Richard Kraft, Her Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera
Here Comes Kitty reaches out in all sorts of ways like a
compendium of the postmodern without pretentiousness which—despite
combining humor, the erotic, the gothic, the wry, the popular and the
sophisticated—tells a tight tale with wild invention and makes you want
both to turn the pages and dwell on the images.
—Tom Phillips
In this wildly irreverent collage narrative, artist Richard Kraft
reassembles a Cold War comic about a Polish spy infiltrating the Nazis
to orchestrate a multiplicity of voices into joyous cacophony. Like an
Indian miniature painting, each comic book page is densely layered,
collapsing foreground and background, breaking the frame and merging
time. An unlikely and enormous cast of characters emerges as Kraft
appropriates images and texts from an extraordinary variety of sources
(the Amar Chitra Katha comics of Hindu mythology, Jimmy Swaggart’s Old
and New Testament stories, the 1960s English football annual
Scorcher, and underground porn comics like
Cherry as well as images from art history, outdated encyclopedias, and more).
Proceeding from Thoreau’s observation, “Yes and No are lies. A true
answer will not aim to establish anything, but rather to set all well
afloat,” Kraft subverts all certainty to reconstruct a world constantly
in flux, rich with dark humor and its own revelatory nonsense. Author
Danielle Dutton’s
set of sixteen interpolations punctuate the book using similar
strategies of appropriation and juxtaposition to create texts that sing
in the same arresting register as Kraft’s collages.
Here Comes Kitty also includes a wide-ranging conversation between Kraft and poet Ann Lauterbach. -Siglio
Tantra Song: Tantric Painting From Rajasthan
It could be a cult classic: the debut edition of Siglio Press’s Tantra Song
—one
of the only books to survey the elusive tradition of abstract Tantric
painting from Rajasthan, India—sold out in a swift six weeks. The works
depict deities as geometric, vividly hued shapes and mark a clear
departure from Tantric art’s better-known figurative styles. They also
resonate uncannily with lineages of twentieth-century art—from the
Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism to Minimalism—as well as with much
painting today. Rarely have the ancient and the modern come together so
fluidly.
—Lauren O’Neill-Butler, THE PARIS REVIEW
is a singular and revelatory collection of rare
Tantric paintings made anonymously by adepts in Rajasthan and used to
awaken heightened states of consciousness. The paintings’ magnetic,
vibratory beauty—as well as their deep affinity with 20th century
abstract art—inspires acute attention and boundless contemplation.
The paintings are the progeny of hand-written, illustrated religious
treatises from the 17th century which have been copied over multiple
generations. Like musicians playing ragas of classical Indian music,
adepts paint in a concentrated state of mental rapture, repeating and
subtly reinterpreting melodic structures of line and color. When
complete, the paintings—made in tempera, gouache, and watercolor on
salvaged paper—are pinned to the wall to use in private meditation.
Having spent more than two decades in conversation with the private communities of Rajasthani
tantrikas,
Jamme—like other poet-ethnographers Michaux, Leiris, and Bataille
before him—draws on an unconventional body of knowledge. His
accompanying texts—concise and luminous—further open readers to the
paintings’ subtle magic.
These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:
Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147
215 592 1207
Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday
