The book is a collection of essays and images that inspired Zoe Beloffs video installation, The Somnambulists 2008. Comprised of five miniature wooden theaters into which moving images are projected, her work centers on the idea of staging the unconscious . Each theater presents a hysterical drama. These include History of a Fixed Idea and A Modern Case of Possession in which two patients of the famous French psycho-pathologist Pierre Janet, express their delusions in song. Other theaters present the ghostly specters of actual hysterics filmed by doctors a hundred years ago. The texts and images included in the book illuminate the complex interweaving of ideas from psychology, writing, performance, art, and moving-image technology at the end of the 19th century. It begins with an introduction to the Players; brief biographies of the scholars, artists, and performers who appear in this volume. The texts include Pierre Janets case study of the writer Raymond Roussel, the Surrealists celebration of hysteria as the greatest poetical invention of the 19th century in The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria and the pioneering psychic researcher Frederic W.H. Myers commentary on Janets contribution to the discovery of the unconscious. Also included are rarely seen photographs by Albert von Schrenck Notzing of artistic production under the influence of hypnosis including images of the celebrated dream dancer Magdelaine G. Included with the book is a DVD-ROM in which Beloffs installation can be viewed as an interactive work for Mac and PC.

The Somnambulists

André Breton

Louis Aragon

Zoe Beloff

Pierre Janet

Raymond Roussel

Frederic W H Myers

Henry Dircks

Gheorghe Marinesco

Christine Burgin

On the afternoon of August 28th, 1909, Sigmund Freud visited Coney Island’s famous Dreamland amusement park. A hundred years later, this lively, imaginative book examines his legacy in Coney Island, a history which might have been. It begins with Norman Klein’s reconstruction of his actual visit, though Freud’s real impact appears to have come later, with the founding of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society. Zoe Beloff conjures up the world of this unique Society, which would have existed from 1926 through the early 1970s, exploring its activities (which included recreating dreams on film) and discussing its visionary founder, Albert Grass, who attempted to rebuild Dreamland according to Freud’s theory of dream formation. Aaron Beebe, former director of the Coney Island Museum, describes how this institution is reviving the idea of the living museum. Amy Herzog discusses how Freud’s theories provide a deeper understanding of the public’s fascination with Coney Island’s attractions. The book is illustrated with previously unseen photographs, drawings and documents.

The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle

Literature & Fiction

Amy Herzog

Norman Klein

Aaron Beebe

Essays & Correspondence

The 25 pictures in this book comprise the dream journal of Albert Grass, founder of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society, an organization that might have been, which was created by Zoe Beloff as part of her project The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle. Beloff created this hand-drawn prototype for a comic book as the work of Grass, made from perhaps 1936 to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. It seems possible that Grass originally intended “The Dreamer” as a comic-book hero in the mold of The Spirit or Superman, but this conception quickly changed. By chapter three “The Dreamer” loses his ability to fly, remains earthbound and the work becomes a more serious investigation into his own psychic life, many of his anxieties speaking directly to us today. This edition proposes an early attempt to use the language of the comic book to graphically manifest the unconscious.

Albert Grass: The Adventures of a Dreamer

Comics & Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels

Collector’s Paradise is Allen Ruppersberg’s unique reflection on the history of popular American music. The product of years of combing flea markets and yard sales in search of both the visual and recorded history of rock and roll, this book traces rock and roll back to the Minstrel days and American popular song post-Civil War, in a chronological list of 1,500 key recordings and more than 300 color illustrations of material from Ruppersberg’s collection. In his introductory essay, Ruppersberg discusses the urgency he feels in creating this narrative of a common musical history before it is lost: If you live long enough you begin to see the endings of the things in which you saw the beginnings. “It seemed to me … that this was the last possible moment to be able to gather any of this material in the manner I did and I am even more convinced now that I was right.”

Allen Ruppersberg: Collector's Paradise: No Time Left to Start Again, The B and D of R 'n' R

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Uniquely among his contemporaries, Allen Ruppersberg (born 1944) has adapted the possibilities of drawing to make idea-based work in populist terms, by uniting his twin loves of illustration and literature. Ruppersberg's drawings, which range from depictions of books from his library and letters by authors such as Joseph Conrad and Ezra Pound to writing, portraits and drawn appropriations of illustrations from magazines, postcards and books, reveal both skill and deftness of conception. This survey of Ruppersberg's early drawings--many reproduced here for the first time--looks at his accomplishments in this medium. An essay by Leslie Jones, curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, explores the relationship between drawing and writing in Ruppersberg's work (an idea further explored in and Writing, the companion volume to Drawing).

Allen Ruppersberg: Drawing

Allen Ruppersberg (born 1944) is among the first generation of American conceptual artists. Allen Ruppersberg: and Writing presents a wide array of the artist’s text-based works from the late 1960s through to his most recent projects. A companion volume to Allen Ruppersberg Drawing, it gathers writings (and visual works containing writing) from series and projects such as Al’s Café, From the South Forty to the Bunkhouse, Great Acts of the Imagination, Le Mot Juste, Free Poetry, Obits and Studies, and excerpts from The Novel that Writes Itself and Great Speckled Bird. In his introduction to the book, poet Bill Berkson writes: “Ruppersberg’s co-exemplars are John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha … Because they are visual artists first, they present language foremost as image--color, shape, light and scale being conditioned often enough by lettering, the quality of handwriting or font, or the format of a book. The upshot is a blithe alchemical switch of sign into symbol.”

Allen Ruppersberg: and Writing

A World Redrawn is an exploration by the artist Zoe Beloff of Sergei Eisenstein and Bertolt Brecht’s experiences in Hollywood in the 1930s and ‘40s, what their time in Hollywood meant to them then and what it might mean to us now. Beloff focuses on two unrealized films written during this time: “Glass House” by Eisenstein and “A Model Family” by Brecht. The book reproduces many important and little-known documents from the period, including a large selection of previously unpublished drawings by Eisenstein discovered by Beloff in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow and facsimile reproductions of the writings of Eisenstein and Brecht as they contemplate the politics and culture of Hollywood. Beloff created three films in connection with this project and the book includes stills and screenplays for these projects and links so that the films can be watched online. Two scholarly essays have been commissioned for this project: an essay by Hannah Frank on the affinities of American and Soviet animation during this period and a meditation on the role of laughter in the work of Bertolt Brecht by the Walter Benjamin scholar Esther Leslie.

A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

The Glovers’ Repository, by New York–based artist Paul Etienne Lincoln (born 1959), tells the stories of 24 characters who either practiced deception or were the unwitting victims of subterfuge. From Mary Toft who claimed to have given birth to a rabbit, to King Zog who survived 55 assassination attempts, the characters are all legends in their own right. Their lives are related by Lincoln with characteristic wit and are documented with photographs. This book was inspired by a large-scale installation by Lincoln, a vitrine containing 24 gloves, one for each character. Each glove rotated via a mechanism based on the workings of Big Ben. The book is bound so that, when it is opened flat, two small books of the characters’ stories are revealed, one left- and the other right-handed. The book then folds out further to reveal documentation of the installation.

Paul Etienne Lincoln: The Glovers' Repository: The Tenaciousness of Subterfuge

Jay DeFeo : Works and Notes

Jay DeFeo

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Christine Burgin publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Christine Burgin