First Edition of Yayoi Kusama’s first novel, published in Japan in 1978 and never translated into English, is best described as a faux autobiography, describing Kusama’s years in New York in the 50s and 60s. Having left behind a strict family life in post-war Japan, Kusama entered a period of heightened creativity. She was free to make what she wanted, but plagued by fears of intimacy and inadequacy. Her art became a form of therapy, and she went on to create a unique body of work that not only parallels and transcends Pop art, Minimal art and Happenings of the ’60s, but remains influential today.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

Atsuko Tanaka was a Japanese avant-garde artist best known for her Neo-Dada Electric Dress (1956), a garment made from hundreds of lightbulbs painted in primary colors. This iconic work, which she wore to exhibitions, functions as a conflation of Japanese traditional clothing with modern urbanization, bringing an unexpected and challenging interpretation to both. “I wanted to shatter stable beauty with my work,” Tanaka once said. A member of the Gutai movement, much of her work used domestic objects like lightbulbs, textiles, doorknobs, and doorbells. With these objects, the artist was able to create work about the body without a body present. She maintained a broad practice that included performance “happenings,” sculpture, and installation, while her later work focusing on two-dimensional painting, with colorful organic abstract shapes connecting circles and lines.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

Edition of 80 copies signed and numbered by the artist, plus 8 artist’s proofs.

道具 / Tool consists of a set of four printed images of forks (two made of silver, two of plastic). Dramatically enlarged and slightly deformed, the utensils stand against a black background, strongly affirming their presence—until they are folded and put back in their custom-made box.

As in some of her previous works, Batia Suter is dealing here with typology and objecthood. These four images—which the artist photographed from her own collection of absurd cutlery—look like samples from a kitchenware catalogue focusing as much on the common features of forks as on their potential deformities and eccentricities. Recalling Karl Blossfeldt’s close-up photographs of plants, they highlight the specificity and variety of forms hidden in ordinary things, as well as the strange, almost threatening nature of these “predatory” tools.

A project by Will Brown. Text by Jean Conner. Photographs by Jason Fulford.

Artist and filmmaker Bruce Conner’s (1933–2008) mobility was severely limited for the last five years of his life, when he rarely left the San Francisco home he shared with his wife, Jean. To aid in his physical navigation of its spaces, he worked with assistants to install a succession of solid brass handles in each and every room—surrounding the stove, down the boat-like stairwell, inside the recesses of the bedroom closet. At last count, the handles, a labyrinth of critical support, numbered 163. Still in situ after his death in 2008, the handles are arguably Conner’s last great work—at once physical and metaphysical, fragmentary and elusive, elegant and anonymous.

Will Brown is a collaborative project founded by Lindsey White, Jordan Stein and David Kasprzak.

Unbidden Tongues #7: Continuity Girl unpacks the ‘forensic feminist methodology’ developed by writer, curator and administrator Naomi Pearce. Informed by research conducted in various personal archives of women administrators of artist studio spaces in London from the 1970s until now, the components of Pearce’s writing span mortuary field notes, interview transcripts, intimate first-person accounts and an auto-fictive mystery novella. These various evidentiary approaches blend to form an unconventional casebook that puts forward the complicating factors underpinning the process of writing history in the first place. In this particular title, the biographical lens focuses on Shirley Read—a photographer, writer, teacher, administrator and oral historian, whose work has been largely overlooked, until now.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Cut a Door in the Wolf at MACRO Museum, Rome, 11 November, 2021–16 March, 2022. An exhibition in the form of a single, site-specific artwork by Jason Dodge. In exploring systems made up of organic and inorganic matter, he is interested in the refuse that humans shed every day: micro- and macro-landscapes made up of the familiar and often discarded things that result from our individual and collective habits. Dodge recognises this not as a singular artistic process, but rather as a shared landscape in which cause and effect are circular phenomena that belong to everyone. He therefore investigates the potential of his audience as producers of meaning. This publication documents the work through a series of photographs.