1 pce.

Spending the last day of 2009 with my best-loved person.

 

 :-) 

"Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and '70s"

During the 1960s and '70s in Japan, the photobook—through a combination of excellence in design, printing, and materials—overtook prints as a popular mode of artistic dissemination. 

This process has expanded to an extent where any discussion of Japanese photography now has to include the book work. Today, the most famous works—such as Nobuyoshi Araki’s Sentimental Journey and Eikoh Hosoe's Man and Woman—continue to inspire artists internationally.

Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and '70s presents forty definitive publications from the era, piecing together an otherwise invisible history that has played out in tandem with photography as a medium. Included are some of the most influential works along with forgotten gems, placed within a larger historical and sociological context. 

Each book, beautifully reproduced through numerous spreads, is accompanied by an in-depth explanatory text and sidebars highlighting important editors, designers, themes, and periodicals. Lavishly produced, this unique publication is an ode to the distinct character and influence of the Japanese photobook.

Select titles by: Nobuyoshi Araki, Ken Domon, Masahisa Fukase, Hiroshi Hamaya, Eikoh Hosoe, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Miyako Ishiuchi, Kikuji Kawada, Keizo Kitajima, Kineo Kuwabara, Yoichi Midorikawa, Daido Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira, Ikko Narahara, Yasuzo Nojima, Kishin Shinoyama, Shomei Tomatsu, Hiromi Tsuchida, and others.

Texting

Sprüeth Magers Gallery in London presents a retrospective of Barbara Kruger’s early works, now on display through January 23rd.  In this rare opportunity to see this portion of her collection, one will note the raw and less yielded approach in these pieces than in her later more refined works.

Kruger’s haunting and exposed imagery is juxtaposed with blaring statements of text relative to the political injustice of the world. All wording shows her simplistically fantastic use of Futura type. They note her distaste for consumerism and mass media with such phrases as “Our Prices are Insane!” and “Who is Beyond the Law?” speaking to us in clichés but saying much more.

Another central theme to her works is the question of power and the identity of those who dictate justice. As seen in “Untitled (You Are a Very Special Person)” the bejeweled crown symbolizes authority while the words speak of subordinate mockery. To quote Kruger, “I’m an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.” 

link: Art Observed

Mats Gustafson’s Landscapes and Swans

 

Since the late 1970s, Mats Gustafson’s fashion illustrations have decorated the pages of magazines such as Interview, The New Yorker, and Vogue, among others. But by 1997, the artist began shifting his focus to the natural world, starting a series of pastel landscape studies. A couple of years later, Gustafson began drawing swans in the same minimalist style that had defined his work in the fashion industry. “It’d been an ongoing switch in my career—focusing on nature—but it was funny, because I picked the most fashionable parts of nature,” Gustafson said. “The swan is very much the supermodel among birds, and they’re very elegant. I was still looking for beautiful lines, but just in the natural world.”

The gallery John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, in New York City, is now showing “Mats Gustafson: Swan,” a collection of the illustrator’s early landscape and swan studies, as well as recent pieces and a digital wall installation. “I wanted to reduce, simplify, and get to the essence of things,” Gustafson said of the stark but romantic works. Herewith, some images from the exhibition, which is on display until January 23. 

via: Vanity Fair

'HERGÉ: The Man Who Created Tintin'

When the Belgian cartoonist Hergé died in 1983 at the age of 75, The New York Times saw fit to run only a brief, 182-word obituary, picked up from Reuters. But in the Francophone world, Hergé’s death was front-page news, inspiring the kind of orgylike coverage reserved in America for fallen statesmen and overdosed pop stars. Belgian politicians asserted Hergé’s greatness, while the French philosopher Michel Serres went so far as to declare that the cartoonist was the author who has had the “most impact on contemporary French life.”

Granted, many people on this side of the Atlantic are also fans of Hergé’s best-loved creation, the tuft-haired boy reporter Tintin, who, along with his trusty dog, Snowy, foiled serial bands of smugglers, gangsters, kidnappers, spies and crude ethnic caricatures across the pages of 24 book-length, Saturday-morning-serial-style adventures. But even Tintin’s most passionate American devotees may choke on the French author Pierre Assouline’s observation, in his scrupulous but stolid biography, HERGÉ: The Man Who Created Tintin (Oxford, $24.95), translated by Charles Ruas, that “today, some speak with some justification of a ‘Tintin century,’ signifying the 20th.” American exceptionalist that I am, I had presumed the 1900s belonged to Mickey Mouse or Batman — or maybe to that relative latecomer Bart Simpson. Though I like Tintin too, I wouldn’t even give him a decade. 

 via: The New York Times Book Review

Merry Christmas

"Patti Smith: Dream of Life"

Snowed

 

"Collection of Collections"

From the moment you step into Partners & Spade’s shop you’ll know that you’re not in the typical retail environment. The space is as much to see as it is to buy, combining aspects of both a gallery and store. Though the idea of art and commerce isn’t especially new, Partners & Spade has successfully executed something fresh in the highly competitive field of Manhattan retail.

Every detail of the store is an opportunity for an unexpected touch of humor, including a comical cluster of security cameras that greets you at the door, or the impulse items only reachable by a 10 foot ladder. 

The shop is also a collection of collections that invites gallery owners, designers, artists, and creatives to share their work and collections, giving them a space to showcase items that they otherwise would not have an opportunity for. Several of our favorites include Mike Mills and Maira Kalman’s contributions to the store. Mills based his collection on memories, in particular 1971. A year in which he believes is the first year of his real memories. Stringing together magazine cut outs as well as illustrations of people and items from that year. Pieces from his collection can be bought as well as bartered. You’ll need to talk to the staff to find out which ones those are. Maira Kalman invited Rivka Schoenfeld an artist who’s contributed to M&Co in the past. Schoenfeld hand made a limited edition of wool hats all accompanied with a tote with each individually numbered. The hats are beautiful as well as endearing given that they are all hand made.

Partners & Spade will include a rotating list of contributors from the high and low. Elevating the mundane with objects as simple as a stapler and beautifying it to showcasing rare books and photographs that would sit comfortably behind a glass case at the Met. We can’t divulge everything here you’ll need to go and experience the shop yourself. 

via: The Scout

On the Waterfront

“The Edge of New York: Waterfront Photographs,” at the Museum of the City of New York, examined the waterfront and its transformation during the 20th century, pairing historic pictures with contemporary images by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel.

“I had this idea of New York and the waterfront as this mythic thing,” said Sean Corcoran, the curator of prints and photographs, who conceived the show.

The photos of Berenice Abbott, Andreas Feininger and David Robbins captured the heyday of the working waterfront in the 1930s and 1940s. They conjure the world of Joseph Mitchell and Elia Kazan; a world where longshoremen toiled, smoking tugboats towed and docks and piers thrust into the water like antennae. New York’s waterfront was once the busiest port in the world, as crowded as a bustling sidewalk but one that was connected to the far reaches of the globe.“It’s so different from what New York is now,” Mr. Corcoran said. “It’s a very stark difference.”

link: Lens Blog