ALEX CECCHETTI

A Society That Breathes Once a Year

Francesco Pedraglio and Gavin Everall

In a mesmerizing story from the Time Machine series, a man and a woman begin the project of building an isolated, sustainable farm in the north of Canada, cut off from civilization. Paris-based author/artist Alex Cecchetti places the protagonists in a non-linear narrative, driving through the tawdry present, only to realize a future set deeply in the past. Haunted by the specters of dead rabbits and a prophetic bear, the couple’s utopian dream is delivered in a rapid, dense stream of language, as if the text itself wants to return to the pace of present. Editor Francesco Pedraglio chooses works from open submission, allowing us to consciously experiment with all our imaginable histories and expected futures.

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More from the Time Machine Series

Certain Encounters

Daros-Latinamerica Collection

Keith Wallace

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HELEN CHADWICK

Wreaths to Pleasure

One of contemporary art’s most provocative and profound figures, British artist Helen Chadwick was celebrated for her controversial feminist installations. Her death in 1996 cut short a brilliant career, but her influence resonates in the work of the YBAs and other contemporary artists. Published on the occasion of Helen Chadwick: Bad Blooms at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London (2014), this volume reexamines her most iconic series, Wreaths to Pleasure (1992–94), originally shown at the Serpentine Gallery and MOMA, New York. Consisting of 13 large circular photo-pieces of vividly colored flowers floating on the surface of domestic fluids, the sensual and sexually suggestive work celebrates the unholy alliance of organic and toxic, fluid and static, clean and dirty. Color illustrations of both historical and posthumous installation are accompanied by David Notarius’s foreword, Marina Warner’s eulogy, and Sophie Raikes’s essay on the work’s inspiration, process and creation.

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THE CHAIR AFFAIRE

Cabinet Project

Lucas Maassen & Margriet Craens

Chair porn? Kama sutra for chairs? This humorous pocket-sized artist’s book catalogs, in over 50 color photographs, iconic mid-century chairs, some with colorful cardigans, in flagrante delicto. Created by Dutch visual artist Margriet Craens and Dutch furniture designer Lucas Maassen, the photographs document their installation The Vincent Affair, which was staged at the Nune Ville, the house where the love of Vincent van Gogh’s life, Margot Begemann, once lived. Four short works of erotic fiction written by actor Twan van Brag lie in between two sections of chair pairings. Even though small in size this publication packs a powerful punch, covering everything from history to mid-century modern design to sculptural installation and erotic writings.

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CHANGING TRENDS

Content and Style

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CHARTRES: ONE HOUR OF SOUND IN A GOTHIC CATHEDRAL

Toine Horvers

This diminutive artist’s book is a translation of the universe of ambient sound amplified within the soaring space of the Chartres Cathedral. Artist Toine Horvers, who works at the intersection of spoken and written language in performances, drawings and books, describes what he hears without stating the source of the sound or referring to the physical space of the Gothic cathedral. The resulting book is a literal tone poem, in which each page represents one minute of sound. Horvers’ work is featured in a number of museums and private collections, including the Drawing Center, New York, and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

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CHER AMI – VOTRE MARCEL PROUST

Marcel Proust in the Mirror of His Corrrespondence

Jürgen Ritte and Reiner Speck

Marcel Proust, author of Remembrance of Things Past, was nothing if not an avid correspondent: and after he withdrew from society to his cork-lined room, his correspondence seems to have become the only link between the inner and outside worlds. Scholars are fascinated by his letters because they show how the author’s three-volume masterwork was plotted and planned over a ten-year period. This unprecedented book includes is a chronicle of Proust’s life, commentary on the letters, a bibliographical compilation of the editions of correspondence, and – most fascinatingly – facsimiles of many letters, showing addresses, omissions, allusions and crossings-out, revealing a remarkable amount about Proust’s mysterious private life. Only published in French and German.

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CHRISTOPH BÜCHEL

Korean Directory

Internationally lauded Swiss artist Christoph Büchel creates hyper-realistic environments that are, in essence, like walking into a mind at work. His detailed installations are three-dimensional renderings of spaces or situations that convey extreme psychological mindsets. This book is another of Buchel’s “environments” – a dead-boring Korean Business Directory turned into a full-color scrapbook of pop-culture ephemera. Seemingly unrelated clippings from German tabloids on minor celebrities and inconsequential members of the nobility, bits from catalogs and travel magazines all come together in an oddly compelling artist book. Somehow, Buchel uses these bits and pieces as a vehicle for social and political commentary within the artist’s contemplative space.

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Clunie Reid

Faker, Drinker, Soldier, Heiress

Drawing on imagery from mass culture, London-based artist Clunie Reid’s photo-collages appropriate everyday images and show how the violence within them has become banal to the contemporary viewer. This artist’s book is inspired by the sexual content and rhetoric of advertising, the Internet and magazines; works are often reproduced on a mirrored surface, with hand-scrawled jokes and texts overlaying them. The images – including the artist’s own drawings and photographs – play on a complex relationship between surface and penetration, where distorted images overlay one another, shattering the reflection of the mirrored surface. These illusionistic, sexual games are replayed across the surface of the book. The book becomes a hall of mirrors in which one meaning rapidly collapses on itself only to reproduce a new, multifaceted one.

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COMMERCE BY ARTISTS

Luis Jacob (Ed.)

Commerce  by  Artists documents a fascinating and sweeping range of artists’ projects produced from the 1950s to the present by Canadian and international artists who have sought to engage, rather than merely represent, the complex contemporary art world of which they are a part. This encyclopedic journey into that pivotal and transitional time encompasses canonical works such as Yves Klein’s “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” (1958), Seth Siegelaub’s “Artist’s Contract “(1971), and Lee Lozano’s “Strike Piece”(1969)—as well as rarely documented works like Keith Obadike’s “Blackness for Sale” (2001) and Kelly Mark’s “In & Out” (1997-ongoing until 2032). A few of the 27 contributors included are Clegg & Guttmann, Jorge di Paola, Hu Fang, Andrea Fraser, Coco Fusco, Hans Haacke, Jens Hoffmann, Mary Kelly, Sina Najafi, Richard Manning, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Andrea Rosen, Martha Rosler, Reid Shier and Julia Steinmetz.

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