Hell, Yes!

Ugo Rondinone; Catherine Schelbert (translation)

ISBN 10: 3775710140 / ISBN 13: 9783775710145

Published by Ink Tree, 2000

About this Item

Large-format hardcover 31 x 24 cm, unpaginated (180 pages), copiously illustrated, pictorial front endpapers, NOT ex-library. Weight over 1.27kg. Very good clean condition with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps. Issued without a dust jacket. -- This out-of-print book by the Swiss-born, New York-based artist Ugo Rondinone is a conceptual extension of his installation practice, situated within his long-running engagement with the diary as an artistic form, which he has pursued across painting, drawing, text and photography since the early 1990s. It is structured around monochromatic double-spread photographs, ordered into colour-themed sequences: red, yellow-purple, grey, blue, purple, brown, and yellow. These visuals focus on the vertical forms of trees within a snowy woodland, rendered through deliberately expressive techniques to create a dreamlike atmosphere of the surreal-synthetic coloured world. A recurring solitary female figure is depicted wandering among the trees, her back frequently turned to the lens, emphasising a sense of anonymity and internalised observation. Interspersed throughout the visual cycles are short, framed textual fragments, such as 'the streets are deserted and there is no wind while I am walking home and I feel as if I'm being watched, followed by the lunatic gaze of tiny beings that live in the cracks of houses', which contrast the natural imagery with a distinct sense of urban, existential anxiety. This interplay between the forest landscape and the intrusive nature of thought is a hallmark of the artist's exploration of the 'melancholy sublime'. The photographic sections are followed by 23 pages of text consisting of short diary entries grouped by year from 1992 to 1995.

Seller Inventory # 013251

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Hell, Yes!
• Publisher: Ink Tree
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3775710140
• ISBN 13: 9783775710145
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Written and drawn in Indian ink, Ugo Rondinone's Diaries have played an important role in the Swiss artist's oeuvre since the early 1990s. The Diaries are conceived as notations covering an entire year, and titled 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 etc.--yet both the contents and the titles of the works are completely fictitious. In his sheets, formally inspired by underground comics, Rondinone blends fiction with the mimesis of authenticity, leading readers in and out of intimate--and lonely--spaces and times. These works constitute a kind of report about subjective experience sounding out, bearing, manipulating, and stylizing the borders of collective experience, testing the limits of boredom, rapture, love, failure, and excess. The artist's book Hell, Yes newly regroups various elements of Rondinone's oeuvre--he translates the illustrations and text of his Diaries into photography and printed text, combining his photographic series In the Sweet Years Remaining with the 1998 Diary into a filmic whole. Also included here is an appendix that features, for the first time, all of Rondinone's diary texts in English.