Category: art

Is God Dead Again?

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That question will be answered in the order in which it was received. But if you can’t wait that long, pick up a copy of C. S. Hibbard‘s THE OTHER SIDE: THE SHOCKING TRUTH BEHIND 100 CLASSIC PAINTINGS—just out from Black Scat.

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Upon its release in the U.K. in 2009, The Other Side quickly became a bestseller. It has been translated into half a dozen languages and over two million copies have sold worldwide. Black Scat Books is honored to offer this provocative work to the American public in a new trade paperback edition—featuring 100 color reproductions, as well as a foreword by noted art historian Paul Forristal.

Includes paintings by 40 of the world’s greatest artists:  Allais, Altdorfer, Bosch, Botticelli, Bruegel, Caravaggio, Chagall, Cranach, Dali, DeVries, Ernst, Giacometti, Giotto, Goya, Greco, Holbein, Klee, Klimt, Leonardo, Magritte, Memling, Michelangelo, Millet, Monet, Paolo Uccello, Raffaello, Rembrandt, Renoir, Rousseau, Rubens, Schiele, Seurat, Tansey, Uccello, Van der Weyden, Van Eyck, Van Gogh, Velasquez, Vermeer, Veronese.

Cecil Sears Hibbard is the author of the acclaimed study Art & Religion: The Bohemian Divide (2005), and a collection of incendiary  essays: Leonardo’s Smile & Other Seductions (2007). His novel The Architect was nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

***UPDATE***We regret to announce that C. S. Hibbard has cancelled his U.S. book tour due to concerns for his personal safety. He will not be signing copies of The Other Side at City Lights in San Francisco (May 1); Book Soup in Los Angeles (May 3); Barnes and Noble / Mission Valley, San Diego (May 4). If you purchased tickets for the party at Chateau Marmont on May 6th, refunds will be provided here.

Moo-na Lisa, mon amour

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moo na lisa

From Austria with love comes this collage by Monika Mori (a.k.a. MOO). Here Ms. Mori reveals her lighter side in a Munch-like self-portrait. Everyone loves a good Ménage à trois, and we think this collaboration between three fine artists is particularly noteworthy.  (What do you say, Marcel?)

Sly smiles aside… consider Mori’s provocative abstracts in her collection Shattered Rainbow, published last year by Black Scat Books.

Take a peek. Then support your local artist.

The Public Poem

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EDITOR’S NOTE: THE WEEK OF  MARCH 11TH IN NEW YORK, THE CITY OF HIS CHILDHOOD, ALAIN ARIAS-MISSON WILL BE PRESENTING SEVERAL EXCITING EVENTS: THE FIRST IS A SHOW AT EMILY HARVEY FOUNDATION WHERE HE USED TO SHOW HIS WORK IN THE LATE ’70’S EARLY EARLY ’80’S. THERE WILL ALSO BE AN EVENT AT WHITE BOX (SEE PREVIOUS POST HERE.) MORE NEWS TO FOLLOW. IF YOU’RE IN THE AREA OR PLANNING TO VISIT, ALAIN WILL BE THERE TO GREET YOU WITH A SMILE.

THE PUBLIC POEM by ALAIN ARIAS-MISSON

Alain Arias-Misson, born in Brussels, educated mostly in the U.S., describes himself as “a real fake-American, a fake real-Belgian”—a dual identity which extended into his life’s work: American novelist by vocation with seven books of experimental fiction, and European artist by accident-as one of the initiators of the visual poetry movement in the early sixties in Spain, Belgium, France and Italy. His works are represented in museums and galleries throughout Europe and the United States. His invention of the Public Poem in 1966-67, however, was a singular poetic experience: he decided he could “write on the street like a page”. His Public Poems or street-texts have since disrupted city life in a score of cities in Europe and the U.S.. 

The exhibition consists of a graphic-documentary illustration of his Public Poems and a video of seven Public Poems—on the occasion of the publication in the current issue of Performance Arts Journal of his Public Poems as the Artist’s Drawings section. Arias-Misson has deliberately enacted his Public Poems outside the “performances” circuit, in order to avoid an elitist art context: always taking place in the city streets, focal point of signs and polis, political-cultural milieu, the Public Poem uses minimal linguistic elements (such as grammatical symbols, let­ters, cartoon balloons) and iconic signs (masks, figures, materials) to point to or to frame an underlying city-text—in the symbolic and the functional aspects of traffic, police, monuments, public buildings, business, political and art institutions etc.. The public he addresses in the first place is the public in the street. Having begun this “street-poetry” in the Sixties, an era of cultural and urban effervescence, he feels that today with “Occupy Wall Street” and mass street demonstrations, his work again enjoys an aesthetic-social dynamic.

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Madrid 1971                                                         Berlin 1991

THE PUBLIC POEM

(40 years of a street poetics)

 a one evening presentation/screening of documents & videos

Emily Harvey Foundation
537 Broadway
Thursday March 14th, 6 – 9 PM

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AND MORE… what a lineup! Don’t miss this on March 15th!

Literary Evening 1

Start celebrating early — read THE MAN WHO WALKED ON AIR & OTHER TALES OF INNOCENCE

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Where is Kirghiz Steppes?

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Or perhaps the question should be what is Kirghiz Steppes?

It’s a new collection of verbo-visual art by M. Kasper.

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A glance at the stunning cover photograph by Toby Kasper beckons us to visit a barely describable world of weirdness. Weird yes, but subtle enough that one may easily mistake it for our own.

Then again, maybe it is.

M. Kasper’s verbo-visual art has appeared—mirage-like—in many small press magazines and journals over the years. The artist’s exquisitely designed books—e.g., The Shapes and Spacing of the Letters (highmoonoon/Hollywood & The London Institute of ‘Pataphysics)—are legendary and highly collectible. 

Kirghiz Steppes is a unique, limited edition album featuring one-page pieces mixing words and pictures—parodies, comics, captioned collages, concrete poems, etc.—made since the 1970’s. It is truly a world unto itself.

We think you’ll enjoy the journey.

UPDATE 5/18/2014  — THIS TITLE IS OUT OF PRINT

 

Laughter & Cheer for the New Year!

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A Cami Sampler

We proudly present a New Year’s treat—#9 in our Absurdist Texts & Documents series: A CAMI SAMPLER, translated from the French by John Crombie in Paris. The collection includes 10 zany, Dadaesque microdramas by Pierre Henri Cami, plus nine pages of his rare drawings. This is the first collection of Cami’s mini plays to be published in the U.S.

From the introduction by John Crombie:

“Though blissfully ignored for most of his life by the
English-speaking public, Cami (Pierre Henri) remained
for four full decades one of France’s most prolific,
and acclaimed, comic authors. Hailed by his idol and
admirer Charlie Chaplin as ‘the greatest humorist in the
world,’ Cami was somewhat willfully omitted by André
Breton from his Anthologie de l’Humour Noir—no doubt
on account of his huge popular success—but admired
by other Surrealists. Between 1910, when he founded
Le Petit Corbillard Illustré, the ‘humorous organ of the
corporation of undertakers,’ and his death in 1958,
Cami published well over forty volumes of minidramas
and comic novels—notably The Memoirs of God-the-
Father, The Adventures of Loufock-Holmes, The Son of
the Three Musketeers, and the travels of his perhaps most
famous creation, Monsieur Rikiki and the Rikiki family—
as well as countless songs, strip cartoons, screenplays
and even operettas. Many of these he also illustrated.

But Cami was best known for his ‘dramatic fantasies,’
written mostly for La Vie Drôle, the humorous column
published weekly by Le Journal, where he had stepped,
somewhat belatedly, into the shoes of that column’s
immortal co-founder, Alphonse Allais. Self-styled
microdramas of everyday life, of legend, of history
(and even of geography), of true (and false) romance,
and more often than not of volupté, these screwball
skits look backward to the music hall and Alfred Jarry,
sideways to the Marx Brothers and forward to, in
England, the Goons and, in France, to the Theatre
of the Absurd.”

Edition limited to 100 copies.

THIS BOOK IS OUT OF PRINT

Merry Xmas from the NRA

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Merry Xmas from the NRA

from IT’S FUN TO BE RICH IN AMERICA by Norman Conquest & Michael Leigh

UPDATED (12/14) A young man clad in black and carrying two handguns shot up an elementary school in a small Connecticut town on Friday, leaving 18 small children and eight adults dead in one the nation’s worst school massacres, law enforcement officials said.

We think it’s long past time America gets rid of the NRA lobby and the politicians they’ve paid off.