David Byrne - Your Action World:
Winners Are Losers With a New Attitude

Text (English) by David Byrne
Plastic bag and PVC cover
Design: Stefan Sagmeister - David Byrne
Size: cm 35 x 28
pp. 128
80 colour-illustrations
Edizioni Gotham (October 1998)
ISBN -42-8
List Price: € 46,48 $ 45
Our Price: € 33,56 $ 32,5

In his latest book, writer, photographer, musician, and former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne has created an extraordinary document and critique of the times we live in. Your Action World parodies the "inspirational" promotional materials-including books, tapes, and corporate advertising-with which we are inundated daily. Byrne's impulse is to fight back, "to stem the tide of images and bullying texts that assault all of us, by building dikes and dams of my own images and texts. To understand the enemy I must become one with the enemy, I must be of one mind with the enemy. I must infect myself in order to be immunized." An intelligent, quirky document from one of our most innovative artists-with a cool debossed PVC cover, a plastic bag and 4-color sticker-Your Action World will be the cult hit of the season.

Here's a book that I did in Italy in conjunction with an exhibition at the LipanjePuntin Artecontemporanea and a museum show in Trieste, Italy. The book was done in collaboration with the NY designer Stephan Sagmeister. We both have a few production grumbles (try getting it out of the bag) but we both love love it as well. It's definitely not for sale in the US...and probably not available outside Italy. We were inspired by both corporate catalogues and inspirational brochures but went off on our own tangents as well. It represents some of the work I've been doing over the past few years, although by no means all of it. Sometimes this work was shown as lightboxes and was accompanied by the audio piece (or acoustic guide as they are called in museums) "Your Action World".... which is one of the darkest, most twisted pieces I've done in a long time. But, it provides a complementary aural world to live in while looking at the images.

Explore! Enjoy

David Byrne