El Lissitzky and Max Burchartz reprints from Lars Müller

While in Koln Germany recovering from the Kassel festival burnout I made many non-photobook discoveries, one of which was a series that Verlag Lars Muller published in the mid-90s reprinting facsimiles of great graphic design from the 20s and 30s.

These are cardboard slipcased boxes of loose material, often magazines, pamphlets, posters and single sheet replicas of letterhead or company advertising created by El Lissitzky and Max Burchartz and others. Individual boxes are dedicated to the work of one designer. I believe there are four in the series. Two others I saw but didn't buy are on the pamphlets and prospectus from the architect Hannes Meyer, and reprints of the architecture magazine from the Bauhaus, ABC which was published from 1924-28 (edited by Hans Schmidt, Mart Stam, El Lissitzky and Emil Roth).

The first that caught my eye in the Walther Konig's bookstore is a box that contains reprints of El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg's Vesc magazines. It debuted in 1922 with the aim of acting as a "link between two neighboring communication trenches" - that of young Russian and western European artists triangulating Berlin, Paris and Moscow. Constructivist in agenda it featured art and writing, "whose task is not to embellish life but organize it."



Its emphasis on literature, art and music contained divergent attitudes and viewpoints partly due to the editor's openness to include of a wide variety of contributors but mostly because 1922 was a watershed year when Dadism was splitting into new camps rational and irrational tendencies - constructivism and surrealism. Contributors included; Lissitzky (of course), Fernand Leger, Boris Pasternak, Le Corbusier, Nicolai Punin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Raoul Hausmann, Harold Loeb, Juan Gris and dozens of others.

This box includes the three issues of Vesc in two booklets (the original issues one and two were combined into a single volume) and a larger book of translations and essays on the magazine's history. There are relatively few illustrations with the articles but the typography and layout are visually exhilarating. The contemporary book of comments and translations (which thankfully includes English) has a fine essay by Roland Nachtigaller and Hubertus Gassner.



The second box from this series I picked up is even better than the first, Max Burchartz: Typografische Arbeiten 1924-1931. If the Lissitzky and Ehrenburg box seems a little empty since it is only three booklets, the Burchartz box is virtually overflowing with material.

Although he never reached the level of fame attached to other designers, Burchartz is now considered a pioneer of modern design. His beginnings in painting and advertising expanded into typography, photography and furniture design. Admired by Jan Tschichold, some examples of his page layouts appeared in Tschichold's classic The New Typography in 1928. His theories of color control for building interiors that he developed while working with the architect Alfred Fischer were thought groundbreaking but ultimately forgotten until recently.

One of the most exciting inclusions in this box are a series of company pamphlets he made for the steel fabrication company Bochumer Verein. Bold use of color schemes, photography and typography beautifully illustrate offerings of bells, springs, railroad tracks, mining tools, crankshafts, and mechanisms used for ship propellors. One might imagine that much of the design greatness of these 10 folios from 1925 went perhaps unnoticed by the tradesman who they were aimed to entice.



Other items included are a couple of advertising pamphlets for a door handle company called Wehag which feature some door handles Burchartz designed himself, a theater program booklet and theater schedule poster from 1925, a poster from a vacuum company called Orion, as well as personal designs for his letterhead and calling card.

The paper stock and printing used for these boxes reflect the original materials. All in all there are 26 items to Typografische Arbeiten, all of which are produced at 1:1 scale. Also included is a booklet on Burchartz's personal history but unfortunately for me, it is in German with no English translation.

These reprint boxes are modestly priced at around 60-80 dollars and luckily from what I see through used book listings they haven't really jumped in price a great deal since their initial publication. If early design and typography is your thing then these are well worth a look.

For a Language to Come by Takuma Nakahira

My last posting on the sweep of awards for Japanese books in Arles leads me to mention the new edition of Takuma Nakahira's For a Language to Come just published by Osiris.

Originally appearing in 1970, Kitarubeki Kotoba no Tameni is Nakahira's jarring description of a dark world - a landscape where the natural order of light and shadow, distinctions of space and time, is upset. From the opening image, the descriptive qualities of Nakahira's approach set a tone of brooding, where even the brightest burst of light can't seem to penetrate the shadows. His staggering vantage points seem envisioned by someone wounded or intoxicated by their surroundings. The apocalypse is nearing or has passed, that is unclear, but the physical impact of the environment on this wanderer couldn't be clearer.

The stifling claustrophobia of space in this world is extreme. Nakahira purposely condenses his tones and contrast to foreshorten space leaving little opportunity to breathe in the landscape. At night, spotlights and fluorescents offer little depth as if the speed of light was dragged to a standstill. When in natural light, we are often oppressed by a weighty haze of grey sky pushing down on the horizon line. The few pedestrians we encounter seem like sluggish sleepwalkers aimlessly going through the motions of life. This is not the dark but invigorated vision of Moriyama but a slowed pulse, the occasional images of lolling waves setting the pace.

This reprint follows the same edit and sequencing of the original. The original jacketed softcover wraps have been changed to a hardcover with a new design by Hattori Kazunari (a new interpretation of the idiosyncratic original by Tsunehisa Kimura). The original rich gravure printing, since now an extinct process, has given way to a finely handled offset. The paper is slightly glossier than the original.

In questioning how photography functions as either a language or something that exists "on the reverse side of language," Nakahira would ultimately re-examine his work in 1973, find it shackled by "expression" and shifted towards the attitude that photography must be like "an illustrated dictionary...[which]... consists only in clarifying the fact that material things are things." This would lead to his burning much of his past work on a beach near his home.

Now that this new edition is presented to us after so much has been written about it - essentially confirming its status as one of the masterpieces of Japanese photography - it is interesting to question how it will be seen, apart from scholarship, within a contemporary viewpoint. Considering Nakahira's initial attempt to reject and destroy it, a level of historical value has won out. 40 years has passed since Nakahira revealed this world and questioned what is photography and what is language, now it can be tested again and see how his "thoughts" stand against time.

Yutaka Takanashi: Photography 1965-74

A month ago marked the start of the 2010 Les Rencontres D'Arles smoking convention which I attended for a few days. I found a small number of books (still trying to show restraint) which I will mention in the upcoming weeks. The main draw for me is the competition which names one "contemporary" book and one "historical" book as "best of the year" - the winners get 8000 euros each. Last year I entered the first Errata Editions books for the historical prize and we didn't fair very well. The judges that year were extremely critical of the concept of my books and not for the reasons you would think. (See my report from last year for more details).

So this year I entered the new Errata books with no hope of a prize but purely to help introduce them to a new audience. That Saturday, the day I was leaving, they made the final decision on the two awards and I was excited, not to mention surprised, to hear that this year's judges liked the series so much they were considering them for the historical prize. Their final decision went to Japanese Photobooks of the 60s and 70s from Aperture instead, but I am pleased to say that during the award ceremony that evening, they gave Errata Editions a special runner-up mention.

The winner of the contemporary book went to Only Photography's fine book Yutaka Takanashi Photography 1965-74. Only Photography is Roland Angst's independent publishing house in Berlin. Their books are beautifully produced with a strong care towards design and printing and the Takanashi book is their best so far. Past titles have been Ray K. Metzker's Automagic and Frauke Eigen's Shoku.

This hardcover book presents an edit of 41 images from Toshi-e in a large vertical format and the selection corresponded to an exhibition of mostly vintage prints that was on display at Galerie Priska Pasquer in Cologne, Germany. This marked the first solo showing of Takanashi in Germany. One of the gallery directors, Ferdinand Bruggemann is a specialist on Japanese photography and contributes a fine essay on Takanashi and his masterwork, Toshi-e. A second essay by Hitoshi Suzuki, who was an assistant to Kohei Suguira the book's designer, provides a personal remembrance of discovering the book in Seguira's design studio while it was being created. A short preface from the gallerist Priska Pasquer opens the book.



Yutaka Takanashi Photography 1965-74 is beautifully realized with three different cover images silk screened onto the cloth of the boards. A yellow translucent dustjacket wraps the book and the color I have been told reflects the tone off an exhibition poster from the first solo exhibit of this work in Japan in the 1980s. The printing of the plates is also exquisite - a modern offset interpretation of the original's lush gravure which remains rich and clean. The design reflects the twisting and turning of the original (horizontals oriented vertically) but with additional gatefolds for a few of the horizontal pictures. It was printed in an edition of only 500, 30 of which come signed and numbered with a print. An additional 100 were signed and numbered by Takanashi. I strongly recommend this book if you can get one. They are a bit pricey but I assure you it is because these books were expensive to produce.

So this year was a clean sweep of awards nodding towards Japan (it was also our study of Toshi-e that had gotten the main attention from the jury). My congratulations go to Aperture and Roland of Only Photography, I don't mind coming in second when the competition was that strong.

720 (Two times around) by Andrew Phelps

“Two hundred years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground of unlimited potential. But it was the minds of 11 year olds that could see that potential.” - CR Stecyk

"Richard Armijo was kicked out of Whittier (skatepark) again for the last time. Maybe his hair was too short, maybe it was his attitude, maybe he just doesn't care. Things are different this go around because Richard and his friends say they're not going back...Ever." - CR Stecyk

The only other thing I was ever good at in my life before photography was skateboarding. I spent nearly everyday from 1980 to 1989 throwing my body around like a dishrag in roughly paved drainage ditches and halfpipe ramps in Arizona and later New Jersey and New York. Those hardcore years are scarred into my hips and shins. After art school, a part of my life has been spent struggling to stay connected with the feelings I had skating back then. I still kick around a bit and tell myself I "still skate" but it is more in my mind than reality. I was never good enough to gain sponsorship, never liked competing, and now, at 41, suffer a bad knee and the worst of traits a skater can feel, fear. I hold on by watching videos of new generations perform feats on the streets and ramps that my generation couldn't have thought possible. It is a passion, like photography, I imagine I will take to the grave.

I make strong comparisons between skating and photography. Both require large amounts of passion, attention to your surroundings, perseverance and risk taking. I see a skater's line as artistic and improvisational as anything William Forsythe choreographs, as sculptural as Richard Serra, or as mind bending as Matthew Barney. It has creates its own language, both in words and form that is as unique as Kurt Schwitters or John Cage.

There are many books on skateboarding but most fail because they suffer from the same trait that I have succumbed to, nostalgia. Powerhouse Books just published Full Bleed which is a compilation of images from the 70s through the 2000s of east coast skaters tearing up NYC. It's an interesting highlight reel of greatness but nothing more. It leaves me in the past like so many now distant memories, where as Andrew Phelps' newest book 720 (Two times around), a small self-published, spiral-bound book of 16 pictures in an edition of 100, holds more of the actual spirit of skating than any image of Huf or Gonz caught at the apex of a trick.

While photographing in Austria, Phelps discovered an abandoned corporate building which had been infiltrated by skaters. They set up makeshift ramps and obstacles with the aid of a few power tools and ingenuity. Left behind doors unhinged from their frames and upturned desks transform into a playground within the wasteland of empty offices and corridors of failed big business.

There are no skaters present, no "tre-flips" or "blunt slides" being performed. Their presence is felt by the wheel marks on walls and blackened, waxed edges of ledges. The improvisation of construction and the lingering excitement of what must have been felt upon the first run up any of these obstacles hangs in the air. Graffiti on the walls marks a list of the fleeting accomplishments. "Mario bailed" but Phil pulled a "backside crooked grind." That unique language again. For the uninitiated it is nonsensical, but to see a backside crooked grind, that is a universal language.

720 (Two times around) is dedicated to both Mike McGill and Robert Adams. Mike McGill revolutionized skating in the 80s with the invention of a spinning 540 degree air performed 5 feet above the lip of Del Mar skatepark's keyhole bowl. It was a spectacle which stunned onlookers and marked a turning point in skating - perhaps like Adam's The New West marked a turning point in photography. As Phelps concludes in a brief afterword, "When I dream of skating, I'm Mike McGill. When I dream of photographing, I'm Robert Adams." Two very different sources of inspiration, one spectacular and the other deceptively not, both meeting the same outcome to push a medium of expression forward for new generations.

Two books by Mariken Wessels

The last artist book Mariken Wessels published was a narrative of found material she discovered in an Amsterdam shop. Elisabeth - I Want To Eat is an assemblage of old photographs, postcards and letters that describe a young woman's life budding and then, rather shockingly, leading towards depression and, what I read as, an implied suicide. It is a reconstruction which blends some fact with loads of interpretation.




In one of the letters translated from Dutch, Elisabeth's aunt, in an attempt to help Elisabeth think differently about her life writes, "But unpicking yourself, that can be done, why am I doing this, couldn't I do it better (for me and for everyone else) in a slightly different way? Each little thing builds the whole. In accordance with the same system as all matter is built up from molecules and atoms." This suggestion of parsing and twisting the events of her life is also the strategy Wessels employs in these works. We grapple with trying to understand this life presented to us through only a few pieces of ephemera which insists that our own twist of psychology intervene.



Wessels' newest artist book, Queen Ann. P.S. Belly Cut Off from Alauda Publications is a look into a life of a woman named Anneka.

Anneka appears to be a woman haunted by loneliness and obesity yet she puts forth a fun-loving and warm, if at times slightly demented, demeanor. When we are shown recent images of her, she (or the artist) has painted their surfaces with adornments such as brightly colored hats or veils or cut out parts of herself in the pictures with shears. In some, she adds a second coat of lipstick or nail-polish that transforms her into an over-the-top eccentric where we might question her sanity.

In one image from which the title refers, she writes, "In a way I really do feel like a "Queen." I think that fits. Although lacking the wealth but perhaps like our image of famous queens, Ann is also slightly lonely, unsatisfied, and displays vengeful violent streaks which in this case, she plays out on her own image rather than others. She seems to mock even her own ideas of beauty in how she "improves" the picture makes herself presentable - all ribbons and bows with make-up dripping from her eyes.

In both Queen Ann and Elisabeth, sexuality is an overt presence. In Elisabeth a suite of scratched nude photos (think G.P. Fieret) is presented, perhaps made as self-portraits or by a lover. In Queen Ann, photography as a somewhat transgressive act is also included - that of what appears to be a middle interlude of stills from a sex film (with Ann as the star?). This is followed by a more recent image of Ann holding an image of herself as a young attractive teenager - the weight of wishing for the past is felt.



Although melancholy in overall tone, Ann's unique character and playfulness outshine her underlying problems with aging and self image. The last images, shot on super-8 film, show her running and twirling, arms outspread, in a forest. A smile is sensed through the grainy and blurred image just before she disappears behind a stand of trees.

As with many contemporary books from The Netherlands, both of these are beautiful objects. The care and attentiveness to "the book" is felt but never trumps the content. In Elisabeth, English translations from Dutch type-written on green tissue paper are loosely laid in are a wonderful touch, and Queen Ann includes a sealed glassine envelope of 4x6 inch snapshots. It isn't clear if this last element, the glassine, is meant to be torn open or whether the images are meant to be viewed through the translucent paper (the metaphoric haze of memory?). You decide. Maybe in that case, collectors should buy two.

Car Crash Studies 2001-2010 by Raffael Waldner

The skin was broken around the lower edge of the sternum, where the horn boss had been driven upwards by the collapsing engine compartment. A semi-circular bruise marked my chest, a marbled rainbow running from one nipple to the other. During the next week this rainbow moved through a sequence of tone changes like the color spectrum of automobile varnishes. As I looked down at myself I realized that the precise make and model-year of my car could have been reconstructed by an automobile engineer from the patterns of my wounds. - from Crash, J.G. Ballard

I have never been in a car crash. Two friends of mine were once in a nighttime high speed head-on collision - one, the passenger, died immediately; the other, the driver, walked from the car physically unscathed. For years, it wasn't the details of the actual accident that were described to me that I dwelt upon, but the story told to me by my surviving friend when visited the car at the police lot to collect his personal belongings from the interior.

The car had been hit on the right front passenger side because he had instinctively jerked the wheel to the left at the last moment. The passenger seat, with Mike, had been compressed so that it came to rest near the trunk. By my friend's account the entire right side of the car was shorn away but the left side, except for the doors jammed into their casings, looked clean. There was something in his description about the post-violence, the lingering event felt in the crash dust seen in the bright afternoon sun, that was more horrifying and memorable than his descriptions of the moment of impact.

Raffael Waldner's Car Crash Studies 2001-2010 just published by JRP Ringier brought these thoughts back to mind.

For the last decade, Waldner has concentrated on automobiles, photographing "the impact of violence and the way it changes the product." The results of his nighttime ventures into scrapyards photographing wrecks might be seen as a sort of attempted typology of the unpredictable transformation of an object that took place in matters of split-seconds.

His still-lifes, described with large format precision accentuated by strobes, are loaded with the tension between beauty and the horror of the implicit event that occurred. If it sounds or looks cold, it is. His is often the sensibility of a scientist, or an insurance photographer might take to matter-of-factly complete an accident claim. Their simplicity is belied by the new forms of twisted metal, the spider-web of windscreen glass, the scratched and battery-acid burnt paint varnishes that he focuses upon.



A degree of fetish is apparent, both on the part of the photographer and reflecting on car culture. The autos shown here are mostly high-end sports cars of a variety common with associations to wealth, sexuality and vanity on the part of the driver. They are expensive status symbols rendered valueless in an instant - the sexual prowess of the driver left limp in a cabin full of flaccid airbags and useless gear shifts.

Waldner breaks the book into various section starting with the surface damage to the car's skin. Abstract and painterly, these feel more like a conscious artistic decision, something that many of the other images seem to resist. He follows with sections on areas of impact that sequentially move us closer and closer to the details. The last sections are interiors and finally a small suite of engine blocks removed completely from the vehicle. The sequence might suggest a sort of autopsy (no pun intended), moving from outer body to inner and diagnosing the damage to individual organs.

If Waldner's book has one flaw I feel it is in the amount of photographs. It is oddly sits between not being 'Becher-exhaustive' enough to feel like a full exploration of a 'typology' and having too many of one section over another. This might be due not through lack of the photographer having material but from the editing which was done by Christoph Doswald. This is not a crushing blow to how the entire book functions but rather like a small design flaw that might be perceived after several test drives.

Car Crash Studies 2001-2010 includes closing essays by Christoph Doswald and Maik Schluter.

Quatorze Juillet by Johan van der Keuken

My best find while in Europe during the Kassel festival was a new book from Willem van Zoetendaal on Johan van der Keuken called Quatorze Juillet.

In July of 1958, Van der Keuken was wandering through Paris and happened upon a street celebration. A stage had been set up, music was playing, people were dancing and Van der Keuken - like most photographers might - took the opportunity to shoot a few rolls of film. The day resulted in one of his more well-known images of a couple dancing which has made it into several of his books - 6 to be exact including Paris Mortel. Most all of the other negatives were never published.

Quatorze Juillet is a book of the other images he made that day presented in a cinematic sequence which gives a look into a much larger, and delightful, afternoon along the Seine. Edited by Noshka van der Lely and Willem van Zoetendaal this construction of a larger narrative suggests Van der Keuken's interest in "stills that move", a curiosity that would later lead him into film-making.

On page one we encounter a couple, they dance, closely embraced, in a vertical image which isolates them from other dancers and celebrants. As Van der Keuken twirls around them photographing, the larger celebration is revealed. People on the periphery become the new leading players and smaller narratives develop - a man approaches a group of young women, another walks through the frames carrying a long ladder, a car speeds around the corner whooshing through the crowd. Small flirtations take place and the photographer works works like a fly on the wall - testing each frame and trying variations which, in my mind, are as wonderful as the image he finally chose as "his best" from the day. This is not a re-edit of mediocre pictures made better by the inclusion of others.



As with most of Van Zoetendaal's books, the care in making Quatorze Juillet is excellent. The choice of paper stock - an uncoated matte stock - is bound sempuyo-style producing a double thickness of each page.

The printing was done by Calff & Meischke in Amsterdam and while I was visiting Holland I stopped by the printing facilities to visit Freek Kuin who had just finished printing the book after testing out several paper and ink variations. Stacks of proofs laying on the floor revealed slightly different interpretations of tone and contrast. Each looked good on their own but when directly compared, slight shifts of color emerged, the contrasts popped or the ink suppressed details. The final result made apparent the vast choices to be made in book reproduction and Freek is an extremely passionate craftsman in putting ink to paper.

The design is also superb. Van Zoetendaal designs most of his books and the placement of the images on the page in Quatoze Juillet is a fascinating study of design. The images are oriented towards the bottom of the page, not extreme enough to be readily noticeable at first, but it pushes the sequence along, connecting the images and grounding them - amplifying Van der Keuken's vantage point since a few of the pictures were shot from the elevated musician's stage.

I received one of only a handful of advanced bound copies of this book that were made to show in Kassel so I am not sure if the book is officially out yet, but this was made to accompany an exhibition of the work at FOAM in Amsterdam this year. I don't know how many they made but if you can get your hands on one, I doubt it will disappoint.

Bernhard and Hilla Becher: Ephemera, Catalogs and Books from Librairie 213

I am finally home again after the second leg of my European tour. Can't say I am happy about that but the photobook burn out I felt after the Kassel Photobook Festival, which started my trip back in May, seems like such a distant memory now. All of my new acquisitions have more or less made it safely to the States and I am going to ease back into regular postings if time permits.

My brain is still recovering from the trip so I thought I would start with a book/catalog which doesn't require much effort from me. It is an overview of ephemera, catalogs and books that have been published on Bernhard and Hilla Becher from Librairie 213.

Librairie 213 is the French book dealer Antoine De Beaupre. Some of you might know him from the Galerie 213 and the slickly designed exhibition catalogs they published in the late 1990s - most notably, one on William Eggleston that has all the plates tipped onto the pages.

This catalog on the Becher's work starts with their earliest appearance in an art magazine review in Die Sonde in 1964 and progresses through their recent books published as late as 2010. Much of the early ephemera such as promotional posters for Anonyme Skulpturen and exhibition announcement cards are the reason to pick this catalog up as many of these items have been lost to history. Last year at Paris Photo Antoine had a framed copy of the Anonyme Skulpturen poster from the Moderna Museet and if expendable income were at my disposal, it would be on my wall right now.

With each entry there is only the most basic of publishing information, all in French, so this teeters between being just a sales catalog (no prices are listed) and a bibliography for Becher scholars. It was printed in an edition of 500 with 50 copies numbered and signed by Hilla Becher.

As with all of Antoine's publications, the design is by Olivier Andreotti of Toluca Studio. At approximately 11 x 11 inches and with high production standards but for the occasional slight Morey patterning in the plates you might over look the 25 euro cover price.

Note: There is no mention of this book on the Librairie 213 website but perhaps email Antoine about getting a copy.



Each year, seemingly made and given free as sales pieces for Paris Photo, Antoine has produced a few other fine catalogs. In 2007, his booklet on 31 Japanese books from 1968 and 1982 is worth looking for if there are any left floating around. Although it is well-trod territory and most of the books won't be a surprise, again the production standards are wonderful.



The same goes for his book on German photobooks En Allemagne from 2008. This one charts an implied timeline of 66 books starting with Renger-Patzsh and Rudolf Schwarz's Wegweigsung der Technik and ending with Jorg Sasse's D8207. Neither of these last two catalogs specify how many were made.

Lost for Words by Peter Fraser

My dream world is almost completely empty of all possessions. When I fantasize about the perfect home, it is almost monastic in appearance. It is flooded with light, has a small library, perhaps a few pieces of artwork sparsely punctuating a couple walls, my cat (the only chaos), a large bed, and the warming presence of someone I love. There is little, if any, bric-a-brac. The world Peter Fraser describes in his photographs is the one I hold at bay. His new book from the FFotogallery in Wales Lost for Words is for me, a decent into one version of hell.

That may sound extreme, hell, but looking at all of the objects he describes in his books my mind reels with the well intentioned but ultimately disturbed creations that surround us daily. Fraser thrusts our noses inches from things which might seem familiar at first and while seducing with color and a straightforward view, he accentuates their decay or artifice.

Looking at his photos I remember the same sinking feeling I used to get as a child when I would pull my N-gauge train set from under my bed only to find that within a short time the small foliage and resin lake, which I labored over to reconstruct reality and suspend disbelief, had been covered in a fine layer of dust and cat hair. It all seemed futile. No longer could I become completely captivated by that miniature world when the locomotive would emerge from the mountain tunnel hauling a huge dust bunny.

When Fraser published his book Material in 2002 I was less disturbed. That work felt partially contained within laboratories and work spaces sealed off from my usual environs. Thus, I could contain it - my mind told me 'that is there, I am here.' With much of his other work though, there is no comforting barrier, I am here, it is here too - just look down at the floor. I want to escape into the blue of the bird's egg in one of his images but those damn thorns and the scraped gold edge of the picture frame just above it keep escape impossible. Those loaves of bread made of foam are harmless yet the color (jaundiced skin?), and the wrinkles make me slightly nauseous.

Just like with the train set of my past, there is a pleasure in disrupting the scale of things. In Fraser's pictures it is a stylistic language he employs that teases the mind. It takes a moment to understand the relationship of these often physically small objects to the larger world. Not enough information is given to know the full answer. We are left grappling, lost for words.

I try to decipher the chalk markings that appear on the side of a red bookcase in the last plate of the book but thankfully their logistical meaning is beyond my grasp - if they weren't, I might be of a mind to follow their direction and descend further. Instead I still have the option to close the book and safely contain this madness. A blue spine peeking from a shelf is less disturbing - it can now coexist with my dream world.

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.

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.

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.