Repetition
Peter Handke
Published by The Last Books, Amsterdam, 2013, 352 pp., 10.8 × 17.6 cm, English
Price: €10

A reissue of Ralph Manheim’s translation of Handke’s 1986 novel Repetition, previously out of print for a quarter of a century.

“In Repetition, Handke allows the peculiar light which illuminates the space under a leafy canopy or a tent canvas to glisten between words, placed here with astounding caution and precision; in doing so, he succeeds in making the text into a sort of refuge amid the arid lands which, even in the culture industry, grow larger day by day.” W. G. Sebald

#2013 #peterhandke #philbaber #thelastbooks
Documenting Cadere, 1972–1978 (poster)
Published by MuZEE, Oostende, 2013, folded poster (b/w ill.), 21.7 × 18.5 cm (folded), 43.4 × 55 cm (unfolded), English/Dutch
Price: €55 (Out of stock)

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Documenting Cadere, 1972–1978, MuZEE, Oostende, 2 March–2 May, 2013, curated by Lynda Morris.

André Cadere belonged to a generation of European artists who contested the art object and institutional framework of the art world in which they operated. Best known for carrying his Barres de Bois Rond—Round Bars of Wood—wherever he went. His appearances at the most important private views of contemporary art across Europe became legendary. With his round bar of wood in hand he would intervene in a provocative way on other artists’ exhibitions in galleries and museums.

You can see Lynda Morris talking about Cadere here.

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

#2013 #andrecadere #ephemera #lyndamorris
Sherrie Levine
Published by Simon Lee Gallery, London, 2013, 40 pp. (colour & b/w ill.), 17 × 24.5 cm, English
Price: €20

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Sherrie Levine at Simone Lee Gallery, London, 28 November, 2012–5 February, 2013.

Sherrie Levine rose to prominence as a member of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists based in New York in the late 1970s and 1980s whose work examined the structures of signification underlying mass-circulated images, and, in many cases, directly appropriated these images in order to imbue them with new, critically inflected meaning. Since then, Levine has created a singular and complex body of work in a variety of media that often explicitly reproduces artworks and motifs from the Western art-historical canon as well as non-Western cultures.

#2013 #sherrielevine
Through the 70s
Murakami Saburō
Published by ARTCOURT Gallery, Osaka, 2013, 170 pp. hardcover with dust jacket (colour & b/w ill.), 18.2 × 25.8 cm, Japanese/English
Price: €58

Murakami Saburō’s ‘Paper-Breaking’ performances, in which he burst through multiple sheets of kraft paper stretched across wooden frames with a sharp crack, were synonymous with the artist. He performed them on close to 40 occasions, between 1955 and 1994, throughout his artistic career. Murakami said that, in 1955, he was inspired to adopt this approach after his son came crashing through the fusuma (sliding door) of his locked room (where the artist was polishing up a plan for a new work to present in the 1st Gutai Art Exhibition) in a bid to get his father to play with him. From that time on, ‘Paper-Breaking’ became a physical means for him to present and investigate questions related to time and space, chance and inevitability, and the self and others.

With essays by Ikegami Tsukasa and Reiko Tomii.

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

#2013 #gutai #japaneseavantgarde #murakamisaburo #performance #reikotomii
Souffleuse der Isolation
Kai Althoff
Published by JRP Ringier, Geneva, 2013, 264 pp. hardcover with cloth binding (colour & b/w ill.), 25.9 × 28.1 cm, English/German
Price: €72

Kai Althoff creates installations, drawings, paintings, photographs, videos and collages; he is also a musician and performer. His fragmentary and enigmatic aesthetic, where the figurative sometimes tends towards a stylization bordering on abstraction, is inspired by subcultures, historical events, religious imagery and his own childhood.

This comprehensive publication is Althoff’s third monograph. It contains never before seen works in addition to images from every stage of the artist’s career, concentrating most heavily on work since 2002.

#2013 #jrpringier #kaialthoff
Optimundus: M HKA 08 02 13 - 19 05 13
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys
Published by Sternberg Press, Berlin; M HKA, Antwerp & Kunsthalle Wien, 2013, 68 pp. (colour & b/w ill.), 18 × 24 cm, English
Price: €19

Optimundus accompanies Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys’s major exhibition at M HKA of the same title—the term they use for their particular conception of the parallel world. Narratives and criticism by Michael Van den Abeele, Nav Haq, Jennifer Krasinksi, Dieter Roelstraete, and artist Peter Wächtler are presented along with photos, drawings, and text illustrating the unsteady barriers and tense contact between Optimundus and the real world.

#2013 #dieterroelstraete #josdegruyterandharaldthys #michaelvandenabeele #navhaq #peterwachtler #sternbergpress