Bøger udgivet af Four Corners Books

St. Ives: Tate St. Ives, 06/26/07-09/23/07

Sixty years of letters, official reports, photographs, drawings and paintings of UFO sightings from British government filesOriginally established at the request of Winston Churchill in the aftermath of World War II, the British Ministry of Defence's UFO Desk operated for more than 60 years, collating mysterious sightings and records of strange objects in the sky from observant, and sometimes imaginative, members of the public. As well as letters and official reports, the UFO files contain photographs, drawings and even paintings of these curious sightings sent in by concerned citizens. In 2007, after decades of stonewalling questions about its UFO investigations, the Ministry of Defence announced that it had decided to release all of its surviving files, in an attempt to counter "the maze of rumor and frequently ill-informed speculation" on the subject.Journalism scholar David Clarke has been working with the UK's National Archives on the UFO files since the Ministry of Defence began to release them. In this volume, Clarke selects examples from the archives to present a history of British UFO art and the remarkable stories behind these images: accounts of an alien craft on the A1, flying saucers over Hampstead and a spaceship landing at a primary school in Macclesfield. Revealing the uncanny experiences, rumors, hopes, fears and fantasies expressed by British people from all walks of life, UFO Drawings from the National Archives offers a glimpse into a secret social history of the twentieth century.UFO Drawings from the National Archives is part of the Four Corners Irregulars series spotlighting important but overlooked areas of creativity from modern British visual history.

Young Jim Hawkins has no reason to suspect that Billy Bones, the pensioner who has taken up residence in his father's inn, is anything other than an aging former mariner. But when violent altercations with visitors to the inn leave Billy on death's doorstep, Jim discovers that they all are members of the crew of the notorious pirate Captain Flint, and that Billy has a map that shows the whereabouts of Flint's buried treasure. . . First serialized in a children's magazine between 1881 and 1882 as a coming-of-age story for young readers, Treasure Island has transcended its time and intended audience. Robert Louis Stevenson's novel forged the template for the tale of pirate adventure, and many of its dramatic elements--including buried treasure, treasure maps, and pirate oaths, among others--have become iconic parts of virtually every pirate adventure story written in its wake.

For the latest in the Four Corners Familiars series, artist Fiona Banner (born 1966) recasts Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness as a luxury magazine with new photographs by Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin. First published in 1899, Heart of Darkness is a story of trade and corruption that proceeds from a boat moored on the banks of the Thames into the heart of the Congo. For her new edition, Banner commissioned Pellegrin, a conflict photographer who has worked extensively in the Congo, to photograph London's financial center, its streets and trading floors, its costumes and strip clubs--the City of London as seen by a veteran war photographer. The collaboration between Banner and Pellegrin emerged from an initial invitation from Peer, London, to work with the collection of the Archive of Modern Conflict; a selection of Pellegrin's images are now part of the Archive, filed under "Heart of Darkness, 2014."

"Girls are powerful" the '70s feminist posters of See Red Women's WorkshopA feminist silkscreen poster collective founded in London in 1974 by three former art students, the See Red Women's Workshop grew out of a shared desire to combat sexist images of women and to create positive and challenging alternatives. Women from different backgrounds came together to make posters and calendars that tackled issues of sexuality, identity and oppression. With humor and bold, colorful graphics, See Red expressed the personal experiences of women as well as their role in wider struggles for change. Written by See Red members, detailing the group's history up until the closure of the workshop in 1990, and with a foreword by celebrated feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham, See Red Women's Workshop features all of the collective's original screenprints and posters. Confronting negative stereotypes, questioning the role of women in society, and promoting women's self-determination, the power and energy of these images reflect an important and dynamic era of women's liberation--with continued relevance for today.

Originally published in St. Petesburg 1842.

Postgate & Firmin produced some of the best-loved British children's television of the 1960s and '70s, including Bagpuss, The Clangers and Ivor the EngineWorking from a cowshed on a farm in Kent, Oliver Postgate (1925-2008) and Peter Firmin (born 1928) produced some of the best-loved British children's animated television of the 1960s and 1970s. Their iconic productions include Bagpuss (originally aired in 1974), The Clangers (1969-74), Ivor The Engine (1975-77), Pogles' Wood (1966-68) and Noggin The Nog (1959-65). Postgate and Firmin worked together from 1959 through the 1980s, creating popular, beloved characters that appealed to children and their parents alike, like the whistling, mousy Clangers (knitted by Firmin's wife Joan in bright pink wool) in outer space, the saggy, baggy cloth cat Bagpuss and the mild-mannered Viking boy Prince Noggin. Firmin painted the backdrops and created the models, and Postgate wrote scripts, did the stop-motion filming and frequently recorded the kindly, avuncular narration. This book, which includes a preface by Postgate's son Daniel, presents the Smallfilms archive: the puppets and cutouts from these shows (including some of the characters who didn't quite make the cut), along with insights into how they were created. The emphatically handmade models and painstakingly drawn illustrations that came to life in the Smallfilms productions are captured here in attentive, detailed photographs. The archive is presented like "a collection of artifacts in an exhibition detailing some much-admired twentieth-century art movement, like Fluxus or Dada," as acclaimed English stand-up comedian Stewart Lee notes in his introduction. The Art of Smallfilms, full of pipe cleaners, cotton balls, wire and ping-pong balls, celebrates the imagination and ingenuity of two artists who shaped a generation's childhood.

In Prison Landscapes artist Alyse Emdur (born 1983) presents over 100 photographs of prison inmates presenting themselves in front of the idealized landscapes of painted visiting-room backdrops, posing with their visitors and pretending, for a moment, that they are elsewhere. Prison Landscapes explores this little-known genre of painting and portraiture seen only by inmates, visitors and prison employees. Created specifically for escape and self-representation, the paintings of tropical beaches, waterfalls, mountain vistas and cityscapes invite sitters to engage in fantasies of freedom. Prison Landscapes offers viewers a rare opportunity to see America's incarcerated population, not through the usual lens of criminality, but through the eyes of inmates' loved ones. The book includes correspondence with prisoners and an interview with prison artist Darrell Van Mastrigt.

For this eighth installment in Four Corners' Familiars series, Marc Camille Chaimowicz has chosen Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Flaubert's bestselling masterpiece was first translated into English by Eleanor Marx-Aveling (the youngest daughter of Karl Marx) in 1898. Chaimowicz has selected Marx-Aveling's translation for his edition of the book, which he has illustrated with more than 250 images.

The Nose, one of Nikolai Gogol's most important and influential tales, is now available in this gorgeously produced volume, illustrated with photographs by British artist Rick Buckley. Taking on a life of its own, the nose of a St Petersburg official leaves its rightful place to cause havoc in the city. The novel ends with the author seemingly addressing the reader directly, refusing to resolve the story he has narrated. Written between 1835 and 1836, and a key precursor to absurdist and Magical Realist strains in 20th-century fiction, this fantastic tale is extended in Buckley's photographs, which document a Gogol-inspired street intervention for which he fixed plaster noses on to buildings all over London. This edition of The Nose is part of the Four Corners Familiars series, in which contemporary artists produce a new edition of a classic novel or short story.

The seventh in Four Corners' Familiars series takes us to Ruritania, a land reminiscent of many Central European countries. A new king is about to be crowned, but his brother drugs him and attempts to claim the throne for himself. To foil him, the king's supporters recruit his cousin to impersonate him at the coronation. British artist Mireille Fauchon's handsome edition of the classic adventure novel includes tipped-in illustrations.

In May 1968, thousands of workers and students took to the streets of Paris, provoking an unprecedented wave of strikes, walkouts and demonstrations. The confrontations between police and protesters led to a general strike of eleven million workers that brought the country to a virtual standstill and nearly toppled Charles de Gaulle's government. The faculty and student body of the Ecole des Beaux Arts were among the strikers, and a number of the students met spontaneously in the college's lithographic department to produce the first poster of the revolt, which bore the declaration "Usines, Universités, Union" ("Factories and universities unite," loosely translated). From this initiative was born the Atelier Populaire (or "popular workshop" ), a collective of print shops that produced hundreds of posters to encourage the protestors and to report on police brutality. These posters included many of the often Situationist-inspired mottos for which May '68 is remembered today, such as "Be young and shut up" and "return to normal" (accompanied by a picture of a herd of sheep). Beauty Is in the Street reproduces more than 200 of these posters in full color, which have since become landmarks in political art and graphic design. Also included is a thumbnail index of an additional 411 posters; a wealth of archival documentary photographs and new translations of firsthand accounts of the clashes between the students and strikers and the police, many published in English for the first time; and an introduction by Philippe Vermès, one of the founders of the Atelier Populaire.

From 1967 up until his recent death, the British sculptor and Pop art innovator Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) used the pages of the innovative British literary magazine "Ambit" as a space for some of his most experimental creations, collapsing the boundary between text and image with Pop abandon. His "Ambit" works-collages, visual essays and fragments from novels, pop culture images from newspapers, magazines and advertisements-tackle such subjects as the war in Vietnam, the acceleration of Japanese technology and the mirages of mass advertising. Housed in a funky Day-Glo plastic slip cover with silkscreened title, and printed on a variety of paper stocks, "The Jet Age Compendium" reprints these works in their entirety for the first time. A 28-page booklet by David Brittain inserted into the slip cover celebrates these works and discusses Paolozzi's relationship to writers associated with "Ambit" such as J.G. Ballard.