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The Mock
FormContent
Price £3

The Mock and other superstitions is a quarterly journal exploring the relation of artists, writers and curators with written words.

The new issue includes contributions by Olivier Castel, Alex Cecchetti, Michael Dean, Marcelline Delbecq, Sarah Elliott, Simon Fujiwara, Charlotte Moth, extracts from Matteo Terzaghi and Marco Zürcher's book Da qualche parte sulla Terra and F/M's hand-written interpretation of Pierre Guyotat's Body of the Text.

Bubble Entendre
Mark Waugh
Bookworks
Price £8

1. A terrorist siege at Claridge’s in 2012 replaces the Olympics as end of the world TV spectacle. An en suite novel is curated around a series of subjects forced to strip naked and perform like pornstars for a watching world.

2. Hard-boiled noir meets classic French theory as a zombie author transgresses the outer limits of postmodern fiction. The warped narrative plunges from art house to grindhouse and back again.

3. An insanely unofficial fictional updating of Derrida's ‘Of Grammatology’. Think ‘24 Hour Party People’ as directed by Kenneth Anger after he'd croaked and crawled on all fours through the furthest recesses of hell.

Brazen sadists, high-flying hopheads, invisible strippers and the destiny of objects are just some of the themes tackled by Mark Waugh in Bubble Entendre, a tripartite, literary bender. Dirty, dingy and drug fuelled, Willhelm Reich might have penned this book if he'd been force-fed LSD and subjected to a steady diet of dubstep and grime.

Erica Baum, The Naked Eye
Kenneth Goldsmith, Excerpts from No. 111.2.7.93-10.20.96
Free Association (Paperback)
Edition of 500

The first title from the free Associations new Notebook Series, published on the occasion of photographer Erica Baum's exhibition at the Dispatch Bureau gallery in New York. In this series Baum explores both the poetic and the painterly qualities of photography by shooting vintage paperbacks from the mid-20th Century with their pages fanned open to reveal fragmented and beautiful narratives in strips of color, image, and text. Her work is complemented by a selection of poems by ubuweb.com founder Kenneth Goldsmith.

Last days of W (Newspaper)
Alex Soth
Self Published
Price £11.95

A 48-page photobook, on newsprint, of pictures Soth had taken in America during the eight years of George W's administration.  The photos, and the method of delivery, act as a commentary on the mess W leaves behind.  Though the collection is primarily landscapes and still lifes, there are a number of startling portraits.

Scenografi
New Print International Published in collaboration with Nieves Books
Price £20

Annika Larsson, Samuel Nyholm made a film shot in Berlin in a constructed set The film, shot in Berlin inspired by the typical kind of rudimentary cartoons you find in the marigin of
newspapers or cross word magazines. Along with the construction and
deconstruction, the Scenografi of wood became an arena for
performances, dinners, friendly meetings, arguments, tears, nudity and
general decadence, including interference from invited and uninvited
guests such as: Tobias Bernstrup, Saralunden, SNOWP, Körner Union,
Michael Portnoy and the Sect of Wood.

The book, and the poster, made together with Nazareno Crea, consists
of outtakes from the film, transcripts of dialogue and documentation
of the process. In total 162 pages b/w offset, hand binded with
analogue interventions.

Poster of cover £20

Beyond
Price Dan Graham (Paperback)


Edited by Bennett Simpson and Chrissie Iles
Price £28.95

This volume accompanies a major retrospective organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. It offers the first comprehensive survey of Graham's work. The book's design evokes magazine format and style, after Graham's important conceptual work from the 1960s in that medium. Generously illustrated in color and black and white, Dan Graham: Beyond features eight new essays, two new interviews with the artist, a section of reprints of Graham's own writing, and an animated manga-style "life of Dan Graham" narrative. It examines Graham's entire body of work, which includes designs for magazine pages, drawing, photographs, film and video, and architectural models and pavilions.

Paul Thek, Artist's Artist (Hardback)
Edited by Harald Falckenberg and Peter Weibel
Price Price £32.95

Paul Thek occupied a place between high art and low art, between the epic and the everyday. During his brief life (1933-1988), he went against the grain of art world trends, humanizing the institutional spaces of art with the force of his humor, spirituality, and character.
This book charts Thek's journey from legendary outsider to foundational figure in contemporary art. In their antiheroic diversity, Thek's works embody the art revolution of the 1960s; indeed, Susan Sontag dedicated her classic Against Interpretation to him. Thek's treatment of the body in such works as "Technological Reliquaries," with their castings and replicas of human body parts, tissue, and bones, both evoke the aura of Christian relics and anticipate the work of Damien Hirst. The book, with more than 500 images (300 in color) and nineteen essays by art historians, curators, collectors, and artists, investigates Thek's work on its own terms, and as a starting point for understanding the work of the many younger artists Thek has influenced.

Essays by: Jean-Christophe Ammann, Margrit Brehm, Bazon Brock, Suzanne Delehanty, Harald Falckenberg, Marietta Franke, Stefan Germer, Kim Gordon, Roland Groenenboom, Axel Heil, Gregor Jansen, Mike Kelley, John Miller, Susanne Neubauer, Kenny Schachter, Harald Szeemann, Annette Tietenberg, Peter Weibel, Ann Wilson.

Enrico David
Price £36.95

This is the first major publication by artist Enrico David, including paintings, works on paper, sculptures and vitrines from the last five years, as well as two large-scale installation photos. In his essay Simon Thompson demonstrates some of the ongoing strands within Enrico Davids work, which borrows from craft and design techniques and often features stylised figures staged within erotic or tragic-comic scenarios.

Axial Age (Hardback)
Sigmar Polke
Price £148.00

Axial Age is the title of a series of seven paintings completed by Sigmar Polke between 2005 and 2007. With his camera, Polke created a fascinating photo documentary of the painting process, including 187 images specially selected by the artist to be featured in this large-format book.
By revealing the materiality and structural complexity of the works from a variety of perspectives and under different lighting conditions, Polke provides the reader with analogies to his oeuvre that are as explicit as they are unique.
Polke makes use of a broad range of materials in his work, including varnishes and pigments, photographic chemicals, gold and silver, lapis lazuli and malachite – all references to alchemistic processes of transformation.
Axial Age is a reference to the term coined by Karl Jaspers to describe the period between 800 BC and 200 BC, during which the world was reinvented based on the principle of transcendence – a principle that finds full expression in this series of paintings.
English and German text.

Every Colour by Itself
Francis Upritchard
Designed by åbäke, published in the UK by Dent-De-Leone, 2009.

Le Corbusier and the Occult (Hardback)
By J. K. Birksted
Price £28.95

 
Through exhaustive research that challenges long-held beliefs, J. K. Birksted's Le Corbusier and the Occult traces the structure of Le Corbusier's brand of modernist spatial and architectural ideas based on startling new documents in hitherto undiscovered family and local archives. Le Corbusier and the Occult thus answers the conundrum set by Reyner Banham (Birksted's predecessor at the Bartlett School of Architecture) who, fifty years ago, wrote that Le Corbusier's book Towards a New Architecture "was to prove to be one of the most influential, widely read and least understood of all the architectural writings of the twentieth century."

Bunker Archeology (Paperback)
By Paul Virilio
Price £28

In Bunker Archeology, urban philosopher and cultural theorist Paul Virilio turns his attention—and camera—to the ominous yet strangely compelling German bunkers from WW II that lie abandoned on the coast of France. These ghostly reminders of destruction and oppression prompt Virilio to consider the nature of war and existence, in relation to both the Second World War and contemporary times.

This is the first English-language translation of the French edition published in 1975 to accompany the exhibition of Paul Virilio's photographs at the Pompidou Center. The author's haunting photographs are accompanied by his analysis of the architecture of war in both philosophical and concrete terms. Virilio discusses fortresses and military space in general and the bunkers themselves, including facsimiles of original military maps and extracts from Hitler's "Directives of War." He also examines the role of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, in the rise of the Third Reich.

Obelisk: A History (Paperback)
By Brian A. Curran, Anthony Grafton, Pamela O. Long and Benjamin Weiss
Price £18.95  

Nearly every empire worthy of the name—from ancient Rome to the United States—has sought an Egyptian obelisk to place in the center of a ceremonial space. Obelisks—giant standing stones, invented in Ancient Egypt as sacred objects—serve no practical purpose. For much of their history their inscriptions, in Egyptian hieroglyphics, were completely inscrutable. Yet over the centuries dozens of obelisks have made the voyage from Egypt to Rome, Constantinople, and Florence; to Paris, London, and New York. New obelisks and even obelisk-shaped buildings rose as well—the Washington Monument being a noted example. Obelisks, everyone seems to sense, connote some very special sort of power. This beautifully illustrated book traces the fate and many meanings of obelisks across nearly forty centuries—what they meant to the Egyptians, and how other cultures have borrowed, interpreted, understood, and misunderstood them through the years.
 
The history of obelisks is a story of technical achievement, imperial conquest, Christian piety and triumphalism, egotism, scholarly brilliance, political hubris, bigoted nationalism, democratic self-assurance, Modernist austerity, and Hollywood kitsch—in short, the story of Western civilization.

Camps (Paperback)
A Guide to 21st-Century Space
By Charlie Hailey
Price £19.95

What is a camp? In August 2005, television news showed viewers an estimated 20,000 Katrina evacuees camped out in the Superdome, Cindy Sheehan protesting the Iraq War on President Bush's doorstep in "Camp Casey," Texas, and Israeli and Palestinian young people at the Seeds of Peace Camp in Maine discussing the evacuation of settlement camps in the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, off camera, summer campers all over America packed up their gear, preparing to depart Scout camps, computer camps, and sports camps, and millions of recreational vehicles owners were on the road, permanent itinerant campers. In Camps, Charlie Hailey examines the space and idea of camp as a defining dimension of 21st-century life.

The ubiquity and diversity of camps calls for a guidebook. This is what Hailey offers, but it is no ordinary one. Not only does he establish a typology of camps, but he also embeds within his narrative a key to camp ideology. Thus we see how camp spaces are informed by politics and transform the ways we think about and make built environments. Hailey describes camps of diverse regions, purposes, and forms, and navigates the inherent paradoxes of zones that are neither temporary nor permanent: camps of choice, including summer camps, protest camps, drift camps (research stations on Arctic ice floes), and LTVA (Long-Term Visitor Area) Camps; strategic camps regulated by power—boot camps, GTMO (the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay), immigrant camps, and others;—and transient spaces of relief and assistance, among them refugee camps, FEMA City, work camps, and Gypsy camps. More than 150 diagrams, sketches, building and site plans, photographs, political cartoons, video game screenshots, aerial and satellite images, and maps illustrate camp space in unprecedented complexity and variety.

"Voids. A Retrospective" is a paradoxical exhibition: by re-actualizing nine “empty exhibitions,” it is simultaneously an experimental project that refuses the classic rules of the visual arts and an historical object which confronts the projects of Art & Language, Robert Barry, Stanley Brouwn, Maria Eichhorn, Bethan Huws, Robert Irwin, Yves Klein, Roman Ondák, and Laurie Parsons.

At once the support and an extension of the event, this publication outlines the concept of the void in art, aesthetics, philosophy, religion, science, popular culture, architecture, and music, and broaches the subject of nothing, of vacuity, of the invisible and the ineffable, of rejection and destruction.

Opening with a catalogue section that documents the nine selected historical and contemporary exhibitions, the publication also contains an anthology of more than forty texts, many published here for the first time, as well as contributions by artists created especially for this volume.

Essays by Benjamin Buchloh, Jean-François Chevrier, Stuart Comer, Lucy Lippard, Bob Nickas, Brian O’Doherty, Sadie Plant, Ralph Rugoff, Jon Savage, and Sarah Wilson thus intersect with interviews conducted with Robert Barry, Morgan Fisher, Claude Parent, and Jacques Villeglé, and the propositions of Hans Haacke, Malcolm McLaren, Olivier Mosset, Yoko Ono, Sturtevant, and Lawrence Weiner.

Through the rich documentation, as well as the texts by specialists on the subject, this book proposes an evaluation of the origins, the mechanisms, and the resonances of this major artistic gesture consisting of emptying the exhibition space rather than filling it.

Easier than catching an airplane to Mexico, this large format edition provides the viewer an opportunity to extensively visit Barragán's self-designed house through a rich collection of both interior and exterior images. Filled with full-page colour, and black and white photographs that capture both the contemplative spaces and rich details of this influential building, the publication is accompanied by floor plans and a short introductory text

Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007

This substantial volume makes available a comprehensive selection of Richter's texts, several published for the first time.

The book forms a brilliantly illuminating commentary on Richter's art, as well as providing a thought-provoking discussion on the status of art and the artist in society today.

A great deal has been written about the remarkable heterogeneity of Richter's work, his seemingly wilful and defiant movement between abstract and figurative modes of representation, and his use of a variety of methods of applying paint to canvas. Central to his work is a strong set of values which throughout his career he has expressed in extensive notes and writings, and in provocative and memorable public declarations in which he shows himself to be the master of the paradoxical statement.

These texts come from all periods of his career: letters and interviews; public statements about specific exhibitions; private reflections drawn from personal correspondence; answers to questions posed by critics; and excerpts from journals discussing the intentions, subjects, methods and sources of his work from various periods.

Complete with a comprehensive appendix, and accompanied by over a hundred photographs of artworks, works in progress, exhibition installations, colleagues and family.

The Pure Society: From Darwin to Hitler (Hardback)
Andre Pichot
Price £19.99

As genetic manipulation comes to dominate medical science, a timely and trenchant history of eugenics

How did the notions of “race” and “ethnic group,” under the cover of scientific legitimacy, get used for political ends? This work retraces the history of biological conceptions of society and their racist and eugenicist applications from the end of the nineteenth century to the post-Second World War epoch. André Pichot analyzes the relationship between science, politics and ideology, through the examination of specific cases: from Nazism to the various eugenicist research programs launched or financed by eminent scientific organizations from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards. And, today, with the mapping of the human genome and rapid advances in gene therapies, he warns that the dream of a “pure society” is in danger of resurrection.

André Pichot researcher at the CNRS in Strasbourg, is one of France’s leading historians of science and a frequent contributor to journals and national newspapers. He is the author of numerous works, including Histoire de la notion de vie and Histoire de la notion de gene.

    
SHE, Works by Wallace Berman and Richard Prince
Exhibition catalogue, 2009
Essay by Kristine McKenna
Price £39.95

She traces these overlaps and sympathies with reproductions of previously unseen works by Berman and new images from Prince's Girlfriends and de Kooning series. Also including an interview with Prince, She is edited by Kristine McKenna, whose ongoing work on Wallace Berman and his contemporaries continues to yield exciting discoveries.
The use of heterosexual pornography or soft erotica in collage and assemblage is often all too uncritical, but for a few of the California artists who came of age in the early 1950s, its applications were much more nuanced. For example, Wallace Berman's 1957 "Cross" assemblage features a close-up photograph of heterosexual penetration that affirms sex as a "factum fidei" ("true fact," as Berman's inscription went)--its explicitness serving simply as realism. This approach to "girlie magazine" imagery and its polar opposite--the impulse to decommodify sexuality--can both be found in the photographs, paintings and books of Richard Prince, an artist whose fondness for the era of Berman is well known.

Much more than a mere catalogue or bibliography, this book includes a rich introduction dedicated to the different possible courses in Munari’s multi-faceted production, that helps to consider it side by side with his contemporary works in the fields of painting, sculpture, design, photography and didactics, crossing their different poetics. Also, a bibliographical index of critical essays about Munari is a useful instrument to analyze in depth Munari’s works.

Mt Fuji
Naoki Ishikawa
Price £29.95

'Mt. Fuji', the mountain attracts widespread popularity and seen as the symbol of Japan.

For Ishikawa who had challenged to scale the peaks of the highest mountains of the world's seven continents at his young age, Mt. Fuji was the mountain more to scale than to view.

In summer, so many alpinists gather that make a long line along its slope.
In winter, its surface is covered with snow and even expert alpinists would pause to climb.

This book includes the photos which have ever been shown such as the landscapes in the winter mountain, the dynamic panorama of the mountain from the air view, the sceneries of the strange festival in surrounding area based on Mt. Fuji worship and so on.

Here is a brand new sight of Mt. Fuji captured by Naoki Ishikawa from zero.

Siedlung
Erik van der Weijde
Price £28.95

Van der Weijde's photographic project documents over 220 houses built in Germany between 1933 and 1945 in order to eventually provide a house for every working-class NSDAP member. In turn this ‘Siedlungpolitiek' was both a powerful Nazi propaganda tool and a way to provide living space to loyal members. Most of these houses still exist, however unless one knows their full history they retain an unassuming normalcy.

Mountain Dream Tarot
Bea Nettles 
Price £10.95

A sampling of the first known complete photographic Tarot deck created with multiple negatives in 1970 decades before Photoshop. Internationally exhibited photographer and book-artist Bea Nettles (beanettles.com) used herself, her family and friends for models. Her 3 of Swords is the disc icon on Bruce Springsteen's Magic.

Daniel Johnson (Hardback)
Philippe Vergne
Rizzoli
Price £25
             

Daniel Johnston only ever dreamt of two things: he wanted to be a rock star and he wanted to be a famous artist. Amazingly enough, he succeeded at both. Today he is an acclaimed indie music star whose charmingly twisted songs have been covered by the likes of Beck, Yo La Tengo, and TV on The Radio. His artwork appears in galleries throughout the world and was featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Johnston’s pen and colored marker drawings contain a range of characters, some benign or heroic, and others quite disturbing. In his complex world, good battles evil attended to by an assortment of playful characters. Johnston’s world is also informed by his conservative Christian upbringing, and filled with depictions of biblical vengeance and salvation. Looking at his work, we are reminded of Heironymous Bosch as much as DC Comics. Daniel Johnston contains over 150 full color illustrations, many taken from the artist’s private archives and never seen before. There is also commentary and analysis by the Walker Art Center’s Philippe Vergne, alt-rock luminary Jad Fair, and underground comic legend, Harvey Pekar. "I see him as an artist on the periphery of the art world, but not an outsider artist . . . It’s impressive when you see the consistency of the work."—Philippe Vergne

The Disco Files 1973-78: New York's Underground, Week By Week 
Vince Aletti
Price £19.95

With reviews of every disco record worth knowing about, weekly reports from New York’s club scene, classic magazine articles and 800 contemporary club charts, this is the definitive chronicle of disco. It's the personal memoir of Vince Aletti, the very first writer to cover the emerging scene, bringing to life the clubs, the characters, and above all the music.

Allegorical Decoys
Rebecca Quaytman
Publisher MER. Paper Kunsthalle vzw Price  £17.00

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