Nowhere is the potential of the printed book better demonstrated than in art publishing. From binding to endpapers, printing to editorial composition, the visual book is where the innovations tend to happen, and where printing reaches the peaks of its possibilities. Title after title in the new D.A.P. Spring 2011 catalog celebrates the pleasures of the printed visual book, most notably by revisiting and retrieving its rich history. Numerous publications reprint either ephemera or fugitive/rare publications: from Aperture, Photographic Memory (the title that opens our catalog); from JRP, Mark Morrisroe , much of whose work emphasizes the materiality of the photograph; from Primary Information, a compendium of the Destroy All Monsters zines; from Errata Editions, facsimile reprints of seminal photo books such as Alexey Brodovitch: Ballet and Walker Evans’ American Photographs; from RM, Mexico Illustrated 1920-1950; and from Czech publisher Kant, three surveys of Czech Cubist book design. The cover and binding for CCA Wattis’ Huckleberry Finn—the latest in their series of books and exhibitions responding to canonical American novels—replicates an early edition of the novel; Canadian conceptualist Rodney Graham also pays homage to a bygone era of book design, with British Weathervanes (Christine Burgin).
Among the many beautifully designed books this season, one might highlight the inaugural title in Dennis Freedman’s new Freedman Damiani imprint, Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Eleven; the satisfying bulkiness and card-style cover stock of Metropolis’ Architects’ Sketchbooks; the faux leatherette, debossed lettering and fine typesetting of Yohji Yamamoto’s autobiography My Dear Bomb, from Ludion; the energetic page layout of Adelita’s book on David Bowie’s early London years; Hatje Cantz’s extravagant ruby velour binding for Surreal Objects; the fantastic overall production of David Zwirner’s Mamma Andersson and Jockum Nordstrom monograph, Who Is Sleeping on My Pillow; Fraenkel Gallery’s adventurous printed Plexiglas cover for Mel Bochner: Photographs and Not Photographs; Kunst Nürnberg’s blue leather binding for McDermott & McGough’s book of cyanotype photographs of their home in Ireland, No. 26 Sandymount Avenue; Rinko Kawauchi’s Illuminance, from Aperture; Xavier Barral’s magnificent oversize monograph of Jean Gaumy’s mountain landscapes, D'Après Nature; and, among many others, Rimaldas Viksraitis: Grimaces of the Weary Village, Aram Tanis: Blowing Smoke and Seahorses and Charles Avery: Onomatopoeia.
Through Kant’s aforementioned Cubist design books and several other titles this season, we encounter new perspectives on modernism, whether through neglected artists like Sonia Delaunay (Cooper-Hewitt), or the less familiar nooks of well-known oeuvres, as in The Museum of Modern Art’s gem , Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914; or through multidisciplinary treatments of modernist movements, as in Hatje Cantz’s The Total Artwork in Expressionism, Mercatorfonds’ Illusions of Realityand the Irish Museum’s The Moderns and (at the tail end of modernism) Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts.
These latter surveys suggest that cultures thrive best when the arts cross-pollinate, and the photographs of Robert Rauschenberg (D.A.P.) and Charles Brittin (Hatje Cantz) record eras in which exchange flowed freely across milieux, in 1950s and 60s New York and Los Angeles. Siglio Press, based in Los Angeles, and making its debut on the D.A.P. list this season, orients its publishing agenda precisely in this realm of overlap, as its new title It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image + Text Work by Women Artists and Writers attests. Kerber’s Not in Fashion looks at the more recent convergence of fashion, photography and art in the 1990s, in the work of Vanessa Beecroft, Helmut Lang, Juergen Teller and Wolfgang Tillmans; and Poligrafa’s critical compendium on New Brutalist architects Peter and Alison Smithson underlines their early emergence alongside the likes of Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi in the British Pop art milieu and the landmark 1956 show This Is Tomorrow, the catalogue to which has become a design classic and is now reprinted by the Whitechapel Gallery.
From Van Cleef and Arpels to Destroy All Monsters, Konrad Witz to Andrew Kuo, the D.A.P. list naturally reflects—and indeed stimulates, and is even built on—the conversations that happen across the arts. In the Spring 2011 catalog, three historical figures notably embody a polymathic scope: the wonderfully unclassifiable Paul Scheerbart, utopian theorist, fantasy novelist and advocate of glass architecture, inspiration to Bruno Taut, Walter Benjamin and glass artist Josiah McElheny, whose The Perpetual Motion Machine is published by Wakefield Press; or the incredible Otto Neurath, philosopher and information design pioneer, whose efforts to establish a global vocabulary of visual signs (Isotype) is surveyed in NAi/DAP’s new paperback edition of Otto Neurath and the Global Polis. And for sheer range of application, who could match Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the sleek, bullet-like Dymaxion Car, the subject of a beautiful clothbound monograph from Ivorypress.
In such diversely informed company, we are reminded how often art renews itself from disciplines previously deemed outside itself, for example in Amy Cutler’s uses of early children’s illustration, Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s canny restagings of cinematic idiom or the 26 artists gathered in the Walker Art Center’s The Spectacular of Vernacular, all of whom utilize craft, folklore and roadside kitsch.
A barometer for both international visual culture and the most sophisticated uses of the book format, the new D.A.P. catalog also offers a preview of the most exciting shows opening in spring and summer 2011. Here on www.artbook.com, it can be viewed as a slide show, or downloaded as pdf, alongside updates on our blog from book events, signings and fairs, excerpts from books now releasing and our ever-expanding content on books, artists, publishers and bookstores.