With a pocket full of borrowed money and a head full of rain, Jimi sits in a pub in London, where he has traveled for no reason except that London isn't Boston, or Manhattan, or the college where Jimi wasted four years, or the brick alleyways where he's puked and made love and crawled and laughed at the night. Jimi Banks is 23: went to school as a hockey player and now just skates: diseased and innocent, criminal and pure. His summer love that started on a posh island crashed on the dusty mainland. And his best friend is dead. From London in a cloud of hashish and tobacco, booze and beer...to Paris to stay with the daughter of a banker who wants to be a patron of the arts...back to London, broke again, where a man named Rosie declares his undying love and it's all right with Jimi if it just comes with a meal....Jimi Banks is dodging shadows. There's his friend, Ray, who hung himself in a gorge outside Aspen; his family who won't return his phone calls anymore; and the vast quantities of booze he has to drink to call them. Out of money, out of favors, Jimi is just not out of places to run.

Technicolor Pulp: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Nelson, Arty

United States

GRAND CENTRAL PUB.

This board book documents Totalities, Chris Johanson’s recent “contemporary living installation” at Deitch Projects, New York. The theme of the work is the planet Earth and its place in the universe. There is also a meditation on the natural world of plants and animals―how they live within themselves, and how they are affected by humans―with an emphasis on conservation. All of the wood used in the exhibition was recycled, either from New York State, from dumpsters near the artist’s Brooklyn studio or from discarded art-shipping crates. The artist even asked his friends and acquaintances for scraps of wood, endeavoring to give his materials a third life. In this volume, he alludes to the degradation of the planet and the beauty of the world through art, reminding us all of our terrestrial responsibilities.

Chris Johanson: Totalities

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Deitch Projects

The greatest cultural accomplishments in history have never been the result of the brainstorms of marketing men, corporate focus groups, or any homogenized methods; they have always happened organically. More often than not, these manifestations have been the result of a few like-minded people coming together to create something new and original for no other purpose than a common love of doing it. In the 1990s, a loose-knit group of American artists and creators, many just out of their teens, began their careers in just such a way. Influenced by the popular underground youth subcultures of the day, such as skateboarding, graffiti, street fashion, and independent music, artists like Shepard Fairey, Mark Gonzales, Spike Jonze, Margaret Kilgallen, Mike Mills, Barry McGee, Phil Frost, Chris Johanson, Harmony Korine, and Ed Templeton began to create art that reflected the lifestyles they led. Many had no formal training and almost no conception of the inner workings of the art world. They learned their crafts through practice, trial and error, and good old-fashioned innovation. Not since the Beat Generation have we seen a group of creative individuals with such a unified aesthetic sense and varied cultural facets. The world of art has been greatly affected by their accomplishments as have the worlds of fashion, music, literature, film, and, ironically, athletics. Over the years, the group has matured, and many have become more establishment-oriented; but no matter, their independent spirit has remained steadfast. Beautiful Losers is a retrospective celebration of this spirit, with hundreds of artworks by over two dozen artists, from precursors like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Larry Clark, to more recent adherents Ryan McGinniss, KAWS, and Geoff McFetridge. Work in all conceivable mediums is included, plus reproductions of reams of ephemera. The accompanying essays are contributed by a half-dozen writers who have championed these beautiful losers from the start.

Beautiful Losers

Rose, Aaron

Strike, Christian

Baker, Alex

Weyland, Jocko

History & Criticism

D.A.P./Iconoclast

The greatest cultural accomplishments in history have never been the result of the brainstorms of marketing men, corporate focus groups or any homogenized methods; they have always happened organically. More often than not, these manifestations have been the result of a few like-minded people coming together to create something new and original for no other purpose than a common love of doing it. In the 1990s, a loose-knit group of American artists and creators, many just out of their teens, began their careers in just such a way. Influenced by the popular underground youth subcultures of the day, such as skateboarding, graffiti, street fashion and independent music, artists like Shepard Fairey, Mark Gonzales, Spike Jonze, Margaret Kilgallen, Mike Mills, Barry McGee, Phil Frost, Chris Johanson, Harmony Korine and Ed Templeton began to create art that reflected the lifestyles they led. Many had no formal training and almost no conception of the inner workings of the art world. They learned their crafts through practice, trial and error, and good old-fashioned innovation. Not since the Beat Generation have we seen a group of creative individuals with such a unified aesthetic sense and varied cultural facets. The world of art has been greatly affected by their accomplishments as have the worlds of fashion, music, literature, film, and, ironically, athletics. Beautiful Losers is a retrospective celebration of this spirit, with hundreds of artworks by over two dozen artists, from precursors like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Larry Clark, to more recent adherents Ryan McGinness, KAWS and Geoff McFetridge. Work in all conceivable mediums is included, plus reproductions of reams of ephemera. The accompanying essays are contributed by a half-dozen writers who have championed these beautiful losers from the start. This paperback reprint includes more pages, more images, an exhibition checklist, installation shots from a variety of exhibitions and an interview with Beautiful Losers advocate Agnes B.

Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture (D.A.P./ICONOCLA)

Wes Lang’s (born 1972) first monograph focuses on his works on paper--complicated arrangements of his typically American iconography, expertly rendered in ink and paint and juxtaposed in riotous combinations. These images, selected from a decade’s worth of material, range from the artist’s covers for a 2012 Grateful Dead box set chronicling their epic 1990 tour (fulfilling a teenage dream of Lang’s) to precise classical drawing reminiscent of a nineteenth-century illustrator, in a dizzying mix of American history, biker culture, tattoo iconography, ornament, Native American art, pin-ups, newspaper headlines and Taoist texts. This book--the only Wes Lang monograph in print--contains an essay by author James Frey and will undoubtedly appeal to both Lang’s substantial online following and to fans of Americana.

Wes Lang

Frey, James

PictureBox/Half Gallery

Michael Muller has carved a career out of impressive encounters. Famed for his portraits of the world’s most elite actors, musicians, and sports stars, he has in the last decade built up one of the most spectacular portfolios of underwater shark photography.
Muller’s quest is to document sharks with an unprecedented proximity and precision, bringing the Hollywood portrait session to the ocean predator. In ocean depths around the world, he approaches the sharks with a patented seven-bulb, 1200-watt plexi-encased strobe lighting rig, developed with NASA engineering, and no cage.
This collection of Muller’s images, including the first-known photograph of a great white breaching at night, is a catalog of adrenalin and awe. Arranged geographically, it follows Muller’s ocean adventures from black tip and sand tiger sharks in South Africa to great hammerheads in the Bahamas, with thrilling narratives from each trip documenting the challenges and near-misses along the way.
To compliment Muller’s work for advocacy organizations such as WildAid and EarthEcho, the images are contextualized with essays from Philippe Cousteau, Jr. and marine biologist Alison Kock, who discuss exploration and conservation of our oceanic kingdom. Culture writer Arty Nelson adds an overview of Muller’s work, while a technical section explains the precise equipment behind these spectacular shots. Together, these insightful texts and awesome images offer a record of breathtaking photographic feats, a tribute to the beauty and might of the shark, and a rallying cry for its fragile future.This book is also available in a signed Collector’s Edition and two Art Editions, each including a signed and numbered print.

Michael Muller. Sharks

Kock, Dr. Alison

Cousteau Jr., Philippe

Taschen

Californian artist Ed Templeton (born 1972) delivers up his diagnosis of the contemporary human condition in a whirlwind of present-tense imagery, filtered through photographs, paintings and drawings. Over the past decade and a half, Templeton has built an oeuvre that closely tracks his day-to-day reality, recording life in the Southern Californian suburbs, his flawed family background, his life as a professional skateboarder, his milieu, the relationship between the artist and his muse (his wife Deanna) and much else. Templeton has also drawn deeply on artists such as Egon Schiele, Balthus, David Hockney, Larry Clark and Nan Goldin; as with their work, what begins as a very personal chronicle ultimately opens out onto grander horizons--in Templeton's case, a broad meditation on the chaos and the joy of being human. The Cemetery of Reason is the first large monographic museum publication devoted to Templeton's work. Presented as a mid-career retrospective accompanying a spring 2010 exhibition at the S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst) in Ghent, Belgium, it combines and juxtaposes works in various media from the past 15 years with new works and series, all reproduced in 260 color images, thus providing the most comprehensive overview of Templeton's work available. Born in 1972 and raised in the Orange County suburb of Los Angeles, Ed Templeton is a professional skateboarder, co-editor of the arts magazine ANP Quarterly, photographer and artist. His work was featured in the hugely successful traveling show Beautiful Losers.

Ed Templeton: The Cemetery of Reason

Chévrier, Jean-François

McCormick, Carlo

Van Cauteren, Philippe

Caron, Thomas

S.M.A.K.

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