Black Library

Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec: Drawing Cornel Windlin (Editor),...

ikhoor — Sat, 18 May 2013 16:21:44 -0400

Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec: Drawing

Cornel Windlin (Editor), Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec (Artist)

This volume unveils a little-seen side of the daily studio work of acclaimed designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec (born 1971 and 1976): their drawing. Printed on newsprint and gorgeously designed, this chunky book has been put together from a volume of sketchbooks and drawings realized between 2004 and 2012, totaling more than 850 color and black-and-white works. Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec have worked together since 1998 for numerous manufacturers, among them Vitra and Cappellini. Among their iconic pieces are the “Disintegrated Kitchen” (1997), the “Spring Chair” (2000), and, more recently, the “Vegetal Chair” (2009). They have also worked with Issey Miyake, Camper and Kvadrat on architectural projects. Drawing is published on the occasion of several exhibitions of Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec’s designs, including their retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.

Multiple Signatures: On Designers, Authors, Readers and...

ikhoor — Sat, 18 May 2013 16:20:24 -0400

Multiple Signatures: On Designers, Authors, Readers and Users

Michael Rock

In the tradition of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Michael Rock, principal and founder of 2x4 Design in New York, explores the history and development of twenty-first-century visual and design culture. This book presents a thoughtful and witty exploration of graphic design today produced by Michael Rock of 2x4, the powerhouse creative firm that partners with some of the most design-savvy brands and institutions in the world to develop design systems that draw on both modernist traditions and the exuberance of contemporary life. Set forth in an engaging and humorous way, Multiple Signatures examines all aspects of modern design, from typography to the evolution of screens in advertising to trusting one’s own creative instincts, through a series of smart and often irreverent essays and images. Using 2x4’s own collaborations and projects as examples, and drawing on the experience of the contributing authors, the result is not a clinical textbook, but a fantastic and thought-provoking work about the limitless applications of design. A must-have for design students and professionals, Multiple Signatures challenges standard ways of understanding design and inspires readers to think of graphic design as a building block for all creative disciplines.

Dexter Sinister: Portable Document Format Dexter Sinister A...

ikhoor — Sun, 12 May 2013 09:10:16 -0400

Dexter Sinister: Portable Document Format

Dexter Sinister

A library is a collection of books kept for use. That axiom is key to this sly little book, part of Sternberg’s White Pocketbook Series. Even the title is sly: the portable document format refers both to texts assembled in the -library- at
dextersinister.org, and to this other amazing artifact of technology, a pocket-sized, hardcover book. Includes 13 texts by a variety of writers (ever heard of that Poe fellow?) that investigate contemporary publishing in its broadest sense, stemming from a New York basement workshop and bookstore in 2006. The second part consists of reproductions of a series of 10 images titled W.A.S.T.E. Proof Prints,
with their extended captions.
Contributions by Stuart Bailey, Rob Giampietro, Anthony Huberman, J. Christopher Jones, Louis Kaplan, Edgar Allan Poe, Seth Price, David Reinfurt, David Senior, Giles Weaver.

Designing Programmes Karl Gerstner Karl Gerstner’s work is a...

ikhoor — Sun, 12 May 2013 09:08:38 -0400

Designing Programmes

Karl Gerstner

Karl Gerstner’s work is a milestone in the history of design. One of his most important works is Designing Programmes, which is presented here in a new edition of the original 1964 publication. In four essays, the author provides a basic introduction to his design methodology. Instead of set recipes, the method suggests a model for design in the early days of the computer era.

The intellectual models it proposes, however, continue to be useful today. What it does not purvey is cut-and-dried, true-or-false solutions or absolutes of any kind - instead, it develops fundamental principles in an innovative and future-oriented way. The book is especially topical and exciting in the context of current developments in computational design, which seem to hold out the possibility of programmed design. With many examples from the worlds of graphic and product design, music, architecture, and art, it inspires the reader to seize on the material, develop it further, and integrate it into his or her own work.

I Swear I Use No Art at All - 10 Years, 100 Books, 17358 Pages...

ikhoor — Sun, 12 May 2013 09:08:23 -0400

I Swear I Use No Art at All - 10 Years, 100 Books, 17358 Pages of Book

Joost Grootens

An somewhat enlarged second edition of the book which displays and dissects the career and design motives of graphic designer Joost Grootens. A monograph that works like an atlas, it charts in a systematic and neutral fashion the first 100 books designed by Grootens in the past 10 years. In three different chapters Grootens traces the course of his career, dissects his own book designs and shows at actual size a number of spreads of books he designed.

Dot Dot Dot 12: Maybe It’s Time It’s Maybe The...

ikhoor — Sun, 12 May 2013 09:07:15 -0400

Dot Dot Dot 12: Maybe It’s Time It’s Maybe

The left-field arts journal whose very name promises more to come delivers three issues this season. There aren’t too many places to find intelligent, passionate, and semi-serious writing about the past, present, and future of visual culture and beyond. Dot Dot Dot, the brilliant journal edited by Stuart Bailey and Peter Bilak, is one of the few we’ve found. Issues 12 and 13 of this acclaimed graphic design journal are united by a thematic preoccupation with issues of distribution and dispersion. Exploring a variety of themes, including networks, schools, libraries, and the U.S. Postal Service, issue 12 collects pieces on and around these subjects, while issue 13 demonstrates them and doubles as a school magazine for the abandoned Manifesta 6 School on the island of Cyprus. Contributors to issues 12 and 13 include David Reinfurt, Ian Svenonius, Katherine Gillieson, Alex Waterman, Ryan Gander, Alice Fisher, Stuart Baile, Louis Lthi, David Greene, Samantha Hardingham, John Morgan, Studio, Steve Rushton, Ryan Holmberg, Mark Owens, Seth Price, Dieter Roelstraete, Chris Evans, Rob Giampietro, Dmitri Siegel, Radim Pesko, and Will Holder. Issue 14pursues the various lines of pedagogy, cupid, and psyche. In short, each issue swallows its predecessor.

Dot Dot Dot 7 Peter Bilak Dot Dot Dot is not your...

ikhoor — Sun, 12 May 2013 09:06:47 -0400

Dot Dot Dot 7

Peter Bilak

Dot Dot Dot is not your father’s design magazine — a high-gloss tombstone with decontextualized, overproduced work by the “usual suspects.” Instead, what you’ll find is a groundbreaking journal that fills a longstanding gap in graphic arts publishing: a venue for creative, interdisciplinary journalism on subjects that affect the way we think about and make design. We’re proud to add it to our growing catalog of books and journals.
For each issue, Dot Dot Dot invites a multidiscipllinary group of contributors to both write and design pieces about the past, present, and future of visual culture. Smart, passionate, and imaginatively designed, Dot Dot Dot is for graphic designers and anyone interested in the creative practice of the visual arts.
Issue 7 includes “The Problem with Posters” by Rob Giampietro, “Mexico 1968/Rotterdam 2003” by Peter Bilak, “‘Landy’s (Failed) Gesture’ and the General Intellect” by J.J. King, “The Every Day Story of Flesh-Eating, Blood-Sucking Freaks” by Steve Rushton (with John Russell), “Eno and the Long Now” by Michael Bracewell (with Brian Eno and Lucy McKenzie), and “Writing on Money” by Paul Elliman, among others.

Dot Dot Dot 8 Peter Bilak The journal whose very name promises...

ikhoor — Sun, 12 May 2013 07:51:30 -0400

Dot Dot Dot 8

Peter Bilak

The journal whose very name promises more to come delivers two issues this season. There aren’t too many places to find intelligent, passionate, and witty writing about the past, present, and future of visual culture. Dot Dot Dot, the brilliant journal edited by Stuart Bailey and Peter Bilak, is one of the few we’ve found, and we’re happy to be able to present it in our catalog. Issue 8 contains articles by Ryan Gander, Paul Elliman, Stuart Bailey, Diedrich Diederichsen, Anna Gwendoline Jackson, Momus, Brian McMullen, Antonin Kosik, David Reinfurt, Graham Meyer, Katherine Gillieson, Karel Martens, and Peter Bilak, among others. Articles range from “Why Are All These BooksOrange?” to “A Coming of Age Reading Checklist” to “City Turned Upside Down” and concluding with “About Nothing, Really.”

Dot Dot Dot 13 The left-field arts journal whose very name...

ikhoor — Sun, 12 May 2013 07:51:10 -0400

Dot Dot Dot 13

The left-field arts journal whose very name promises more to come delivers three issues this season. There arent too many places to find intelligent, passionate, and semi-serious writing about the past, present, and future of visual culture and beyond. Dot Dot Dot, the brilliant journal edited by Stuart Bailey and Peter Bilak, is one of the few we’ve found. Issues 12 and 13 of this acclaimed graphic design journal are united by a thematic preoccupation with issues of distribution and dispersion. Exploring a variety of themes, including networks, schools, libraries, and the U.S. Postal Service, issue 12 collects pieces on and around these subjects, while issue 13 demonstrates them and doubles as a school magazine for the abandoned Manifesta 6 School on the island of Cyprus. Contributors to issues 12 and 13 include David Reinfurt, Ian Svenonius, Katherine Gillieson, Alex Waterman, Ryan Gander, Alice Fisher, Stuart Baile, Louis Lthi, David Greene, Samantha Hardingham, John Morgan, Studio, Steve Rushton, Ryan Holmberg, Mark Owens, Seth Price, Dieter Roelstraete, Chris Evans, Rob Giampietro, Dmitri Siegel, Radim Pesko, and Will Holder. Issue 14pursues the various lines of pedagogy, cupid, and psyche. In short, each issue swallows its predecessor.

Dot Dot Dot 16 Stuart Bailey The journal whose very name...

ikhoor — Sun, 12 May 2013 07:50:53 -0400

Dot Dot Dot 16

Stuart Bailey

The journal whose very name promises more to come is back with a new issue certain to surprise and delight its dedicatedlegion of readers. Dot Dot Dotinvites a multidisciplinary group of contributors to write design pieces about the past, present, and future of visual culture. Far from your typical design magazine filled with glossy and overproduced work by the usual suspects, Dot Dot Dot has become the premier venue for creative journalism on diverse subjectsmusic, art, literature, and architecturethat affect the way we think about and make design. Smart, passionate, and imaginatively designed, Dot Dot Dot is for graphic designers and anyone interested in the creative practice of the visual arts.

Dot Dot Dot 17 (Issue 17) The must-read journal on every...

ikhoor — Sun, 12 May 2013 07:50:41 -0400

Dot Dot Dot 17 (Issue 17)

The must-read journal on every designer’s desk, Dot Dot Dot covers design in the widest possible sense. Steering clear of both commercial portfolio presentations and impenetrable academic theory, it offers intelligent, passionate, and clever writing on the tangled web of influences that determine the shape of contemporary cultural production. Art, music,language, film, literatureyou never know what you might discover on its offbeat pages. Featuring a design as unexpected as its contents, Dot Dot Dot 17 presents new artifacts from its ongoing investigation into the past, present, and future of visual culture.

Dot Dot Dot 18 “Dot Dot Dot mingles texts on art,...

ikhoor — Sun, 12 May 2013 07:50:29 -0400

Dot Dot Dot 18

“Dot Dot Dot mingles texts on art, design, architecture, and music with literary efforts and linguistic musings into a coherent package replete with equal parts of mirth and seriousness.”
BOMB

After seventeen issues, Dot Dot Dot remains the must-read journal on every designers desk. By steering clear of both commercial portfolio presentations and impenetrable academic theory, it has become the premier venue for creative journalism on diverse subjectsmusic, art, literature, and architecturethat affect the way we think about and make design. Dot Dot Dot 18 presents the latest fieldwork of a multidisciplinary group ofcontributors investigating the web of influences shaping contemporary culture. Smart, passionate, and imaginativelydesigned, Dot Dot Dot is for graphic designers and anyone interested in the visual arts.

Dot Dot Dot 19 Stuart Bailey After eighteen issues, Dot Dot...

ikhoor — Sun, 12 May 2013 07:50:15 -0400

Dot Dot Dot 19

Stuart Bailey

After eighteen issues, Dot Dot Dot remains the must-read journal on every designer’s desk. By steering clear of both commercial portfolio presentations and impenetrable academic theory, it has become the premier venue for creative journalism on diverse subjects, such as music, art, literature, and architecture, that affect the way we think about and make design. Dot Dot Dot 19 presents the latest fieldwork of a multidisciplinary group ofcontributors investigating the web of influences shaping contemporary culture. Smart, passionate, and imaginativelydesigned, Dot Dot Dot is for graphic designers and anyone interested in the visual arts.

Dot Dot Dot 20 Stuart Bailey The must-read journal on every...

ikhoor — Sun, 12 May 2013 07:49:57 -0400

Dot Dot Dot 20

Stuart Bailey

The must-read journal on every designer’s desk, Dot Dot Dot covers design in the widest possible sense. Steering clear of both commercial portfolio presentations and impenetrable academic theory, it offers intelligent, passionate, and clever writing on the tangled web of influences that determine the shape of contemporary cultural production. Art, music, language, film, literature—you never know what you might discover on its offbeat pages. Featuring a design as unexpected as its content, Dot Dot Dot 20 presents new artifacts from its ongoinginvestigation into the past, present, and future of visual culture.

Collected Words, 1953-1982 Richard Hamilton richard hamilton

ikhoor — Sun, 12 May 2013 07:34:16 -0400

Collected Words, 1953-1982

Richard Hamilton

richard hamilton

Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital...

ikhoor — Sat, 04 May 2013 20:38:57 -0400

Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age

Kenneth Goldsmith

Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist.

In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.

Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New...

ikhoor — Sat, 04 May 2013 20:38:37 -0400

Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century

Marjorie Perloff

What is the place of individual genius in a global world of hyper-information— a world in which, as Walter Benjamin predicted more than seventy years ago, everyone is potentially an author? For poets in such a climate, “originality” begins to take a back seat to what can be done with other people’s words—framing, citing, recycling, and otherwise mediating available words and sentences, and sometimes entire texts. Marjorie Perloff here explores this intriguing development in contemporary poetry: the embrace of “unoriginal” writing. Paradoxically, she argues, such citational and often constraint-based poetry is more accessible and, in a sense, “personal” than was the hermetic poetry of the 1980s and 90s.

Perloff traces this poetics of “unoriginal genius” from its paradigmatic work, Benjamin’s encyclopedic Arcades Project, a book largely made up of citations. She discusses the processes of choice, framing, and reconfiguration in the work of Brazilian Concretism and Oulipo, both movements now understood as precursors of such hybrid citational texts as Charles Bernstein’s opera libretto Shadowtime and Susan Howe’s documentary lyric sequence The Midnight. Perloff also finds that the new syncretism extends to language: for example, to the French-Norwegian Caroline Bergvall writing in English and the Japanese Yoko Tawada, in German. Unoriginal Genius concludes with a discussion of Kenneth Goldsmith’s conceptualist book Traffic—a seemingly “pure’” radio transcript of one holiday weekend’s worth of traffic reports. In these instances and many others, Perloff shows us “poetry by other means” of great ingenuity, wit, and complexity.

Forgetting the Art World Pamela M. Lee It may be time to...

ikhoor — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 12:33:43 -0400

Forgetting the Art World

Pamela M. Lee

It may be time to forget the art world—or at least to recognize that a certain historical notion of the art world is in eclipse. Today, the art world spins on its axis so quickly that its maps can no longer be read; its borders blur. In Forgetting the Art World, Pamela Lee connects the current state of this world to globalization and its attendant controversies. Contemporary art has responded to globalization with images of movement and migration, borders and multitudes, but Lee looks beyond iconography to view globalization as a world process. Rather than think about the “global art world” as a socioeconomic phenomenon, or in terms of the imagery it stages and sponsors, Lee considers “the work of art’s world” as a medium through which globalization takes place. She argues that the work of art is itself both object and agent of globalization. Lee explores the ways that art actualizes, iterates, or enables the processes of globalization, offering close readings of works by artists who have come to prominence in the last two decades. She examines the “just in time” managerial ethos of Takahashi Murakami; the production of ethereal spaces in Andreas Gursky’s images of contemporary markets and manufacture; the logic of immanent cause dramatized in Thomas Hirschhorn’s mixed-media displays; and the “pseudo-collectivism” in the contemporary practice of the Atlas Group, the Raqs Media Collective, and others. To speak of “the work of art’s world,” Lee says, is to point to both the work of art’s mattering and its materialization, to understand the activity performed by the object as utterly continuous with the world it at once inhabits and creates.

Artists for Artists: 50 Years of the Foundation for Contemporary...

ikhoor — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 12:32:35 -0400

Artists for Artists: 50 Years of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts

Eric Banks (Editor), Stacy Tenebaum Stark (Foreword)

In 1962, Jasper Johns, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and other artists came together to help Merce Cunningham finance a proposed season on Broadway by organizing a sale of their artworks. Their success led to the formation of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts—now among the most celebrated of grant-giving organizations—and a radical new way for artists to support other artists through the sale of their work. Artists for Artists celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Foundation, tracing its vital role in supporting artists and sponsoring some of the signal performance events of the last half-century. This beautifully designed book includes a full event history, profiles of key artist-beneficiaries, the original texts of the Foundation-sponsored Six Lectures series of 1966 (most never before published) and an oral history including the Foundation’s co-founder, Jasper Johns.

MVRDV Buildings MVRDV MVRDV is a Rotterdam-based architecture...

ikhoor — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 06:15:28 -0400

MVRDV Buildings

MVRDV

MVRDV is a Rotterdam-based architecture and urban design practice founded in 1993 (its name is an acronym for founding members Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries). In cooperation with Ilka and Andreas Ruby, MVRDV has assembled this overview of 20 years of architectural practice—a redefined monograph about their realized work to date that features user testimonies, journalistic articles, unpublished images and drawings. Since amazing the world with their design for the Dutch Pavilion at the 2000 World Expo in Hannover, MVRDV has been regarded as one of the world’s top architecture bureaus, acclaimed for its visionary research and thought-provoking projects such as Pig City (a high-rise landscape designed to solve lack-of-space problems for the pig meat industry in the Netherlands) and Grand Paris (a proposal to join Paris and its suburbs into a high-density “post-Kyoto city” by 2030). Over the course of the past 20 years the office has realized a stunning portfolio of buildings and urban plans, including Villa VPRO (Hilversum), WoZoCo (Amsterdam), Balancing Barn (Suffolk, UK) and Edificio Mirador (Madrid). How do these buildings perform? What is the philosophy, logic and thinking behind imminent MVRDV concepts? And what is life like in a blue house (in Didden Village, near Rotterdam), on an orange tribune (The Why Factory, situated within a courtyard at Delft University of Technology), in a vertical shopping street (the Gyre Shopping Center in Tokyo), in a housing silo (on the IJ waterfront in Amsterdam) or inside a mountain of books (the Book Mountain library in Spijkenisse)?