The Thing Quarterly Issue 25 (A Catalogue Raisonné)
Published by THE THING Quarterly. Edited by Brian Roettinger. Introduction by Aaron Rose.
Los Angeles–based artist and two-time Grammy-nominated graphic designer Brian Roettinger is celebrated for the graphic design and art direction he has created for artists, architects and musicians such as No Age, Liars, Beach House and Jay-Z. In 2009, he was chosen as Rolling Stone's Album Designer of the Year. Roettinger's issue for The Thing Quarterly is a massive (412-page) catalogue raisonné that collects, documents and indexes the majority of his design work produced to date. The works, which are reproduced in black and white from photocopies, are not presented chronologically, nor is it clear, upon first inspection, which project is which: an early version is shown, sometimes just a sketch, and in some cases, the final printer proofs. Unlike a traditional monograph, Roettinger's reimagined interpretation is a testament to the process itself, and underscores the poles of his approach, which is both visibly chaotic and meticulously organized.
PUBLISHER THE THING Quarterly
BOOK FORMAT Boxed, Flexi, 6.5 x 9 in. / 412 pgs / 32 color / 384 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 2/24/2015 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2015 p. 158
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780984915057TRADE List Price: $60.00 CDN $79.00
AVAILABILITY Out of stock
STATUS: Out of stock
Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.
Published by Damiani/Alleged Press. Edited by Aaron Rose. Text by Jeffrey Deitch, Michael Mann.
Self-taught Italian photographer Gusmano Cesaretti (born 1944) was one of the very first photographers to document the street culture of East Los Angeles, and The Thrill Is Gone is a retrospective history of his celebrated photographic work of the 1970s. Chapters include “Bikers,” “East L.A. Diary,” “Folsom Prison,” “Maria Sabina,” “Muscle Beach” and “Street Writers,” along with selected other iconic images from this important time in the photographer’s creative history. As a boy growing up in Italy, Cesaretti listened to jazz and rock ’n’ roll on the radio, and was drawn to the worlds of Marlon Brando and James Dean in Hollywood movies. But when he arrived in the U.S.--Cesaretti has lived in Los Angeles since 1970--it was the raw energy, graffiti, culture and people of East L.A. that seduced him. His early work--featured here in the chapter “East L.A. Diary”--documents his immersion in the low-rider subculture of the Klique car club. Cesaretti credits his poor English with allowing him to earn the trust of local residents--he found it hard to understand their graffiti on his own and had to ask for help. Independent curator Aaron Rose describes him as “one of the few true artists documenting outlaw cultures in the tradition of Robert Frank.”
Mike Mills' films and design work have dominated the visual landscape of the past two decades, through record covers and music videos for bands like Air, Blonde Redhead and Sonic Youth, movies such as The Architecture of Reassurance (2000) and Paperboys (2001) and his first feature-length film, Thumbsucker (2004), starring Keanu Reeves and Tilda Swinton. 2011 sees the release of Mills' new feature film, Beginners, starring Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer. McGregor plays a character who, as Mills describes, “shares some things with me: we both do graphic design, we both often figure out what we're thinking by drawing, we both have dogs and we both did record covers for a very real band named The Sads. This book contains all the drawings which I (Mike) drew, and that Oliver (played by Ewan) works with in the film. Oliver has the unfortunate idea of creating an illustrated 'History of Sadness' as a record cover for the The Sads, including such episodes as: Neanderthal man realizes he's outclassed by homo sapiens man, the pilgrims, industrialization, birth of the novel, pets in general and many more.” This volume also features a new series of drawings: an illustrated History of Love which includes such chapters as: the first butt to attract, great lovers in film, flappers, free love's not so easy, internal vs external problems and many more.
Published by JRP|Ringier. Text by Aaron Rose, Mandy Kahn.
I have gathered a garland of other men's flowers, the French philosopher Montaigne famously wrote, "and nothing is mine but the cord that binds them." The first decade of the twenty-first century appears to belong to the collagist, for whom the creative act is not creation sui generis, but rather the collecting, cutting and pasting of the already extant. Collage, which began as an art meant to confound the brain with its disparate components, has jumped the flat surface, so that almost all musicians, designers, writers and bloggers might today be described as collage artists. Collage Culture contains two essays, buttressed by artworks and vividly typeset by Brian Roettinger. The first essay, by Mandy Kahn, chronicles collage's forays into the realms of music, fashion, literature and architecture. The second, by Aaron Rose, examines what he sees as the neutralization of countercultural energies in today's pic 'n' mix world.
Barry McGee's art buzzes with an infectious street vitality that celebrates the rich pageant of city living, while lambasting its ills, overstimulations, frustrations, addictions. His early years as a graffiti artist, tagging on the streets of San Francisco under such monikers as Ray Fong, Twist and Twisto, still nourish his drive to inscribe the blank face of modern life with the personal and the handmade. A part of the early 1990s art and graffiti boom associated with San Francisco's Mission School (others include Clare Rojas, Chris Johanson and Aaron Noble) and with the Beautiful Loser generation, McGee synthesizes a wide range of resources, including the Mexican muralists, anonymous street art and San Francisco Beat poetry, all of which are notably characterized by a sense of public address that McGee never neglects to convey in his own work. His paintings, drawings and installations spill over with graphic energy and political anger, and direct exhortations to his audience to respond to the life around them. This hardcover artist's book takes the form of a visual collage, incorporating photographs, drawings, paintings and documentation of past and present installations. It is the definitive volume on a much-loved artist.
Barry McGee was born in San Francisco in 1968 and studied at the San Francisco Art Institute. He continues to live and work in that city. He has had solo exhibitions at Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts, Deitch Projects in New York and the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.
Graphics Films is the first retrospective monograph on one of the hardest-working men in contemporary creative culture. For more than 15 years, Mike Mills' works in the fields of design and film have determined the visual landscape of our times. Graphics Films is a painstakingly produced document of Mills' career to date, including many never-before-seen examples of his works in graphic design, installation, publications and film projects. Past projects by Mills include music videos for Air ("Sexy Boy"), Blonde Redhead ("Top Ranking"), Yoko Ono ("Walking on Thin Ice") and Bran Van 3000 ("Afrodiziak") and album cover designs for the Beastie Boys (the Root Down EP), Sonic Youth (Washing Machine), Air (Moon Safari and Kelly Watch the Stars) and others. He has designed graphics and textiles for Marc Jacobs and created the identity for X-Girl Clothing, and has exhibited his unique graphic installations worldwide, with solo shows at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York and Colette in Paris, among others. In 1996 Mills cofounded The Directors Bureau, a multidisciplinary production company, with Roman Coppola. Since then, he has directed an impressive slew of music videos and films including The Architecture of Reassurance (2000) and Paperboys (2001), both of which were official selections at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2004 he completed his first feature film, Thumbsucker (starring Keanu Reeves and Tilda Swinton), and he is currently at work on his second.
Published by Damiani. Text by Aaron Rose. Contributions by Sean Kennerly, Jack Hanley.
For more than a decade, Chris Johanson has been transforming day-to-day subject matter into simple stories in paintings that make bright, flat reference to illustration or folk art: The New York Times called their look "a down-on-its-luck, cheerfully abject cartoon style… reminiscent of artists like William Wegman, Raymond Pettibon and Sue Williams." The same primary palette and angular compositions make Johanson's abstract works, which often take the form of geometric patterns or starbursts, into gleeful but sophisticated takes on Modernism. This, the artist's first major monograph, is also only the second title from Alleged Press, created by Aaron Rose of the influential Alleged gallery (1992-2002) and organizer of the groundbreaking traveling exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Beautiful Losers, in which Johanson featured prominently alongside artists such as Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Phil Frost, Spike Jonze and Harmony Korine. Please listen I have something to tell you about what is assembles Johanson's complete works to date, as well as several new pieces that have appeared nowhere else. Each spins a world from small, diffuse details: these are scenes where nude dancers, distracted pedestrians, forests, abstract rainbows and "good vibes" exist next to one another, on a sinister, comic edge that, even in its apparent brightness, can reflect the darkest places of human experience.
Published by Damiani. Foreword by Fabio De Luca. Introduction by Uwe Husslein. Text by Aaron Rose, Valerio Dehò.
As the Velvet Underground put it, "I'll be your mirror, reflect what you are, in case you don't know." Sound Zero opens on the Velvet Underground's work with Warhol, and follows the close, even mimetic, relationship between Pop Art and pop music through the psychedelic explosion of the 70s and the graffiti, hip-hop and skate punk of the 80s and beyond. From Pop's simple and direct communication, colorful and clean, through psychedelia's overabundance of symphonic chaos, to the remixed and appropriated work of street artists and musicians, the interrelations are clear, and clearly influential. Sound Zero tracks them in over 100 color illustrations of paintings, photographs, objects, installations, graphics, placards, video and paintings, and a parallel universe of record covers, posters and performances. It features works by Robert Rauschenberg, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Hamilton, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Chris Johanson, Barry McGee and Ari Marcopoulos; an interview with Aaron Rose; and a timeline showing developments in Pop, psychedelic and street art alongside the history of popular music.
Published by D.A.P./Iconoclast. Edited by Aaron Rose and Christian Strike. Interview with Agnes B.
The greatest cultural accomplishments in history have never been the result of the brainstorms of marketing men, corporate focus groups or any homogenized methods; they have always happened organically. More often than not, these manifestations have been the result of a few like-minded people coming together to create something new and original for no other purpose than a common love of doing it. In the 1990s, a loose-knit group of American artists and creators, many just out of their teens, began their careers in just such a way. Influenced by the popular underground youth subcultures of the day, such as skateboarding, graffiti, street fashion and independent music, artists like Shepard Fairey, Mark Gonzales, Spike Jonze, Margaret Kilgallen, Mike Mills, Barry McGee, Phil Frost, Chris Johanson, Harmony Korine and Ed Templeton began to create art that reflected the lifestyles they led. Many had no formal training and almost no conception of the inner workings of the art world. They learned their crafts through practice, trial and error, and good old-fashioned innovation. Not since the Beat Generation have we seen a group of creative individuals with such a unified aesthetic sense and varied cultural facets. The world of art has been greatly affected by their accomplishments as have the worlds of fashion, music, literature, film, and, ironically, athletics. Beautiful Losers is a retrospective celebration of this spirit, with hundreds of artworks by over two dozen artists, from precursors like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Larry Clark, to more recent adherents Ryan McGinness, KAWS and Geoff McFetridge. Work in all conceivable mediums is included, plus reproductions of reams of ephemera. The accompanying essays are contributed by a half-dozen writers who have championed these beautiful losers from the start. This paperback reprint includes more pages, more images, an exhibition checklist, installation shots from a variety of exhibitions and an interview with Beautiful Losers advocate Agnes B.
Ari Marcopoulos immerses himself completely in the personalities and scenes he has photographed, but more than that, he seems to always be anticipating the zeitgeist. As a result, he has become one of our chief documenters of contemporary culture, as it emerges. Whether he was hanging in the East Village in the 1980s at age 23 as Warhol's assistant (and snapping Basquiat at his most intimate), recording the burgeoning hip-hop scene of the late 1980s, riding along with multi-ethnic New York skateboard kids in the 1990s, or shooting snowboard schussers hurtling down a mountain (or chilling in the lodge) in recent years, Marcopoulos's pictures always penetrate the heart of the underground of the moment and its denizens. This volume is the first in a new, ambitious series called Alleged Press, a collaboration between Damiani and the renowned curator Aaron Rose.
Published by Deitch Projects. Essay by Aaron Rose.
Known for his expressive, skater-punk, urban landscape drawings that combine image and text in an irreverent, angst-ridden, deliberately pathetic sort of way, Chris Johanson takes over where Raymond Pettibon leaves off. Less angry and witty than his predecessor, Johanson scribbles colorful, dead-on portraits of street culture and the yuppies, hippies, hipsters, losers and drunkards who inhabit it.
Published by D.A.P./Iconoclast. Edited by Aaron Rose and Christian Strike. Essays by Alex Baker, Thom Collins, Jeffrey Deitch, Rene deGuzman, Carlo McCormick and Jocko Weyland.
The greatest cultural accomplishments in history have never been the result of the brainstorms of marketing men, corporate focus groups, or any homogenized methods; they have always happened organically. More often than not, these manifestations have been the result of a few like-minded people coming together to create something new and original for no other purpose than a common love of doing it. In the 1990s, a loose-knit group of American artists and creators, many just out of their teens, began their careers in just such a way. Influenced by the popular underground youth subcultures of the day, such as skateboarding, graffiti, street fashion, and independent music, artists like Shepard Fairey, Mark Gonzales, Spike Jonze, Margaret Kilgallen, Mike Mills, Barry McGee, Phil Frost, Chris Johanson, Harmony Korine, and Ed Templeton began to create art that reflected the lifestyles they led. Many had no formal training and almost no conception of the inner workings of the art world. They learned their crafts through practice, trial and error, and good old-fashioned innovation. Not since the Beat Generation have we seen a group of creative individuals with such a unified aesthetic sense and varied cultural facets. The world of art has been greatly affected by their accomplishments as have the worlds of fashion, music, literature, film, and, ironically, athletics. Over the years, the group has matured, and many have become more establishment-oriented; but no matter, their independent spirit has remained steadfast. Beautiful Losers is a retrospective celebration of this spirit, with hundreds of artworks by over two dozen artists, from precursors like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Larry Clark, to more recent adherents Ryan McGinniss, KAWS, and Geoff McFetridge. Work in all conceivable mediums is included, plus reproductions of reams of ephemera. The accompanying essays are contributed by a half-dozen writers who have championed these beautiful losers from the start.
Gusmano Cesaretti: Fragments of Los Angeles 1969-1989
Mike Mills: Drawings from the Film Beginners
Collage Culture
Barry McGee
Mike Mills: Graphics Films
Chris Johanson: Please Listen I Have Something to Tell You About What Is
Sound Zero
Beautiful Losers
Ari Marcopoulos
Chris Johanson
Beautiful Losers