List #9: CULTURE
We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped.
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Arboretum by David Byrne $45
In a wonderful series of eccentric annotated drawings — each in the form of a tree! — Byrne presents his thoughts about just about every human foible, habit and concept with the same gusto, irony and individual flair that he brings to both his music and his writing.
The Mirror Steamed Over: Love and pop in London, 1962 by Anthony Byrt $45
In the early sixties at the Royal College of Art in London, three extraordinary personalities collided to reshape contemporary art and literature. Barrie Bates (who would become Billy Apple in November 1962) was an ambitious young graphic designer from New Zealand, who transformed himself into one of pop art's pioneers. At the same time, his friend and fellow student David Hockney - young, Northern and openly gay - was making his own waves in the London art world. Bates and Hockney travelled together, bleached their hair together, and, despite being two of London's rising art stars, almost failed art school together. And in the middle of it all was the secretary of the Royal College's Painting School - a young novelist called Ann Quin. Quin ghost-wrote her lover Bates's dissertation and collaborated with him on a manifesto, all the while writing Berg, the experimental novel that would establish her as one of the British literary scene's most exciting new voices. Taking us back to London's art scene in the late fifties and early sixties, Byrt illuminates a key moment in cultural history and tackles big questions: Where did Pop and conceptual art come from? How did these three young outsiders change British culture? And what was the relationship between revolutions in personal and sexual identities and these major shifts in contemporary art?
On Photographs by David Campany $75
Is it possible to describe a photograph without interpreting it? Can a viewer ever be as dispassionate as the mechanism of a camera? And how far can a photographer's intentions determine responses to their image, decades after it was made? These are just a few questions that David Campany addresses in On Photographs. Campany explores the tensions inherent to the photographic medium — between art and document, chance and intention, permanence and malleability of meaning — as well as the significance of authorship, performance, time and reproduction. Rejecting the conventions of chronology and the heightened status afforded to 'classics' in traditional accounts of the history of the medium, Campany's selection of photographs is a personal one — mixing fine art prints, film stills, documentary photographs, fashion editorials and advertisements.
Stranger than Kindness by Nick Cave $70
A journey in images and words into the creative world of musician, storyteller and cultural icon Nick Cave. This highly collectible book contains images selected by Cave from 'Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition', presented by the Royal Danish Library in partnership with Arts Centre Melbourne. Featuring full-colour reproductions of original artwork, handwritten lyrics, photographs and collected personal artefacts, it presents Cave's life, work and inspiration and explores his many real and imagined universes, with texts from Cave and Darcey Steinke on themes that are central to Cave's work.
Index Cards by Moyra Davey $34
In these essays, the artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter—with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book—and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists—Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others—in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.
"Her work is steeped in literature and theory without being deformed by contemporary iterations of such. I have a deep admiration of her as an artist, thinker, writer, and person." —Maggie Nelson, Artforum
Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon $38
Dillon has written a sequel of sorts to Essayism, his roaming love letter to literature. In this new book Dillon turns his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence—from Shakespeare to Janet Malcolm, John Ruskin to Joan Didion—the book explores style, voice, and language, along with the subjectivity of reading. Both an exercise in practical criticism and a set of experiments or challenges, Suppose a Sentence is a polemical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature. Whether the sentence in question is a rigorous expression of a state of vulnerability, extremity, even madness, or a carefully calibrated arrangement, Dillon examines not only how it works and why but also, in the course of the book, what the sentence once was, what it is today, and what it might become tomorrow.
"Taking as his starting point a sentence that has intrigued him for years or, in some cases, come into his ken more recently, Brian Dillon in Suppose a Sentence ranges through the centuries exploring the associations of what he observes and discovers about his object of study and its writer, through biographical anecdote, linguistic speculation, and a look at related writings. This rich and various collection resembles a beguiling, inspiriting conversation with a personable and wry intelligence who keeps you happily up late, incites you to note some follow-up reading, and opens your eyes further to the multifarious syntactical and emotional capacities of even a few joined words of English." — Lydia Davis
>>Read Thomas's review.
Architek by Dominique Ehrhard $55
An introduction to architectural creation, the 95 precut cardboard elements in this book can be combined in an infinite variety of ways to build all sorts of fantastical structures. Follow the full-color idea diagrams to create more than 20 unique projects, then disassemble them and try something different. Developing direction-following skills and 3-D creativity, this kit allows young architects to both learn traditional design rules and break them.
Marti Friedlander: Portraits of the Artists by Leonard Bell $75
Friedlander's incisive photographs chronicled the country's social and cultural life from the 1960s into the twenty-first century. From painters to potters, film makers to novelists, actors to musicians, Marti Friedlander was always deeply engaged with New Zealand's creative talent. This thoughtfully assembled book shows us new sides of both well-known and forgotten artists and writers.
Eileen Gray: Her life and work by Peter Adam $65
One of the most important designers and architects of the 20th century, Eileen Gray (1878-1976) wielded enormous influence — though often unacknowledged, especially in her lifetime — in a field largely dominated by men. Today, her iconic designs, including the luxurious Bibendum chair and the refined yet functional E.1027 table, are renowned throughout the world. Resolutely independent and frequently underappreciated, Gray evolved from a creator of opulent lacquer furniture into a pioneer of the modernist principle of form following function. Definitive.
High Wire by Lloyd Jones and Euan Macleod $45
A fascinating and beautifully presented collaboration between writer Lloyd Jones and artist Euan Macleod, exploring the tensions, exhilarations and dangers of the metaphorical tightrope walked by all who step out above the void in the search of new experience. Macleod's figures struggle against consuming backgrounds, or to emerge from the scribbles that are their genesis, and Jones's words slice and hum with the clarity of taut wires. An excellent piece of publishing.
>>Read Thomas's review.
Te Reo Māori: The basics explained by David Kārena-Holmes $35
The use of te reo Māori in daily New Zealand life is snowballing, as is demand for resources to make learning the language efficient and enjoyable. This book helps answer that demand. Here in simple terms is a thorough guide to the building blocks of grammar in te reo, showing how to create phrases, sentences and paragraphs. The book employs real-life examples to illustrate how Māori grammar works day to day, and draws on David Kārena-Holmes's decades of experience teaching and writing about Māori language.
Funny Weather: Art in an emergency by Olivia Laing $50
We’re often told art can’t change anything. Laing argues that it can: it changes how we see the world, makes plain inequalities and offers fertile new ways of living. This wide-ranging collection of essays on the arts and letters in both their 'high' and 'popular' forms is an urgent response to these times of funny political weather.
"I yield to absolutely no one in my admiration of Olivia Laing; her essays are magical liberations of words and ideas, art and love; they're the essence of great 21st century literature: brilliantly expressed, wildly uncontained, willful and wonderfully unbound." —Philip Hoare
"Laing is to the art world what David Attenborough is to nature." —Irish Times
Colin McCahon: Is This the Promised Land? (Volume 2: 1960—1987) by Peter Simpson $80
Remarkable both for its breadth and its depth of insight, Peter Simpson's work on New Zealand's most important artist is completed in this second volume. Through landscapes, biblical paintings and abstraction, the introduction of words and Maori motifs, McCahon's work came to define a distinctly New Zealand Modernist idiom. Collected and exhibited extensively in Australasia and Europe, McCahon's work has not been assessed as a whole for thirty-five years.
"New Zealand's foremost artist Colin McCahon is many things to many people: modernist, visionary, environmentalist, shaman, preacher, rustic provincialist, bicultural trailblazer, painter-poet, graffiti artist, teacher, maverick. Peter Simpson's account interrogates as well as accommodates all of these possibilities. Guiding us year by year through the artist's career, he offers a ground-breaking overview of the life's work of a tenacious, brilliant and endlessly fascinating figure." —Gregory O'Brien
>>Volume 1: There is Only One Direction, 1919—1959 $75
Observations of a Rural Nurse by Sara McIntyre $55
Sara McIntyre, the daughter of the artist Peter McIntyre, was nine years old when her family first came to Kākahi, in the King Country, in 1960. The family has been linked to Kākahi ever since. On the family car trips of her childhood, McIntyre got used to her fathers frequent stops for subject matter for painting. Fifty years on, when she moved to Kākahi to work as a district nurse, she began to do the same on her rounds, as a photographer. This book brings together her remarkable photographic exploration her observations of Kākahi and the sparsely populated surrounding King Country towns of Manunui, Ohura, Ongarue, Piriaka, Owhango and Taumarunui.
The Eighth: Mahler and the world in 1910 by Stephen Johnson $40
The world premiere of Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony in Munich in 1910 was the artistic breakthrough for which the composer had yearned all his adult life, filling Munich's huge Neue Musik-Festhalle on two successive evenings, to tumultuous applause. Stephen Johnson recounts its far-reaching effect on composers, conductors and writers of the time — Berg and Schoenberg, Korngold, Bruno Walter and Klemperer, and the writers Zweig and Mann
Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde by Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima $45
the writer and the photographer visit a series of locations in New Zealand in an attempt to capture something of the experiences there of Iris Wilkinson/Robin Hyde— brilliant, desperate, and still refreshingly unassimilable to the literary canon. This is a thoughtful, moving, and beautifully produced book, full of sharp observations about the New Zealand literary community and wider society that made life difficult for this unconventional woman.
>>VOLUME feature.
Home Stories: 100 years, 20 visionary interiors by Jasper Morrison, Mateo Kries and Jochen Eisenbrand $155
Our homes are an expression of how we want to live; they shape our everyday routines and fundamentally affect our well-being. Interior design for the home sustains a giant global industry and feeds an entire branch of the media. However, the question of dwelling, or how to live, is found increasingly to be lacking in serious discourse. This book sets out to review the interior design of our homes. It discusses 20 iconic residential interiors from the present back to the 1920s, by architects, artists and designers such as Assemble, Cecil Beaton, Lina Bo Bardi, Arno Brandlhuber, Elsie de Wolfe, Elii, Josef Frank, Andrew Geller, IKEA, Finn Juhl, Michael Graves, Kisho Kurokawa, Adolf Loos, Claude Parent, Bernard Rudofsky, Margarete Sch tte-Lihotzky, Alison and Peter Smithson, Jacques Tati, Mies van der Rohe and Andy Warhol. Including historic and recent photographs, drawings and plans, the book explores these case studies as key moments in the history of the modern interior.
The fun includes crosswords, word-finds, rhyming riddles, visual puzzles, colouring-in activities, word matches, and code crackers.
In his final version of the Variations, Glenn Gould introduces a subtle, almost imperceptible change, breaking with the nocturnal circularity. As if he didn’t want the Count to sleep after all, condemning Goldberg to inhabit that wakeful night forever. The change occurs in the last beat of the final aria: an ornament that concludes the recording. Gould’s great contribution lies not in what he modifies, but in the very gesture of modification.
Tracing a circular course that echoes Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Luis Sagasti takes on the role of Scheherazade to recount us story after story, interwoven in subtle and surprising ways to create unexpected harmonies. He leads us on a journey from the music born of the sun to the music sent into space on the Voyager mission, from Rothko to rock music, from the composers of the concentration camps to a weeping room for Argentinian conscripts in the Falklands. A Musical Offering traverses the same shifting sands of fiction and history as the tales of Jorge Luis Borges, while also recalling the ‘constellation’ structure of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights.
Do You Read Me? Bookshops around the world by Marianne Julia Strauss $120
Delectable.
Lo-TEK: Design by radical indigenism by Julia Watson $110
In an era of high-tech and climate extremes, we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. Enter Lo-TEK, a design movement rebuilding indigenous philosophy and vernacular architecture to generate sustainable, resilient infrastructure and design solutions that are eco-positive.
"Can ancient fixes save our crisis-torn world? This book is the result of a decade of travelling to some of the most remote regions on the planet, interviewing anthropologists, scientists and tribe members. Watson carefully documented their indigenous innovations using the landscape architect's language of plans, cross-sections and exploded isometric diagrams to explain clearly how they work." —The Guardian
Handmade in Japan: The pursuit of perfection in traditional crafts by Irwin Wong $135
A beautifully presented record of the care, skill and aesthetic sensibilities of practitioners of traditional Japanese crafts.
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