Earth Station launches with AMBruno in London
I am happy to announce my new book Earth Station, made as part of AMBruno’s project ‘Intervals’ which will launch at Tate Britain in London this week (see below).
The book uses intervals between images found on postcards from the 1950s and 1960s, when mass tourism began to grow, as a playful method of critique – creating brief visual stories about how humans changed nature. See more images here (though because of the intervals, this book needs to be held in hand: without intervals there is no story).
Edition limited to 50 copies (not numbered), inkjet printed and wire bound. 40 pages, 14 full color illustrations, size 21,5 cm wide x 17,2 cm high.
Priced at € 45 plus shipping. Order through my webshop or by sending an email. If ordering, note that the book will be shipped as of next week. The book will also be available at the multiple book fairs AMBruno participates in during 2024/5.
This Friday October 18, AMBruno will present an afternoon of talks at Tate Britain around ‘Intervals’. A panel conversation with AMBruno artists and past project selectors, including Gustavo Grandal Montero, Elizabeth James, Sophie Loss, Richard Price, Chris Taylor and Cally Trench, will discuss ‘Intervals’ in the context of the group’s history. Follow this link for the details. It is free to visit this.
Next week, AMBruno will also show the project at the Small Publisher’s Fair in Conway Hall (October 25 and 26). Yay!
About AMBruno
The artists’ association AMBruno focuses on developing and promoting the book as a key medium in art. Founded in 2008, the group’s members change with each new project, where artists create books based on a specific theme each year.
In 2024, an open call invited artists to create books exploring the theme ‘Intervals.’ This could refer to an intervening time, a pause or break, a gap between two things, or the difference in pitch between two sounds. Fourteen artists were selected for this project by Sarah Bodman, an artist and scholar from the Centre for Print Research at UWE Bristol. The artists are Karen Blake, Helen Douglas, David Howes, Julie Johnstone, Philip Lee, Sophie Loss, John McDowall, Alastair Noble, Redell Olsen, Ximena Pérez Grobet, Peter Rapp, Rachel Smith, Elisabeth Tonnard and Maria White.
Exhibition in Arles
Métamorphose(s) opens tomorrow. This is an exhibition in which Antony Cairns, Stephen Gill, Galerie Christian Berst, NSDOS, Bill Viola and myself show work in collaboration with Publicis Luxe. See the invite below.
The show is curated by Julien Frydman at Les Collatéraux in Arles and runs during the opening weeks of the Rencontres d’Arles from July 3 – 12.
I have collaborated with Guillaume Gaud of Publicis Luxe to create an interactive spatial installation based on my book of found conversational phrases A Dialogue in Useful Phrases. Two chairs will invite the audience to be actors in the work. By sitting down, a viewer will automatically cause a series of conversational phrases to start appearing (basically a monologue, as if reading only the left pages or only the right pages in the original book). When a second person sits down in the other chair, a second series of conversational phrases starts to appear in answer and a dialogue in useful phrases will ensue. This serendipitous dialogue of miscommunications will be different each time because it will be influenced by when exactly each person sits down.
Exhibition in The Crocodile
A tiny solo exhibition of mine, curated by Jason Fulford, is on view in The Crocodile. This is an exhibition that you can see and hear and imagine exclusively if you meet up with Jason personally, since he carries it on his person. It can be encountered this way from May 23 until roughly August 1. After appearances in Spain and New York, the gallery is now on its way to San Francisco.
Jason prints letterpress cards for each show (see below), this is the fourth show so far.
Book exhibitions Munich and Bristol
Work of mine is included in Library of Artistic Print on Demand, curated by Annette Gilbert. It is on view at Villa Stuck in Munich until September 15th. For more information, visit the museum’s website. A book about the Library of Artistic Print on Demand is forthcoming from Spector Books. More info about the whole project: https://www.apod.li/
Then this Friday the 28th is the opening of B for Book, curated by Sarah Bodman at Frankenstein Press in Bristol. It looks like a joyful eclectic mix of artist’s books. It also launches the weekend of BABE – Bristol Artist’s Book Event and runs through July 19. More information about the show here or in the press release.
Daylight
A little promotion for Daylight, a book that was published of Truus van den Boezem’s photography work. I wrote a short essay for the book, in Dutch, but an English translation is included.
It was published at the initiative of Marianne Kleijwegt by the Verbeke Foundation on the occasion of Truus’ centennial birthday. The editing, design and production is by Marie Verboven. The book is presented alongside an exhibition of Truus’ work at the Verbeke Foundation from May 12 to November 3, 2024.
The book can be purchased at the Verbeke Foundation, or at any bookstore (ISBN 9789464448191) and in case of emergency I have a few copies as well.
New print run of Oceanus
Oceanus was reprinted. Already quite an oldie, but it is one of those books I would make again right now and it’s nice to keep it available. Not that this is always easy to do. The photo above was taken in the town of Buren in The Netherlands and says something like “Create your happiness. From print and press”. It should perhaps in 2023 be something like “Try and stay sane. Despite the disregard of paper grain”. Anyhow, some attempts later there are now happy books. It is the third print run if the print-on-demand version is counted as one (first) print run. I have again made some changes in paper stock. The book is printed digitally, in B&W.
The Invisible Book at the National Library plus postcard set news
The Invisible Book has been gathering attention lately, and my postcard set Highlights in the history of The Invisible Book was sold out. I can now announce a new print run has become available, on a new cardstock. The set of six cards in a bellyband is priced at €10 plus shipping and available in my webshop. Or order by email.
The National Library (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) of The Netherlands is currently presenting The Invisible Book as one of the five most remarkable books in their collection. You can find more information (in Dutch) here. On September 26 there will be an evening at the library where all five books are discussed by the curators, find info here.
As a source of discovering many conceptual artists’ books that I hadn’t yet heard of, plus rediscovering works I did know, Moritz Küng’s Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements (1960-2022) (published by Walther Koenig on the occasion of the show I wrote about in my previous post) has been enjoyable. The Invisible Book is also presented in this, and gives one of the chapters its name. For those who read Dutch, there is a good review by Christophe Van Gerrewey in De Witte Raaf.
Blank. Raw. Illegible…
From May 14 to September 3, the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren shows Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements (1960-2022). Expect a whopping total of 259 books in the show, most of which will be visible to the eye.
Curated by Moritz Küng, the exhibition explores how contemporary artists and artist collectives exploit and activate the conceptual potential of a blank sheet of paper or a book with empty pages for their artistic practice. Starting with an authoritative exploration by artist Herman de Vries of the designation of the color white, the exhibition opens up the diversity of artistic concepts in reflecting on emptiness, purity, and raw material in relation to the formal and functional criteria of books in 15 chapters, the headings of each of which are taken from one of their book titles.
The Invisible Book will be on view in the show, and gives one of the chapters its name. For more information, visit the museum’s website. A catalogue will be published by Walther König (ISBN: 978-3-7533-0463-2).
For those wishing to read up on The Invisible Book, there were recently some new discussions of it: by Gill Partington in the London Review of Books (Vol. 45 No. 4, February 2023), by Annette Gilbert in the quite essential Literature’s Elsewheres (MIT Press, 2022), and by Felipe Cussen in La oficina de la nada (Ediciones Siruela, 2022).
Also
The postcardset of The Invisible Book will be part of Inexistent Books VI, curated by Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson and Jan Steinbach at Salong in Oslo, May 19 – June 4.
Visible, but also involving blank spaces, the book version of The Man of the Crowd is on view in a small exhibit on Edgar Allan Poe at Centre Céramique in Maastricht right now.
The Power of the Powerless
Not a book but a gesture.
In my work I have explored white spaces since 2003 as a method to suggest rather than erase. Even if the suggestion was that the omnipresent Plan may be empty.
I have been struck by the recent street protests in China in which blank sheets of paper are used to defy censorship. The sheets serve effortlessly to indicate everything that should be expressed. Something so small, simple, and yet universal.
The title of The Power of the Powerless is a reference to Václav Havel’s essay of that same title. It speaks of the power that those who are not in power have through simply no longer living (as if) in obedience to the system. No longer “doing” the lies. Something relevant not only in totalitarian states but wherever system tries to dominate life and replace actual experience. The blank of this paper can never be totally contained by those who want to control it.
Published in Leerdam, The Netherlands, December 2022.
Free to enjoy as an idea.
For those who find themselves inclined to purchase:
Edition limited to 40 numbered copies.
12 x 19 cm cover, handmade, inkjet printed, with in it a loose blank A4 sheet.
Priced at € 50,- plus shipping. Order through the webshop or by email. Please note orders will be taken in December but shipped out in January. If you need to get it sooner please email me and we can arrange that.
The Pine of Takekuma
I’m pleased to publish a small handmade book I have been working on. It is based on Matsuo Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi, one of the major texts of classical Japanese literature. Specifically, it traces Bashō’s description of the pine tree of Takekuma, an immortal image that utters itself through several temporary realizations.
Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi – one possible English translation is The Narrow Road to the Deep North – is a travel sketch, written in a combination of prose and haiku, based on a journey Bashō undertook in 1689. This journey took shape around many places mentioned and celebrated in earlier Japanese poetry. One of the sights depicted by Bashō is the pine tree of Takekuma. Time and again this tree, forked into two trunks, is resurrected.
The Pine of Takekuma presents and continues this process of resurrections by placing before the reader ten different existing English translations of the same passage in Bashō’s work.
Inkjet printed and handbound in a Japanese style stab binding with folds on the foredge, 30 pages, 12×19 cm.
Edition limited to 45 numbered copies.
The book is priced at €95 plus shipping. Order through my webshop or by sending an email.
