List #10: VISUAL CULTURE
A selection of books on art, architecture, photography and design.
Come in or click through to browse our full selection, or ask us for our recommendations for your specific needs.
Architecture, furniture, glassware, textiles, product design: Alvar Aalto brought a clarity and humanity to every project. This lovely book surveys the full range and depth of his activities.
>> Visit the Alva Aalto Foundation.
>> Meet Alvar Aalto.
An excellent selection of photographs from Aberhart's early career in the 1970s and 1980s, demonstrating his developing concerns and technique (and recording some extraordinary buildings and interiors).
The Ukraine was once bristling with statues of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. Political changes have left these toppled, broken, vandalised and stored in sheds and back rooms. Ackerman and Gobert have set about recording these statues, and the residual attitudes towards them amongst the Ukrainians.
A generous and varied survey. Some of these works you may have seen before, but many will come as a complete surprise.
Artworks selected from the Christchurch Art Gallery selected for their exemplary treatment of hair. Fun.
From the 1930s to the 1950s, forced migrants - refugees from Nazism, displaced people after World War II and escapees from Communist countries - arrived in New Zealand from Europe. Among them were extraordinary artists and writers, photographers, designers and architects whose European Modernism radically reshaped the arts in this country. How were migrants received by New Zealanders? How did displacement and settlement in New Zealand transform their work? How did the arrival of European Modernists intersect with the burgeoning nationalist movement in the arts in New Zealand? This book introduces us to a group of `aliens' who were critical catalysts for change in New Zealand culture. An outstanding piece of social and artistic history, beautifully illustrated.
The most comprehensive book on architect and designer Marcel Breuer (1902-1981), looking in detail at all the houses, furniture, and public buildings he designed In Europe and the United States–from his beginning at the Bauhaus through his collaboration with Walter Gropius, and the establishment of his own practice in the USA.
With influences ranging from illuminated manuscripts, Persian miniatures, naive artists, European art history and popular culture, this Dunedin artist's distinctive work teems with figures and throngs with disconcerting detail.
>> Visit the artist's website.
A retrospective survey of the projects of this photographer in the form of 110 postcards, one for each of her experiments in the ambivalences of photography and memory.
In Known and Strange Things we learned of Cole's interest in the practices of photography, and in Blind Spot we can see what he sees from behind his camera. The results are impressive, and will add another dimension to your understanding of this interesting author.
Before Eggars was a writer he was an illustrator. In this book he presents a series of animals, both wild and domestic, with plaintive or pseudo-Biblical texts. Odd and rather touching.
A full exploration of the wide range of Emin's work, all assailing the division of private and public lives. Moving chronologically through a prolific decade of work from major public installations to recent reflective paintings and sculptures this book shows a coherent vision that defies the idiosyncrasies of Emin s evolution as an artist. The same mixture of anger, hope, curiosity, and vulnerability that informs her delicate drawings and handwritten neon works can be felt in the darker tones of recent monoprints and the weight of later bronze pieces.
The best full survey of the architecture, furniture, lighting, glass, ceramics, metalwork, woodenware, plastics, textiles, jewelry, and graphic design that has had such an impact on the world since the 1920s.
Studio kO by Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty $150
An exquisitely produced volume surveying the raw minimalism and clean lines of the architecture of Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty.
>> The kO website (recommended).
An exquisitely produced volume surveying the raw minimalism and clean lines of the architecture of Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty.
>> The kO website (recommended).
For the first time, every Dior haute couture collection has been plucked from the catwalk and put into one book. Endlessly stimulating.
>> Lost in the woods.
A good survey of his work, well illustrated, with a thoughtful alphabetical exploration of themes and influences.
"Journeys between the decades to liberate Modernism from its traditional definitions and proposes its continuing presence in the work of 21st century architects. With elegant spreads and striking examples, this is an intriguing manifesto. Quotes from figures as diverse as Leonard Cohen and Kazimir Malevich reframe Modernism as a timeless dialogue." -Aesthetica
Is there a mainline from the fingers to the brain? The pencil is undergoing a resurgence in designer, artist and writer circles. This book is a collection of portraits of the very various pencils used by creative people.
Early in his career, New Zealand artist Gavin Hipkins was described by fellow artist Giovanni Intra as a ‘tourist of photography’. This epithet has been used repeatedly by commentators on Hipkins’ work to describe two intertwined aspects of his practice. As art historian Peter Brunt puts it, Hipkins is a constantly travelling photographer, ‘an iconographer of desire, travel, time and modern communities’, and a tourist within the medium, ‘a great manipulator of the photographic artifact itself’.
>> See some of the photographs on the Dowse website.
Lavishly illustrated across the full six decades of Hockney's career, and across the full spectrum of media.
>> How do you paint memorable pictures?
A stupendous encyclopedia of typographical evolution and innovation, including not only typefaces but also layout, ornament and aesthetic. Full of information and inspiration.
On Kawara: 1966 $90
1966 was a pivotal year in the career of one of contemporary art's most radical and rigorous practitioners: it was the year in which the Japanese artist began his series of date paintings, which depict nothing but the date upon which they were painted (the 'Today' series numbered over 3000 on Kawara's death in 2013).
>> 'Today' discussed.
The outstanding graphic designer, best known for his book covers.
>> Portfolio.
A speculative architectural fiction and theoretical analysis of the American single-family house and its native habitat, the suburban metropolis. Mass-marketed and endlessly multiplied, and the definitive symbol of success in America and around the world, the suburban house has also become a global economic calamity and an impending environmental catastrophe. Yet, as both object and idea, it remains largely unexamined from an architectural perspective. This new book fills this gap through projects and essays that reflect upon, critique, and reformulate the equation that binds the house as an object to the American dream as a concept.
Since 1965's Phalli's Field, Kusama has produced over twenty mirrored installations with an impression of infinite extent. This book surveys her career.
>> Some infinity rooms.
>> Obsessed with dots.
>> Also new: Yayoi Kusama: From here to infinity by Sarah Suzuki $35: A children's book on the Infinity Mirrors and their creator.
How have artists envisaged human and prehuman life in prehistoric times? Perhaps you have been moved or amused by the often poignant depictions of dinosaurs, mastodons or hominids in the books of your childhood. This vast volume collects the best of such art, in all its poignancy and ludicrosity, from 1830 to 1990. Beneath the dustwrapper, the book is bound in real dinosaur skin (or something very like it).
>> A tour through the book (then resist it if you can).
Pissing Figures, 1280-2014 by Jean-Claude Lebensztejn $20
An incisive illustrated essay on urinating figures in figurative and sculptural art.
>> No urinating in the streets of Belgium.
Stunning, as you would expect. Leibovitz's sure and incisive eye captures layers of subtlety beneath each exquisite surface. Sumptuous, large-format production.
Clothing has caused illness, injury, madness and death ever since it was adopted, but in some eras more than others. This well-illustrated volume explores the hazards, both of substance and of design and ponders the social forces that have exposed humans to intimate hazards, both known and unknown.
One of the most important of the early Expressionists, Paula Moderson Becker is most remembered for her searching, sensitive self-portraits.
A compilation of Soviet counter-alcohol propaganda posters and graphic design. How does the vilification of alcohol differ from society to society?
>> Back in the USSR.
Since Michael Illingworth assumed the first fellowship in 1966, Otago University has hosted a sequence of outstanding New Zealand artists. This book surveys, therefore, the changing flavour of New Zealand art in the last half century, and is supported with reproductions, commentaries and interviews.
A beautifully presented survey of all the artworks mentioned in In Search of Lost Time, with quotes and contextual notes.
Both filming and the showing of films transformed the way New Zealanders saw themselves and their world, and also how they saw the relationship between work and leisure. This book is the first time this subject has been fully documented.
200 objects from Scandinavia and Finland that exemplify those countries' contribution to modern design.
An examination of the video installation In Pursuit of Venus [infected], prepared to accompany its presentation at the 57th Venice Biennale. Comprising seven essays, a conversational exchange, and insights into the career of Lisa Reihana (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tu), the book provides an account of the sources that influenced the artist and how the Venice exhibition might be understood within the context of transnational indigenous art making.
>>A glimpse of the work.
Features 30 cutting-edge women photographers from around the world.
>>fire-cracker.org/
Full of inventive ideas and creative solutions to practical problems. Includes houseboats, huts, and tricked-out caravans, alongside disaster shelters, wearable structures, and futuristic prototypes.
500 images, 32 varied and outstanding contemporary artists whose practice includes making books. Impressive, and full of interesting ideas.
>> Sample pages on our website!
An excellent and enticing survey of a period of great fertility and change in dustwrapper design, which started off as a way to protect bindings but soon became the arena in which the book's design first and most effectively attracts the eye of readers and buyers.
As well as providing an excellent survey of the artist's distinctive work, Schroder helps the reader to decipher the allegorical nature of many of them and to appreciate the passions and ambivalences that drove the artist.
If "all art is theft" (Picasso), what can we make of art that deliberately appropriates, subsumes, samples or reconfigures other art? Interesting.
Best known for his positive/negative koru stacks, Walters, as this book demonstrates, was a remarkably diverse and accomplished abstract artist.
>> An exhibition by the same name is currently on display at the Auckland Art Gallery.
Whether he is writing graphic novels, making paintings, or building sculptures, Ware explores universal themes of social isolation, emotional torment, and depression with his trademark self-effacing voice. The end result is wry and highly empathetic. This vast and splendid volume chronicles a quarter century of remarkable and very individual creative work.
>> What is he doing now?
If only.
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