MoMA Bibliographer conferring over an image from the magazine Radical Software. The talk was at the ICA in Philadelphia this past Sunday as part of their Excursus series.
The Museum of Modern Art Library
Welcome to the life and times of the MoMA Library.
Our library is open to the public--just contact us to make an appointment.
Our library is open to the public--just contact us to make an appointment.
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Eugenio Dittborn (1983)
Early Airmail Painting / very large piece of mail art ==> it’s really big. -ds
Come visit our new Library exhibition - Please Come to the Show. You can access the show when visiting MoMA or free of charge by entering at the 4 W. 54th St. entrance to the Education Building. -ds
Match text to publication. Which was rendered in typewriter type in the 1979 self-published paperback Publish Your Photo Book by Bill Owens, and which in 2011 in the full-color, hardcover, trade press Publish Your Photography Book (2011) by Darius Himes and Mary Virginia Swanson?
In the last ten years we have seen an tremendous change and growth in the photographic industry. Today photographic education, museum exhibits, and photographic publications are dominating the (photographic) art scene.
The book can be reviewed…and given mass media exposure. [It may] become an exhibit in a museum or gallery. [It] can be talked about in lectures [and] workshops, passed around to friends and have a life of its own….exposure of your work is the main reason for self-publishing.
[With the photographic book,] the young photographer can share with the public his or her artistic vision.
Photography books have never commanded greater interest than they do today. Over the past fifteen years, interest in photography books has grown at an accelerated rate, due in no small part to the welcoming embrace of photography by the contemporary art world…They provide an artist a passport to the international photography scene: exhibitions, talks, gallery walks, book signings, and press interviews are all brought into being through their publication.
Ultimately, this book is about our inherent desire to communicate, about creating and manifesting one’s creative vision in book form.
Flared jeans may be out but photobooks remain vital. -jt
“The nine photographs of the TV project Self Burial by Keith Arnatt were transmitted daily beginning 11th of October ending 18th of October 69. Each photograph was shown 2 seconds at 8.15 and 9.15pm without any introduction or commentary. The stills of Keith Arnatt were cut into the running daily TV program.” —from the colophon of this book. This project was aired on WDR Fernsehen - a regional West German TV channel. -ds
John Cage and the Percussion Players! at the Modern in 1943! Imaginary Landscape #3 looks pretty good. -ds
Today’s stacks find: the score for a “slideopera,” The Philistine Traveler (New Haven: Philistine, 1954), a labor of love by Dave Jones and William Kent.
The opera was created specifically as a synchronization of Kodachrome slides and sound recording. Per the prescient introduction, (complete with idiosyncratic capitalization),
“The Authors maintain that modern Mechanical Means of Reproduction both in Audio and Visual terms can be approached and used for Themselves…and not merely as a ‘substitute’ for a live-performance.” They believed that such works could “result in an Operatic artform more relevant to Our Times.”
Neither slides nor recording are included in the small-run publication, so performance is left to the imagination, stimulated by the basketweave cover, multicolored paper stock, planograph prints, hand-lettering, perforations, and inserts.
One of the opera’s thirteen sections is titled “Create Traffic,” narrated by the biblical Samuel. Here we see the cover and score. Much like Tumblr traffic, it’s “Going Going, Out and In, Out and In…” -jt
