Here is another beautifully constructed book from Claire Van Vliet’s Janus Press. Beauty in Use is a book of poetry by Sandra McPherson, her third collaboration with Janus Press. Each poem is accompanied by a colorful and complex paper quilt.  The book is assembled and bound without the use of adhesives.

We’re suckers for accordion books, paper-cut, and whimsy. So at the LineWork NW festival, when we saw this little accordion from New York based illustrator/designer Kim Ku, it was a must-have. Check out her Etsy shop, where this item, and a few others are available.

For one more along these same lines see our earlier post on a Shelby Arnold project.

The Swiss-born artistic nomad Dieter Roth, spent much of his 5-decade career flitting between styles and media and means of production. But for me, the most exciting slice of this vast and varied career is that moment in the 1950s and early 60s knows as his “Concrete Period“.

During this phase of geometric, op and process-oriented art Roth created over twenty version of what he usefully called “Bok”. These “books”, were collections of loose-leaf pages, that had slots handcut from them according to certain rules and patterns. The pages in each book were largely 2 colors (with one exception), and ranged in number from 10 to 24. The pages in each could be rotated, arranged and stacked to create millions of patterns.

Each book was about 40cm square and the edition sizes were small. Many versions were one-of-a-kind, only four were printed in editions of more than 20 copies. Eventually, in his Collected Works, Volume 8, (Gesammelte Werke Band 8), 2 of these were reproduced in a die-cut edition of 1000.

More information about these books at MoMA’s website, as well as at sites maintained by the Grahame Galleries and Zucker Art Books. In print, the volume Dieter Roth Books + Multiples: Catalogue Raisonne has plenty of information about the various iterations of this idea, and is the source of some of the images in this post.

Additionally, in my fascination, I’ve recreated one of these books as an interactive web app project, you can play with it here. (Thanks to Zucker Art Books for providing the measurements.)

Andrew McLeod is a ridiculously prolific artist. So said the gentleman at the DDMMYY table at the LA Art Book Fair earlier this year. DDMMYY is a small press based in Auckland, New Zealand, that puts out a zine series featuring a single artist in each issue. This issue is only the tip of the iceberg of Andrew McLeod’s work:

He remixed the Te Papa Museum’s collection of historic paintings into this series of amazing posters.

He had a show of these paintings and collages earlier this year.

He designs textiles for fashion designer Jimmy D.

He has a publication called BMCT, which stands for blackmetalcytwombly.

Some select favorite collages and sculptures from the past several years of work by Dutch artist Louis Reith. Prints are available from Little Paper Planes. Reith also founded Jordskred, an indie publisher of artist books and music.

Louis Reith with his submission to a Nike/YOUR:OWN collaboration in 2010

This is a companion to our recent post of Lebbeus Woods’ illustrations.

Prior to his wider recognition as an architect and theorist, Lebbeus Woods provided illustrations for several works of science-fiction. One of which was a book club edition of Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sentinel publish in 1983 by Berkley Books. This hardcover was simultaneously offered in a deluxe slip-cased edition of 465 copies, each signed by both Clarke and Woods. Nice.

While these illustrations are fantastic, perhaps Woods’ best-known intersection with science-fiction came later when he sued the makers of the film 12 Monkeys for undeniably appropriating some of his images for the film.

Enjoy.

For more Lebbeus Woods work, info and links, see our earlier posts on his illustrations for the Red Herring Poets, and on OneFiveFour.

Images courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press blog: http://blog.papress.com/

1. In the City by Nigel Peake, Princeton Architectural Press. This is the urban-focused follow up to Peake’s excellent illustrations of rural life, In the Wilds. Earlier this summer PAP put out a set of 12 full color note cards by Peake, including 6 illustrations from the City series and 6 from the Wilds. In the City is available on PAP’s web store now.

Images courtesy of the artist’s website: http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/

2. Burtynsky – Water, Edward Burtynsky, Steidl Verlag. The release of this book coincides with exhibitions of Burtynksy’s photographs at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery and Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York (through November 2), a touring museum exhibition organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art (October 5 – January 19), a documentary film called Watermark, and an iPad app. Through all of these formats, Burtynsky explores the relationship between civilization and water, and the impact of that relationship on the landscape.

photo from W.W. Norton

3. The Great War, Joe Sacco. This looks exciting. We snap up a lot of accordion books, and we’re eager to get our hands on this 24 foot long drawing. The project reminds us that just before the advent of the motion picture, battlefield cylorama toured the world providing 19th century audiences with sprawling narrative, pseudo-cinematic experiences. This looks like the kind of project that reveals new details each time you pick it up. Check out some more pictures at W.W. Norton, and more still at NPR.

Bonus Track: And once fall is over, you can look forward to something new from James Turrell. Details are scarce but he…

is currently working on a book with LACMA and Kulturforum Järna that he hopes to debut at the end of this year called “The Turrell World Tour”, which challenges fans to visit all 82 of his site-specific works across 26 countries. “You go and visit a place and you have that signed,” says Mr Turrell. “If you visit all the spaces, then you’ll be our guest at Roden Crater.”

That’s according to The Economist. For more details on the “World Tour” and Turrell’s “masterwork” at Roden Crater, here’s a post at ArtInfo. The Roden Crater project has site now too.

Photo from http://rodencrater.com/

The images in this post are from our collection of Lebbeus’ early published drawings which appeared alongside poetry, not architecture, although they are clearly characteristic of the later Lebbeus Woods aesthetic.

Details:

In the Dream Museum — Red Herring Chapbook No. 6.
Robert Bensen. Swamp Press, 1980

Matrix — The Red Herring Poets
Robert Bensen (ed.). Channing-Murray, 1976.

Here is some information about The Red Herring Poets from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:

Formed in 1974, the Red Herring Poets hosted weekly poetry workshops and monthly meetings at the Red Herring Coffeehouse, located at the Channing-Murray Foundation in Urbana, Ill.

SFMoMA had an exhibit on Lebbeus Woods earlier this year, described as follows:

The extensive drawings and models on view present an original perspective on the built environment — one that holds high regard for humanity’s ability to resist, respond, and create in adverse conditions. “Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules,” he once said.

And Woods’ sizeable blog is still available and full of content for you to browse.

This is LODE, an interpretation of Nevada’s land use patterns during the boom and bust cycles of the late 19th century. Repeated symbols that represent various conditions and uses of the landscape are printed onto vellum, so that flipping through the pages mimics an excavation of the layers of the land’s history.

Other works of interest by Graham include this print of Oakland’s Lake Merritt and The Map of Neighboring Territories accordion book, much reminiscent of our other favorite accordion book artist Warja Lavater.

All things Graham are available in the Most Ancient shop.

SCAPEGOAT has recently released its winter/spring 2013 issue, “Currency”. This is the journal’s 5th issue, and the first to assume a book format, which is considerably more dense than previous broadsheet issues. All issues are designed by Chris Lee.

The Currency issue explores the relationship between money and territory. Notable contributions include: an essay on the “Grexit,” a theoretical currency that challenges European money-image iconography; Abbas Akhavan’s gallery show, Islands, in which a map of Dubai was gold leafed onto the galley wall, then divided and sold to collectors in units of drywall; a Berlin co-working space, ExRotaPrint, organized to shield its tenants from the gentrification of the surrounding city; two architects rebuilding a derelict house in Buffalo, NY, by engaging directly with cheap and locally available materials rather than resorting to detached consumerism; a proposal for a new value system based on soil, and the “soil-erg” as its unit of currency.

SCAPEGOAT is a bi-annual publication with curated contributions that address global capital as it relates to architecture, landscape and political economy. Previous issues have discussed Property, Service, Materialism and Realism. Upcoming issues will discuss Excess and Mexico City.

You can subscribe, purchase at an assortment of bookstores around the globe, or read them online for free.

Six new Tauba Auerbach prints, “Mesh/Moiré I-VI”, 2012 have been unleashed by Park Life and Paulson Blot Press. The material is classic Tauba Auerbach and these are excellent and successful works in process and composition that should please her fans. You can read details about the process on a promotional flyer/PDF that the press has released.

A lot of Auerbach’s art is about the tension between  an almost total control over what goes into a process and an absence of control about the result that emerges from that process. She explores her system and process thoroughly, with thought and experimentation, and then when she’s ready, she lets go.

Following that intro is an interview with the artist that reveals in generous detail the process that produced the patterned prints. The issue price is $4,500 for each of the 6, with sets available. Let the feeding frenzy begin. For those west coasters that want a closer look, we assume that Park Life will be showing off these beauties at the artMRKT San Francisco May 16-19.

Tauba Auerbach – Mesh/Moiré from Paulson Bott

Tauba Auerbach – Mesh/Moiré from Paulson Bott

Tauba Auerbach – Mesh/Moiré from Paulson Bott

Tauba Auerbach – Mesh/Moiré from Paulson Bott

Tauba Auerbach – Mesh/Moiré from Paulson Bott

Tauba Auerbach – Mesh/Moiré from Paulson Bott

The above images are from either the Paulson Bott Press site or the promotional flyer. Paulson Bott has a long history with Tauba Auerbach, which you can browse on their site. Some of these prints may be available still, they’re probably upwards of $5K by now.

In thinking about these new prints, we did some reading about past Aurebach prints and came up with a few details to share. With the recent well-documented blockbuster exhibition Tetrachromat came an uncharacteristic untitled edition of 120 spray-paint-on-my-studio-floor silk screen prints on black paper, which may have started out around $700*. Some images from the artist’s studio on the Goldminer Project reveal how these prints came about.

Tauba Auerbach – Tetrachromat print

In 2011 came a pair of C-prints, “Static 18” and “Static 19“, from Texte Zur Kunst. These 2 editions started out at the awesome price of 245 euro and have easily appreciated an order of magnitude* since then. There were 30 of each of these plus 10 proofs. As their titles suggest, these are a continuation of a long series of haunting static prints that came in much smaller editions. The “static” series followed “crumple”, “shatter” and “crease”, all concerned with randomness, disruption and confusion. You can follow up about many of these earlier prints by getting ahold of the increasingly scarce monograph Chaos (alternate link), put out in 2010 by Deitch Projects.

Tauba Auerbach – Static

Tauba Auerbach – Static

Tauba Auerbach’s website has an excellent list of her works. Click through, it’s good way to spend an afternoon into evening.

And finally, one more mesmerizing print. This one, “Untitled (Fold)”, was a Printed Matter benefit print from 2009. It’s a shame that here we can only trade in these little images which fail to draw you in and play with your vision and perception the way the full size and real editions do. From the Printed Matter description:

Tauba Auerbach’s two-tone screenprint is a visual cacophony of purple and yellow gridded dots that, when seen at a distance of 9 or 10 feet, resolve into an ingenious optical illusion suggesting a piece of paper that has been folded into sixteen segments.

 

The thirteenth edition of documenta, the prestigious German contemporary art festival, wrapped up September 2012. As a teaser for that festival, the organizers, along with Hatje Cantz, put together a list of 100 slim volumes titled 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts which “comprise facsimiles of existing notebooks, commissioned essays, collaborations, and conversations.” The long list of artists and theorists covered includes Ruins or Books favorites Kenneth Goldsmith, William Kentridge and Florian Hecker. And the titles are largely available at the project site (or perhaps at your local art book shop), and a browse of the project site will reveal that several of the later episodes are available free via PDF.

The following pictures come from the Alejandro Jodorowsky volume. The contents being a reproduction of a notebook that, despite the impeccably lettered cover, has nothing to do with the aborted Dune film project. Instead its pages are full of Jodorowsky’s obsession with the Tarot de Marseille. This obsession lasted decades and may offer you at least a partial answer to the question “what has he been doing for the last 30 years?”. In fact Jodorowsky maintained an interest in this centuries old Tarot deck, finally releasing an edition based on his research in 1998 with Philippe Camion.

Here’s the product page for this Jodorowsky item.

Here’s the wikipeda page for the documenta festival.

Here’s an odd and unexpected delight from John Dilnot. White Poplars is a simple “one idea” book that would be at home in Various Small Books, a recent ode to Ed Ruscha from the MIT Press. This one is a collection of photographs of graffitied and scarred poplar trees in Alicante, Spain, bound as accordian books in corrugated cardboard. 2 similar volumes in a slip case, edition of 500, inkjet and rubber stamps.

The item is available from the artist’s site. Take a look around because he has a handful of artists’ books divided across two pages: “Little Books” and “Bigger Books“.

And just in case you are as curious as we were, yes, you can see these same trees in Google Street View.

Ben F. Laposky is referred to on Wikipedia as “the pioneer for electronic art”. Bold words, but given that in 1953 he had a touring gallery show of oscilliscope designs, it’s clear that he’s at least near the front of the pack.

This curiosity I came across is from 1961. Computer art was still pretty far off the art world’s radar but Recreational Mathematics (Issue No 4, August 1961) provided Ben Laposky a venue to discuss his process. This little journal piece features seven of the “oscillons” (numbers: 39, 11, 10, 18, 41, 16, 38) from his Electronic Abstractions exhibit.

The content of Laposky’s article is largely a readable technical explanation of the work. Eventually he shifts from referring to this work as “design” to calling it an “art form”. Furthermore he briefly calls it the reigning “fourth-dimensional art form” and appeals to relativity and “Minkowski geometry time”. He closes out by discussing his successful traveling exhibit of this work, but suggests that 8 years on it is the only art show of its kind, although the advertising world frequently co-opts the aesthetic. This piece refers to 1937 article that describes a similar design process… so the hunt continues.

For more on early computer artists visit [DAM], the Digital Art Museum’s, site as well as the Spalter Digital Art Collection’s blog. It was their collection in the DeCordova’s Drawing with Code exhibition, that turned us on to this corner of the world.

All images from mattshlian.com

Matt Shlian has a way with folded paper. His fascination with geometric, 3-D forms and interactive art is leading him to collaborations with scientists and retailers alike. Attractive wall hangings, small sculptures and art books by Shlian are available through the Ghostly store and through Eight Emperors, a subscription series run by Matt and his partner, Thea Augustina Eck.

Out of this excellent body of work, we are most excited by the kinetic sculptures and flip books. Movement best showcases the complexity of these folded and layered forms, and betrays Shlian’s talent as an engineer.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Even just watching this guy fold paper is mesmerizing. Shlian will be teaching a course on paper sculpture at Haystack this summer.

These lovely patterns are actually type specimens. The typeface is Hypnopaedia by Zuzana Licko, who co-founded the venerable typographic clearhouse Emigre in 1984. Hypnopaedia was released by Licko in 1997 and can be found at Emigre along with the PDF specimen sheet from which the above images came.

Each Hypnopædia illustration was created by concentric rotation of a single letterform from the Emigre Fonts library. When repeated, each Hypnopædia illustration creates a unique pattern of interlocking letter shapes.

An infinite variety of patterns can be composed by combining and alternating the basic 140 Hypnopædia illustrations.

The specimen that is this PDF was released as a promotional booklet, which was surprisingly included in Thames and Hudsons The Book of Books edited by Mathieu Lommen. Seems like an odd choice to include a stapled pamphlet in a survey of the most innovative books of the last 500 years. But we’re glad to have come across it. The specimen was also printed in the Emigre Fonts Type Specimens Volume I which as of press time is nowhere to be found.

Licko’s portfolio includes another pattern face Puzzler.

Since then, we’ve snapped up a copy of Klaus-Peter Dienst’s 1962 typographic onslaught “Carmina Burana.” The exercise treats the Latin “O Fortuna” text of Carmina Burana to a  heavy dose of black and white geometry. Thoroughly designed and generous with its variety of letterforms and structure, this is truly a labor of love by an impassioned typographer.

This Simic title is (maybe?) one of their first publications and unusual from them as it was a limited run. We’re happy to have snagged it as we’re fans of Damon & Naomi, Charles Simic, and Exact Change, not only for their output, but also because they are a hometown favorite.

Check out the Exact Change catalog for more gems by folks like Raymond Roussel, Kurt Schwitters, Franz Kafka, Alfred Jarry, John Cage, Antonin Artaud…

Daniel Temkin’s delightfully titled Yeep!Eep!Eep!, which is what you know Autechre really wants to name their songs. You can read more about it on the project’s site which has the source code for you to run and play with. There are also many more pictures on flickr.

Book’s site. Project site.

Image via Daniel Temkin

…is neither bad nor good, but sublime, maybe the greatest film you have ever seen, and you will need to come back in the morning, in the evening, and late at night, abandoning everything else, packing a sleeping bag, and decamping to the Paula Cooper Gallery until sunrise.

image from discogs.com

However, the project pictured, Shuffle, came along before all that. Aperture published this set of 75 cards in 2007. We first learned of Christian Marclay through his also-collectible 1985 work “Record Without a Cover,” a discovery that came while writing about music that is set free by it’s composer. Marclay’s “Record” is shipped (and ideally stored) “Without a Cover”. Over the course of its existence, the recording becomes increasingly composed of the scratches accumulated through its being a naked record in the world.

The sonic output of a Shuffle performance is similarly out of the hands of the composer, although it employs an entirely different and less poetic strategy. Shuffle is a deck of cards, a series of 75 photographs, collected from our everyday world, which is littered with musical symbols. Notes, staves and clefs appear on jackets, tattoos, mugs, signs. Like an Bill Cunningham photo-spread as John Zorn’s Cobra with a bit of Cage’s anarchy, these appropriated images are pulled at random as flash cards and become “sheet music” for the performers of Shuffle.

More details on the project on the Aperture site.  If you’d like to see it in action here’s a video of a performance by La Générale d’Expérimentation.

still from La Générale d’Expérimentation

photo via wearewillbrown.com

photo via wearewillbrown.com

photo via wearewillbrown.com

We’ve been admirers of Tauba Auerbach’s work ever since we saw her sitting with her epic pop-up book-sculpture [2,3] at the New York Art Book fair a few years back. Now that a set of her postcards asks $750, and her prints are easily $3K and up, up, up, her older stuff is getting tricky to find. So we were thrilled to be tipped off by the blog of Auerbach-champions Park Life that she designed a pin to fundraise for the Will Brown exhibition space in San Francisco’s Mission.

“Contgratulations” the edition, and the event, celebrates Will Brown’s successful first year of delightful, critical irreverence. 2012 was a year that brought them immediate attention and praise with their first show Illegitimate Business, which itself speaks to the politics of collecting. The year ended with some “Best of 2012″ props from Frieze and elsewhere, which you can find more about on the event’s page. Spend a moment browsing the rest of their projects for gems like this:

At 6PM, 10 artists will set out on foot from their respective homes and walk to Will Brown. Departing from disparate corners of the Bay Area, participants will arrive in a staggered procession throughout the course of the evening. The physical space will be empty of art.

The humble buttons sold for $40 online. The fifty that were made available sold out, sight-unseen, shortly after being posted online. The rest of the 150 pins were sold at the fundraiser event, at which the artist was present.

photo via wearewillbrown.com

All of these pictures and more are from the Will Brown site.  Also, check out a previous foray of Tauba Auerbach’s into wearables: jewelry for Ohne Titel.

We leave you with a pic of Auerbach herself. How about that other pin?

This time a new year means throwing out an awesome calendar! We just took this one off the wall, but we had to share it with you before it goes for good. It’s the Space Garden 2012 Calendar from APAK (Aaron and Ayumi Piland), check out their whimsical wares, and if you still need a 2013 calendar, they can do that via Etsy…

This is the second issue of THE STATE, a print journal from Dubai experimenting with the translation of online information consumption to a book form. Lejla Redja is the designer of this issue, in which essays are folded and tucked into pockets of a two-spread folio.

Dubai, a place where “announcements become architecture within a matter of months,” is an apt place from which to meditate on speculative geographies. The essays of volume ii meander from Brasillia to London to Indonesia to Accra, but all revolve around contemporary understandings of place.

THE STATE announces issue topics in advance and accepts submissions. They also blog. Volume ii is available at Printed Matter.