Tom Friedman is an unusual young American sculptor who produces quirky yet beautiful sculptures out of household objects – pencils, plastic cups, laundry detergent, paper straws. Featured in cream and in a one-person presentation at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Friedman has quickly gained an impressive following of some of the most attentive and influential contemporary art-watchers in the United States. This is art which raises questions about the making and seeing of art, about the pleasures of small transformations producing sudden beauty. This book will coincide with Friedman's first major American museum tour, to be held in 2000–2002. American art critic Bruce Hainley examines the artist's work as a kind of giant self-portrait. Poet and novelist Dennis Cooper discusses with the artist such unexpected influences as contemporary electronic music. Guardian art critic Adrian Searle looks at the artist's work Untitled, 1993 – a ring of plastic cups in a home-made Minimalist tradition. The Artist's Choices are The Dinner Party (1919) by Swiss writer Robert Walser, and the glossary to Info-Psychology (1975–76) by Timothy Leary, the cult psychologist who advocated the use of psychedelic drugs. Facsimiles of the artist's notebooks and text works are published alongside an important interview by curator Robert Storr.

Tom Friedman (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Arts & Photography

Dennis Cooper

Adrian Searle

Bruce Hainley

Individual Artists

Phaidon Press

Peter Doig (b.1959) is a pioneering artist whose work has charted a new direction in contemporary painting.Contains interviews with the artist and essays in his art.

Peter Doig (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Peter Doig

Kitty Scott

Catherine Grenier

Hannes Schneider

Arnold Fanck

History & Criticism

The Hope That Kills Us: An Anthology of Scottish Football Fiction

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Freight Design

Isle of Wight Folklore

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

The Dovecote Press Ltd

Challenging and provocative, Mikhailov's photographs document human casualties living in post communist Eastern Europe after the demise of the Soviet Union. They are unflinching and ruthless depictions of poverty and the homeless (also known as Bomzhes) living in the margins of Russia's new economic regime without social support or care. This series presents a simulated wedding between two homeless people often naked and in sexual poses, set amongst their own surroundings. Mikhailov's photographs, often presented in these wry even humorous situations, only add to the absurdity of this tragic life. The onlooker experiences feelings of empathy and disgust as they guiltily absorb the content of these engaging yet horrifying pictures, peering into an unknown world of madness, destitution, longing and death in an un-redemptive portrait of outcast humanity. The Wedding is bound in imitation of a traditional wedding album, with faux-leather and gold-debossed lettering designed by calligrapher John Stevens. It is further finished off with a text by Adrian Searle.

The Wedding

Boris Mikhailov

Photography & Video

Morel Books

In the gauche surroundings of a hotel room, Juergen Teller combines the braggadocio of his nude self-portraits with his ongoing paean to woman in an often x-rated filmic narrative. The faux-leather bound, gold leaf tipped slim volume, Louis XV contains a series of photographs that is an intimate tale of lust and excess with his latest muse, the actress Charlotte Rampling. Teller's work is essentially autobiographical--his art has always explored his personal milieu of friends and family and his position at the intersection of fashion and art. For some years he has also used the self-portrait as a ground for personal expression, theatrical role-play and exploring his relationship to his own history. At the same time, as essasyist Adrian Searle points out, "Teller frequently makes his appearance in his own photographs as though he has just blundered in like an unexpected and unwelcome guest, a gatecrasher. There is something either farcial or vainglorious about this, perhaps both. Something almost obscene, too, about the way he overwhelms certain of his images, disrupting them, hogging the lens, filling the frame, crashing about unconstrained, unleashed, as it were, dragging his life about with him. It is somehow embarrassing. You want to look the other way." Included with Louis XV is the 104-page exhibition catalogue, Ich Bin Vierzig, a paperback collection of selected images from the photographer's past works. It includes highlights from his Tracht and The Clients series.

Juergen Teller: Louis XV

Steidl

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Books by Adrian Searle