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
Performance People
Ei Arakawa
Published by Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Artists Space, New York & Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2021, 414 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 15.2 × 22.8 cm
Price: €34

This first monograph on Ei Arakawa allows a profound understanding of Arakawas complex artistic practice in general: on behalf of Illustrations, performance scripts, notes, and sketches it unfolds a kind of archive along the performances as well as the performance people the artist has worked with over the past ten years.

With texts from Ei Arakawa, Eva Birkenstock, Sarah Chow, John Kelsey, Jutta Koether, Erika Lindström & Reiko Tomii. Reiko Tomii’s talk on Ei Arakawa can be seen here.

Designed by Hit Studio.

#2021 #eiarakawa #evabirkenstock #hit #juttakoether #performance #reikotomii #verlagderbuchhandlungwaltherkonig
Retrospektive
Tetsumi Kudo
Published by Fridericianum, Kassel & Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2010, 356 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 19.5 × 26 cm, English / German
Price: €39

Bottled humanism, colored neon contaminations, tattered flaps of skin, and limp penises bring humanist self-assurance crashing to the ground. What appears as poison or chemical devastation is in fact an appeal to understand metamorphosis as a state of being. Over a period of three decades, from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s, the Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo created a consistent body of work that serves as a model for contemporary conceptual approaches of Posthumanism and the New Materialism. The catalogue brings together contributions by artists and theorists and documents Kudo’s comprehensive oeuvre in work and archive images as well as exhibition views from the retrospective at the Fridericianum (2016). Texts from Mike Kelley, Antje Krause-Wahl, Susanne Pfeffer & Reiko Tomii. Designed by Dan Solbach.

#2021 #dansolbach #fridericianumkassel #mikekelley #reikotomii #susannepfeffer #tetsumikudo #verlagderbuchhandlungwaltherkonig
QUANTUM ART MANIFESTO
Yutaka Matsuzawa
Published by Yale Union, Portland, 2019, 112 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 18 × 25.5 cm, English
Price: €28 (Out of stock)

Yutaka Matsuzawa (1922–2006) was considered the father of Japanese conceptual art. In his pursuit of ways to express the invisible invisibly, Matsuzawa developed a unique understanding of conceptual art that both elevated and transcended the typical notions of conceptual art in the western, euro-centric art worlds.

A new edition of Yutaka Matsuzawa’s groundbreaking book, Quantum Art Manifesto was published on the occasion of the exhibition Yutaka Matsuzawa at Yale Union, curated by Alan Longino and Reiko Tomii. Including the original Japanese text, the original English translation (with minor edits), a foreword by Haruo Matsuzawa, and an essay by Reiko Tomii.

Offset printed by Gary Robbins at Container Corps with tipped-in color fields and Matsuzawa’s Psi stamp. Exposed spine Smyth-sewn binding. Dust jacket letterpressed by Aaron Flint Jamison. This new edition of the publication is now also out of print. Images of the exhibition can be seen here. And a text by Alan Longino on Yutaka Matsuzawa can be found here.

#2019 #alanlongino #japaneseavantgarde #reikotomii #yaleunion #yutakamatsuzawa