BOOKS @ VOLUME #108 (29.12.18)
Our last NEWSLETTER of 2018
Saturday, 29 December 2018
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Stella also reviewed the book on the radio.
>> Read an extract.
>> Read another extract.
>> Drive Your Plow was made into a film, Spoor.
>> The book's title comes from the 'Proverbs of Hell' section of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. There are references to Blake throughout the book.
>> Yes, Blake did prefer 'plow' to 'plough'.
>> On Poland.
>> Tokarczuk won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for Flights.
>> Read Thomas's review of Flights.
 | Crimson by Niviaq Korneliussen {Reviewed by STELLA} Greenland is a small country, and the town of Nuuk, where Crimson is set, even smaller. Especially so for the characters in Niviaq Korneluissen’s novel about being a Greenlander and being young and queer. There are five distinct voices in the novel: Fia, who has just broken up with her long-term boyfriend; Inuk, Fia’s reporter brother who has just landed himself in a sticky situation; the wild and unreliable Arnaq, Inuk’s best friend who Fia is staying with while she finds her feet; Sara, a young woman who Fia is extremely attracted to; and Ivik, Sara’s girlfriend. As these characters dance a complex and messy polka around each other, the reader is hooked into the world of the young and confused. Korneluissen lays open prejudice, boredom and anger with humour (albeit black) and sympathy towards her fellow Greenlanders. The novel moves along at a clip as the young people go to parties, suffer hangovers, wheedle money and alcohol out of others, have personal crises, and find love. Crimson is enjoyable and believable and doesn’t shy away from painting a realistic picture. Fia’s despair and revulsion at her predictable relationship wakes her up - her complete annoyance finally drives her out of the mundane towards at first a crazy few weeks with party-girl Arnaq and then something more curious (a discovery about herself and her desires), to something ultimately more satisfying. Arnaq, for all her bluster, is a vulnerable young woman with a complex past - trauma rooted in alcohol and neglect. Inuk escapes to Denmark after finding himself in a tricky situation, yet this flight just pulls him back tighter to his homeland despite the homophobic attitudes that are ironically ingrained in him as well as in society. Crimsonisn’t all doom and gloom - in fact, the lively writing gives it a lightness that keeps you engaged. The different viewpoints are the exceptional part of this slice-of-life novel - each voice is distinct even while their problems and joys are shared. Each story adds to and builds on the former, with the change in perspective creating those full circle moments. Korneluissen became a sensation in Greenland, especially among the young and LGBT communities, when she published her book in Greenlandic (rare for contemporary works) in 2014. She translated it into Danish, and in 2018 the English translation was produced. Like Sally Rooney’s Normal People, this is a book that will appeal for its candid approach to relationships, for its portrayal of imperfect yet endearing human behaviour, and for its reflections on claustrophobic situations. And you might find yourself humming along to Joan Jett's 'Crimson and Clover' as you read. |
 | Walking by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS} It is thought that makes life intolerable, suggests Bernhard in this 1971 novella that both anticipates and provides a key to reading his subsequent novels of ineluctable self-erasure (notably 1975’s Correction). Bernhard is constantly in mind of the widespread complicity of his fellow Austrians in Nazism, both a symptom and a cause of many of the societal ills he is most perplexed and disgusted by. “I ask myself, says Oehler, how can so much helplessness and so much misfortune and so much misery be possible? That nature can create so much misfortune and so much palpable horror. That nature can be so ruthless toward its most helpless and pitiable creatures. This limitless capacity for suffering, says Oehler. This limitless capricious will to procreate and then to survive misfortune.” But there is no real difference, suggests Bernhard, between objective and subjective suffering. “When we imagine ourselves to be in a state of mind, no matter what, we are in that state of mind, and thus in that state of illness which we imagine ourselves to be in.” We are unavoidably perplexed by our existence and cannot help thinking about it, but thought will not do us any good, as we are always carried towards the conclusion we strive most to avoid, drawn to it by this striving. “If we see something, we check what we see until we are forced to say that what we are looking at is horrible. If we do something, we think about what we are doing until we are forced to say that it is something nasty, something low, something outrageous.” In Bernhard’s works, thought is a kind of a chute leading towards madness and suicide, a chute down which all characters slide, faster or slower, obsessed, losing perspective. “Circumstances are everything, we are nothing.” How, then, are we to carry on existing? “There is little doubt that the art lies in bearing what is unbearable and in not feeling that what is horrible is something horrible. Of course we have to label this art the most difficult of all. The art of existing against the facts. If we do not constantly exist against, but only constantly with the facts, says Oehler, we shall go under in the shortest possible time.” “The art of thinking about things consists in the art, says Oehler, of stopping thinking before the fatal moment.” In common with many of Bernhard’s novels, the unnamed narrator of Walking is effectively passive, effectively annihilated by his role of *merely* reporting what his friend Oehler tells him during their walk or walks together. Oehler’s observations chiefly concern another one-time walking companion, Karrer, who has recently gone “irrevocably mad” and been confined to the Steinhof lunatic asylum. Karrer’s madness followed the suicide of his friend, the chemist Hollensteiner, and you can feel the pull of this annihilation reaching through the layers of narration as far as the narrator himself, each character being effaced by their narration. “I am struck by how often Oehler quotes Karrer without expressly drawing attention to the fact that he is quoting Karrer. Oehler frequently makes several statements that stem from Karrer and frequently thinks a thought that Karrer thought, I think, without expressly saying, what I am now saying comes from Karrer.” The second of the three paragraphs that constitute the novella describes Karrer’s breakdown in Rustenschacher’s clothing shop, irrevocably losing perspective, ranting about what he perceives as the inferior cloth from which the trousers are sewn, repeatedly banging his walking stick upon the counter. At times the layers of narration are wonderfully deep, such as when the narrator tells us what Oehler tells the narrator that Oehler told the psychiatric doctor Scherrer about what Karrer said and did in Rustenschacher’s shop, and the novella becomes as much about the migration of narrative burden as it is about what the narrative is about. Habit, character, tendency, circumstance comprise a trap, a trap we find ourselves in when we begin to think but into which thinking can only drive us deeper. “When we walk, we walk from one helplessness to another. It is suddenly clear you can do what you like but you cannot walk away. No longer being able to alter this problem of no longer being able to walk away occupies your whole life. From then on it is all that occupies your life. You then grow more and more helpless and weaker and weaker.” All Bernhard’s subsequent novelsaddress this problem of the obliterative nature of thought. “We may not think about why we are walking, says Oehler, for then it would soon be impossible to walk.” |
Friday, 28 December 2018
The last new releases bulletin of 2018.
l'Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (workshop for potential literature) was founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais in 1960 as a sort of laboratory in which members can perform experiments - chiefly experiments of constraint - in order to use the mechanisms inherent language to express new literary forms. This wonderful anthology presents the results of experiments various members through the decades, and provides a primer for you to run the experiments yourself.
>> N+7
>> Lille
>> Other extracts.
A young couple, involved in the struggle against the military dictatorship in 1970s Argentina, must flee the country. The brutality and terror of the regime is closing in around them. Friends are being ‘disappeared’. Their names are on a list. Time is running out. When they leave, they take with them their infant son, adopted after years of trying for a child without success. They build a new life in Brazil and things change radically. The book unfolds as an intimate portrayal of the formation of a family under extraordinary circumstances, told from the point of view of the youngest child. It’s an examination of identity, of family bonds, of the different forms that exile can take, of what it means to belong to a place, to a family, and to your own past.
"A brilliant achievement." - Le Monde
Essays, book reviews, short articles and obituaries handling subjects from mistresses to marketing, and seduction to psychoanalysts, from the immensely opinionated, witty and acute editor of the London Review of Books.
A remarkable novel from one of American fiction's outstanding stylists and observers, author of The Visiting Privilege and 99 Stories of God. First published in 1978, this novel blends myth with alcohol, time with desperation, motherhood with extinction, and is as fresh and urgent today as it was when first published.
"Like no book I have read, The Changeling is illumined by the spark of life, the life that wears a thousand skins. Its wisdom is unparaphrasable." - Karen Russell
>> 'Uncanny the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks.'
Frank Bidart, for several decades, has waged a collision between language and the human body which has resulted in some of the most original and surprising poetry produced in America.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2018
Bread and butter are first recorded as being eaten together in 1492. This book looks at a long association, and provides 40 outstanding and varied recipes that celebrate the marriage of bread and butter.
The island has run out of oxygen. The island is swollen. The island is rotten. The island has taken my beloved from me. The island is a Greenlander. It's the fault of the Greenlander. In Nuuk, Greenland, Fia breaks up with her long-term boyfriend and falls for Sara. Sara is in love with Ivik who holds a deep secret and is about to break promises. Ivik struggles with gender dysphoria as their friends become addicted to social media, listen to American pop music and get blind drunk in downtown bars and uptown house parties. Then there is Inuk, who also has something to hide - it will take him beyond his limits to madness, and question what it means to be a Greenlander, while Arnaq, the party queen, pulls the strings of manipulation, bringing a web of relationships to a shocking crescendo. Translated from Greenlandic.
"Ferocious, inventive and unlike anything I've read in a long time." - Sophie Mackintosh (author of The Water Cure)
A strange and strangely wrought novel (first published in 1914) in which, in the words of John Ashbery, "A prominent scientist and inventor, Martial Canterel, has invited a group of colleagues to visit the park of his country estate, Locus Solus. As the group tours the estate, Canterel shows them inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness. Again, exposition is invariably followed by explanation, the cold hysteria of the former giving way to the innumerable ramifications of the latter. After an aerial pile driver which is constructing a mosaic of teeth and a huge glass diamond filled with water in which float a dancing girl, a hairless cat named Khóng-dek-lèn, and the preserved head of Danton, we come to the central and longest passage: a description of eight curious tableaux vivants taking place inside an enormous glass cage. We learn that the actors are actually dead people whom Canterel has revived with 'resurrectine', a fluid of his invention which if injected into a fresh corpse causes it continually to act out the most important incident of its life."
>> A brief biography of Roussel.
>> Interiors in the Void.
The author of The Queen of the Night delivers a series of superb essays investigating his development as a person and as a writer and activist, intimating how we form our identities both in life and in art.
"Alexander Chee is the very best kind of essayist, a boon companion in good times and bad, whose confiding voice you'd follow anywhere, just for the wonderful feeling of being understood like never before." - Charles D'Ambrosio
"Masterful." - Roxanne Gay
Brings together recent scholarship by experts in the field and featuring a wide array of objects from the region, including many that have never been published before. Included are many works that have historically been overlooked, such as painted and woven textiles, elaborate wicker assemblages and expressively sculpted vessels, alongside works by artists working in Oceania today. These objects reveal a complex web of social, mythological and historical influences.
Two novellas from the author of The Evenings. Young Elmer longs to make friends and tries to control the world around him by forming secret clubs, of which he is always the president, but when he invites Werther to become a member, a game of attraction and repulsion begins. During the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, a boy watches as the family of one of his friends slowly loses everything and is then taken away.
Just moments after Duchamp died, his closest friend Man Ray took a photograph of him. His face is wan, his eyes are closed, he appears calm. Taking this image as a point of departure, Donald Shambroom begins to examine the surrounding context: the dinner with Man Ray and another friend, Robert Lebel, the night Duchamp died, the conversations about his own death at that dinner and elsewhere, and the larger question of whether this radical artist's death can be read as an extension of his work.
Useful.
What constitutes 'the people', and what constitutes 'the people's' assumed 'right' to exercise it's will, democratically or otherwise?
What does the sea mean? Humankind has a profound and complex relationship with the sea, a relationship that is extensively reflected in biology, psychology, religion, literature and poetry. Krell engages the work of an array of thinkers and writers including, but not limited to, Homer, Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, many Greek gods, Holderlin, Melville, Woolf, Whitman, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schelling, Ferenczi, Rank and Freud.
Can Western nations preserve the liberal world order against rising authoritarian powers without the United States, or with Washington working against them?
An idiosyncratic, devastating graphic novel. Cassandra Darke is an art dealer, mean, selfish, solitary by nature, living in Chelsea in a house worth £7 million. She has become a social pariah, but doesn't much care. Between one Christmas and the next she has sullied the reputation of a West End gallery and has acquired a conviction for fraud, a suspended sentence and a bank balance drained by lawsuits. On the scale of villainy, fraud seems to Cassandra a rather paltry offence - her own crime involving 'no violence, no weapon, no dead body'. But in Cassandra's basement, her young ex-lodger, Nicki, has left a surprise, something which implies at least violence and probably a body, something which forces Cassandra out of her rich enclave and onto the streets. Not those local streets paved with gold and lit with festive glitter, but grimmer, darker places, where she must make the choice between self-sacrifice and running for her life.
"The thing to do is just begin. The question, of course, is where?"
So opens Thom Eagle’s description of the creation of a singular early spring meal. A cookbook without recipes, this is an invitation to journey through the mind of a chef as he works. Eagle muses on the very best way to coax flavour out of an onion (slowly, and with more care than you might expect), and considers the crucial role of salt in the creation of the perfect assembly for early green shoots and leaves.
Science is really beautiful. Artist and lay scientist Iris Gottlieb explains among other things: neap tides, naked mole rats, whale falls, the human heart, the Uncertainty Principle, the ten dimensions of string theory, and how glaciers are like Snickers bars.
With knowledge passed down from centuries ago, the presence of traditional crafts such as spoon carving, leather working, and knife making is becoming more and more pronounced in contemporary culture and on platforms such as social media and ecommerce. As the pressures of a fast-paced, modern-day life weigh on people, many seek solace in more manual, artful practices that take us out of our selves and produce something beautiful and useful. Forge & Carve looks at twenty crafters and how and why they create the items they do. Includes Takaka trugmaker Tony Hitchcock.
This is a book about a man's relationship with hawks, and his self-education as a falconer, and about his discovery that despite his Asperger's Syndrome, which hampers his normal social interactions, he can forge a loving bond with the young son he thought he had lost.
What does the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies and deception do to a black body, a black family and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse?
"Unflinchingly honest." - Reni Eddo-Lodge
The opioid epidemic has been called one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine but calling it a mistake is a generous rewriting of history. Driven by greed, incompetence, and indifference, it was an utterly avoidable tragedy.
The Bard of Salford's first poetry collection for over thirty years, proof he is still alive at least.
>> 'I Don't Want to Be Nice' (1978)
How Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China's information technology successes today. Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters, in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter.
An essay on bridging the gap between writing and the visual arts.
>> An extract: 'Why Contemporary Art (and Literature) Needs More Sarcastic Critics'
The Life and Times of a Very British Man makes the case for a new conversation about race in Britain through personal stories and political analysis. Kamal recounts the extraordinary circumstances that led to his father, a Sudanese scientist, marrying his mother, a grammar-school educated woman from Yorkshire and the first white person he had ever met. It was a time when Enoch Powell's infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech cast a shadow over the childhood of a schoolboy in Ealing.
The night flower blooms at night in the desert. Who notices it?
Well, of course.
Monday, 24 December 2018
Use the selector to choose your seasonal gifts and summer reading.
Use the 'click and collect' function on our website to reserve your copies.
If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
List #1: FICTION
List #3: SCIENCE
List #4: FOOD & DRINK
List #5: BIOGRAPHY
List #6: CHILDREN'S NON-FICTION
List #7: NEW ZEALAND POETRY
List #8: BIBLIOPHILIA!
List #9: VISUAL CULTURE
List #6: CHILDREN'S NON-FICTION
List #7: NEW ZEALAND POETRY
List #8: BIBLIOPHILIA!
List #9: VISUAL CULTURE
Saturday, 22 December 2018
BOOKS @ VOLUME #107 (22.12.18)
Click through to read our latest NEWSLETTER, use our gift selector, and find out which novels have been our favourites for 2018.
Have a look through this selection of books we are recommending for summer reading and as seasonal gifts. Click through to read our reviews. Use the 'click and collect' function on our website to reserve your copies.
If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
The first full biography of this pivotal artist, educator and theorist, from his Bauhaus beginnings through his Black Mountain College years to Yale. Is colour more important than form?
>> Search vs research.
Explores the story behind the promotion of New Zealand's mountains through posters, advertisements, hand-coloured photographs and more.
"I am the supercommunity, and you are only starting to recognize me. I grew out of something that used to be humanity. Some have compared me to angry crowds in public squares; others compare me to wind and atmosphere, or to software." A project by e-flux for the Venice Biennale, identifying the naked power that is revealed when the complex of art, the internet and globalisation shed their utopian guises.
An excellent selection of works demonstrating the scope, characteristics and quirks of this printmaking process.
>> Risography explained and demonstrated.
Known for her intricate and dynamic wire sculptures, the American sculptor, educator and arts activist Ruth Asawa challenged conventional notions of material and form through her emphasis on lightness and transparency. Asawa began her now iconic looped-wire works in the late 1940s while still a student at Black Mountain College.
>> The Ruth Asawa website (recommended).
>> Of forms and growth.
>> Objects and apparitions.
The first-ever collection of Ashbery's collage work (interesting!), with a selection of related poetry.
>> All the kitsch.
Flora Magnifica: The art of flowers in four seasons by Makoto Azuma and Shunsuke Shiinoki $70
A stunning, luscious book of unusual flower arrangements, a collaboration between a flower artist and a botanical photographer. Come and see this book.
A good survey of photography and its relationship to abstraction since 1910.
The 350 images in this book, many of them published here for the first time, not only chronicle the introduction of photography in Japan, but are also useful in helping to understand the dramatic changes that occurred in mid-nineteenth century Japan. Taken between 1853 and 1912 by the most important local and foreign photographers working in Japan, the photographic images, whether sensational or everyday, intimate or panoramic, document a nation about to abandon its traditional ways and enter the modern age.
Galleries of Maoriland introduces the many ways in which Pakeha discovered, created, propagated and romanticised the 'Maori world' at the turn of the century: in the paintings of Lindauer and Goldie, among artists, patrons, collectors and audiences; inside the Polynesian Society and the Dominion Museum; among stolen artefacts and fantastical accounts of the Maori past. The culture of Maoriland was a Pakeha creation. The book shows also that Maori were not merely passive victims: they too had a stake in this process of romanticisation.
Storms are seen quite differently from the air from on the ground. Borja has captured a range of them in these stunning images.
>> Some storms.
A stunning comprehensive survey of the revolutionary aesthetic, in all media and from a vast range of practitioners.
Specially trained Egyptian photographers were an integral part of the pioneering Harvard-MFA expedition during the first half of the twentieth century. Their photographs documented the excavations with thousands of images, as the riches of a great ancient civilization in northern Sudan were uncovered. These photographs bring to life the dramatic landscapes of the Nile Valley and the excitement of archaeological discovery.
A beautifully presented and thoughtfully selected survey of the persistence of myths in visual culture.
Photographer Frederic Chaubin reveals 90 buildings sited in fourteen former Soviet Republics which express what could be considered as the fourth age of Soviet architecture. They reveal an unexpected rebirth of imagination, an unknown burgeoning that took place from 1970 until 1990. Contrary to the twenties and thirties, no "school" or main trend emerges here. These buildings represent a chaotic impulse brought about by a decaying system. Their diversity announces the end of Soviet Union. Taking advantage of the collapsing monolithic structure, the holes of the widening net, architects revisited all the chronological periods and styles, going back to the roots or freely innovating.
Representation of defining events in New Zealand's history have changed in parallel with other cultural and political developments.
The first retrospective collection of this savagely interesting artist sprung from Christchurch's itching cultural underbelly.
>> The "low-brow high art world of Tony de Lautour".
>> From earthquakes to fatherhood.
>> The thought part of the act.
This survey of Soviet design from 1950 to 1989 features more than 350 items from the Moscow Design Museum's collection. From children's toys, homewares, and fashion to posters, electronics, and space-race ephemera, each object reveals something of life in a planned economy during a fascinating time in Russia's history.
>> Visit the Moscow Design Museum.
38 floral designers.
An interesting and well illustrated survey of ways in which fashion design has been influenced by the natural world.
Brings the legacy of architects, artists and designers that have influenced the creative discourse over the last fifty years into critical dialogue with a young generation of upcoming influencers in the respective fields. The publication doesn't regard the legacy of an individual architect, artist or predecessor as an end point but as a simple moment in an infinite chain of contributions and inspirations that naturally extends and transforms through its successors. The creative conversations illustrated in this title reflect the inspirational vision of personalities such as Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Yona Friedman, Charlie Koolhaas and Rem Koolhaas, Rachel Libeskind and Daniel Libeskind, Gianfranco Bombaci, Matteo Costanzo and Gian Piero Frassinelli, Aric Chen and Arata Isozaki, Liz Diller and ElizabethLeCompte, Sophie Lovell, Dieter Rams and Olafur Eliasson.
A well selected survey, featuring the work of 55 photographers.
You couldn't hope for a more stimulating and surprising collection of architectural forms from around the world.
Human's fascination with animals as recorded in art from all ages. Stunning. Beautiful.
>> See some spreads.
Dripping with blood and gold, fetishised and tortured, gateway to earthly delights and point of contact with the divine, forcibly divided and powerful even beyond death, there was no territory more contested than the body in the medieval world. Hartnell investigates the complex and fascinating ways in which the people of the Middle Ages thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves, and the ways in which they left evidence of this. Beautifully illustrated.
Browse the workbooks of leading contemporary typographer and hand-letterers. Plenty of inspiration here.
A beautifully presented collection of over 60 real and imagined mazes from around the world, each with a bird's eye diagrammatic view and description.
Using over 200 circus-related artworks from the French National Library's collections, Pascal Jacob tells the story of travelling entertainers and their art and trade. From nomadic animal tamers of the Dark Ages to European jugglers and acrobats of the 1800s, from the use of the circus as Soviet propaganda to the 20th-century Chinese performance art renaissance, this is a fascinating and attractive book.
>> The horrific and the entertaining are never far apart.
Kiefer wrestles with the darkness of German history, unearthing the taboos that underlie the collective past and interweaving them with Teutonic mythology, cosmology, and meditations on the nature of belief. His works have a disconcerting tactility, at once emerging from the picture plane and decaying into it.
A beautifully presented selections of Expressionist art and of the more-seldom-seen Expressionist literature, all claiming the value of a subjective response to the world.
When Norwegian photographer Peter Lukas visited Nelson, he was so impressed with the photographic collections at the Nelson Provincial Museum that he set out to photograph the same street views as they appear today. The result is this wonderful book: historical photographs paired with their modern equivalents.
Explores the homes of 18 global creatives who take an eccentric, whimsical, curated and clever approach to their living space. An interiors book both for people who love interiors books and for people who ordinarily don't love interiors books.
Forty years of superb journalistic photography. The most comprehensive volume of McCurry's work yet.
This first history of Samoan tatau explores the people, encounters, events and external forces that have defined Samoan tattooing over many centuries. The Samoan Islands are unusual in that tattooing has been continuously practised for 3000 years with indigenous techniques. Beautifully produced and illustrated.
Bookbinder Olga Hirsch (1889–1968) left her collection of 3,500 papers dating from the 16th to the 20th centuries to the British Library - one of the largest and most diverse collections of decorated papers in the world. This book contains reproductions of papers used as wrappers and endpapers for books, as the backing for playing cards, as linings for chests and cases, as pictures for display in churches and homes, as souvenirs for pilgrims, and as wrappings for foodstuffs such as gingerbread and chocolate.
A Surrealist artist himself but better known as a zoologist and ethnologist, Morris is an excellent guide to the people who, rebelling against the strictures of modern life, devised modes of access to the workings of the unconsciousness, which they allowed expression in literature and art.
The unprecedented surge in popularity of ceramics in the last five years has helped forge a new type of potter: the ceramic designer. Part-craftsman, part designer, they bridge ceramic craft, collectable design, and fine art. These ceramicists include product designers who use clay as a means of creative expression, and classically trained potters who create design-led pieces, in addition to interior decorators, illustrators, and graphic designers.
An explorer's guide to the chasm between art and politics, and to the cultural forces that lurk there. Can art catalyse historical moments into philosophical truth?
>> What makes contemporary art contemporary?
The best survey of New Zealand art available, thoughtfully selected and presented, drawn from the national collection.
A stunning large-format book of stunning large-format photographs of stunning large-format landscapes devoid of even the slightest human impact. You will want this.
How can modes of visual and performance art be used effectively in protest and other political action? This is a good survey of art on the front lines of activism.
A blush is a gulp, a glitch, a stammer, a flutter, a flinch. A blush is hot. A blush is an index of confusion. A blush, according to Darwin, is "the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions". This essay by Jack Robinson, exploring the cultural and social history of the blush from the 18th century to the present, is illustrated with witty and often unsettling images by Natalia Zagórska-Thomas.
>> See some of Zagórska-Thomas's work.
>> Read Thomas's review.
Brings together recent scholarship by experts in the field and featuring a wide array of objects from the region, including many that have never been published before. Included are many works that have historically been overlooked, such as painted and woven textiles, elaborate wicker assemblages and expressively sculpted vessels, alongside works by artists working in Oceania today. These objects reveal a complex web of social, mythological and historical influences.
Remarkably good analysis of the evolution and design considerations of fonts.
A good selection, well illustrated, from Eileen Gray, Lora Lamm and Lella Vignelli, to Kazuyo Sejima, Hella Jongerius and Neri Oxman.
Drawing from the Victoria and Albert Museum's unparalleled collections of wallpapers and fabrics, this useful book analyses colour palettes from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. The exemplars are arranged chronologically with their own double-page spreads that explain the significance of the palette. A colour grid is shown beside each pattern, in which the colors in the original piece are shown in proportion to their use, and with their CMYK references to enable designers to replicate these colors in their own work. Useful, beautiful, interesting.
We shape ourselves, and are shaped in return, by the walls that contain us. Buildings affect how we sleep, work, socialise and even breathe. They can isolate and endanger us but they can also heal us. We project our hopes and fears onto buildings, while they absorb our histories. Iain Sinclair embarks on a series of expeditions - through London, Marseille, Mexico and the Outer Hebrides. He explores the relationship between sickness and structure, and between art, architecture, social planning and health, taking plenty of detours along the way.
"A remarkable book; surprisingly gripping and often very moving. Stories weave and unweave over the book's course, patterning thought into a complex built environment, at once disorientating and illuminating." - Robert Macfarlane
Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie's philanthropic trust established 2,509 library buildings throughout the English-speaking world between 1886 and 1917. This book of well-observed photographs and documentary images records the 23 libraries established in the South Pacific (18 of them in New Zealand). A few have been demolished, others have been repurposed, some are still used as libraries.
70 illustrators were given the brief to illustrated their "dream studios" - with such wonderful results. These are the centres of creative vortices, places where dreams cross between an illustrator's internal and external worlds by means of paper.
In 1585 four young Japanese men from the nascent Christian community in Japan appeared before Pope Gregory XIII. Renowned photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto traces their steps, capturing the architectural wonders of Rome, Florence, and Venice as the Eastern visitors might have seen them. His photographs are presented in context with reproductions of Japanese art of the same period. Interesting and impressive.
New Zealand artist E. Mervyn Taylor was not only an internationally influential wood engraver. During the burgeoning of New Zealand nationalist-cultural focus in the 1960s he produced a dozen murals for government and civic buildings. Some were later destroyed or covered over. This book records the search for a distinctive artistic legacy.
New applications and developments in robotics are transforming architectural practice (and theory too, for that matter). This book takes us to the forefront of design.
How do architects get their ideas down on paper? A beautifully presented collection of 250 outstanding architectural drawings, sketches and concepts, spanning continents and centuries.
>>See some spreads.
The machinery of cultural production has been co-opted by institutions, corporations and governments in order to further their interests, maximise profits and suppress dissent. A perceptive account of how advertising, media and politics work today.
The tribes of Whanganui take their name, their spirit and their strength from the Whanganui River. In Te Ahi Kā, photographer Martin Toft explores the deep physical and metaphysical relationships between the river and the Māori. In 1996 Toft spent six months in the middle and upper reaches of the Whanganui River in the King Country. Here he met Māori who were in the process of reversing the colonisation of their people and returning to their ancestral land, Mangapapapa, which is on the steep banks of the river inside Whanganui National Park. Returning twenty years later, Toft began to work on this book. Its narrative is situated within the context of the current Whanganui River Deed of Settlement, Ruruku Whakatupua and the projects led by local Māori to settle historical grievances with the government dating back to the 1870s. At the heart of it is the Whanganui tribes’ claim to the river, which is seen by them as both as an ancestor and as a source of both material and spiritual sustenance.
>> Look inside the book.
War has always provided the opportunity for crimes either against art or against its established ownership structures. A well illustrated survey, from Classical antiquity to the present. New Zealand author.
>> Tompkins talks with Kim Hill.
Examines the work and work processes of two dozen leading weavers from around the world. Very nicely presented.
>> Find out more.
More than thirty young and passionate ceramicists in New York, London, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Sydney and Sao Paulo introduce us to their work, their studios and their inspiration. Beautifully photographed and presented.
A striking set of index cards surveying the history of type design.
The manifestos written by Tzara between 1916 and 1921 epitomised an assault on all traditional norms-and-forms, in art and in the art of living. Primarily works of liberating destruction, the manifestos pointed the way towards Surrealism and towards the new ways of seeing, living and making that were experimented with in the following decades.
>> "I am against manifestos."
This excellent book covers every aspect of paper: its history, composition, production, application, and trade. Beginning with the anatomy of paper and its earliest forms, this book looks at paper as a symbol of political and economic importance and as a carrier of ideas, from literature to art, design, and music. It looks at the different surfaces, opacities, weights and volumes of paper and how it is used for printing, typography, graphics, and maps as well as a vehicle for origami, architecture, and fashion.
Lissaman designed, threw, decorated, fired and sold her first significant collection of pots in 1927 and potted continuously until 1990, spanning New Zealand’s studio pottery movements. Her life, work and importance is explored in this superb new book.
The absolutely new edition of Vitamin D is packed with recent examples of artists pushing at the edges of the medium.
How can art be made following a cultural trauma such as that experienced by Europe during World War 2? This important new book includes some 400 works by 150 artists, bringing together for the first time post-war art from both Western and Eastern Europe. The book studies how Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Ossip Zadkine, Henry Moore, Renato Guttuso, Fernand Leger, Yves Klein, Gerhard Richter, Lucian Freud and many others worked through the trauma of 1940-1945 and the Cold War.
An unparalleled resource of fashion detailing from throughout the last century: elaborate embroidery, intricate pleats, daring cuts, innovative approaches and solutions. Beautifully presented and containing only the very best examples.
Considers every room and detail. Includes floor plans and endless ideas.
Mr Kinfolk introduces us to the unseen shapers of visual culture: Dries van Noten, Kris Van Assche, Spike Jonze, Melina Matsoukas, Grace Coddington, Linda Rodin and many more. Excellent photography and production inside.
>>Look inside.
878 Buildings, 798 Architects, 102 Countries, 9 World Regions, 1 Style. A stunning oversize volume of the best examples of brutalist construction around the world.
>> See some spreads.
A huge amount of fun (and inadvertent learning) will be had from these madcap activities based around works in the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu.
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