The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers
$25.00
A lovely little artist’s book that’s a companion piece and making-of document of Rivers’s 2015 installation The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, made up of all sort of ephemera pertaining to that work, filmed in Morocco. Rivers is a guy whose film projects tend to generate all sorts of incidental art objects, made by himself and others—a couple of months ago I saw a gallery show he had up at Jeux de Paume in Paris consisting of mock-up models and preliminary sketches for a movie he hasn’t even made yet. He’s tremendously prolific and talented, which of course I resent. This slender volume includes crude storyboards, maps of the shooting terrain, lovely production photographs courtesy of Yuki Yamamoto, and facsimile reprints of stories that informed Rivers’s film: Paul Bowles’s short story A Distant Episode and three pieces by Bowles’s close associate, the painter Mohammed Mrabet, whose orally transmitted tales Bowles transcribed. I like the book a lot, particularly because the burgundy leatherette binding reminds me of this series of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition supplements from the ‘90s.—Nick Pinkerton
New, printed in an edition of 1,500 copies
Ben Rivers
Artangel / Whitworth Art Gallery
2015
5.25″ x 7.5″
128 pages