AIDS Activist Legacies

RSVP

Please join us Saturday July 19th 4pm at Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore for a conversation by Visual AIDS presented in tandem with Love Rules: The Harm Reduction Archives of Heather Edney and Richard Berkowitz, Visual AIDS' current exhibition at MoMA PS1.

Join us in-person or livestream on Instagram @artbookps1 The conversation centers three long-term HIV survivors and AIDS activists. Richard Berkowitz is joined by Linda H Scruggs and Ivy Kwan Arce as they celebrate "How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach", Berkowitz' seminal work that laid the foundation for safe sex practices. Together, the three will trace the enduring impact of the text and how it has influenced their activist careers. The conversation will expand to more broadly highlight the importance of legacy work, prompting insights into how we properly archive histories and give activists their flowers while they're here.

Following the discussion, visitors are welcome to explore the exhibition and converse with the panelists.

"Love Rules: The Harm Reduction Archives of Heather Edney and Richard Berkowitz" is on view at MoMA PS1 from April 24 to October 6. MoMA PS1 is free for all New Yorkers.

For Ruth, the sky in los angeles
by Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and
David Horvitz

Signed by David Horvitz


An intimate, cross-generational conversation through mail art. American multimedia artist David Horvitz (born 1982) visited visual poet and mail artist Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt (born 1932) in her native Germany while conducting research in 2014. There, Horvitz discovered her archives of “typewritings,” graphic works that Wolf-Rehfeldt had used for mail art and sent across the globe from her studio in East Berlin in the 1970s. Later, Horvitz invited Wolf-Rehfeldt to use a disposable camera to record images of her house and garden and, in return, he photographed his studio in Los Angeles. These snapshots and dialogues are presented along with Horvitz’s text-based watercolors—such as For Ruth, the sky in los angeles and For Ruth, the wind to you, which were original sent as mail art. Together they constitute a delightful dialogue.

Spector Books, 2022 | Paperback, 9 x 6.25 in. / 112 pgs / 50 color. | $35.00

Sophie Calle: Suite Venitienne

Calle’s first artist’s book documents her pursuit of one man through the streets of Venice

After following strangers on the streets in Paris for months, photographing them and notating their movements, Sophie Calle ran into a man at an opening whom she had followed earlier that day. "During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. I decided to follow him," she writes at the beginning of Suite Vénitienne, her first artist's book and the crucible of her inimitable fusion of investigatory methods, fictional constructs, the plundering of real life and the composition of self. Over the course of almost two weeks in Venice, Calle notates, in time-stamped entries, her surveillance of Henri B., as well as her own emotions as she seeks, finds and follows him through the labyrinthine streets of Venice.

Her investigation is both methodical (calling every hotel, visiting the police station) and arbitrary (sometimes following a stranger—a flower delivery boy, for instance—hoping someone might lead her to him). This Siglio reissue is a completely new iteration of Suite Vénitienne (first published in 1988 and long out of print), designed in collaboration with Calle to be the definitive English-language edition. Printed on Japanese paper with a die-cut cover and gilded edges, this beautiful new Siglio edition allows readers to devour this crucial and compelling work.


Siglio, 2015 | Hardcover | 96 pages | 5.5 x 8 in | 4 color | 56 bw. |

9781938221095

 

Sophie Calle Because

A stunning artist’s book containing loose photographs hidden between pages of text that tell the story of each image
Words have always been central to the practice of French artist Sophie Calle (born 1953), who is known for her photographic work that often includes panels of text of her own writing. In this project, Calle conceives of the internal thought processes behind her art-making as stories to be told. It is with these stories—alongside the external stories of the moments preceding a click of a camera shutter—that Calle opens Because. The volume chronicles her reasons behind capturing particular moments in time, but the corresponding photos themselves are revealed only later, hidden in the interstices of the Japanese binding. In this process, Calle reverses the relationship of natural primacy between an image and the words that accompany it, instead calling our attention to the influence that the latter may have on our perception of a photograph.
The new revised edition of this classic artist’s book contains 39 loose photographs inserted between the pages, alongside text and other imagery by Calle. A beautiful object in its own right, it features Japanese binding and an iridescent orange cloth cover.

Atelier Exb, 2024 | Hardcover | 6.75 x 9.5 in. | 168 pgs | 39 color.
| 9782365114097

Sophie Calle:
The Sleepers

Calle’s seminal 1979 series of people sleeping in her bed: now in English
In one of Sophie Calle’s first artistic experiments, she invited friends, acquaintances and strangers to sleep in her bed. Twenty-seven people agreed, among them a baker, a babysitter, an actor, a journalist, a seamstress, a trumpet player and three painters. Calle photographed them awake and asleep, secretly recording any private conversations once the door closed. She served each a meal, and, if they agreed, she subjected them to a questionnaire that probed their personal predilections, habits and dreams as well as their interpretations of the act of sleeping in her bed: a curiosity, a game, an artwork, or—as Calle intended it—a job. The result, comprising her first exhibition in 1979, was a grid of 198 photographs and short texts.
Unlike the original installation, this artist’s book version of The Sleepers contains not only all the photographs and captions but also her engrossing, novellalike narrative, untranslated until now. From the single, liminal mise-en-scène of her bedroom, Calle reports in text and photos, as if in real time, as sleepers arrive, talk, sleep, eat and leave. Their acute and sometimes startling, sometimes endearing particularities merge into something almost like an eight-day-long dream. Many seeds of Calle’s subsequent works are embedded in The Sleepers: her exacting and transgressive methods of investigation, her cultivation of intimacy and remove, and her unrelenting curiosity. In this work, as she observes the sleepers, they observe her too—with reciprocal candor. The Sleepers, clothbound and pillow-like, unfolds as it opens, inviting the reader to join the others in Calle’s bed.

Siglio, 2024 | Clth, 6 x 8 in. | 304 pgs | 176 bw. |  9781938221347
$48.00

Sophie Calle:
The Hotel

A forensic conceptualist's inventory of the ordinary and extraordinary lives in a Venetian hotel
In 1981 Sophie Calle took a job as a chambermaid for the Hotel C in Venice, Italy. Stashing her camera and tape recorder in her mop bucket, she not only cleans and tidies, but sorts through the evidence of the hotel guests' lives. Assigned 12 rooms on the fourth floor, she surveys the state of the guests' bedding, their books, newspapers and postcards, perfumes and cologne, traveling clothes and costumes for Carnival. She methodically photographs the contents of closets and suitcases, examining the detritus in the rubbish bin and the toiletries arranged on the washbasin. She discovers their birth dates and blood types, diary entries, letters from and photographs of lovers and family. She eavesdrops on arguments and love-making. She retrieves a pair of shoes from the wastebasket and takes two chocolates from a neglected box of sweets, while leaving behind stashes of money, pills and jewelry. Her thievery is the eye of the camera, observing the details that were not meant for her, or us, to see.
The Hotel now manifests as a book for the first time in English (it was previously included in the book Double Game). Collaborating with the artist on a new design that features enhanced and larger photographs, and pays specific attention to the beauty of the book as an object, Siglio is releasing its third book authored by Calle, after The Address Book (2012) and Suite Vénitienne (2015).

Siglio, 2021 | Clth | 6 x 8 in. | 224 pgs | 12 color | 180 bw.

Tim Davis

I’m Looking Through You
Photographs by Tim Davis.
Text by Tim Davis.

SIGNED BY TIM DAVIS IN-STORE AT ARTBOOK @ HAUSER & WIRTH LA! 

I’m Looking Through You is an expansive visual poem celebrating the glamorous surface of Los Angeles and its reach.

Animating Tim Davis's wry observations and the mesmerizing, color-pop geometry of his images is the photographer and writer’s decades long, gimlet-eyed meditation on making pictures. As Davis states, “The camera is a machine that sees only surfaces. The world casts its spell, and the camera gobbles up its glamour, uncritically, with pure certainty, assuming there is nothing underneath.” Davis’s keenly observational images, interspersed with a selection of his writings on the medium—the joys and pitfalls of camera seeing—solidify I’m Looking Through You as an unabashed celebration of photography.

Aperture
Hardcover | 6.5 x 9”| 
256 pgs

︎︎︎ GO BACK TO MAIN MENU 

 

Taryn Simon. The Color of a Flea’s Eye

Taryn Simon’s The Color of a Flea’s Eye presents a history of the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection—a legendary trove of more than one million prints, photographs, postcards, posters and images from disused books and periodicals. Since its inception in 1915, the Picture Collection has been a vital resource for writers, historians, artists, filmmakers, fashion designers and advertising agencies.

In her work The Picture Collection (2012-20), Simon (born 1975) highlighted the impulse to organize visual information, and pointed to the invisible hands behind seemingly neutral systems of image gathering. Each of Simon’s photographs is made up of an array of images selected from a given subject folder, such as Chiaroscuro, Handshaking, Haircombing, Express Highways, Financial Panics, Israel, and Beards and Mustaches. In artfully overlapped compositions, only slices of the individual images are visible, each fragment suggesting its whole. Simon sees this extensive archive of images as the precursor to internet search engines. Such an unlikely futurity in the past is at the core of the Picture Collection. The digital is foreshadowed in the analogue, at the same time that history—its classifications, its contents—seems the stuff of projection.expansive conversation with the filmmaker Arthur Jafa.

Produced in direct collaboration with the artist, the book contains 57 individually hand tipped-in plates, numerous gatefolds and a variety of unique papers, as well as essays by Joshua Chuang, head of The New York Public Library’s Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, and Tim Griffin, executive director and chief curator at The Kitchen.

Cahiers D’Art, 2020 | Hardcover, 10 x 13.25 in. / 460 pgs / 57 color / 442 bw.

Taryn Simon. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters

SIGNED BY TARYN SIMON

A significant and extensive book on a major new body of work by the American artist Taryn Simon. Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I-XVIII was produced over a four-year period (2008-2011), during which Simon travelled the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen "chapters" that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. Her subjects feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate. This volume accompanies the exhibitions at Tate Modern, London (May 2011), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (September 2011), and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (May-September 2012).

MACK, 2011 | Hardcover

Taryn Simon: Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies 

In 1936 an American ornithologist named James Bond published the definitive taxonomy Birds of the West Indies. Ian Fleming, an active bird-watcher living in Jamaica, appropriated the name for his novel’s lead character. He found it "flat and colourless," a fitting choice for a character intended to be "anonymous ... a blunt instrument in the hands of the government." In Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies, Taryn Simon casts herself as James Bond (1900–89) the ornithologist, and identifies, photographs and classifies all the birds that appear within the 24 films of the James Bond franchise. The appearance of many of the birds was unplanned and virtually undetected, operating as background noise for whatever set they happened to fly into. Simon’s ornithological discoveries occupy a liminal space—confined within the fiction of the James Bond universe and yet wholly separate from it. This taxonomy of 331 birds is a precise consideration of a new nature found in an alternate reality.

Hatje Cantz, 2016 | Hardcover, 7.5 x 11.5 in. / 608 pgs / 367 color.

Taryn Simon. Contraband

This publication reissues a much sought-after photobook. Taryn Simon is an American artist whose works combine photography, text and graphic design. Her practice involves extensive research, in projects guided by an interest in systems of categorization and classification. For Contraband, 1,075 photographs were taken at both the US Customs and Border Protection Federal Inspection Site and the US Postal Service International Mail Facility at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York. From November 16 to November 20, 2009, Simon remained on site and continuously photographed items detained or seized from passengers and express mail entering the United States from abroad. The list of items includes pork, syringes, Botox, GBL date rape drug, heroin, imitation Lipitor, Ketamine tranquillizers, Lidocaine, Lorazepam, locust tree seed, ginger root, deer tongues, cow urine, Cohiba cigars and Egyptian cigarettes. The volume is published in three differently colored covers.

Hatje Cantz, 2015 | Paperback, 7 x 9.5 in. / 480 pgs / 1,075 color

Nan Goldin. The Other Side
 

This is an expanded and updated version of Nan Goldin’s seminal book The Other Side, originally published in 1993, featuring a revised introduction by Goldin, and, for the first time, the voices of those whose stories are represented. Published at a time when discourse around gender and sexual orientation is evolving rapidly, The Other Side traces some of the history that informs this new visibility.

The first photographs in the book are from the 1970s, when Goldin lived in Boston with a group of drag queens and documented their glamour and vulnerability. In the early 1980s, Goldin chronicled the lives of transgender friends in New York when AIDS began to decimate her community. In the ’90s, she recorded the explosion of drag as a social phenomenon in New York, Berlin, Bangkok and the Philippines. Goldin’s newest photographs are intimate portraits, imbued with tenderness, of some of her most beloved friends. The Other Side is her homage to the queens she has loved, many of whom she has lost, over the last four decades.

Steidl | 2019 | Hardcover | 9 x 10.75 in | 140 pgs 

Nan Goldin. The Beautiful Smile

 

2007 winner Nan Goldin is easily one of the most significant photographers of our time. Adopting the direct aesthetics of snapshot photography, she has documented her own life and that of her friends and others on the margins of society for more than 30 years, offering frank depictions of drug abuse, cross-dressing and alternative sexualities. Her intimate photographs depict urban lives in New York and Europe in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, a period massively determined by HIV and AIDS. Her practice of photography as memoir, as a means of protection against loss and as an act of preservation, as well as her use of the slide show, resonates in the work of photographers of recent generations.

This classic volume, which the photographer has called her favorite of all of her books, is a moving homage to the work of one of the most eminent artists of our time.

Steidl | 2017 | Hardcover | 9.75 x 10.5 in | 150 pgs

Nan Goldin. A Double Life
“David is the first person I ever took a picture of- and the last one I photographed today. He’s the one who named me Nan and showed me my personality. That was twenty-five years ago and we still live together now. “ 

-Nan Goldin 

“I used to think Nan and I were complete opposites and it was all about the complement. But it’s different from that. At the same time we’re identical- like our pictures. At first they seem to come from different plants but finally they arrive at the same place.” 

-David Armstrong



DAP | 1994 | Hardcover | 9.75 x 13 in | 184 pgs

Nan Goldin. I’ll Be Your Mirror
“David is the first person I ever took a picture of- and the last one I photographed today. He’s the one who named me Nan and showed me my personality. That was twenty-five years ago and we still live together now. “ 

-Nan Goldin 

“I used to think Nan and I were complete opposites and it was all about the complement. But it’s different from that. At the same time we’re identical- like our pictures. At first they seem to come from different plants but finally they arrive at the same place.” 

-David Armstrong


Scalo Verlag | 1996 | Hardcover | 8.5 x 11.5 in | 491 pgs

 

Niki de Saint Phalle, Nicole Rudick. What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle


A biography by Nicole Rudick told in Saint Phalle’s own words, assembled from rare and unseen materials. 

Known best for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works that celebrate the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual, a performance—a process connecting life to art. This unconventional, illuminated biography, told in the first person in Saint Phalle's voice and her own hand, dilates large and small moments in Saint Phalle's life which she sometimes reveals with great candor, at other times carefully unwinding her secrets. Editor Nicole Rudick, in a kind of collaboration with the artist, has assembled a gorgeous and detailed mosaic of Saint Phalle's visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches and writings, many previously unpublished or long unavailable, that trace her mistakes and successes, her passions and her radical sense of joy. Saint Phalle's invocation—her "bringing to life"—writes Rudick, "is an apt summation of the overlap of Saint Phalle’s life and art: both a bringing into existence and a bringing to bear. These are visions from the frontiers of consciousness."

Siglio Press
Hardcover | 7.25” x 10” | 268 pgs

Niki de Saint Phalle: Memory Game

Stimulate your memory with this matching game featuring 24 images by Niki de Saint Phalle! 

Il Giardino dei Tarocchi
48 cards (24 images)

Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life
Edited with text by Ruba Katrib. Text by Anne Dressen & Nick Mauss, Alex Kitnick, Lanka Tattersall.


A new exploration of Niki de Saint Phalle’s colorful and compelling public structures, with archival materials and more

This volume brings newfound attention to Niki de Saint Phalle’s work in architecture and public sculpture, and the commercial products such as perfume and jewelry that she produced to fund these ambitious projects.

Featuring a wide selection of images of her architectural works and rarely seen archival materials, this book places these projects within the context of her larger boundary-defying practice, drawing connections with politically charged works such as the films and books she made in response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

Charting Saint Phalle's many efforts to radically open her practice beyond the confines of the art world, it serves as a survey of her practice from the 1960s until the early 2000s. Edited and with an essay by exhibition curator Ruba Katrib, the publication features new scholarship by Anne Dressen and Nick Mauss, Alex Kitnick, and Lanka Tattersall.

MoMA PS1
Paperback | 6.75” x 9” | 232 pgs

Cao Fei: I watch that worlds pass by

Snoeck

Apichatong Weerasethakul: Memoria

Firefly Press

Derek Jarman

JRP Editions

Hito Steyerl
The City of Broken Windows

SKIRA

Shanekia McIntosh
A New Sense of Luxury

A New Sense of Luxury is the first full-length collection from poet & artist, Shanekia McIntosh.

“Shanekia Mcintosh’s A New Sense of Luxury is a lyric epic of presence, where being here and now is too often a choice between only Pleasurescrolling./Doomscrolling. - thus, not enough and too much at the same time. 21st-century luxury is such a muchness as that; up in imperial prolapse, what’s luxe ain’t nothing if the good feeling doesn’t cost someone some blood. Sometimes, the buyer’s. McIntosh spurns, reels, wants and winces in a tableau of cramped plentitude and roomy scarcity, taking inventory. This book tells us what’s extra and what’s missing.” - Douglas Kearney

Shanekia McIntosh is an interdisciplinary artist, with her work rooted in poetry, performance and installation. Her work is an exploration of memory and archives, guided by an insatiable curiosity and interest in philosophy and history, McIntosh uses her work to explore themes of time, dislocation, trauma, climate, passivity and action and connectivity through the lens of digital culture probing at the stories we tell ourselves and interrogating at who gets to tell them. In 2021, she released her debut chapbook, Spiral as Ritual, published by Topos Press.

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 is carrying the book in conjunction with a reading program for the current exhibition at MoMA PS1 “DON CHRISTIAN JONES: The Sumptuous Discovery of Gotham a Go-Go”. The program features Martine Gutierrez, Morgan Bassichis, and Shanekia McIntosh.

Eureka! Press
5x8 inches | 111 Pages | Digital Print |Letterpress Cover | Perfect Bound | First Edition of 400
$17.99

    

On the Town: A Performa Compendium 2016-2021

Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2022 | ‎ English | Paperback | 384 pages | 6.5 x 0.7 x 9.5 inches 

Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019: Yvonne Rainer, Emily Coates, Nick Mauss 

Performa/Lenz/Wadsworth Atheneum | November 5, 2024  English| Paperback‏ |‎ 160 pages | 7 x 10 inches

Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done

MoMA, 2018 | Paperback | 199 pages | 8 x 10 inches

Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York

1955-1972 | University of CA Press, 2016 | Hardcover | 192 pages | 8.5 x  10.5 inches