art december 2015

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John Cage - How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Siglio 2015 ISBN 9781938221101 Acqn 25204 Hb 15x22cm 176pp 145col ills £24.50 Composed over the course of 16 years, John Cage's Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) is one of his most prescient and personal works. A repository of observations, anecdotes, obsessions, jokes and koan like stories, the diary registers Cage's assessment of the times in which he lived as well as his often uncanny predictions about the world we live in now. With a great sense of play as well as purpose, Cage traverses vast territory, from postwar music to Watergate, from domestic minutiae to ideas on how to feed the world. Typing on an IBM Selectric, Cage used chance operations to determine not only the word count and the application of various typefaces but also the number of letters per line, the patterns of indentation and--in the case of Part Three (published as a Great Bear pamphlet by Something Else Press)--color. The beautiful and unusual visual variances become almost musical as the physicality of the language on the page suggests the sonic. This first complete hardcover edition collects all eight parts Cage originally published in A Year from Monday, M and X. Coeditors Kraft and Biel have consulted these publications along with Cage's original manuscripts, and--with the Great Bear pamphlet as a guide--they have used chance operations to render the entire text in various combinations of red and blue as well as apply a set of 18 typefaces to the entire work.

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Paper Airplanes - The Collections of Harry Smith J&L 2015 ISBN 9780989531139 Acqn 25238 Pb 15x23cm 240pp 251col ills £27 Filmmaker, painter, anthropologist, musicologist and occultist--Harry Smith (1923-1991) was an incomparable polymath and seminal figure in the realms of beat culture and avant-garde art. Smith's kaleidoscopic experimental films have influenced generations of artists and cinephiles, while his landmark three-volume compilation, the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), laid the foundation for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to his ecstatic artwork, Smith is renowned for his vast collections of curious objects. The Collections of Harry Smith, Catalogue Raisonné series spotlights and indexes his eclectic research obsessions. Volume one features richly detailed photographic documentation of 251 paper airplanes gathered by Smith from the streets of New York City over an approximately 20-year period. Whimsical and weird, the paper airplanes rank among Smith's most mysterious collecting pursuits. This extensive compendium presents the fruits of his extraordinary aeronautic pursuit and highlights the tangled history and myths that accompany them.

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String Figures - The Collections of Harry Smith J&L 2015 ISBN 9780989531160 Acqn 25239 Pb 15x23cm 152pp 125col ills £19 Volume two of The Collections of Harry Smith focuses on Smith's erudite study of string figures, an age-old form of spiritual and recreational play that he passionately chronicled in multiple mediums. This immersive volume contains photographs of the extant mounted string figures created by Smith alongside interviews, film stills and selections from his unpublished anthropological research. Additional contextual materials include an introductory essay and a conversation between musician, photographer and filmmaker John Cohen, a long-time colleague of Smith, and painter Terry Winters.

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Walter Benjamin - Berlin Childhood Circa 1900 Publication Studio Hudson 2015 ISBN 9781935662136 Acqn 25271 Pb 12x17cm 326pp 32ills 1col £16.95 This fresh translation by Carl Skoggard of philosopher Walter Benjamin's (1892-1940) engaging memoir remains faithful to the author's voice. Readers are offered glimpses of an anonymous Berlin childhood, which might have been Benjamin’s, own, with recollections of an affluent Jewish home in Berlin's West End, circa 1900. Focusing less on events and characters than on places and things, Benjamin vividly re-imagines a young child's idiosyncratic private world. Written in the months before and after the Nazi takeover of Germany, these recollections served as a coping mechanism for Benjamin, a way of working through irrevocable loss. This edition is illustrated with 30 black-and-white images and comes with a foldable colour map of Berlin circa 1900 as well as a translator's essay and an extensive commentary.

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Walter Benjamin - The "Berlin Chronicle" Notices Publication Studio Hudson 2015 ISBN 9781935662853 Acqn 25270 Pb 12x17cm 294pp 15ills 1col £16.95 A companion volume to Walter Benjamin's (1892-1940) memoir Berlin Childhood circa 1900, The "Berlin Chronicle" Notices is now in a new translation by Carl Skoggard. The German-Jewish philosopher, theorist and critic Walter Benjamin began to ruminate on his comfortable Berlin childhood in 1932, not long before he would flee Germany for good to escape the Nazis. The resulting "Berlin Chronicle" notices--40 in all--do not result in a linear narrative but instead remain fragmentary recollections of Benjamin's young years, from his early childhood to the threshold of adulthood. More generally, they are a series of profound explorations of memory and of the ways memory relates to place. Rich in and of themselves, these notices greatly illuminate "Berlin Childhood circa 1900," written by Benjamin months later. This translation, in a charming pocket-sized format, comes with an extensive commentary, a historical map of Berlin and numerous illustrations.

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Walter Benjamin – Sonnets Publication Studio Hudson 2015 ISBN 9781624620812 Acqn 25274 Pb 11x17cm 394pp 5ills £16.95 Walter Benjamin's sonnets, written to mourn his friend Fritz Heinle, constitute an important though little-known part of the philosopher's literary achievement and a unique contribution to the history of the German sonnet. Benjamin would add to their number over a decade, having begun his project soon after the outbreak of World War I and the suicide of his friend. They were among the writings that Benjamin, forced to flee France, entrusted to Georges Bataille in 1940 for safekeeping. Here, for the first time, readers of English are offered translations of all 73 "Heinle sonnets" along with the original German text and an extensive commentary. The Introductory Essay examines the poems' biographical context as well as Benjamin's bold approach to sonnet writing. These poems weave the deeply personal together with Benjamin's evolving religious and philosophical perspective--shedding new light on the emergence of the man and the thinker.

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Parchman Farm + 2 CDs Dust-to-Digital 2015 ISBN 9780981734293 Acqn 25218 Hb 17x24cm 124pp 77ills 19col £30 In 1947, 1948 and 1959, renowned folklorist Alan Lomax (1915-2002) went behind the barbed wire into the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. Armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck--and, in 1959, a camera--Lomax documented as best an outsider could the stark and savage conditions of the prison farm, where the black inmates laboured "from can't to can't," chopping timber, clearing ground and picking cotton for the state. They sang as they worked, keeping time with axes or hoes, adapting to their condition the slavery-time hollers that sustained their forebears and creating a new body of American song. Theirs was music, as Lomax wrote, that "testified to the love of truth and beauty which is a universal human trait." Their songs participated in two distinct musical traditions: free world (the blues, hollers, spirituals and other songs they sang outside and, when the situation permitted, sang inside as well) and the work songs, which were specific to the prison situation. A chilling account of how slavery persisted well into the 20th century in the institutionalised form of the chain gang, Parchman Farm includes two CDs with 44 of Lomax's remastered audio recordings and a book of more than 70 of Lomax's photographs, many published here for the first time.

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Lead Kindly Light + 2 CDs of Old Time , Blues And Gospel Music 1924-1939 Dust-to-Digital 2015 ISBN 9780981734262 Acqn 25687 Hb 17x22cm 176pp 156ills 10col £31 A portrait of the rural American South between the dawn of the 20th century and the Second World War, Lead Kindly Light brings together two CDs of traditional music from early phonograph records and a handsome clothbound volume of never-before-published vernacular photography from the region. North Carolina collectors Peter Honig and Sarah Bryan, a husband-and-wife team, have spent years combing the back roads, from deep in the Appalachian Mountains to the cotton and tobacco lowlands, in search of the evocative music and images of the pre-War South. The music of Lead Kindly Light (which borrows its name from a 1927 recording by the Loveless Twins Quartet) presents outstanding lesser-known recordings by early stars of recorded country music, as well as rarely and never-reissued treasures by obscure country, blues and gospel artists--46 recordings in all, recorded between 1924 and 1939, from the 78 RPM collection of Peter Honig. The images from Sarah Bryan's vernacular photography collection, mainly pictures of the rural and small-town South found in the Carolinas, Virginia and Tennessee, are richly textured depictions of family life, work and leisure, and fine exemplars of the often accidental beauty of the vernacular snapshot.

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Vostell / Higgins - Fantastic Architecture Primary Information 2015 ISBN 9780990689607 Acqn 25686 Hb 15x21cm 192pp 150ills £21.95 Compiled by Fluxus artists Wolf Vostell and Dick Higgins, and first published by Higgins' legendary Something Else Press in 1970, Fantastic Architecture anticipated the critiques launched by a new generation of visionary architects in the 1970s. In his introduction, Higgins argued that "architects … have only just begun to escape from the drawing board mentality," and articulated the need for "creating space, which may or may not be functional, but which is at least relevant to the sensory environment in which we live. The economics of building has led to an aridity in our experience which is not consistent with the richness of our time." Against this, Higgins and Vostell advocate the approach of polymath artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann, Erich Buchholz, John Cage and Buckminster Fuller. From their contemporaries and friends, artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Ben Vautier, Richard Hamilton, Douglas Huebler, Lawrence Weiner, Dennis Oppenheim, Jan Dibbets, Jean Tinguely, Robert Filliou, Daniel Spoerri, Geoff and Bici Hendricks, Philip Corner, Joseph Beuys, Ay-o, Claes Oldenburg and others also made contributions, which range from the visionary to the absurd to the political, from the epistolary to the outright manifesto. Joseph Beuys submitted a recommendation to raise the height of the Berlin Wall; Claes Oldenburg's proposals included a colossal replacement for the Washington Obelisk and a monument for war heroes. Vostell and Higgins considered it the artist's responsibility to research and revolutionize structures in space, recognizing that artists could reconceive buildings without the bureaucracy of government and urban planning. The missives and artworks made for this book show how much visionary architecture was intertwined with all facets of culture and critique. Fantastic Architecture is a prime example of a 1960s Fluxus artist's book and of imaginative cross-media thinking.

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Robert Smithson In Texas Estate of Robert Smithson 2015 ISBN 9780984680948 Acqn 25220 Hb 24x28cm 80pp 56ills 48col £17 Robert Smithson (1938-73), the internationally renowned pioneer of the earthworks movement who is best known for his earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970), is considered one of the most iconoclastic artists of the 20th century. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Robert Smithson in Texas at the Dallas Museum of Art, this book contains essays and illustrations that examine Smithson's engagement with the Texas landscape. Smithson's involvement with Texas began in July 1966, when he was hired as an artist consultant to the New York-based architecture and engineering firm Tippetts, Abbett, McCarthy, Stratton (TAMS) to develop plans for the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport. Though his plans never came to fruition, Smithson credited the project as a major catalyst in his development toward the concept of large-scale earthworks. The artist returned to Texas several times in the years following the DFW Airport project, proposing earthworks related to islands off the Gulf Coast outside Houston and at the Northwood Institute near Dallas. Smithson's final work, Amarillo Ramp was completed posthumously in August 1973. Though the artist had finalized the arrangement for the earthwork, he died tragically in a plane crash while aerially viewing the staked-out form. In addition to the essays and illustrated exhibition checklist, the publication includes still images from Nancy Holt's film The Making of Amarillo Ramp, 1973-2013. Using archival footage shot in 1973 by Holt--artist and wife of Robert Smithson--as well as still images of Smithson's visit to Amarillo, the film provides a visual story of the Amarillo Ramp as it was developed from start to finish.

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Lars Elling - Lucid Dreaming Forlaget Press 2015 ISBN 9788232800254 Acqn 25223 Hb 24x27cm 208pp 83col ills £60 The volume surveys works by Norwegian painter Lars Elling (born 1966) from 2008 to the present. Elling's paintings are layered narratives told in a fragmented visual language that incorporate allusions to film and photography, sometimes also invoking nostalgia with references to private photo albums.

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Ari Marcopoulos – Fumes Karma 2015 ISBN 9781942607014 Acqn 25242 Pb 21x31cm 420pp 800ills 400col £38 Photographer Ari Marcopoulos' newest publication takes an in-depth look into the studio process of American artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney. Shot over four years, Fumes depicts the activity within Barney's Long Island City studio from 2011 to 2014. Marcopoulos documented the day-to-day activity in the workspace, from the digging of an Egyptian death chamber to the flooding during Hurricane Irene, to the ongoing preparation for Barney's 2014 film epic River of Fundament: "I got sucked into taking photographs of the people working on the various projects, more and more it felt almost like a performance." The publication is comprised of black-and-white and full-colour spreads showing workers transporting, moulding and fusing toxic materials, interwoven with an array of intricate pictorial montages, mirroring those of a negative. Marcopoulos captures the human figure at work, in motion, pursuing life in its most ordinary moments in order to create something extraordinary.

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Dan McCarthy – Facepots Hassla 2015 ISBN 9781940881058 Acqn 25516 Pb 19x26cm 196pp 184col ills £41 Facepots focuses on the recent ceramic work of New York–based artist Dan McCarthy (born 1962)--highly animated and emotionally charged objects formed through an immediate, hands-on process. The volume situates McCarthy's ceramics historically and includes a visual essay by the artist himself, featuring images and icons that served as inspiration.

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Dike Blair – Gouaches Karma 2015 ISBN 9781938560286 Acqn 25518 Hb 16x23cm 416pp 400col ills £41 This comprehensive volume surveys over 30 years of gouache-on-paper works from New York–based artist Dike Blair (born 1942), beginning in 1984. Blair's still lives and landscapes--painted from his own snapshots--are photo-realist visions of everyday objects, views through windows and natural scenery.

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Blair Thurman Karma 2015 ISBN 9781938560934 Acqn 25519 Pb 22x30cm 168pp 150col ills £35 Blair Thurman (born 1961) creates work at the intersection of Pop art, abstract geometric art of the 50s and 60s and Americana. This volume presents his most recent abstract pieces--most of them painted on canvas covering shaped stretchers--alongside an essay by critic and curator Vincent Pécoil.

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Chen Zhen - Without Going To New York And Paris, Life Could Be Internationalized Sternberg Press 2015 ISBN 9783956791789 Acqn 25689 Hb 17x24cm 240pp 210col ills £27 Edited by Li Qi. Texts by Larys Frogier, Hou Hanru. Chen Zhen (1955–2000) is largely recognized as one of the most important artists of the global art scene. His work thrived from his singular and intense life experience of migrating and working across different continents and cultures. The recent exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum in Chen’s native city of Shanghai reflected on his lifework, at once unique and complex, critical and optimistic, and its attempts to provide innovative responses to the diverse challenges of the changing world, from the end of the Cold War to the rise of of global capitalism and new geopolitical conflicts. Chen proposed to constantly re-examine the realities and histories of what he viewed as an exciting new world, full of problems—like a giant with an over muscled body and an exhausted heart. This catalogue presents an art-historical angle on Chen Zhen’s unique way of questioning his experience of globalisation through art. It includes documentation of the eponymous exhibition at Rockbund Art Museum (May 30–October 7, 2015), along with detailed sketches of both existing and unrealised projects.

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Tom Burr - Anthology: Writings, 1991–2015 Sternberg Press 2015 ISBN 9783956791963 Acqn 25690 Pb 24x33cm 128pp 20ills £21.50 Since the late 1980s, Tom Burr has been reusing appropriation strategies in his art. Not confined to his photographic and sculptural works, they also lend momentum to many of his writings. The artist has created assemblages of personal writings and sources, differing in nature and style, which he has used as both conceptual and aesthetic materials in his oeuvre. Thus, Burr extends his art praxis into the field of writing, and vice versa; art and language cannot be dissociated from each other. At times, the text precedes and anticipates the work; at others, it emanates and results from it; in most instances, it is an integral part of it. Words constitute the work. Thirty-seven texts—works, poems, autobiographical texts, and portraits—have been compiled for the first time in this publication. Written over a period of twenty-four years, they are presented chronologically, enabling us to fully appreciate the conceptual and visual coherence and richness of Burr’s writings.

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Hairy Who And The Chicago Imagists - 2 Flip Books + DVD Pentimenti Productions 2015 ISBN 9780692481400 Acqn 25521 Pb 16x20cm 68pp £38 In the mid 1960s, Chicago was an incubator for an iconoclastic group of artists collectively known as the Imagists. A cousin to the contemporaneous phenomenon of Pop art, Chicago Imagism took its own weird, wondrous, in-your-face approach. The Imagist artists--including Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Christina Ramberg and Karl Wirsum--each had his or her own unmistakable style: scatological, meticulous, comical and absurd. Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists is the first film to tell the Imagists' whole story, from their notoriety in the 1960s to their 21st-century resurgence in popularity. Almost 50 years after their first show, the Imagists have influenced generations of artists, from Jeff Koons to Chris Ware. With a wealth of archival footage and photographs, the film also includes over 40 interviews with critics, curators, collectors, artists and the Imagists themselves.

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It's Mine - A Tribute To Art Collectors Arvinius + Orfeus Publishing 2015 ISBN 9789187543500 Acqn 25612 Pb 20x29cm 318pp 230ills 200col £27 It’s Mine: A Tribute to Art Collectors portrays 33 Swedish and international art collectors and artists who have devoted their lives to art. In intimate interviews and at-home stories they tell what has sparked their interest and what role art plays in their everyday lives. The narratives presented in this richly illustrative book are about initial meetings – about desire, passion, and acquisitiveness. And most of all, about the relationship between works of art and their owners.

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Letter To My Dear Arvinius + Orfeus Publishing 2015 ISBN 9789187543227 Acqn 25685 Hb 14x21cm 200pp £28.95 In this beautifully designed book, Lennart Grebelius, a philanthropist/businessman/artist, uses art to turn abstract ideas into tangible objects. With Letter To My Dear, Grebelius takes on eternity. He asks a simple question that sheds light on a very real and very moral dilemma: What can we demand of our children? And of their children?

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Lisa Beck - The Middle Of Everywhere. Works 1986-2015 La Salle de Bains 2015 ISBN 9782954792200 Acqn 25693 Pb 20x30cm 140pp 131ills 116col £33.75 This reference monograph on New York artist Lisa Beck, who has been developing for more than 30 years an abstract language which is as playful and discreet as it is effective and sharp, presents a significant body of work ranging from the 1980s to the present, and also offers to revisit Beck's recent solo exhibitions such as “Endless” (La Salle de bains, Lyon), “Observatory” (Galerie Samy Abraham, Paris) and “The Middle of Everywhere” at Circuit art center in Lausanne. With essays by Samuel Gross and Bob Nickas.

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Luca Trevisani - Grand Hotel Des Palmes Nero 2015 ISBN 9788897503569 Acqn 25695 Pb 10x16cm 132pp 128ills £17.50 Luca Trevisiani stamps images derived from antique herbaria and design magazines on objects with heterogeneous surfaces (textiles, clothing, tropical leaves, minerals). Luca Trevisani explores the dimension of transience, fragility and metamorphosis of nature, isolating the perceptive-sensorial aspect in the human cognitive and experiential process. Playing between the three-dimensionality and two-dimensionality of bodies, he analyses the structural properties of vision and the reduction of the real into perceived forms. The name of the project is based on the eponymous hotel in Palermo where the body of Raymond Roussel was found, French writer and playwright among the fathers of “pataphysics”, the science of imaginary constructions. Passionate defender of freedom of expression, Roussel is the symbol of the revolutionary power of the imagination, a concept present in the whole of Trevisani's artistic research. Published following the eponymous exhibition at the Italian Institute of Culture in Madrid in February 2015.

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Interpellations - Three Essays On Kent Monkman Ellen Art Gallery 2015 ISBN 9782920394902 Acqn 25696 Pb 17x24cm 124pp 28ills 24col £24.50 Three art historians offer perspectives and analyses on Monkman's work that address history and genre painting, the queered Romantic landscape, the shifting and unfixed subject, race, sexuality, conquest and sovereignty, and modern versus discontinuous temporality. Kent Monkman (born 1965 in St. Marys, Ontario, lives and works in Toronto) is a Canadian artist of Cree ancestry who works with a variety of mediums, including painting, film / video, performance, and installation. His work fascinates. He revisits North American historical events and western cultural representations, often under the guise of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, his alter ego, the sexy and extravagant diva warrior. His aesthetics and drama have the effect of drawing out both what has been erased and concealed in the historical inscription of aboriginal culture the repressed desire and troubled fascination that have paradoxically contributed to shaping it.

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Archive Crisis - Stefanos Tsivopoulos Jap Sam 2014 ISBN 9789490322441 Acqn 23472 Pb 21x28cm 176pp 105ills 5col £19.50 Shaking up the Shelves of History: A Visual Essay on Media Images from the Recent Political Past of Greece Stefanos Tsivopoulos, Hilde de Bruiijn (eds.) Archive Crisis is a visual essay based on a series of previously unpublished images from Greek (media) archives collected by visual artist Stefanos Tsivopoulos. The book explores the mechanisms of visual culture in a mediatized democracy, and their effect on the production of collective memory. Tsivopoulos' multi-layered visual essay – which builds the main body of this book – not only reveals the patterns, idiosyncrasies, textures, and tactility of these images but ultimately inquires the extent to which photographic, archival documents provide us with knowledge. The book's fascinating image material is of a diverse nature and is intrinsically linked to a broader European and global context such as the Cold War, Greek-US relationships, and more recent crisis. Essays from authors provide academic reflection and link these historical images to a broader contemporary context. With contributions by Dimitris Antoniou and Alfredo Cramerotti.

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Doris Denekamp & Geert van Mil - Call me Ishmael Jap Sam 2015 ISBN 9789490322519 Acqn 25338 Pb 14x19cm 218pp 26ills £17.50 Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.'- Ishmael in Moby Dick, 1851 In the summer of 2014 artists, Doris Denekamp and Geert van Mil, worked and lived in the artist in residence Het Vijfde Seizoen in Den Dolder. The residency space is an old pavilion on the terrain of the Willem Arntsz Hoeve, a psychiatric institution. Together with the patients, Denekamp & Van Mil read the epic story of Moby Dick. This novel written by Herman Melville in 1851, tells the story of revenge by Captain Ahab on the white whale Mody Dick and the protagonist Ismael. Inspired by this classic novel, the artists and the patients came up with new stories. These are being processed in a contemporary version of Moby Dick. The title of this new publication is Call me Ishmael, and it will be published by Jap Sam Books spring 2015. Doris Denekamp (1984) and Geert van Mil (1983), both artists, have been working together under the name informal strategies since 2011. With their work, they investigate the role of stories in society today. Their (video) installations, publications and performances come into being in constantly changing, collaborative exchanges, and often have a direct relationship to the location where the work evolves.

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A Schelde Riverscape - Vlassenbroek,Broekkant. Jap Sam 2015 ISBN 9789490322557 Acqn 25341 Pb 21x27cm 208pp 200ills 150col £17.50 Landscapes are elusive. They defy every attempt to commit them to paper. Rising sea levels and the inevitable heavy rainfall make Flanders a very dangerous place during spring tide. Government agencies and engineering firms work hard to keep the water in check. The River Schelde gets more space, dikes are moved… in a constantly shifting panorama. This book features a series of drawings that portray the landscape between Vlassenbroek and Broekkant – made by workers, artists, and visitors, from nearby and far afield. Enthusiasts who seized the challenge, because en plein air is the tradition here. In the last century painters and sketch artists loved to try their hand at representing the river or they ventured into the polder. The tradition had faded but it was revived as a slow and last-minute attempt to capture the fleeting landscape.

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Anuli Croon - Patterns Of Life Jap Sam 2015 ISBN 9789490322595 Acqn 25706 Pb 17x24cm 128pp 155ills 150col £17.95 'Along. We recognize everything in Anuli Croon's large, clear paintings. The hands, eyes, buildings and ornaments are lovingly meticulous, but at the same time unsetting in their anonymity. We recognize everything and yet we go astray among the figures and fragments of a metropolis. And then, distorientated, we see the beautiful composition, the intense colour patterns and the texture.' - Landa van Vliet. With contributions by Vera Illés, Aat Ceelen, Maarten Janssen, Dees Linders

art december 2015

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