Things

Things has been an education of sorts this week. Tate have publsihed an invaluable resource about an early 20’s Avant-Garde journal, schooled in psychedelics from a pony and you know those two rude boy twins with matching Loakes and parkas? We know who took that photo. Also we became happy voyeurs on the town of Ystov (somewhere vaguely Eastern European), and we have the official right to “vom” with excitement at the pending royal wedding.

Zine Kai Nodland

Here is a pony getting increasingly mental in a landscape also of increasing mentalness. In Kai’s own words it’s “a loose narrative concerning an alarming love for a horse”. Shadowfax (as we have adopted him) enjoys walks in the park, psychedelics, running in the trip-woods only to disapear into geometric void where there is no logic, only happiness. This is a most excellent zine.
www.kainodland.com

G, An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design and Film Detlef Mertins and Michael W.Jennings, editors

This is about the journal G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung, sort of “elemental form-creation” and as the title suggests, it’s a comprehensive resource of 1923-1926. The original, innovative graphic design, general avant-gardeness grouped the likes of Tristan Tzara, Man Ray and Theo van Doesburg in a common belief – "emphasis on the process and the materials through which cultural objects are produced rather then on any “ism”, style of form". Good looking thing it is too.
www.tate.org.uk/publishing

Royal Wedding Sick Bag Lydia Leith

The memorabilia has already started. The local “snappy-well-haps” will crumble from the inundation of glitched Wills and Kates jpegs fused onto pound shop mugs and your nan will go mental like it’s 1981. “Keep this handy on April 29th” states the sick bag Lydia Leith has ingeniously screen printed. Throne Up is an excellent alternative souvenier for the occasion, but to be honest we feel sick already so thanks in advance Lydia.
www.lydialeith.com

Project Space/Arkitip/JB collaboration newspaper Janette Beckman

Janette Beckman is a legend. Unequivocally cool, her images aren’t “sort of” anything, they are it, she’s the one that took those photos that we see everywhere, reconstructed in cinema and fashion shoots and contrive in our bedrooms. This no frills newspaper collaboration for/with Arkitip and Project Space is a brief but important lesson in what a visual record really meant to a photographer from the 60’s on. “No lies”.
www.janettebeckman.com

Vignettes of Ystov William Goldsmith

This is William’s first graphic novel and if this is how he means to carry on then he’s won us over. Each “vauguely Eastern European” character is presented on a double page and in individual shades that colour their walks of life, “charting their everyday absurdities, restraints, and small triumphs”. It’s a micro-macro affair with Goldsmith playing nicely to the characters and the panaromic world he’s created for them.
www.williamgoldsmith.co.uk