Cookie Mueller: How to Get Rid of Pimples
Regular price
$225.00
On Sale!
1984
Softcover
Cookie Mueller (with photographs by David Armstrong, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar)
8vo. Very Good. Black-and-white photographic illustrations after David Armstrong, Nan Goldin, and Peter Hujar; internally clean. Original salmon wrappers with photo of Cookie Mueller on the upper cover; wrapper unevenly sunned, some minor shelfwear.
Mueller’s scarce first book, featuring pseudonymized photos of her friends in “before and after” shots—with the “before” pictures featuring dots drawn on to the subjects, jokingly mimicking pimples—accompanied by strange, miracle-cure home remedies for acne. “These images of a 1980s New York creative class, drawn-on and dot-less, alongside Mueller’s surreal takes on wellness, suggest a dearth of cures for the maladies ailing this milieu: AIDS, for one. In the five years following How to Get Rid of Pimples’s publication, Mueller, her husband, Vittorio Scarpati, and contributing photographer Peter Hujar would all die from complications related to the virus” (Natasha Stagg). A nice copy of this rare work by the indelible Dreamlander, writer, and downtown figure, and a relic of 1980s New York.