Thursday, March 12, 2015

TIME












Time  - Guillaume Belhomme, Guillaume Tarche

Published by Lenka Lente

78 pp
10 x 15 CM
100 copies
ISBN :  978-2-9545845-7-7



I’m a sucker for art gallery bookshops and those books that you just don’t find anywhere else except in art gallery bookshops. Books full of the work of an artists you’ve never heard of before delight me no end. Books chock full of images that are immediately inspiring. You buy them. I buy them. I shouldn’t because they’re expensive but I can’t help myself. I take them home, look at them and put them on a shelf where, years later, I take them down and marvel at them once more.

I dare say I shall take down ‘Time’ sometime in the future but more in bafflement than amazement. Time contains nothing but black and white images and is, I think, themed around improvisation and the difference between improvisation and composition

‘In fifteen seconds, the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to think about what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have only fifteen seconds.’

Theres a picture of Ornette Coleman’s ‘Something Else!!!’ LP cover and beside it a card with the words ‘Et maintenant’ printed on it. There’s a picture of Japanese tape manipulator Aki Onda and sound artist Akio Suzuki, pictures of rocks, Japanese art, abstract snapshots, John Coltrane CD’s, mushrooms, some grainy images of a woman giving birth, some pictures show an album sleeve sharing the frame with something else such as the reverse of Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity LP sat atop some dusty analogue equipment, a CD sits atop a cactus and so it goes.

The back cover lists the people you can find in this book. People such as Sun Ra, WG Sebald, Guy Debord, Samuel Beckett, Orson Welles, Lol Coxhill, Sonic Youth and for some reason, highlighted, Steve Lacy.

And so it goes.

At a time when you can download a copy of Proust’s ‘À la Recherche du Temps Perdu’ to your Kindle for two quid I quite like the fact that publishers such as Lenka Lente exist. Long may they do so.

Their other publications include a tome on the outsider artist Adolf Wölfli which contains a three inch CD by Nurse With Wound, something that appears to have lots of John Coltrane album artwork and the Futurists manifesto as written by Francesco Balilla Pratella. There’s other goodies too including EVP searcher outer Michael Esposito. All in French mind.


http://www.lenkalente.com/





No comments: