From 1976 to 1978, the young photographer Simon Barker was a member of the "Bromley Contingent"--a group of avid Sex Pistols fans who comprised the group’s inner circle at the height of the punk movement. Many of them, such as Jordan and Siouxsie Sioux, were notorious for their daredevil dress sense, and several--such as Sioux, Steven Severin, Adam Ant, Poly Styrene, Billy Idol, Viv Albertine and Ari Up--went on to form some of the most important bands of the era. This compilation of previously unseen photographs by Barker shows these founders of punk in their earliest incarnations--in bedrooms and kitchens, at public gigs and private parties--before media and commerce sunk their claws into punk’s iconoclastic look and class politics. Taken with the simplest and cheapest pocket cameras, the photographs in this collection constitute Barker’s "family album for the years 1976 to 1978." In the spirit of the Pistols’ "God Save the Queen," the volume closes with a photographic sequence taken by Barker during the 1976 Jubilee celebrations, which shows Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu hobnobbing with the Queen of England in the royal procession.

Simon Barker: Punk's Dead

Arts & Photography

MARCUS, Greil

Bracewell, Michael

Tatchell, Peter

Woodlawn, Holly

Photography & Video

Divus

Mike Diana (born 1969) became known in the early 1990s for scary, childlike drawings that he published in his Boiled Angel magazine. Over the past two decades, this body of work has grown to epic proportions, as Diana refines and expands his vision of a culture overloaded on greed and violence. This handsome box set consists of two volumes, Live and Die--the first of which compiles several comic-book sequences, while the second gathers paintings and drawings. "Art should afflict the comfortable and disturb the complacent, and Mike Diana‘s work does that in spades," says Neil Gaiman. "He‘s been arrested for his art, he‘s been sentenced for his art, and a local police force was even charged to make 24-hour random raids and spot-checks on Mike‘s living space, to make sure he wasn‘t committing art in secret. Now you can find out what all the fuss was about."

Mike Diana: America: Live/Die

Individual Artists

Stu Mead's (born 1955) paintings approach the art world at a tangent; though the artist received a formal art education, his cartoon-inspired style and predilection for painting prepubescent, female objects of desire has placed him somewhere outside the mainstream, but with a firm cult following. This monograph compiles many of Mead's paintings--fantastical, surreal and erotic--in a handsome hardcover. Inspired by the paintings and drawings of Hans Bellmer and Balthus, Mead works at the intersection of high and low art, unabashedly depicting taboo topics and scenarios. A student of Andrea Dworkin's in the 1980s, Mead comes out of the radical feminist movement, and his graphic painting style investigates identity, gender and social emancipation. Straddling the line between fairytale illustration and comic-book humor, Berlin-based Mead's controversial work is published as a retrospective for the first time.

Stu Mead

Sounds Familiar: Or the Beast of Artek

Zinik, Zinovy

Mike Diana: RIP is a new book of horror, fun, unexpected adventure and disaster from Mike Diana―an internationally known underground cartoonist, and the only artist in America to have received a criminal conviction for artistic obscenity.
His run-ins with the law have seemed to have the opposite of the intended effect; since first arriving on the scene in the 1990s with his (in)famous Boiled Angel magazine, Diana has only refined and expanded his vision of a culture engorged and overloaded on greed and violence.
This volume, featuring recent cartoons and drawings along with some rare finds from Diana’s archive, features exotic, druggy, disgusting stories in Diana’s inimitable, sharp style―scary and childlike, inflected with a deadly dark humor and punctuated by weird punchlines.

Mike Diana: RIP

Man Bag grew out of the Artpolicecomics magazine project that had been publishing out of the community of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which fell victim in the late 1980s to the culture-wars climate of censorship.
In response, two of the protagonists of Artpolicecomics, Stu Mead (born 1955) and Frank Gaard (born 1944), got together on a new zine, this time deliberately thumbing their noses at political correctness and decency, fixating on “sick sex and decadence” in an underground “men’s magazine focused on deviated sexuality,” as Gaard puts it. Stu Mead &amp; Frank Gaard: The Immortal Man Bag Journal of Art collects all printed editions of the zine, along with Man Bag No. 6, released for the first time. In his introduction, Gaard offers an unvarnished, conversational, infectious history of Man Bag, supplemented with extracts from Stu Mead’s diary.

Stu Mead & Frank Gaard: The Immortal Man Bag Journal of Art

History & Criticism

My itinerary has been monotonous for quite a while

Jirous, Ivan Martin

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