The ‘Twice As Tall In The Rain’ Bookshelf

Partisan of Things

By Francis Ponge, 2016

Poetry. Hybrid Genre. Environmental Studies. Translated from the French by Joshua Corey and Jean-Luc Garneau. "There is no escape from trees by means of trees." The ordinary objects to which Francis Ponge directs his attention—a tree, an oyster, a cigarette—come uncannily alive in his seminal first book of prose poems, newly translated by Joshua Corey and Jean-Luc Garneau. Published in 1942, as Ponge was enlisting in the Resistance to the Nazi occupation of France, these poems offer their own dryly humorous resistance to our tendency to take "things" for granted as either dead matter or as commodities for our disposal. Arch, alive, and unexpectedly profound, here is a new Ponge for the age of hyperobjects and the revenge of nature, a poet of the Anthropocene avant la lettre.

David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale

By Elena Filipovic, 2017

Drawing on unpublished documents and oral histories, an illustrated examination of an iconic artwork of an artist who has made a lifework of tactical evasion. One wintry day in 1983, alongside other street sellers in the East Village, David Hammons peddled snowballs of various sizes. He had neatly laid them out in graduated rows and spent the day acting as obliging salesman. He called the evanescent and unannounced street action Bliz-aard Ball Sale, thus inscribing it into a body of work that, from the late 1960s to the present, has used a lexicon of ephemeral actions and self-consciously "black" materials to comment on the nature of the artwork, the art world, and race in America. And although Bliz-aard Ball Sale has been frequently cited and is increasingly influential, it has long been known only through a mix of eyewitness rumors and a handful of photographs. Its details were as elusive as the artist himself; even its exact date was unrecorded. Like so much of the artist's work, it was conceived, it seems, to slip between our fingers-to trouble the grasp of the market, as much as of history and knowability. In this engaging study, Elena Filipovic collects a vast oral history of the ephemeral action, uncovering rare images and documents, and giving us singular insight into an artist who made an art of making himself difficult to find. And through it, she reveals Bliz-aard Ball Sale to be the backbone of a radical artistic oeuvre that transforms such notions as "art," "commodity," "performance," and even "race" into categories that shift and dissolve, much like slowly melting snowballs.

Richard Wentworth: Making Do and Getting

Hans-Ulbrich Obrist, 2015

A leading figure in the New British Sculpture movement of the early 1980s, Richard Wentworth (born 1947) uses photography to register chance encounters of oddities and discrepancies in the modern landscape, expanding the possibilities of sculpture into the public realm. Documenting Wentworth's ongoing series Making Do and Getting By, the book's 750 images document excess--a creativity beyond functionality, something transformative that lurks beneath the surface intention in acts of ordering and repair. In one image, a car door serves to mend a fence; in another, wooden crates are wedged into a doorway. Wentworth seizes on this rupture between object and intended function, object and meaning. In Making Do and Getting By, Wentworth redefines the art of the human hand with a light and witty touch.

To See Stars Over Mountains

Vlatka Horvat, 2022

An artist’s book published on the occasion of her exhibition ‘By Hand, on Foot’ at PEER, London

Each day in 2021, Vlatka Horvat took a photograph while on a walk. These photographs of landscapes and urban locations became the basis for ‘To See Stars Over Mountains’ a series of 365 works on paper. After printing each day’s photograph on her home inkjet printer, Horvat transforms them manually in different ways; by drawing or collaging on top of it, by making cuts or tears in the paper, by folding the page or relocating parts of the image. This book gathers all 365 pieces that comprise the project, a diary of sorts as well as a thoughtful re-imagining of the landscape and its possibilities.

Scarecrows

Colin Garrett, 1995

This unique book brings together fifty masterly photographs made on location by Colin Garratt. These amazing pictures depict genuine working scarecrows filmed, as discovered, in the landscape. They are not from the anaesthetised world of the craft fair, but the direct descendants of the ancient spectres which have haunted the landscape for centuries...

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Laurie Lee, 1969

Abandoning the Cotswolds village that raised him, the young Laurie Lee walks to London. There he makes a living labouring and playing the violin. But, deciding to travel further a field and knowing only the Spanish phrase for 'Will you please give me a glass of water?', he heads for Spain. With just a blanket to sleep under and his trusty violin, he spends a year crossing Spain, from Vigo in the north to the southern coast. Only the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War puts an end to his extraordinary peregrinations . . .