TALES TO TAKE YOUR BREATH AWAY
The flip-top cigarette pack is one of the most successful pieces of packaging design in history. TankBooks pay homage to this iconic form by employing it in the service of great literature. We have launched a series of books designed to mimic cigarette packs – the same size, packaged in [...]
Crazy Horses
Ali Mahdavi discusses cabaret with Marjane Satrapi and channels the spirit of Eric von Stroheim for Ellen von Unwerth, at Crazy Horse Paris.
TANK BOOKS
How much can you endure?
Marina Abramovic has referred to herself as “the grandmother of performance art” and has been called its “empress” by others – a status acknowledged by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which this year awarded her a major retrospective, the first they have given to any performance artist. Abramovic pioneered a tradition of performance in the 1960s and 1970s that foregrounded endurance, suffering and personal peril: a reminder that regardless of wealth or poverty, fame or wretched fate, we all begin and end with our bodies.
The blue planet
Long before Foals formed in Oxford in 2005, the band was close friends with filmmaker and photographer Dave Ma, and illustrator Christopher Wright, also known as Tinhead. “When we started Tinhead was a bin man and a failed model,” says guitarist and vocalist Yannis Philippakis. “Dave was working in a kebab shop… sorry, a kebab restaurant. And we’d just quit our degrees for nothing.”
On the seventh day
A preacher’s week in words
Text by Gordon Atkinson
Monday is my day off, but I stop by the church anyway because I want to know what text I’ll be preaching from on the following Sunday. I need the whole week if I’m going to be ready for the sermon. I open the Common Lectionary and flip [...]
If you go down to the woods today…
Kohei Yoshiyuki’s Koen, or The Park, is a series of black-and-white photographs taken in Tokyo’s Aoyama, Shinjuku and Yoyogi parks in the 1970s. It depicts a form of live performance that the British call “dogging”: people having sex in public while being watched by strangers.
Performance attitudes
Tank visits the bars, gardens and discos of contemporary art. Featuring Paulina Olowska and Lucy McKenzie, Alistair Frost, Juliette Blightman, Ei Arakawa, Mark Leckey and Linder.
Chatwin and Bucky
Why did he go to Patagonia? You might not know this but Bruce knew a lot about Japanese haiku. He read ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ by Basho and thought that if Basho went to the North, he should go to the South. He had another reason that made sense to me. A long time ago, his grandmother kept a piece of skin of the animal that resides in Patagonia. He kept this story in him all his life, so he wanted to see that animal.
Strawberry Kidnapper
A fat bartender welcomed us. The whole space was like folding furniture with six seats. The kitchen was slightly wider than the bartender’s waist.
On the table, there were strawberries in a glass. They held a strong presence like burning red flowers in the dark forest.
“What shall I serve?” the bartender asked.
Kiss with Beak
Like a work of origami, the grilled sparrow looked very flat and small. Legs and feathers were folded tight. Somehow, it looked symmetrical as it was pierced by a bamboo stick in the centre. It was so flat and brown with soy sauce on the green rectangular plate that it reminded me of a shadow-play puppet.
Soil and Bubble
It was a cold day. It did not snow, but everything was frosted in the chestnut forest. Underground, the soil was warm, as warm as human body temperature. It contained liquid and was drifting like the waters of the deep sea.