The Abecedarium of the Artist’s Death
Guidebook
Moussa Kone: The Abecedarium of the Artist's Death. 26 dangers for your career. Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Vienna, 2014
14.5 x 17 cm, 56 pages, 26 drawings, hardcover, thread-bound, register-cut. Texts in English. Graphic design by Martin Wunderer.
ISBN 978-3-86984-527-2
More than any other profession the artist is exposed to a variety of dangers which could cause the sudden end of the career. Moussa Kone portrays tragic examples of this from everyday artistic life through 26 drawings of testified moments. Each entry is tabbed in an address-book index from A to Z.
Kone creates detailed, Gorey-esque, black-and-white ink drawings that are darkly humorous and socially critical. The delightful artist book is filled with gory but humorous cautionary tales for aspiring artists in the contemporary art world. It is a memento mori, demonstrating the precarious position of the artist, which every art student - and his or her parents - should have read.
The book is a homage to Edward Gorey.
Macabre-beautiful corpses
"The early bird catches the worm", the English teacher liked to preach. But if you're too early, you'll also catch nothing. Like Bianca on the circus trapeze. A classic artist's fate: some ideas are only understood too late. Not all fates end so disastrously, sometimes only the career is as dead as a doornail. With bittersweet sarcasm, artist Moussa Kone pays tribute to some of his failed colleagues: those slain by their own work, those consumed by doubt, those who never arrived in Berlin, victims of turpentine and of double liter wine bottles. He translates shattered ideals into macabre, gloomy ink drawings, accompanied by bitter epitaphs. The Abecedarium of the Artists Death is the title of this exquisite book (also available in a limited watercolored edition of 20), a homage to the whimsical poetic Abecedaria of Edward Gorey (1925-2000).
In particular, Kone borrows from the latter's The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963), which describes in ironic, unsentimental rhyme the fatal accidents of 26 children - a reaction to the obsessive moralism of the Victorian era. Kone's wicked reckoning with the art business is at the same time a memento mori for real, deceased companions: "Every one of us knows a Susi.”
Quoted from a book review by Anne Katrin Feßler, Der Standard Album, April 18, 2015, p.A6 (translated from German)
The limited book collector’s edition of 12 hand-colored artist books, signed and numbered.