An Experiment in Concrete Poetry by Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz created TOPOEMS and DISCOS VISUALES in 1966, works that are now virtually unobtainable. They were his first experiments in concrete poetry. In 1972, Robert Gardner, Director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard, produced NOTATIONS/ROTATIONS yet another such experiment. It is composed of four rotating panels each gradually revealing the four haiku-like poems by Paz as they are rotated.

3 Notations/Rotations was published in an edition of 1,000 copies. 150 were boxed, numbered and signed by the poet and the graphic artist, Toshi Katayama. An additional 26 copies lettered A-Z, signed by the author and artist, were ‘hors de commerce.’ Examples of this work are extremely rare.

The few remaining copies of this project may be ordered from Studio7Arts.

This issue of AGNI Magazine was an effort to take note of the work of an important visual artist by the name of Michael Mazur. Its singularity was that it contained a DVD of a short film by Robert Gardner made about Mazur called Good To Pull. This important literary journal is published at Boston University and is made available here.

This 40th anniversary issue of AGNI is largely devoted to the life and work of the poet Robert Lowell. It contains a portfolio of thirteen black and white photographs chosen from over one hundred taken of Lowell by Robert Gardner. The photographs were developed and remastered by Simon Malkovas and appear in lustrous fashion as a result. This important literary journal is published at Boston University and is made available here.

This limited edition book is composed of words taken from a journal kept in 1978 by Robert Gardner while he was making the film Deep Hearts and a series of Polaroid SX-70 portraits he made of Borroro dancers’ faces to see if there was any agreement as to what constituted the looks of a perfect male Borroro. Over 100 images were made at the time and yet only a handful were kept by Gardner: the men so desired to posses images of themselves that it was nearly impossible for him to retain them.

32 pages, 6 1/2 x 8 1/2, foil stamped recycled paperboard perfect bound cover with large folding inside flaps. First edition of 250 copies signed and numbered by Robert Gardner, designed by Fogelson-Lubliner, printed February 2009 by Meridian Press.

An online exhibition of these images can be seen at www.luminous-lint.com

The Early Photography of Robert E. Fulton III

The book includes 74 black and white remastered photographs that Fulton took in Boston in the early 1960s.

Robert E. Fulton III (1939-2002)
An insightful and skilled photographer, Robert Fulton graduated Harvard in the 1960s and merged his passions for flight and photography to design a camera system for his single-engine Cessna which enabled him to pilot the aircraft while operating a wing-mounted 35mm Arriflex camera, capturing incredible aerial images. He won an Emmy in 1997 for Denali: Alaska’s Great Wilderness. His last major aerial photographic work was released in 2000, the result of a year’s filming for the BBC Natural World series Andes To Amazon. In addition to his work on nature documentaries, mainstream features and music videos, Fulton made many short 16mm films (many available through Canyon Cinema), and worked with his close friend, documentary filmmaker Robert Gardner, on several projects, including Ika Hands (1988).

On May 30, 2002, Fulton died when his Cessna A-185-F crashed in Pennsylvania, an accident caused by a freak combination of thermal forces that, despite Fulton’s high level of skill as a pilot, caused the plane to break up in the sky. At the time of his death, Fulton was planning a film project with the BBC which would have involved flying around the world to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first manned flight.

A limited edition flipbook of a sequence from Robert Gardner’s PASSENGER, a video about Sean Scully in his Barcelona studio in 1997 creating a painting of that name. The flipbook is a sequence documenting Sean Scully’s ‘kata’ or personal karate routine. Sean Scully is a black belt karate adept.

This flipbook is signed and numbered by Scully in an edition limited to 100.

Robert Gardner and Karl G. Heider, introduction by Margaret Mead

“Always the least didactic of sciences, anthropology speaks to the heart as well as to the mind of man. It treads a careful path between those who ridicule it as “unscientific” in its humanism, and those who, mistaking sentiment for truth, reject the methods of science in the their search for the nature of man. The best kind of anthropology, – scholarly, comprehensible and extraordinarily evocative – is to be found in Gardens of War. This superb literary and photographic essay is, in some ways, a monument to the Dani people who are its subject; more than that, however, it captures the eternal poignancy of the human paradox. War in Eden, cruelty and gentleness, love and hate; death and life.”

— Gloria B. Levitas

In a hidden valley of great beauty, beyond the framework of our modern sense of time, lives a people until lately touched by civilization, direct survivors of the Stone Age. Gardens of War is a moving pictorial record of the lives of the Dugum Dani, a tribe of Neolithic warriors, during two seasons of 1961, when they were studied by the Harvard-Peabody Anthropological Expedition to New Guinea. The Expedition’s visit to the Grand Valley of Baliem in the Central Highlands of Western New Guinea offered a unique opportunity, perhaps the last, for a first-hand account of a lost culture in all its pristine simplicity and violence. Sixteen pages of magnificent color photographs and 96 black-and-white illustrations are matched here with a fascinating and superbly readable text to record a primitive world most of us are unlikely to see.

Published by Random House (1969)

Published by The Gehenna Press, 1964

Illustrated with two woodcuts by Leonard Baskin; plus a orange colored woodcut vignette in the colophon. 9 1/2 x 6, original saddle-sewn gray wrappers with large folding inside flaps. 500 hand-numbered copies printed at the Gehenna Press by Harold McGrath.