Cars can be super sexy and art sublimely beautiful, this then, is one red hot collaboration. Art Drive has been running for 35 years and BMW now has an extraordinary collection of customised cars, including Koons, Holzer, Hockney and Warhol, literally anyone art-pop has got their sticky paws on these voluptuous, highly charged machines and performed an automobile alchemy. It is the first time these cars will come to London and they are being hosted by the ICA off site at the Great Eastern Street Car Park, Shoreditch. 

Which one would you choose? As fine art, mine is Jenny Holzer's, so true Jenny, so true! Then the years of 1975-77 are rather special, though it has to be the body work of the cars and my nostalgia as much as the art, a really superb time in design. I've always wanted a boxy Beemer to boot about town in, jungle bass kicking in and general showing off. And in my fantasy garage – in my fantasy house with my kitchen island and infinity pool in the back yard – I'd own  Alexander Calder's (75), Frank Stella's (76) and Roy Litchenstien's (77). Call me greedy, but in my fantasy life I wouldn't have to choose. 

Don't miss it. Honk Honk!

BMW Art Cars is a partnership with BMW, London 2012 Cultural Olympiad and Mayor of London. 

Monologues is an audio publication. For each volume two participants are invited to pick and speak about a topic from a pre-selected list.

Monologues #1:

 Mark Fisher on The Poor and the Proletariat 

Sally O'Reilly on Wine and Milk

Cassette (EP4)
Listen to an extract here 
£6:00 inclusive of postage. 
Buy here

Sally O’Reilly is a writer, contributing regularly to many art and  culture publications. Her book The Body in Contemporary Art was published by Thames & Hudson in 2009. She has also curated and produced numerous performative events and was writer in residence at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (2010–11).

Mark Fisher is the author of Capitalist Realism (Zer0, 2009). His writing regularly appears in frieze, The Wire, Film Quarterly and Sight and Sound. He teaches at the University of East  London, the City Literary Institute and Goldsmiths, University of London.

Co-published by CT Editions and Entr'acte 

Drool.

This month’s UK Vogue (March) is HOT. Spring fashion by Mario Sorrenti, Mario Testino, Alasdair McLellan and David Sims. Oh, and ‘Shop at Moschino’ if you can ladies, the ad has convinced me.

I’ve never thought much of religion which seems to manipulate by fear as much as by love. Fear, really, should have no position in faith, love must always take its place, as Cassavetes said “Fear is the basis for everything terrible. Fear is what causes all the horror in the world. No man achieves anything through fear.”

I have often wondered how Muslims dealt with men committing such crimes in their shared name. Abbas, spent seven years exploring the aftermath of 9/11 in the Islamic world, his pictures certainly tell a story.

You can tell so much about a person from their collection of books. Friend, potential lover, there’s nothing like having a good nose through someone’s personal belongings, and the look and feel of someone’s book collection gives you an insight into their psyche and further develops how you might see them. 

Check out eFlux’s project with Martha Rosler and her library here.

You can tell so much about a person from their collection of books. Friend, potential lover, there’s nothing like having a good nose through someone’s personal belongings, and the look and feel of someone’s book collection gives you an insight into their psyche and further develops how you might see them. Spine after spine, type and cover designs span decades where their aesthetics tell you as much about the content as their titles or authors. Books that look old and well handled where you might be treated to hand-written notes in margins or a smattering of little explanation marks where the reader’s found something that excites them; maybe even a post-it note or a bus ticket used as a place holder. There’s something rather epistemological in looking upon someone’s library, where we feel we might know the truth of the collector more intimately on the basis of what they choose to surround themselves with. Yes, the phenomenology of a book collection with all its physical presence, unique character and intellectual nouse can be quite seductive to a roving mind and I don’t think looking through the contents of someone’s Kindle would have quite the same affect at all!

Casco publishing class sounds like a fascinating programme and totally in line with my current research. Here, a quote for you on what they’re about: ‘Observations from this year’s New York Art Book Fair offer that art­istic publishing is seeing an upsurge in activity and interest in spite of the impending dematerialization of publishing, and in spite of symptoms of the crisis of dematerialized capital. 

…Could it be then that the claim that “print is dead” is exposed as merely the fading whisper of a class of mass-publishers/mass-public? What space then remains in the wake of the modern publication? What resources and relations can be mobilized to fill that space?”

Then on 14 Feb AA Bronson will make a visit there to discuss contemporary publishing. Bronson, you may know from the artist group General Idea, and the megazine he produced with the group called FILE between 1979-1982. A truly inspirational print publication that my discovery of worked as a catalyst for my introduction to the world of print media and the idea of distribution. JRP Ringier did a lovely box set that reprinted the entire series that I featured and sold in my temporary (I cannot bring myself to use the word pop-up) shop MAN-MADE. I love having it here on my shelf, I love the object and my relationship to it, as much as I enjoy its contents.

This is an offering of recognition and appreciation to the following book dealers and interventionists who each seem committed to finding spaces to honour the physicality of printed matter and celebrate its cultural importance. Idea Books, Donlon Books, and @Artbook Their activities which push paper into hands feels a little like a resistance movement within a dominant post-industrial, informational age, that seems all about service and speed a less about reflection. I feel a little militant today or nostalgic, maybe both.

The more I become involved in the digital questions surrounding contemporary media, and in particular the niche of fine art and photography publishing, I see the emergence of ever more sophisticated and well produced print publications that celebrate and embrace our subjective ecology to such tactile things. Correspondencia is a new publication that features two of my favourite photographers who seduced me in the early ‘90s and continue to make sublime images to dwell in, Wolfgang Tillmans and Mark Borthwick.

If any further evidence was needed on the future of Print and Publishing and its popularity, simply pop over to New York today and visit the last day of the New York Art Book Fair. I’m pretty sure that by now we should all be in agreement that it’s not digital orprint, but that both can work alongside each other, and it’s more about what you’re publishing, and to what media.

In terms of periodical publishing, whilst I doubt the long term print future of magazines such as Vogue or Frieze – which I think can work just as beautifully as a iPad app whilst offering exciting digital ‘extras’ – it’s magazines such as my personal favourite, Kilimanjaro, that will no doubt have a long future in physical form. Kilimanjaro pays as much attention to its media as it does to its content. It encourages the eye to wallow in generous images saturating a surface that is immediately tactile and luxurious.