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Over the course of his 20-year career, Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997) cast himself alternately as hard-drinking carouser and confrontational art-world jester, thrusting these personae to the forefront of his prodigious creativity. He was also very much a player in the international art world of the 1970s right up until his death in 1997, commissioning work from artists such as Jeff Koons and Mike Kelley, and acting as unofficial ringleader to a generation of German artists. Written by the artist’s sister, Susanne Kippenberger, and now available in paperback, this first English-language biography draws both from personal memories of their shared childhood and exhaustive interviews with Kippenberger’s extended family of friends and colleagues in the art world. Kippenberger gives insight into the psychology and drive behind this playful and provocative artist. Reviewing the hardcover edition in The New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote: “Ms. Kippenberger provides wonderful thumbnail portraits of the many key figures in her brother’s life, while using their reminiscences to create a finely diced composite oral history that makes palpable both his charming and his repellent sides.”

Economically downtrodden New York City in the mid-to-late 1970s was like the end of the world, but only if you chose to see it that way. For young artists running amok in the collapsing capital, the possibilities seemed endless. For Manuel DeLanda (born 1952), a Mexican transplant enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, overcrowded sidewalks and decrepit subway stations were blank canvases for inspired mayhem.Widely recognized today as a philosopher, professor and author (of A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Assemblage Theory and The Rise of Realism, among other titles), DeLanda initially came to prominence as one of the premiere experimental filmmakers of his generation. Fueled by the gonzo humor and graphic audacity of Frank Zappa and Zap Comix, DeLanda’s fevered productions were among the most deliriously innovative movies of the punk era. While films like Raw Nerves: A Lacanian Thriller and Incontinence: A Diarrhetic Flow of Mismatches are certified underground classics, DeLanda’s visually striking, virtually unknown graffiti work (signed with the tag Ism Ism) has long remained more urban legend than legendary.ISM ISM presents a comprehensive overview of DeLanda’s ephemeral street collages through a colorful frame-by-frame breakdown of a Super-8 short film made in 1979 to document his sweetly subversive activities. Extensive still images, an expansive interview and copious contextual materials combine to illustrate the story of DeLanda’s aesthetic attack on 23rd St, including his friendly competition with fellow taggers Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In the winter of 2007, photographer Michael Schmelling--known for his previous books Shut Up Truth and The Plan--photographed the USA National Memory Championships in New York City. Roughly 100 competitors gathered in a modest conference hall in the Con Edison building to compete in a series of mnemonic tests. Schmelling's photographs from that day are primarily of the competitors, all intensely engaged in recalling and reciting lists of information. Schmelling returned to the championships in 2008, photographing many of the same competitors as the year before. Building a book of short, interrelated stories, Schmelling has combined these images of mnemonists with a series of similar, overlapping narratives. Traveling through a North American landscape of neutral interiors, the viewer of Land Line encounters an array of subjects in the midst of thinking, forgetting, questioning and interpreting. Photographs of professional mnemonists, teenagers in an algorithmic code competition, entrepreneurs, a Hollywood actor, prisoners and English language students dressed up as historical figures coalesce into a larger narrative about cognition, memory and information.

Filmmaker, painter, anthropologist, musicologist and occultist--Harry Smith (1923-1991) was an incomparable polymath and seminal figure in the realms of beat culture and avant-garde art. Smith's kaleidoscopic experimental films have influenced generations of artists and cinephiles, while his landmark three-volume compilation, the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), laid the foundation for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to his ecstatic artwork, Smith is renowned for his vast collections of curious objects. The Collections of Harry Smith, Catalogue Raisonné series spotlights and indexes his eclectic research obsessions.Volume one features richly detailed photographic documentation of 251 paper airplanes gathered by Smith from the streets of New York City over an approximately 20-year period. Whimsical and weird, the paper airplanes rank among Smith's most mysterious collecting pursuits. This extensive compendium presents the fruits of his extraordinary aeronautic pursuit and highlights the tangled history and myths that accompany them.

San Francisco Oracle was a countercultural newspaper published in the city’s bustling Haight Ashbury neighborhood from September 1966 to February 1968, bookending the iconic “Summer of Love.” In 12 issues combining poetry, spirituality and speculation with revolutionary rainbow inking effects, the Oracle reached well beyond the Bay Area and spoke to a radical new American ethos.Where to Score presents not the candy-colored prophecies of various gurus, but a quieter, more revealing corner of the paper—its classified section. There, surrounded by advertisements for drummers, carpenters and head shops, are the desperate pleas of parents seeking wayward children. “Will you trust me enough to call collect and let me know you’re alright?” Elsewhere, beat poet Michael McClure needs a harp and the Sexual Freedom League is hungry for recruits. The diminutive entries speak volumes to the times, showcasing an honest, immediate and lesser-known chapter in the era’s history.

Found art in the form of record covers, lovingly and mischievously vandalized by anonymous music loversMarred for Life! presents over 250 record covers, lovingly and mischievously vandalized by anonymous music lovers. The LP covers were selected from the collection of Greg Wooten, a Los Angeles–based collector, musician and design purveyor. Wooten and his community of record-collector friends have discovered these in used record bins over the course of several years. Sometimes over-the-top and other times subtle—and often, really funny—the objects become a kind of found folk art.Bloodshot eyes, blackened teeth, moustaches, tattoos, reviews, love letters, collage and psychedelic and pornographic embellishings of record covers by Elvis, the Beatles, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, Yoko Ono, Nina Simone, Led Zeppelin, Sparks, LL Cool J, David Bowie, The Velvet Underground, Mose Allison, Prince, Tim Buckley, Neil Young and more can be found here. The book is edited by Jason Fulford, in a way that highlights connections and humor between the covers.

A tender, lighthearted homage to a father’s “beautiful legs”Croatian-born photographer and architect Sara Perovic's mother once told her, "I fell in love with your father because of his beautiful legs." With this small paperback photobook, Perovic (born 1984) has created a tender, humorous study of her boyfriend's legs, as a stand-in for her father's, depicting them in color against various backdrops—aboard a boat, indoors, standing on a bed, or on the tennis court—isolated from the rest of his body. She laments that her father's love of tennis kept his attentions away from her when she was a child, and a short series of full-figure portraits of him delivering a backhand shot in flipbook style concludes the volume, along with a coda from the photographer: "And now my daughter's father has beautiful legs.

A cultural history of the sublime first image of a black hole, in photographs and documents“Peering into Light’s Graveyard: The First Image of the Black Hole,” read the New York Times' April 11 cover story. The headline, like many others that day, was accompanied by an image of a glowing celestial ring framed by infinite blackness: the first image of a black hole. In his first book, New York photographer Matthew Beck (born 1986) focuses on the unveiling of this previously unseeable image by following it into the depths of the New York City subway.The book suggests the notion that the cosmos is not something to simply be observed from our vantage point as humans, but more a system that we are intrinsically a part of; and the true nature of the black hole seems to be as elusive as the answer to humanity’s most pressing question of “why.”

Corita Kent’s photographs of vernacular inspiration—from street signs and folk art to kites, parades and fairsCorita Kent, formerly Sister Mary Corita, is known for her exuberant, colorful serigraphs and her teaching, as evidenced in her lively art classes. As a Catholic nun from 1936 until 1968, Corita lived and worked in the Immaculate Heart of Mary community in Los Angeles. She taught lettering and layout, image finding, and art structure for 20 years in Immaculate Heart College’s art department. There, she screened multiple films simultaneously, hosted guest thinkers including Saul Bass, Buckminster Fuller and John Cage, and guided the making of large-scale collaborative projects with students.Corita regularly took her students out for looking sessions at a used car lot or an art exhibition. While constantly looking and discovering visually, Corita shot thousands of 35 mm slides documenting references, the IHC milieu and the art department processes. For Corita, the vernacular environs of advertising, supermarkets and the city’s media landscape were a source of inspiration and raw material. Her slide collection encompasses a wide range of subjects: cookies, coke bottles, toys, presents, experiments, projects, Mary’s Day celebrations stemming from Corita’s classroom, flowers, magazines, seeds, puppets, visits with Charles and Ray Eames, street signs, trade fairs, folk art, boxes, billboards and kites. Drawing from the Corita Art Center’s vast slide collection, Ordinary Things Will Be Signs for Us embodies Corita’s philosophy of looking.Corita Kent (1918–86) was known for her iconic art, innovative teaching methods and messages of social justice. Born Frances Elizabeth Kent in Fort Dodge, Iowa, she entered the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Hollywood at age 18. As a professor and later chair of the art department, she helped establish its reputation as a hub of creativity and liberal thinking. By 1968, her art was enormously popular, showing in more than 230 exhibitions and held in public and private collections around the world. She remained active in social causes until her death in 1986.

Viking’s curated family photos take on a nostalgic, foreboding tone under the specter of his father’s imprisonmentWhen Danish artist André Viking (born 1989) was a child, his father, an amateur bodybuilder, was imprisoned. In his absence, family photo albums took on a tender and heartbreaking role. Hello "Soul Mate" presents a selection of these photographs, accompanied by love letters written from prison by his father.

Clayton’s poetic, intricate drawings made on a typewriter capture glimpses of life at the beginning of the Covid pandemicSince 2012, Lenka Clayton (born 1977) has (mis)used the typewriter as a drawing tool. To this date, she has made over 500 typewriter illustrations by using only the letter and punctuation keys on a standard mechanical typewriter. How We Thought It Would Be and How It Was presents 23 of these drawings, executed on a 1957 portable Smith-Corona Skyriter on antique, letter-size typewriter paper. Each drawing carries physical traces of the making process, including folds that enable the paper to move in all directions through the carriage. The subjects are all drawn from direct observation of daily life Clayton experienced during the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020, including her grandma’s thumb on the camera during a Zoom conversation, empty supermarket shelves and the remnants of tea towels that were hastily cut up to make homemade masks.

Kaltenbach's staggering, psychedelic portrait of his dying father is a transcendent meditation on life, afterlife and symbiosis with the universeArtist Stephen Kaltenbach was working at the bleeding edge of Conceptualism when he dropped out of newly named SoHo in 1969 to pursue a far stranger dream. Trading his heady downtown atmosphere for the relative isolation of a Northern California barn, he spent the better part of the next decade painting a colossal—and colossally cosmic—portrait of his dying dad. At nearly 15 feet wide, it’s a sincerely wondrous and confounding artwork.Portrait of My Father is stunning on its face, where each beard whisker explodes a window onto eternity, and from across the room, as a photorealistic depiction of a man on death’s door. But equally staggering is that Portrait was painted by an artist who moved west as a Conceptual gesture in and of itself, under the terms of his self-defined “Protocol of Opposites”—a mode dedicated to what was least expected of him. While the painting was essentially (and intentionally) the most heretical artwork he could imagine, Kaltenbach’s quest was simultaneously earnest, driven by spiritual and pharmacological awakening, love for his father, and commitment to seclusion and process. Since 2000, Portrait has been on permanent view at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, where it’s a cornerstone of the permanent collection.The definitive history of the painting and the intentionally oppositional choices that led to its implausible creation, the book consists of an epic interview with the artist conducted and annotated with context and corrections by curator and writer Jordan Stein (Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts, 2023), who also offers an introduction, alongside a trove of archival material.

An unprecedented exposé of an infamous hoax campaign to clothe animals that, decades later, remains completely uproariousPerpetrated from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA) was a fabricated moralist campaign that received unimaginable amounts of international attention in newspapers, radio and on the TV news. Its goal? To clothe all animals higher than 4 inches and longer than 6 inches. Its leader? G. Clifford Prout, a bespectacled fuddy duddy with an inheritance to burn through and an even better catchphrase: "Decency Today Means Morality Tomorrow." A pioneering prank that lasted way longer than anyone would have expected, SINA was the comedic pipe dream of Alan and Jeanne Abel, a pair of anarchic lovebirds who perpetrated dozens of ambitious hoaxes and hysterical deceptions for well over 50 years. They were joined in this confounding crusade by their friend, Buck Henry, who served as the organization's honorable spokesman in the years before he became an acclaimed actor and screenwriter (The Graduate, To Die For). Together, they put pants on kangaroos, picketed the White House and pulled the wool over the eyes of mystified people everywhere.Inside SINA tells the whole crazy story through Alan Abel's words and an eye-popping array of original documents, news reports, correspondence and photos. As the first publication to compile the complete history of this legendary media hoax, this jam-packed book reveals, at long last, how these three jesters pioneered the perfect prank. SINA was a brilliant lampooning of traditional American values and hypocritical attitudes that remains strangely timely and forever funny.

Shut Up Truth is a document of artist Michael Schmelling's friendship with James Holloway, a Texas native and union projectionist. The project began in 1996, when Schmelling met Holloway at a film screening while on assignment in Texas for the Associated Press. Shut Up Truth iis an unflincing and intimate portrait of a single, white middle-aged man. The photographs, taken in El Paso, constitute a documentary of contemporary American life. Michael Schmelling was born in Pittsburgh in 1973. He now lives in New York City and is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The Fader, Details.

Jubliee is Ted Fair's first book, comprised of color photographs taken between 2000 and 2003 across the United States. The selection of photographs is meant to be read as one would read the lines of a poem; each image offering a perspective on the one before, and one following. The result is an oblique window into Fair's world, and a tender picture of contemporary suburban and rural American life. Ted Fair was born in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania in 1970. He now lives in Brooklyn, NY where he surveys buildings for an architectural restoration company.

Beautiful Ecstasy is a collection of snapshot portraits and still lifes by American photographer Michael Northrup (born 1948), shot in the 1970s and 80s. Young families--Northrup's own and those of friends--are depicted partying and performing for the camera, a jubilant and wild community in small-town America.

Funny and insightful, Chart Sensation is a hilarious collection of Power Point illustrations by Michael Lewy, depicting his daily struggle with boredom and malaise, success and failure. Michael Lewy is an artist who holds a day job at MIT in Cambridge, MA. He was born in Rivervale, New Jersey in 1964.

Paper Placemats is a book of 40 paper placemats, printed with work by 30 artists and ten writers. Each placemat can be ripped out and used. Contributors were asked to submit work having to do with “Place.” Conceived as a public art project, the placemats were donated to restaurants across the U.S. in 2004/5 with the help of volunteers in each state. Additional copies are sold to cover the costs of production.Contributors include Jennifer Arnow, Amie Barrodale, Jeff Billak, Blixie, Ryan Blomberg, Helen Chough, Fern Cogley, Steve Featherstone, Ted Fair, April Gertler, Michelangelo Iaffaldano, Paul Marlow, Michael Martone, Eileen Maxson, Michael Northrup, Amy O’Neill, Ed Panar, Tim Parrish, Christian Patterson, Gus Powell, Alex Romero, Hadley Ross, Matt Salacuse, Matthew Sandager, Joanna Scott, Ross Schwartzman, Hasanthika Sirisena, Ben Skinner, Gwen Smith, Gilbert Sorrentino, Barry Stone, Zach Storm, Ashley Thayer, Miriam Toews, Lars Tunbjork, Paul West and Lloyd Ziff.

J&L Illustrated #2 is the second volume of J&L's collection of drawings and fiction. The work was commissioned in 2004 by asking the contributors to submit work having to do with "Adventure". The fiction was edited by Craig Taylor, and the drawings by Leanne Shapton and Jason Fulford. Contributors include Helon Habila, Miriam Toews, Kevin Sampsell, Adam Sternbergh, Paul Maliszewski, Sarah Shawn, Corey Keegan, Hannah Griffiths, Jeff Johnson, Nathan Whitlock, David Shrigley, Ryan Blomberg, Marcel Dzama, Forest Juziuk, Jason Logan, Justin Peroff, Amy O'Neill, Matthew Sandager, Serge Onnen, Jill Smith, Richard McGuire, Brian Rea, Harrison Haynes, Michelangelo Iaffaldano, James Gallagher, Olia Mishchenko, Leif Parsons, Gary Peter, Will Van Roden, Nick Dewar, Paul Marlow, Ryan Storm, Jemal Hamilton, Alex Romero, Zach Storm, Shawn Creeden, Brendan Nakahara, Al Peterson, Brian Rea, Booh Stoodio, Nicholas Blechman, Joe Mattson, Paul Clark, Tucker Nichols, and Michael Harwell.

Drawings on Geology is Dutch/French artist Serge Onnen's collection of black-and-white drawings based on the concept of the horizon. Onnen has drawn on works by artists from across history to the present, as well as on anonymous ephemera, to elaborate this theme. The artists included here are David Shrigley, Paul Noble, Mark Dion, MVRDV, Hans Broek, Sebastiaan Bremer, Matthew Monaham, Olav Westphalen, Robert Longo, Raymond Pettibon, Leonardo DaVinci, Satoru Eguchi, Le Corbusier, Daragh Reeves, Marla Bussmann, Ellen Harvey, Alice Smit, Ben Polsky, Mathilde ter Heijne, Seurat, Paul Nassenstein, Toba Kedoori, Hannes Kater, Serge Onnen, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Aam Solleveld, Carlos Roque, Caspar David Friederich, Albrecht Dürer, Arnoud Holleman, Napoleon Bonaparte, William Wegman, Christine Rusch, Grandville, Pope sixtus, Roy McMakin, Marc Smeets, Geert Dekkers and others.

This funny, dry and absurd twist on conventional art criticism serves as a great reference book for 20th Century art criticism. In 2001, while residing at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, artist and curator Octavian Esanu read hundreds of interviews and essays by artists and art critics. He then formed a new text out of the questions about art which he had culled from his readings. Each question is duly footnoted. The results are hilarious, absurd and profound. Originally published in 2002 in Germany by Edition Solitude, JFL: What Does "Why" Mean? is now available in North America, re-typeset and printed by J&L.

In June, 2005, while traveling in Vietnam, artist Harrell Fletcher visited The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Deeply affected by the exhibit, Fletcher returned to photograph all of the images and text descriptions from the main museum with the intention of re-presenting the exhibition in the United States. Fletcher's exhibition The American War toured for two years, stopping at various U. S. venues including the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M. I. T. and White Columns in New York City. With this collection of images, Fletcher encourages his audience to reconsider opinions of the War in Vietnam and other American wars that have occurred since. Harrell Fletcher is a visual artist working in mixed media: video, installation, photography and web based works. His work was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Fletcher has an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and has taught and lectured in the US and Europe. In Spring 2004, he taught at New York's Cooper Union. A hallmark of his work is to devise strategies for transforming the everyday experiences and objects of community residents into curated exhibitions.

J&L Video is the first in a new series of anthology DVDs featuring 12 original shorts, each under seven minutes, by contemporary artists and filmmakers. In the spirit of the book series J&L Illustrated, J&L Video compiles films and video works from around the world with a sensibility that combines the real and the ridiculous. Featured works include Catherine Ross's split-screen, cropped outtakes from the TV show The Price is Right; Matt McCormick's Destiny, a bizarre world of clicking and applause; dreamy documentary sketches about family by Brock Enright; stock figurative illustrations representing all of human history in a continuous loop by Oliver Laric; Will Rogan's incredibly mundane experiments with chance; Julie Lequin's Sounds Like Julie, in which the artist is imitated by her friends; an exchange between a photographer and his subject in the American Southwest by Amy Harrington; Ed Panar's ebullient music video, Here I Go Again; Shana Moulton's exercise-video fantasy world, Feeling Free; and Andrew Lampert's fashion-shoot nightmare.

This veritable visual encyclopedia collects 132 images of our most dexterous body part, gathered by Dutch-French artist Serge Onnen from across the annals of art history--from meticulous sixteenth-century renderings (Hendrick Goltzius) to contemporary punk-influenced depictions (Raymond Pettibon), from instructional handshake diagrams to political cartoons. Other contributors include Kinke Kooi, Robert Filliou, William Kentridge, Shakers, Michael Kirkham, Balthus, Daragh Reeves, Mrzyk & Moriceau, Serge Onnen, Marcel van Eden, Andrej Roiter and Olav Westphalen. Drawings on Hands's packaging, with a folded cardboard cover and elastic cord, is as pleasing to the eye as to the hand.

J & L Books’ acclaimed J & L Illustrated series presents handsomely designed paperback volumes of fiction and art at an affordable price. Shout magazine wrote of the first volume, published in 2002: “This impressive collection of illustrations and fiction makes sense of the world like good liquor should.” Edited by writer Paul Maliszewski (author of Prayer and Parable and Fakers), this third volume of J & L Illustrated is comprised of 13 short stories by authors Amie Barrodale, Scott Bradfield, Stephen Dixon, Steve Featherstone, William H. Gass, Michael Martone, Joseph McElroy, Elizabeth Miller, Robert Nedelkoff, Hasanthikia Sirisena, Steve Stern, Mike Topp and Xiaoda Xiao. The Paris-based artist Shoboshobo provides accompanying drawings.

Adam Penn Gilders was a virtuoso of the deadpan prose miniature. He published his stories in Paris Review, The Walrus and J&L Illustrated, before passing away in 2007, at the age of 36, of a brain tumor. Another Ventriloquist collects Gilders' charming vignettes, which fall somewhere between Aesop's fable and bitch session: "My friend Geoffrey, to my constant dismay, seems compelled to enjoy life's little pleasures, such as coffee or perfectly cooked eggs, all at once, without delay or hesitation. With coffee, for example, which he particularly loves, he drains his cup with almost demented eagerness, often before his companions have taken a single sip. It was as though the best experiences, like hot liquids, were liable to evaporate if measured out in teaspoons. He had what I considered a 'Now or Never' attitude which made me want to proclaim 'Never!'" With this posthumous collection, Gilders bequeaths a gem of concision and wit.

Baltimore photographer Michael Northrup (born 1948) has been making gently humorous but decidedly jubilant color photographs of his daily life since the early 1970s. His 2004 J&L publication Beautiful Ecstasy depicted young families (Northrup’s own and those of friends) partying and performing for the camera, often in each other’s homes, bringing a beautifully understated formal elegance to moments of tender and chaotic everyday living. This sequel to Beautiful Ecstasy presents a further selection of previously unpublished photographs from the 1970s and 80s, all permeated with Northrup’s characteristic joie de vivre. Period details in furniture and clothing vividly resurrect the textures of these bygone moments; here, we also see young couples bringing children into their chaotic worlds, freighting these scenes of small town America with a powerful atmosphere of fragility and wonder.

French photographer Bertrand Fleuret (born 1969) has made some of the most poetical and beautifully produced photobooks of the past ten years--among them The Risk of an Early Spring and Landmasses and Railways, published by J&L Books, who brings us Fleuret’s latest volume--a continuation of Landmasses and Railway’s exploration of the moods and imagery of imaginary worlds. Several years ago, Fleuret had an unusually intense dream that began with him standing by a wall of dark cliffs. When he awoke, he found that the details of the dream remained oddly vivid, and he decided to reconstruct it in photographs. This volume reproduces the sequence of color photographs along with Fleuret’s account of the dream.

Elisabeth Tonnard’s In This Dark Wood is a study of urban alienation in America. In a haunting, modern-gothic style, it pairs images of people walking alone in nighttime city streets with 90 different English translations, collected by Tonnard, of the famous first lines of Dante’s Inferno: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita.” (“In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood / for the straight way was lost”). The images were selected from the Joseph Selle collection at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, which contains over a million negatives from a company of street photographers who worked in San Francisco from the 1940s to the 70s. This edition is a reprint of a work originally self-published in 2008.