A compendium to the widely traveled installation of the same title, this book guides us through the “set” of a 19th century museum room where all aspects of what we see are covered with traces of the artist’s likeness. (Self) portraits which take the form of vanity mirrors, watermark porcelain tea cups, chocolates, cameos, designs for her tombstone commemorative stamps showing the hospital where the artist was born, even period chairs upholstered with a cloth pattern of the artist’s dental X-rays. The texts delve us into the worlds of Hegel on The Greek Profile, Virginia Woolf’s The Lady in the Looking Glass, Ovid’s myths of Echo and Narcissus, Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, and Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. The overall effect of this elegant, subtle and ironic work is ultimately quite eerie.

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

A comprehensive record of the London-based art collective BANK’s notorious project from the late 1990s, a fierce critic of the language elements of the art market.

Between 1998 and 1999, BANK operated The BANK Fax-Bak Service. For the project, the group’s members, Simon Bedwell, John Russell and Milly Thompson proof-read and copy-edited more than 300 press releases published by galleries in London and New York. The procedure was simple: after adding their mocking corrections, the artists faxed the promotional texts back to the respective galleries. The BANK Fax-Bak Service exposes the art market’s (ongoing) sisyphean effort to legitimize itself through boasting, self-important and nonsensical language. Published in collaboration with Treize (Paris), this volume is a comprehensive record of BANK’s notorious project from the late 1990s.

Edited by Tenzing Barshee, Gallien Déjean, Dan Solbach. Designed by Dan Solbach.