend reading Blau wherever possible. Here is a link to the piece “Solid Air” he wrote inspired by the work of Vija Clemins that appeared in her ICA/Whitney Museum catalog from 1992.

Record 1974/1975 by June Leaf

In November of 1974 to January 1975 June Leaf kept a sketchbook of her time in Mabou Mines, Nova Scotia where she lived with her husband, Robert Frank. Steidl has just released a facsimile called Record 1974/1975.

Record starts with Leaf questioning her thoughts and ideas - trying to find the 'stimulation' to proceed. She writes: "Let me start with the series of the woman in the lifeboat. That is the oldest of the ideas. It is also the most faint to me. Perhaps it is already abandoned. I will therefore recount it here...I recalled that in my last series I had become interested in the shape of a knot." For several pages after she sketches a seagull figure whose eye is a knot in string and as the drawings get more frantic and impulsive she declares: "I've come to a dead stop. Should make a sculpture - don't want to! Should play the fiddle - don't want to! Should take a walk - too cold! Where's the inspiration?"

What I find powerful about Record is it is a diaristic outpouring of thoughts, creative bursts and frustrations. One almost feels embarrassed to be witness to these inner states, dreams and confessions. Working in pencil, ink and watercolor the page to page dynamic is jarring. One is splashed brightly with uplifting color while the next is covered with a violent looking scribble impossible to decipher. Thrown into the mix, Robert appears both as a muse and a dark figure, absent and mourning the death of his daughter Andrea who died in a plane crash that same winter.

Throughout Record Leaf's psychological state seems put to paper. One drawing over which she has written "first demon?" starts a fit of violent pages which the pressure from her pencil varies, making deep rich lines over softer squiggles and finally ending with the figure of a man whose mouth is gushing lines. Leaf notes the lines could be either flames or rolls of paper. A few pages further, another figure is made out in crude rendering over which she writes in a childlike hand "Some demon is responsible for all this."

Towards the end of Record her confessional writing turns back to Robert and living in Mabou. In it she writes of the pain of defeat she experiences and the final understanding that, "we can not really live here. I tried, but like the majority of people here, I tread on ground which is not solid. Yes, I would be a fool to stay...Nothing can grow here. The Mabou Coal Mines are finished. Robert will never understand...He wants to be a man alone on a hill looking at the ocean - it is his picture in his mind that he wants to live. This place is no longer a picture to me. It is a graveyard, only good for starved city souls and eyes."

This dark passage of soul-baring is followed by a small drawing on the last page of a peaceful looking landscape drawn in black ink and captioned with the hopeful passage "Sun falls across this page." The drawing is dated November 24th - two days before her first entry in the sketchbook. The knot was still being examined then, perhaps the hope of unraveling it was still a possibility.

A Half Dozen Non-photo Books (for your pleasure)

Here is part one of a barrage of books with short descriptions, this time mostly non-photographic ones I have enjoyed over the last half a year. Yes I have a great number of non-photo books and although I stand by the statement that photographs work best in book form and that most all other mediums suffer to an extent in reproduction, these are well done and worth a look.



Starting with the most popular artist of all time, Warhol from the Sonnebend Collection published by the Gagosian gallery in 2009 (distributed by Rizzoli) is a beautifully produced oversized book of mostly early work (1962-65) that Ileana Sonnebend collected while she represented Warhol to Parisian audiences.

The Gagosian gallery has been publishing a lot of very impressive books, all of which appeal in design and quality. This publication comes in a cardboard slipcase upon which is silk screened to look like a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes. After presenting about 50 works the back section of the book delves into the history of the exhibitions held at Sonnebend's Paris gallery. As a bonus, facsimile reproductions of each gallery catalog and booklet published for each show are slipped into glassine holders.



Also included are dozens of photographs taken during the exhibition openings and a great essay by Brenda Richardson describes the complicated relationship between Andy, Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnebend during his rocketing to fame.



Gerhard Richter's Elbe from Walther Konig and the Gerhard Richter Archive in Dresden concentrates on 31 monotype prints Richter made in 1957. These constitute some of his earliest works as a recently graduate from the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste. He had enrolled in a class for printmaking, he found a disinterest in proper technique and instead spent his time trying out unevenly applied ink on linoleum and wooden blocks.

Many appear to be abstractions while others offer a direct reference to landscapes - some moonlit. In a couple, Richter has penned in figures so the unevenly distributed ink comes across as an atmosphere or haze - something his later work would reflect.

Elbe is softcover and employs a very deadpan design - a straightforward presentation printed on very nice cream-colored stock. A short text by Dieter Schwarz lends insight into Richter's method and motivation.



Sol Lewitt once said that "Artist books are not valuable except for the ideas they contain." I wish that were true today as I would be able to afford his Autobiography and Cock Fight Dance. This book from Edizioni Viaindustriae is a study of Lewitt's complete bibliography of artist books from 1967 to 2002. Although well illustrated, it doesn't go as far as to discuss each individual book - most of which are confined to a single page of coverage. Still, it is a good reference work sure to spawn further exploration into these fine books.



Andrew Dodds' Lost in Space is a small artist book from Bookworks from 2006 which sets out to examine what artifacts were left behind on the moon by the Apollo space projects. He corresponds with scientists, lecturers and heads of physics departments asking what they imagine these objects would look like today after such a long time abandoned on the moon's surface. Complimented by archive photographs and other supporting historical material, it is Lost in Space's design which makes for additional enjoyment. Now if only someone would inform Dodds that the moon landing was faked!



Another book which is based upon historical fact is Jeremy Deller's The British Civil War Part II published by Artangel in 2002. This book documents two things, first the personal accounts of participants of the 1984-85 miners' strikes in Northern England, and second, Deller's reenactment of the confrontation between the strikers and the police in Orgreave in South Yorkshire in June of 1984 - over 800 people participated in this reenactment. Less an attempt to tell the definitive history of the strike or that day but taking the idea of a 'living history' and exploring how that can be interpreted and presented over something that was essentially chaos. The British Civil War Part II contains lots of archive material along with a DVD of present day interviews of people who were in Ogreave that day in 1984.



Lastly I want to mention a new book on Josef Albers' Homage to the Square just published by Editorial RM. Made on the occasion of an exhibition at the Casa Barragan. Albers saw this group as "platters to serve color" which attested to the infinite possibilities of hue and light - colors influencing change on one another. This edition is elegant with a sturdy slipcase out of which comes a small but very nicely conceived book of plates. Accompanying are essays by Nicholas Fox Weber and Brenda Danilowitz, both from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

I will be serving up another six titles in this vein in just a few days.