Pencils

Pencils by Micah Lexier, Roula Partheniou, Jem Maegan, Van Maltese, Kelly Mark, Yoko Ono, Colter Jacobsen, Image Bank, David Shrigley, Jenny Holzer and Buzz Spector. 

Erwin Heerich

Erwin Heerich

Heerich

Mönchengladbach, Germany: Städtisches Museum, 1967

21 x 17 cm.

Edition of 330 numbered copies

Following Joseph Beuys, this is the second in the series of influential boxed catalogues published by the Städtisches Museum, from 1967 to 1978. 

The printed cardboard box contains an 8-page folded checklist, 20 loose cards printed on both sides with photographs of sculptures, drawings and German text by Johannes Cladders, and a printed graph paper sheet. It was created to accompany an exhibition that ran from the 18th of November to the 31st of December, 1967. It originally sold for 10 DM. 

Christian Marclay | Fourth of July

Christian Marclay

Fourth of July 

New York City, USA: Paula Cooper Gallery, 2010

128 pp., 10 x 7”, softcover

Edition of 1000

Recalling the destructive gestures of Guitar Drag, Footsteps or Record Without A Cover, this artist book features photographs that Marclay took on July 4th, 2005. They were subsequently produced as eight large prints, and torn into forty pieces.  

The images of the marching band at the Independence Day parade in Hyde Park, New York become chaotic fragments of sound, detached from the performers. 

Fourth of July is printed in uncut French folds that the reader must tear open to read. 

Elisabetta Benassi | All I Remember

Elisabetta Benassi

All I Remember 

Rome, Italy: NERO, 2011 

478 pp., 16.5 x 21.5 cm, hardcover

Edition of 1000

Sometimes having the central information of an image denied to the viewer allows us to better understand it, or contemplate it anew. 

All I remember is a collection of four hundred and seventy-seven photographs that Elisabetta Benassi found in the archives of daily newspapers around Italy and the United States, between the years 2008 and 2011. She collected what she considers to be the most significant photos of the 20th century.

Each page of All I remember corresponds to a single photograph, from a collection of approximately 70,000 images dating from the 1920s to the early 1990s. The dates are not arbitrary. They correspond with the introduction of the 35mm Leica camera in 1925, and the first flash bulbs shortly afterwards, which led to the "Golden Age of Photojournalism”. By the 1990’s, digital photography made such archives unnecessary. 

The origins of the work date back to a time the artist visited the “Pommidoro” in Rome, where a an uncashed cheque from November 1, 1975 is framed on the restaurant wall. It is signed by one of Italy’s most celebrated and controversial filmmakers, Pier Paolo Pasolini. 

The next day he was brutally murdered at a beach in Ostia. Pasolini's body was almost unrecognizable, after being savagely beaten and run over several times with his own car. Multiple bones were broken and a metal bar had been used to crush his testicles. After his death, his body had been burned with gasoline. 

Benassi made work about Pasolini over a decade prior to this project, from videos where she interacts with a look-alike, to a replica of the car that ran him over. 

A photo of the car is included in All I Remember, taken on November 2, 1975 by the Associated Press. 

But Benassi’s book only features the backs of these photographs, so we do not see the violent image, merely read it’s typewritten caption on the verso: 

[Rome, 2 Nov. (AP) The car owned by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which Giuseppe Pelosi was stopped. A non-commissioned officer examines Pasolini’s jacket, which was found inside the car.]

The filmmaker’s name and the name of the man who spent nine years in prison for his murder (and recanted his confession almost thirty years later) are circled in felt-tip pen. 

Other photographs documented upside down feature similar handwritten and typed notes, name, dates, rubber stamps, stickers, newspaper clippings and sometimes other photographs. The detritus of now obsolete filing systems. 

Benassi uses the archive for a different kind of archeology, and together these images form an alternative portrait of the 20th century, where images of historical importance are coupled with those from news stories that came and went.  

"It's a collection of events and non-events in history, rather than the images we are addicted to, evoked by the signs that the reverse of those images traced over time, their use and reuse,” Benassi told Fabio Pariante of Frontrunner magazine. "Reversing history, forcing the links to show its hidden plot, looking at things a second time and reversing this gaze of mine also to the beholder: this interests me.”

These ‘images without images’ recall Christian Marclay’s White Noise (1983, see below) and Leah Singer’s silhouette imagery from discarded rubyliths she collected while archiving the photographic collection at the New York Daily News (below, centre). 

Photographs of Hitler admiring a prototype of the Volkswagen Beetle (a car that was partly his idea) and Ku Klux Klan demonstrations bring to mind a troubling exhibition curated by Kim Simon for TPW many years ago, in which lynching photographs had literally been whitewashed. With the hanging victims reduced to a white outline and the horror diminished, the images invite us to look closer at the gathered crowd - hateful expressions, smiling children and picnicking families in their Sunday best. 

The best, and ultimately most honest, histories tend to trouble the timeline, allowing fact and fiction to intermingle. Errors are uncorrected and alternate histories emerge. Books and films are discussed that were never released, or released under different titles. 

Benassi’s work takes its title from an unpublished Gertrude Stein novel. The back of the photograph of the author may be the only time it is referred to. Web searches for “Gertrude Stein” + “All I remember” returned zero results. 

The picture [which I assume is the one I found below, bottom] is captioned as follows:

“Gertrude Stein left), noted writer, sits with Justin Rey, Mayor of the village where her chateau is situated. Miss Stein remained at her chateau during the four years of German occupation of France. She has just completed a new book, dealing with the human race, entitled “All I Remember”. 

All I remember is available from the publisher, here, for the discounted price of €42.50 (from€50.00). 

 

The Getting Into the Spirits Cocktail Book from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion

General Idea

The Getting Into the Spirits Cocktail Book from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion

Toronto, Canada: Self-published, 1980

64 pp., 4.5 x 10.7 cm., hardcover

Edition of 900 signed, numbered and rubber stamped copies

"The Cocktail Book is a souvenir of the Colour Bar Lounge of the 1984 Pavillion, General Idea’s mythological edifice: “ we think of the Colour Bar Lounge as a sort of cultural laboratory where we can experiment with new cultural mixes and serve them up to you, our friends...an establishment dedicated to the eradication of abstract expressionism and the encouragement of artful research. Although the mass media, like a vast pharmaceutical complex, continue to develop new cultural elixirs of an unprecedented intoxication and manufacture them in consumable form, art remains a curious and elitist drink. Despite its unique flavour and heady cultural properties it has never been effectively injected into the mainstream. Now General Idea is taking the necessary risks to isolate this potent mixture and introduce the infectious mutations into your home. These cocktails are the medium in which a culture is grown and introduced to the host...and everyone is a host at the Colour Bar Lounge!”

— General Idea

Alexandra Loske | The Artist's Palette

Alexandra Loske

The Artist's Palette

Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 2024

256 pp., 26.4 x 20.6 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Subtitled The palettes behind the paintings of 50 great artists, this title from October of last year is a  scholarly work that functions equally well as an Artist Book. 

Author Alexandra Loske is an art historian, writer and curator known for her investigations into the history of colour in Western art, print culture and architecture. Her previous books on the subject include The Book of Colour Concepts (2024), A Cultural History of Colour in the Age of Industry (2021) and Colour: A Visual History (2019).

Here palette refers both to the physical object (a wooden board, often with a thumb hole, on which an artist mixes paint colours) and the choice of colours in a given work. 

Artists featured include Paul Cézanne, Helen Frankenthaler, Lucian Freud, Artemisia Gentileschi, Keith Haring, Georgia O’Keeffe, Rembrandt, Egon Schiele, Vincent van Gogh and over forty others. 

The palettes here are uniformly photographed, suggesting a massive undertaking of traveling to various institutions and estates where they reside. 

Tracey Emin | Strangeland

Tracey Emin

Strangeland

London, UK: Sceptre, 2005

213 pp., 20.5 x 13.5 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Tracey Emin's most celebrated and controversial work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 consisted of a tent with the appliquéd names of everyone she had ever shared a bed with. She described the piece as about "abortion, rape, teenage sex, abuse and poverty".

Three years later My Bed was inspired by a depressive time in Emin's life when she remained in bed for four days without eating or drinking anything but alcohol.

Given the overt and autobiographical nature of these work, a tell-all memoir was inevitable. 

In Strangeland, she candidly and matter-of-factly writes about her abortions (the second was “revenge for the first”), her eating disorders (“I had no tits, no hips, and I only ate digestive biscuits”), and her back alley rape by a classmate when she was thirteen (“I was crying. His lips were pressed against mine but I was motionless, like a small corpse.”). 

She quit school that year, and left the small seaside town of Margate two years after that. 

The book offers an account of the artist's journey to becoming "a fucked, crazy, anorexic-alcoholic-childless, beautiful woman” - from departing for London with twenty pounds and a pair of David Bowie LPs, to laying poolside and receiving calls about a Turner Prize nomination, the Pulp song about her hitting number one on the charts, and Bowie himself offering a flight home on his private jet.  

The passages that Julian Schnabel cites below are about Emin shoving a classmate into a tree and another - repeatedly - into a wall until “blood squirted everywhere”, all because one of them called Emin’s mother “old”; stealing from a drug dealer because he was "shit in bed”; and losing a dance competition because several boys she had slept with began chanting “Slag, Slag, Slag” at her. All before she was fourteen. 

Some of the most interesting stories in the book are about her Turkish father, constantly trying to regale his bored daughter with tales of his homeland:

“Yes, Dad, I know all about my grandmother and how she tore off her yashmak in front of the whole village because she wasn’t allowed to marry my granddad.”

“No, Dad. But you told me how Queen Victoria earned the island of Cyprus. She spent one night at the Sultan’s palace and the next morning she left with the deeds of Cyprus.”

""Like a fucking dog when the truth is hard to bear; I waved goodbye to my mum at the school gates.” I've read these words aloud on more than one occasion. This is the title of a story from Tracey Emin's book Strangeland. At the time, I wanted to share it with everybody I met. I don't know the exact date of when it was written. I'm under the impression that it was written as a diary entry by the teenage Tracey. I wouldn't be surprised if it was written yesterday. I was so impressed by this book that I'd like to recommend it as required reading for young people everywhere; the loneliness, the fragility, the disappointment and honesty, the clarity of all of it.

Suggested reading: "Like a fucking dog when the truth is hard to bear"; "Nayland Rock"; "Why I never became a dancer" – Hades, read the whole book for God's sake. She's a teenage Charles Bukowski, a Sam Shepard, giving Margate the distinction that Marty Scorsese gives to Little Italy. The cradle and site of adolescent crimes, unconscious acts, and brutal truths that form who we are and the scenes that made Tracey an artist.”

- Julian Schnabel