Artists' Books in Crossett: L-M

The Velvet Wire by Anne Waldman (Bennington College '66) & No Land is a book of fine-art, poetry, telepathic voyage, & mentorship between sister-poets in an intergenerational transmission. Anne Waldman & No Land met on the street in 2012, exchanging a flower and a few words. Over the following decade, together the two poets have created forty-plus collaborative works, weaving their shared sensibilities in the realms of poetry, art, cinema, performance, and activism. The Velvet Wire is an archival reliquary book of many of their collaborations. In The Velvet Wire, Waldman & No Land offer poems to one another and write to the wider atmosphere of our time. No Land's artworks illuminate an understanding of Waldman's kinetic, delicate, empathic writings. The pair speak to each other in devotional texts, journal-memories of their travels, and through codes of the poet's vow and path. 10 x 14 in., 28 pp. with Japanese paper flyleaf. Sewn in St. Armand black paper wrappers, and foil-stamped cover. Bound with silver thread. Housed in vellum dust jacket with foil-stamped diamond.
Signed. No. 1 of Edition of 33.

A combination of appropriated images and text. The images are of historical prints of animals. The text is taken from Rev. J. G. Wood, "The Boys Own Book Of Natural History" and addresses the edibility of the various animals. Pamphlet stitch binding. Offset printed. Edition of 125. Crossett owns number 54.

Roald Amundsen was a Norwegian explorer of polar regions. He is known for leading the first expedition to reach the South Pole (1911) and the first to traverse the Northwest Passage (1903–06) in the Arctic. The Fog log collection; no. 1. 14 unnumbered pages ; 11 cm. Pamphlet stitch binding.

Ten rengas were written between 2:15 and 2:25 pm on Tuesday, February 20, 2018 in the Word & Image Lab at Bennington College by the PRI 4236 students Mira Darham, Raewyn Fairless, Bennett Grossman, Ferne Johansson, Bailey Kushinsky, James Mcbride, Emily O'Donnell, Zadie Ross, Chase Spearance, and Carmela Uribe. The rengas were composed with handset type and printed letterpress, also by the above. 11 unbound booklets. 22 x 23 cm, folded to 22 x 12 cm. Edition of 15.

Pierre Leguillon echoed the octagonal structure that he imagined for the Rotonde Balzac space, in the National Foundation for Graphic and Plastic Arts in Paris. Images of antique kimono fabrics are juxtaposed with pictures: discarded photographs from news agency, or postcards, which show a strange natural history: animals, plants or minerals are often out of scale or transformed by photographic representation. Tifaifai is a Polynesian word, a language that has no writing form and where culture is transmitted by oral tradition. Pierre Leguillon puts two collections together: the fabrics and the pictures. All these pictures, even if they are odd and sometimes difficult to "read", are left without any explanation: there isn't any caption with them. 15.5. x 15.5 cm 16 pages. Wordless.

Designed so that the reader/viewer interacts with text that has been communicated through "word of mouth", in a symbolic way of "hanging out the dirty laundry." Contains twelve sheets of unbleached muslin (12 x 8 cm), with text printed in black; 12 wooden spring clothes pins; 1 piece of string (148 cm). Objects, along with information leaf, rest within a brown cardboard box. Silkscreen. "On The Line is a collection of stories, rumors, little known facts, and folk tales about well-known artists relayed through word of mouth. The book is designed for the viewer to interact with the piece in a symbolic way of hanging out the dirty laundry of stories and rumors."

"The title of Stu Levy’s One Picture Book is also an anagram of the book’s subject, Carl Chiarenza. Levy’s “Grid Portraits” – in which multiple photographs of his subject, taken from various perspectives and distances, are combined to create one portrait – have been exhibited widely and are featured in many important collections throughout the United States. Cranial Czar, Eh? folds out map-like from its hardbound case." "One Picture Book series was conceived in 1998 as a way to make original artwork affordable. The series consists of uniformly designed, modestly-sized hardcover books, comprising 16 pages that serve as a “canvas” for the artist to display one cohesive body of work. Each One Picture Book is published in an edition of 500 numbered copies, and each contains an original tipped-in photograph, signed on the verso by the artist; hence the name of the series." 19 cm. Edition of 500. Crossett owns number 393.

22 x 31 cm. 65p. Off-set printing.

A prolific writer and documenter of both her art and her relationships, the public and private, Lozano kept a series of personal journals from 1968 to 1972 while living in New York's SoHo neighborhood. Eleven of these private books survive, containing notes on her work, detailed interactions with artist friends and commentary on the alienations of gender politics, as well as philosophical queries into art's role in society and humorous asides from daily life. In the decade before her infamous "dropout piece"--culminating in a move to Dallas where she would remain until her death--Lozano returned to these notebooks, editing the entries, sometimes blacking out entire pages. Private Book 2 is the second in a series of 11 pocket-sized books, which are printed as facsimiles with spiral binding.

This third volume in Karma’s 11-volume facsimile edition of Lee Lozano’s Private Book project is primarily a calendar of Lozano’s personal, artistic and “chemical” interactions in 1969–70. A prolific writer and documenter of both her art and her relationships, the painter Lee Lozano (1930–99) kept a series of personal journals from 1968 to 1970 while living in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. In 1972 she rigorously edited these books, thus completing the project. Eleven of these private books survive, containing notes on her work, detailed interactions with artist friends and commentary on the alienations of gender politics, as well as philosophical queries into art’s role in society and humorous asides from daily life. Spiral bound. 3 x 5 in.

Haunting concrete poetry made from splicing together fragments of plays. 11 x 17.5 cm. Perfect binding. 109 p.

A 40-page newspaper catalogue, printed on heavy white newsprint, presenting six projects of bespoke Colophon Foundry work. Each project is paired with an illustration by William Luz. Web offset lithography. [40] p. 40 x 29 cm folded to 21 x 29 cm + 1 sleeve (30 x 22 cm).Edition of 500, limited to 350 sold.

Transparency Reflection Light Space: A Response was created as a response to a 1971 exhibition catalog interview with the artist, Larry Bell. Prior to the publication of the catalog, Bell removed the vowels from his answers. Leah Mackin read Bell’s obfuscated responses as inherently gendered in the context of the masculine art historical legacy of Minimalism. They are defiant, brusque and, when read aloud, Bell’s words are unpronounceable, guttural noises. Her response to the work presents the remaining vowels, as a sort of harmonic vocalization, since vowels give shape and rounded-out sound to the English language. 20.5 cm x 20.5 cm. Letterpress, photocopy and laser printed. 38 pages. Saddle stitch pamphlet in hard covers. Signed. Edition of 63. Crossett owns number 44.

Catharine Maloney has combined and recorded her interest in men, outer space, and play in her photographic series Teleplay, Part I. The book is filled with playful men, bright-makeshift costumes, and backdrops. Her photographs are helter-skelter constructions, manipulated by hand or crudely on the computer, in order to create a strange place. "Notable for their curiously unsettling shabbiness, Catharine Maloney’s photographs are clearly testament to the author’s laissez faire attitude to perfection and technical mastery. By shooting with a medium format camera, scanning in the film and routinely tinkering with the images in Photoshop, the Texan-born artist then gets prints made cheaply and either draws on them or creates collages. They combine the coarse ingenuity of mixing and layering various media with an ambiguous and uneasy decontextualisation of objects and subjects. Peopling the images, figures can often appear multiple times within the same work, and superimpositions, doublings and reflections are all commonplace. So too are distortions in scale and perspective. All the long-held notions of space and temporality appear to collapse revealing photography’s limits and inherent contradictions." Spiral bound. 15×20 cm. 62 pages

An artist book inspired by images and articles published in the Illustrated London News during the Irish Famine in the mid-nineteenth century. Alexis Soyer, the celebrated chef de cuisine of the private Reform Club in London, often orchestrated many of these lavish banquets during the famine years, attended by the power and financial elite of the British Empire. In response to his concern about the Irish starvation, Soyer proposed a Model Soup Kitchen, to feed large numbers of people efficiently, and as cheaply as possible. Murrain contrasts the Illustrated London News coverage of M. Soyer’s Model Soup Kitchen (1847), with the extravagant banquets held in England. The ILN reporting for the soup kitchen and the banquets mirror each other - describing the seating arrangements, room layouts, dinnerware and menu. Accordion. Digitally printed. Paper: Strathmore cotton. Slipcase with image of potato plant tipped in on front cover of accordion board end and title foil stamped below. Tiziano black paper liner in slipcase with Zerkall Ingres light green as end paper. Signed edition of 20. Crossett owns number 2.

As a follow up of Reprint, this publication by renowned Dutch graphic designer Karel Martens contains a sequence of unique letterpress monoprints made between 2014 and 2016. The book comes in two different covers which is the result of a printing experiment by printing all the content of the book in 3 layers on top of each other. This particular print sheet was cut and folded into two different covers. "This publication contains monoprints made by Karel Martens between 2014 and 2016, reproduced at actual size, except for the two larger prints on page 24 (1992, 58 x 42 cm) and page 26 (2008, 56 x 38 cm), which features stenciled numbered printed in a 'magic square' configuration from Vedic mathematics." --Colophon.

Bardo is a collection of drawings by Christina Martinelli (Bennington College '08) depicting what happens to ones soul as it passes from this life onto what is next. 26 cm. 16 p. Risograph printed. Edition of 100. Crossett owns number 3.

Channel & Flow documents an attempt to follow a stream on its path through a dense suburban neighborhood. It uses the structure of the book's page turns and fold outs to represent how the stream has been contained and fragmented by the built environment. The images are letterpress printed and screenprinted on Shikoku paper. The typeface is Avenir, letterpress printed from polymer plates. The cover is handmade paper from milkweed collected and retted at Ruocco Family Farm in Sandgate, VT, mixed with cotton and abaca. 15.24 x 9 cm. Long-stitch binding.

An observation of childhood idols and their extreme social media presence. This documents Cypress Hill’s obsession with National Geographic’s Instagram account. Cypress Hill Loving Natgeo is a 34-page survey of their emoticon expressions of Natgeo’s wildlife photography. 5.5"W x 8.5"H. 34 pages. Edition of 50.

The second zine in a series documenting Cypress Hill’s obsession with National Geographic’s Instagram account. Cypress Hill Really Loving Natgeo is a 42-page survey of their emoticon expressions of Natgeo’s wildlife photography. Includes a bonus chapter of the group loving NASA’s account. 5.5"W x 8.5"H. 42 pages. Edition of 50. Saddle stitch / Staple Bound.

31 p. : photos ; 23 cm. “The map was located in a school in Napareuli, in the Republic of Georgia: all the desktops in the classroom were covered with student grafitti and the map - printed at a moment just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union - seemed like it had been hanging there for the past twenty-four years, unmarked by the collapse of communism, unreflective of an entirely new world order, simple reduced to serving as an uninteresting backdrop for bored students.” Clifton Meador

The book consists of altered photographs on two folded leaves.Two 1865 newspaper articles from New York Times and the Richmond Whig report on General Robert E. Lee being photographed by Matthew Brady. The slipcover is a facsimile of a newspaper dated Monday, April 10, 1865 with the headline "Surrender of Lee and his whole army!".; 2 folded leaves; 23 cm.An artist's book consisting primarily of enlarged and altered photgraphs of General Lee with accompanying text, printed offset. Two folded sheets forming eight unnumbered pages with two fold-outs are saddle-stitched into a red paper wrapper, laid into a paper wrapper printed with facsimile images of a newspaper.

"Dallas, a pleasant city in Texas, has a remarkable number of bail bond businesses. I was stuck in a hotel with a fever of 103, tossing and turning, and this dreadful fact became clear to me: there is a lot of money to be made in punishing crime." Industry of Punishment vol. 1. 34 pages. Saddle-stitch binding.

"Catalogs once brought the world into the home: place-bound people could roam the planet, shopping from a magazine. But this was a focused experience, since catalogs always represented a particular notion of commerce, with a particular, unique physical identity: LL Bean never seemed anything like Omaha Steaks. The web is a catalog of enormous proportions, and everything is produced in the same medium—RGB pixels. Police uniforms are identical with French cheese, making crime-fighting just another way to turn a profit." Industry of Punishment vol. 2. 36 pages. Saddle-stitch binding.

"The role of the state in punishing crime is changing. Three for-profit, publicly traded corporations operate prisons in many states of the US. Is it right to subcontract this basic function to private companies? Is it right for people to make a profit on punishment? Images and text extracted from annual reports of these companies: boards of directors, blinded by the flash of public attention." Industry of Punishment vol. 3. 56 pages. Saddle-stitch binding.

The words on the matchsticks describe former friends and lovers. As matches are removed the text changes. Catherine Michaelis began Old Flames Mismatched by looking at a matchbook, taking it apart, looking at the matches as pages that "turned" as they were used. Match layers made her think of a book with divided pages where images and/or text could mix and match. As one would use a match the words below would differ, altering the story. While the stories change, altering the "reasons," it suggests that perhaps relationships are not taken seriously enough to begin with, and finding the right match is a game we play. The matches are meant to be used. Just as in relationships we often get burned or burned out, feel used or used up, Old Flames Mismatched is meant to be a ritualized experience of that end of the romance feeling. A delightfully funny look at our past "loves" in this first in the series of "Old Flames" in the context 1.5 x 2" unused matchbook. Letterpress printed.

Duane Michals new book takes a satirical and humorous look at contemporary photography, art criticism and the state of today's art market. Whether parodying Wolfgang Tillmans or Thomas Ruff, Andres Serrano, Sherrie Levine, or Cindy Sherman, Michals uses his wit and pictorial skill to create pictures that are both humorous and penetrating, while taking aim at the pretensions that are often perceived as deliberately obscuring contemporary art. Michals provides us with a grand parody that exemplifies his mastery of the visual world and the written word. 24 cm. Perfect bound.

Humorous quasi-erotic short stories told in photographs with handwritten narratives as captions. Designed by John and Mary Condon. 64 unnumbered pages : illustrations ; 16 x 21 cm. Vellum. Perfect binding.

Catalogue folded into an accordion-pleat for an exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery, Sept. 7 - Sept. 30, 1992.

Unfolding Practice: Reflections on Learning and Teaching is a conversation between two artist-educators. Flowing across five chapters, the double sided accordion book has been curated from ten years of recorded conversations, field notes, planning, sketches, reflection, and teaching. The front of the book weaves text, illustration, cutouts, and screen prints, journeying through artistic process and educational practice. The back of the book is a guide, expanding on the practice of using accordion books as a tool for capturing, visualizing, and building upon reflective thinking. The brown paper alludes to the craft paper that is ubiquitous in schools and captures process more than the preciousness of a final product. Throw out accordion in hard covers. 7.875 x 5.25 x .75 Edition of 60. Silkscreen, Digital, Laser-cut, Hand-cut. Helvetica Neue. Hard cover bound. Throw out accordion.

By graphically isolating words and lines from the August 26, 2001 obituary page of The New York Times, Judith Mohns creates new and nuanced readings of the page's existing text. Her textual manipulations explore the visible and underlying structures of obituaries, families, society, and the qualities of life and death itself, revealing both the cold commonalities and the very personal specifics of the lives of the deceased. Paper: French Dur-O-Tone newsprint paper. Printing method: Photocopy, offset. Binding: Pamphlet stitch. 16 x 16 cm. Edition: 400

"Photographer Daido Moriyama book features photographs he made over the years of kuchibiru (lips). The subjects range from anonymous women whose likenesses are reproduced on posters, to Daido’s own friends and acquaintances." "One Picture Book series was conceived in 1998 as a way to make original artwork affordable. The series consists of uniformly designed, modestly-sized hardcover books, comprising 16 pages that serve as a “canvas” for the artist to display one cohesive body of work. Each One Picture Book is published in an edition of 500 numbered copies, and each contains an original tipped-in photograph, signed on the verso by the artist; hence the name of the series." 19 cm. Edition of 500. Crossett owns number 459.

Color photographs by the French artist Jean-Luc Moulène. 140 p. 22 cm. Japanese / English

A Bullet for Buñuel: Fragments of a Failed Bullet documents Myers’ attempt to complete a project begun by the late filmmaker Luis Buñuel: to create a bullet possessing such a weak charge that it would simply bounce off the filmmaker’s shirt when fired at him. Consulting with the estate and sources ranging from online forums for bullet makers to a ballistics lab associated with the U.S. Secret Service, Myers sought to make the bullet and fire it at a shirt that had been worn by Buñuel. While trying to bring this absurdist endeavor to completion, he was met with a colorful cast of characters and failures at almost every turn. 116 pages. 6 x 9 inches. Perfect Bound.Paperback. Edition of 1000

This book was designed by Micah Lexier in collaboration with Lisa Naftolin. It was produced in an edition of 1250 copies; 100 advance copies were produced for the opening and have grey endpapers, 1150 copies have printed endpapers, featuring photographic views of the completed work.

Designed by Marshall Hendrichs

Staple bound; 18.5 x 15 cm; Edition of 50.

"A seancé via abstraction, the veil between worlds. The title originates from a secret phrase known only to Harry Houdini and his wife. Houdini, who had spent years of his life discrediting mediums, told his wife before dying that if she ever received the message “Rosabelle Believe” she would know that the message was from Houdini and that he was communicating from the dead, proving that the afterlife was real. After he died she (perhaps) received the message." 21.5 x 14 cm. Staple Bound. Edition of 50.