Exhibition 36: Mixed-Media Demonstrations + Explorations


Susan Tuttle - 2008
    There's something for everyone at this art expo. Whether you want to sharpen digital-imaging skills, make your own jewelry or listen to the stories behind provocative works, you're sure to find plenty to keep you busy--all included with the price of admission.Amidst a full-color feast for your eyes, you will: Discover ways to turn your art mistakes" into meaningful creationsSit in on mixed-media demonstrations, guiding you through techniques for layering, transferring, altering and moreBe introduced to the works and inspiration of 36 artists, including: Lisa Falzon, Sheri Gaynor, Claudine Hellmuth, Katie Kendrick, Deryn Mentock, Karen Michel, Ted Orland, Izabella Pierce, Richard Salley, Suzanne Simanaitis, Roben-Marie Smith, Jonathan Talbot and many more!Take on creative challenges to push your art-making into new directions Enter the "Exhibition 36" experience--your ticket to an amazing gallery of mixed-media inspiration."

The Book of Leviathan


Peter Blegvad - 2000
    In a dazzling work of graphic fiction, a surreal journey through a wonderland eerily like real life, The Book of Leviathan chronicles an infant's investigations into life's great mysteries. Endowed with a preternatural interest in metaphysics and philosophy, yet as confused as any innocent by the vagaries of adult behavior, little Levi bears the added burden of living in a world that can literally change at the stroke of a pen.Aided by a wise pet ("Cat") and a favorite toy ("Bunny"), Levi encounters a frothing ectoplasmic Hegel and a woefully off-the-mark Freud. In less heady adventures, Levi contemplates why his parents disappear at night (and whether he is wholeheartedly pleased when they return each morning); the regrettable liberties taken with the English language; and the relationship between Bennetton and Pablo Neruda.Peter Blegvad's Book of Leviathan assembles the cream from Levi and Cat's adventures, published in The Independent on Sunday newspaper in the twilight years of the old Millennium. Blegvad's darkly humorous work has been described by Matt Groening as "one of the weirdest things I've ever stared at". Quirky and referential, dark and droll by turn, it follows the faceless baby Levi's journeys into and out of the world. They are escapes, but as some sage once observed, only a jailer would consider the term "escapist" pejorative.

The Illustrated Vivian Stanshall: A Fairytale of Grimm Art


Ki Longfellow - 2018
    Drunk, he slept through his own death. Vivian was the ineffable, unflappable, elegant and irreverently funny frontman and songwriter for the Bonzo Dog Dada Band, a group of art students who’d created a band unlike any other band one could name - and still adored by thousands long after their short time in the sun was knocked on the head by Vivian himself. "We were art students. We were Dada. We were making fun of the worst excesses of rock 'n roll. One day I looked around to discover we'd become what we were parodying." Written by his wife of 18 years, an artist in her own right, this is a behind-the-scenes, beneath-the-sheets, under the bed tale of an actual genius – few who admired him would disagree. In many ways this is Vivian through his own private words gleaned from his personal journals. It’s also full of up close and revealing portraits of legends: Keith Moon, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix, George Harrison, Steve Winwood, Stephen Fry, Michael Palin, John Peel, Joe Cocker, and so many more. But even more than all that, it’s an ART BOOK: crammed full of Vivian’s paintings, sketches, unpublished family photos, letters and poems.Vivian Stanshall was the last of the true Bohemians. This is also a tale of Dada, a mad sad glad voyage through life on a grand scale made by one of England’s greatest treasures: the genius who was Vivian Stanshall.(As Ki writes: all memory is Kurosawa's "Rashomon". These are her memories accompanied by Vivian's actual journals.)

Lana del Rey - Ultraviolence


Lana Del Rey - 2014
    This chart-topping 2014 album release from Lana Del Rey is presented in piano/vocal/guitar arrangements for all 11 songs: Brooklyn Baby * Cruel World * Money Power Glory * Old Money * The Other Woman * Pretty When You Cry * Sad Girl * Ultraviolence * West Coast * and more.

Babylon


René Crevel - 1927
    Crevel explores the private worlds of children and their sexual imaginations in this important novel, now republished in the prestigious Sun & Moon Classics. A free-spirited young girl witnesses her father elope with a beautiful English cousin, the chambermaid run off with and then kill the gardener, her grandmother seduce her mother's new fiance, and her mother finally accept an arranged marriage with the bizarre Mac-Louf, darling of the Society for Protection by Rational Experience.

Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder


Mark Nelson - 2006
    Presenting the most compelling explanation yet for the bizarre nature of the Black Dahlia murder, this volume includes never-before published crime-scene photographs and links the alleged killer to a vast array of influential people.

Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell


Deborah Solomon - 2004
    Legends about Cornell abound--as the shy hermit, the devoted family caretaker, the artistic innocent--but never before Utopia Parkway has he been presented for what he was: a brilliant, relentlessly serious artist whose stature has now reached monumental proportions. Cornell was haunted by dreams and visions, yet the site of his imaginings couldn't have been more ordinary: a small house he shared with his mother and invalid brother in Queens, New York. In its cluttered basement, he spent his nights arranging photographs, cut-outs and other humble disjecta into some of the most romantic works to exist in three dimensions. Cornell was no recluse, however: admired by successive generations of vanguard artists, he formed friendships with figures as diverse as Duchamp, de Kooning, and Warhol and had romantically charged encounters with Susan Sontag and Yoko Ono--not to mention unrequited crushes on countless shop girls and waitresses. All this he recorded compulsively in a diary that, along with his shadow boxes, forms one of the oddest and most affecting records ever made of a life. It is from such documents, and from a decade of sustained attention to Cornell, that Deborah Solomon has fashioned the definitive biography of one of America's most powerful and unusual modern artists.

Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents


Tom McDonough - 2002
    The first section of the issue contained previously unpublished critical texts, and the second section contained translations of primary texts that had previously been unavailable in English. The emphasis was on the SI's profound engagement with the art and cultural politics of their time (1957-1972), with a strong argument for their primarily political and activist stance by two former members of the group, T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith.Guy Debord and the Situationist International supplements both sections. It reprints important, hard to find essays by Giorgio Agamben, Libero Andreotti, Jonathan Crary, Thomas Y. Levin, Greil Marcus, and Tom McDonough and doubles the number of translations of primary texts, which now encompass a broader and more representative range of the SI's writings on culture and language. In a field still dominated by hagiography, the critical texts were selected for their willingness to confront critically the history and legacy of the SI. They examine the group within the broader framework of the historical and neo-avant-gardes and, beyond that, the postwar world in general. The translations trace the SI's reflections on the legacy of the avant-garde in art and architecture, particularly on the linguistic and spatial significance of montage aesthetics. Many of the translated works are by Guy Debord (1932-1994), the impresario of the SI, especially known for his book The Society of the Spectacle.

Pataphysical Essays


René Daumal - 2012
    Alfred Jarry's posthumous novel, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, first appeared in 1911, and over the next 100 years, his pataphysical supersession of metaphysics would influence everyone from Marcel Duchamp and Boris Vian to Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. In 1948 in Paris, a group of writers and thinkers would found the College of 'Pataphysics, still going strong today. The iconoclastic René Daumal was the first to elaborate upon Jarry's unique and humorous philosophy. Though Daumal is better known for his unfinished novel Mount Analogue and his refusal to be adopted by the Surrealist movement, this newly translated volume of writings offers a glimpse of often overlooked Daumal: Daumal the pataphysician. Pataphysical Essays collects Daumal's overtly pataphysical writings from 1929 to 1941, from his landmark exposition on pataphysics and laughter to his late essay, "The Pataphysics of Ghosts." Daumal's "Treatise on Patagrams" offers the reader everything from a recipe for the disintegration of a photographer to instructions on how to drill a fount of knowledge in a public urinal. This volume also includes Daumal's column for the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, "Pataphysics This Month." Reading like a deranged encyclopedia, "Pataphysics This Month" describes a new mythology for the field of science, and amply demonstrates that the twentieth century had been a distinctly pataphysical era.Poet, philosopher, and self-taught Sanskrit scholar René Daumal (1908–1944) devoted himself to a lifelong attempt to think through death by means of what he called “experimental metaphysics”: an attempt to address metaphysical questions through scientific methodology. After co-founding the iconoclastic journal Le Grand Jeu and rejecting overtures from the Surrealist movement, he abandoned the literary path to become a disciple of the spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff.

Literature and Evil


Georges Bataille - 1957
    “It is guilty and should admit itself so.” The word, the flesh, and the devil are explored by this extraordinary intellect in the work of eight outstanding authors: Emily Bronte, Baudelaire, Blake, Michelet, Kafka, Proust, Genet and De Sade.Born in France in 1897, Georges Bataille was a radical philosopher, novelist, and critic whose writings continue to exert a vital influence on today's literature and thought.

Nights as Day, Days as Night


Michel Leiris - 1961
    (...) By transcribing the events of his daily life as if they were episodes in an ongoing dream, by recording his dreams as if they embodied the true narrative of his waking existence, Leiris in effect defuses the distinction between two.

Touch and Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine '79-'83


Tesco Vee - 2010
    Major fanatics of the new punk happenings in the late ’70s, TV and DS set out to chronicle, lambaste, ridicule, and heap praise on all they arbitrarily loved or hated in the music communities in the US and abroad.In laughably minuscule press runs by today’s standards, T & G was made by guys within the Midwest scene strictly for the edification of scenesters and pals in other cities like DC, Philly, Boston, LA, SF, Chicago, et al. Inspired by magazines such as Slash and Search and Destroy and writers like Claude Bessy and Chris Desjardines, TV and DS pumped out seventeen naughty, irreverent issues together, and TV did another five solo.Magazines like Forced Exposure and Your Flesh, among others, soon fired up Xerox machines themselves, and the rest is history. So is the legendary independent record label launched from this zine, and so are the bands covered inside: Black Flag, Minor Threat, the Misfits, Negative Approach, the Fix, the Avengers, the Necros, Discharge, Iron Cross, Youth Brigade, Faith, Die Kreuzen, Crucifix, Poison Idea—and all the other punks worth their weight in glorious black and white.

Tape Delay


Charles Neal - 1987
    A virtual Who's Who of people who've done the most in the eighties to drag music out of commercial confinement."--NMEContributors: Marc Almond, Dave Ball, Cabaret Voltaire, Nick Cave, Chris & Cosey, Coil, Einsturzende Neubauten, The Fall, Diamanda Galas, Genesis P-Orridge, Michael Gira, The Hafler Trio, Matt Johnson (The The), Laibach, Lydia Lunch, New Order, Psychic TV, Boyd Rice, Henry Rollins, Clint Ruin, Silverstar Amoeba, Mark E. Smith (The Fall), Sonic Youth, Stevo, Mark Stewart, Swans, Test Dept, David Tibet (Current 93), Touch.

Paris Peasant


Louis Aragon - 1926
    publication of Simon Watson Taylor's authoritative translation, completed after consultations with the author. Unconventional in form--Aragon consciously avoided recognizable narration or character development--Paris Peasant is, in the author's words, -a mythology of the modern.- The book uses the city of Paris as a stage, or framework, and Aragon interweaves his text with images of related ephemera: cafe menus, maps, inscriptions on monuments and newspaper clippings. A detailed description of a Parisian arcade (nineteenth-century precursor to the mini-mall) and another of the Buttes-Chaumont park, are among the great set pieces within Aragon's swirling prose of philosophy, dream and satire. Andre Breton wrote of this work: -no one could have been a more astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms; no one else could have been carried away by such intoxicating reveries about a sort of secret life of the city. . . .-

The Fantod Pack


Edward Gorey - 1969
    Each of the 20 cards forecasts a list of outcomes for the user ranging from the merely unpleasant (loss of hair, breakage, thwarted ambitions) to the downright horrible (catarrh, spasms, shriveling). The 32-page booklet provides interpretation of the cards courtesy of one Madame Groeda Weyrd, who Gorey tells us “is of mixed Finnish and Egyptian extraction, has devoted her life to divination, and is the author of, among a shelf of other works, Floating Tambourines, a collection of esoteric verse, and The Future Speaks Through Entrails.” Who but Gorey to make mirth from a kaleidoscope of catastrophe?