Absolution Pool
Leon Johnson
Iowa City, IA: Long Bell Press. 1994

A small pamphlet whose text is a meditation on memory and the transitory nature of pleasure. Found historical images are offet printed in six rich colors.

Category: Small Book

$8.00

[-10% discount to Printed Matter members at the Member level]

Elegant Options From the Machinery of Attrition
Leon Johnson
Eugene, OR: The Long Bell Press. 1998

An atmospheric, offset pamphlet: "the distillation of earnest efforts concerning mercy, denial, lies, and finally, absolution"--artist's statement. Printed by Janice Frey on a Heidelberg press.

Category: Book

$10.00

[-10% discount to Printed Matter members at the Member level]

Empire Postcards: My Colonial Fathers
Leon Johnson
Eugene, OR: Long Bell Press. 1997

A gathering of paternal surrogates and ineradicable, post-colonial ghosts, all with suitable physique--artist's statement. A thoughtful pamphlet, printed on a Heidelberg offset press. “‘Empire Postcards: My Colonial Fathers’ is another in a series, this one Cape Town to Cairo, published by Leon Johnson, with beautiful male nudes divided by old papers found obviously in a family archive. There is a haunting quality to these papers, framed as one would say by male bodies, but there is memory, personal and familial; there is the stirring of years gone by and a hint of something in Leipzig. Triggered by those words and those papers, the viewer feels part voyeur, partially participant in the memory track. Exquisite." --Umbrella v.20, no.2, May 1997, p. 72.

Category: Book

$10.00

[-10% discount to Printed Matter members at the Member level]

the fit / THE FITTING
Leon Johnson
Eugene, Oregon: Long Bell Press. 2003

This pamphlet of color photographs draws from Leon Johnson and John Schorr's performance of the fit/THE FITTING and reconfigures it as a book. Color photographs of a pretty young man imitating striking poses in a succesion of exotic outfits alternate with the repeated black and white image of another man, hands folded in lap, on the edge of his seat. The only text, taken from the performance, is on the back of the book. "Turn around. Stop. Is it tight?" The small photograph of The Palms Motor Hotel beneath this epigram seems to situate THE FITTING in the fitting rooms of this neon lit side of the road night spot.

The author gives this background information: "In 1999 I bought a collection of Physique Pictorial muscle magazine in an estate sale. They were all dated from 1967 to 1970. In one, called Apollo, I discovered a sealed glassine envelope of negatives. The man imaged in the processed photographs was recreating poses from the magazines, in his basement. He is now my collaborator and muse. Mr. Fact and Mr. Fiction, the fit/THE FITTING."

Category: Book

$8.00

[-10% discount to Printed Matter members at the Member level]

Oceans of Everything
Megan O'Connell, Leon Johnson
Iowa City, IA: Dead Skin Press/Long Bell Press. 1991

This double-bound paperback is chock-full of verbo-visual puzzlers. Dedicated to St. Frank, and bearing an epigraph from The Boke of the Secrets of Albertus Magnus:(a) serpent be burned and the ashes of ii put in ye fyre, anone shall there be a raine bowe with a horible thunder.

Category: Small Book

$10.00

[-10% discount to Printed Matter members at the Member level]

Blasphemies and The Cause of Plagues
Leon Johnson
Iowa City, IA: The Long Bell Press. 1993

Category:

Out of Stock

Faust/Faustus in Deptford
Leon Johnson
Eugene, Oregon: Long Bell Press. 2003

This book is derived from a live performance by Johnson presented in the UK, in the summer of 2002. It is based on two versions of the Faust legend, Christopher Marlowe's 16th century Tragical History of Doctor Faustus and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 19th century Faust. It constitutes a meditation and inventory that examines alliances of desire, cellular mutation, Deptford (the murder and burial site of Marlowe), the river Thames, and the HIV resistant CCR5-DELTA 32 gene. Johnson asks, "In their final hour, before the termination of their agreement with the devil, what are the remnants of contracts negotiated and broken? And what of the dumb show of memory?"

Category: Book

Out of Stock

reMembering Wilde
Leon Johnson
Eugene, Oregon: Long Bell Press. 2003

From the artist’s statement: "In 1912 a memorial, sculpted by Jacob Epstein, was erected on the site f Wilde’s grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Soon after, a visitor to the tomb took a hammer to the sculpture and obliterated the penis on the underside of the hovering sphinx. In the summer of 2000 I traveled to Paris to perform a ceremony entitled, reMEMEBERING WILDE. Rebecca Scheer produced the sterling silver prosthetic."

Category: Book

Out of Stock