Bøker utgitt av Karma

An acidic portrait of the grifters and pretenders of the art world, from the celebrated author of The Mars RoomIn Rachel Kushner's latest work of fiction, The Mayor of Leipzig, an unnamed artist recounts her travels from New York City to Cologne--where she contemplates German guilt and art-world grifters, and Leipzig--where she encounters live "adult entertainment" in a business hotel. The narrator gossips about everyone, including the author. "Taking a time out from what happened to me in Cologne and in Leipzig," Kushner writes, "I want to let you in on a secret: I personally know the author of this story you're reading. Because she fancies herself an art world type, a hanger-on. Who would do that voluntarily? I mean, it's not like someone held a gun to my head and said, Be an artist. I chose it, but I still can't imagine having anything to do with the art world if you don't have to. Also, people who don't make stuff, who instead try to catalogue, periodize, and understand art, they never understand the first thing. Art is about taste, a sense of humor, and most writers lack both." Rachel Kushner (born 1968) is the author of The Flamethrowers (2013) and The Mars Room (2018). Her debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book. A collection of her early work, The Strange Case of Rachel K, was published by New Directions in 2015. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's and the Paris Review.

A half-century of social change in America, documented in the writings of Danny Lyon, photographer and author of The Bikeriders and The Destruction of Lower Manhattan"From the beginning, even before he left the University of Chicago and headed south to take up a position as the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Danny Lyon dreamed of being an artist in language as well as in pictures," writes Randy Kennedy in the introduction to American Blood. In 1961, at the age of 19, for example, Lyon penned a brutally satirical article for a student mimeo magazine in which he argued for the deterrent power of prime-time televised executions ("the show would open, no doubt, like a baseball game, with a rendition of the National Anthem"). Lyon is widely celebrated for his groundbreaking work in photography and film. Less recognized is the extensive body of writing that has broadened and reinforced his reach, in both the pages of his own publications and in others as varied as the Los Angeles Times, the New York Review of Books, Aperture, civil rights publications, underground magazines and Lyon's blog. This 400-page volume spans republished and previously unpublished texts from nearly six decades of his career, comprising a vast, meticulously archived history of American social change. Also included are conversations between Lyon and Hugh Edwards, Nan Goldin and Susan Meiselas. As Kennedy writes, Lyon's collected writings, "remarkable as both artistic and moral models, remain far too little known, especially for an author who has seen what he has seen and possesses the rare ability to write about it as he speaks; Lyon is a world-class talker, funny, wise, sanguine and indefatigable." Danny Lyon (born 1942) is one of the most influential documentary photographers of the last five decades. His many books include The Movement (1964), The Bikeriders, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (1969), Knave of Hearts (1999), Like a Thief's Dream (2007) and Deep Sea Diver (2011).

Permutation and portraiture: serial paintings of moons, stripes and the birds of Maine by Ann CravenBirds We Know is the catalog for an exhibition of paintings by New York-based artist Ann Craven (born 1967). This large survey at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art is the artist's first exhibition in Maine, where she has been living part-time and painting since the early 1990s. It was at her farm house in Lincolnville, Maine, inspired by the colors of the natural environment, that Craven completed her very first moon painting in 1995; she says her time in Lincolnville "gave me my subject matter." The new exhibition and catalog include the imagery that Craven is renowned for including her lushly colored, mesmerizing moon and stripe paintings, but here the birds dominate as the primary subject, including work made between 1997 and 2019. The book includes an essay by Christopher B. Crosman, formerly of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Farnsworth Art Museum.

The latest in Karma's acclaimed series of overviews, this 424-page clothbound volume is the first comprehensive survey of New York-based minimalist painter Paul Mogensen (born 1941). Born in Los Angeles, Mogensen arrived in New York in 1966 already associated with such peers as David Novros and (through Novros) Brice Marden. His first solo exhibition at the Bykert Gallery came the following year. Since that time, Mogensen has created often colorful works that follow rule-based progressions (such as the "n + 1" method) to generate sharply executed geometric abstractions. In a text for this volume, the artist Lynda Benglis usefully summarizes the special character of Mogensen's art: "Paul is a colorist who is measured in his method. It may be said that he is a decorative painter as well a painter of a philosophical disposition. He is stringent in his approach, as stringent as a mechanic might be with a Ferrari. There are no accidents."

This book collects images that New York-based artist Anne Collier (born 1970) originally presented as a slideshow of 80 35mm slides depicting found images of female subjects in the act of taking self-portraits. Dating from the 1970s to the early 2000s, these relics of the analog age were collected by Collier, each image discarded by its original owner but finding its way back to relevance in Collier's work. The slideshow consists of amateur snapshots of women photographing themselves with film cameras prior to the advent of the digital "selfie." Instead of circulating on social media, these abandoned images once existed for a private audience. The resulting work is steeped in a deep sense of loneliness, illustrating photography's contentious relationship to memory, loss and self-representation. The book represents a kind of sequel to Collier's 2017 book Women with Cameras (Anonymous).

This is the fifth volume in Karma's 11-volume facsimile printing of Lee Lozano's Private Book project. Eleven of these private books survive, containing notes on Lozano's 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.

This is the fourth volume in Karma's 11-volume facsimile printing of Lee Lozano's Private Book project. It 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 public and private, 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.

The latest volume of writing by influential New York-based critic and curator Bob Nickas collects his 2012-14 column for Vice magazine's Komp-laint Dept. This column unleashed the full omnivorous range of the author's interests. There are essays on musicians such as Neil Young, Sun Ra, Royal Trux and Lydia Lunch, which look at their biographies and the history of Nickas' personal relationship with their music; there are lengthy and often very funny "complaints" about, among other things, two different presidents, Jeff Koons, New York architecture, the meeting of fashion and punk, religion in general, nostalgia and the problem with contemporary graffiti. Additionally, there are meditations on filmmakers such as David Cronenberg and Nicolas Refin. The book is rounded out by perhaps the definitive (two-part) examination of how and why Richard Prince uses appropriation.Bob Nickas has worked as a critic and curator in New York since 1984. He is the author of Theft Is Vision (2007) and The Dept. of Corrections (2016).

16 Pictures is the latest in a series of photobooks by American artist Robert Grosvenor (born 1937). Included here are color photographs of vehicles, scale models and ordinary objects. Sometimes blurry, sometimes overexposed, and very often brightly colorful, the photographs depict scenes that may be staged or chanced upon.

Boats Crosses Trees Figures 1977-78 is a survey of Peter Halley's (born 1953) early works on paper made during his years as a graduate student at the University of New Orleans.Already pointing clearly to the pictorial concerns that he would focus on throughout his career these works initiate Halley's interest in the interaction of opposites, primarily abstraction and figuration but also interior and exterior, foreground and background, light and dark, appearance and disappearance.Inspired by the color and sound of New Orleans, Halley translates the physical world into bright, geometric compositions constructed of gridded squares of color, where, through the combination of formal severity and openness as equal partners, seemingly simple compositions turn into complex amalgams of various possible views of an image and its space.

First published in 1993, Sister is a story of love and violence bearing justice. In author and critic Jim Lewis' first novel, an orphaned, 17-year-old Wilson leaves his Nebraska home and heads south to Mississippi. There, he finds work as a gardener on the estate of the Miller clan--a nuclear family with two lovely daughters, Marian and Olivia, living in compliant happiness. Wilson's surreptitious presence soon casts a quiet path of destruction through the Miller home with very tangible results for the sisters. Twenty years after its original publication, Lewis' lyrical, atmospheric novel remains exacting in its appraisal of young love linked to loss and unnerving in its examination of the isolated American family.

This is the seventh volume in Karma's 11-volume facsimile printing of Lee Lozano's Private Book (1930-99) project. "Don't be RIVAL RABBITS," she writes here. "Give your ideas away. Help the world survive. SHARE AN IDEA JOINT."

Before her self-imposed exile from the art world, Lozano was a highly regarded painter who defined a generation of American artists infusing conceptualism with a new intensity. A prolific writer and documenter of both her art and her relationships, she kept a series of personal journals. This series of 11 pocket-sized books is printed as facsimiles.

Kokuyo Business Paper is the latest of Michael Williams' (born 1978) artist's books published by Karma. This newest book focuses on drawings on top of photocopies and employs the gatefold as a primary characteristic of the book. Each fold has the potential to hide and reveal another image, forcing the viewer to look and open each fold.