Prem Krishnamurthy
Prem Krishnamurthy’s Book List
I encountered most of the books on this list while conducting background research for a six-month cycle of exhibitions on copying at P!, my exhibition space. Some, like artist Gareth Long’s Don Quixote remake, are new discoveries. Others, like Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, are old favorites.
As a designer of exhibitions, books, and identities, I am constantly confronted by the unstable boundaries between original and copy, appropriation and falsification. And as a curator, I try to create situations in which alternate histories and cultural expectations are forced to overlap and negotiate the same space.
For both these roles, I find that embedded, hyper-descriptive texts, such as W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, are indispensable frames of reference. I need them to unsettle me: to make strange a world that can, at times, feel reductive and normative; to offset the designer’s—the human’s—impulse to identify, to categorize, to manipulate in the service of a seamless, intuitive visual experience.
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The Black Book is a detective story, but it exceeds the genre and becomes many other things as well: a comedy, a caper, a labyrinth, an identity crisis. Each time I read it, I feel that, like the character of Galip, I have been consumed by false leads or, at the very least, the city of Istanbul itself.
This is the out-of-court oral testimony of Richard Prince, who was accused by the French photographer Patrick Cariou of copying 41 images of Rastafarians and landscapes. Prince’s cross-examination took place for almost seven hours, and his defense is riveting. This is an essential text for navigating contemporary questions of intellectual property, digital copyright, and free expression.
I can’t think of a “copy” more fittingly perverse than Gareth Long’s Don Quixote (2006). Long generated this text using speech recognition software, which he trained to identify the Don Quixote audiobook narrator’s voice. He played the subsequent recording into a computer and produced this clever doppelgänger. His “Chapter XVI” begins: “regarding what they fail in the ingenious government in the American debut Castle.”
An instant classic of a catalogue, from the moment it was published—this book takes the fascinating subject of artists' certificates of authenticity and creates a work that is visual, verbal, legal, and conceptual simultaneously.
Bioy Casares, a contemporary and friend of Jorge Luis Borges, ingeniously employs the replicating—and revisionary—structure of memory to craft a novella as tightly wrought as it is unpredictable. The first edition's illustrations, by Norah Borges (Jorge Luis's sister), alone make the book worth examining.
An endlessly permutational book, as well as the most appropriate use of the typeface Buster in print; the first English edition of Invisible Cities makes the font look like a bespoke creation for this very volume.
A recent discovery for me, but one that lingers—a brilliant riff on Ed Ruscha's books of commercial and urban sites, but made domestic and personal in a way that his work evades.
This is the book that I have read most, and most deeply—a densely interwoven work of texts and spectral images that traces multiple geographies of colonialism, manufacturing, and influence. As in much of Sebald’s writing, images of uncertain provenance embed themselves throughout the narrative without captioning or context—curious interlopers that gain their strange authority through precise form and lack of comment.
Announcements
Now is Better by Stefan Sagmeister
Now is Better
By Stefan Sagmeister
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: October 2023
Combining art, design, history, and quantitative analysis, transforms data sets into stunning artworks that underscore his positive view of human progress, inspiring us to think about the future with much-needed hope.
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future
By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022
Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.
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Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People
By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: February 22, 2022
Debbie Millman—author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast “Design Matters”—showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today’s leading creative minds from across diverse fields.
Milton Glaser: POP by Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Milton Glaser: POP
By Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2023
This collection of work from graphci design legend Milton Glaser’s Pop period features hundreds of examples of the designer’s work that have not been seen since their original publication, demonstrating the graphic revolution that transformed design and popular culture.
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Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange
Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall
By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022
Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”
Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition) by Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition)
By Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Publisher: Letterform Archives Books
Published: October 2023
This facsimile edition of Die Fläche, recreates every page of the formative design periodical in full color and at original size, accompanied by essays that contextualize the work, highlighting contributions by pathbreaking women, innovative lettering artists, and key practitioners of the new “surface art,” including Rudolf von Larisch, Alfred Roller, and Wiener Werkstätte founders Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann.
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