Paul Chan

This volume surveys Paul Chan's publications and works made between 2010 and 2022 following his return to artmaking. The exhibition takes as its organizing principle the notion of the "breather," a word that can signify a moment of rest or pause but can also reference a purposeful redirection toward other activities.

Chan's turn to publishing through the founding of his independent press Badlands Unlimited represented a type of "breather." Badlands for Chan embodied a radical break that seeded new ideas and ways of working. The term is also what Chan titles a recent major body of work. Breathers is an ongoing series of pneumatic sculptures and installations that he considers a new genre of moving-image works. Tacitly and overtly, the metaphor of the "breather" underscores each of the works in the Walker Art Center exhibition, which, with the artist's input, is conceived in four sections. The exhibition catalog includes scholarly contributions by Chan; Pavel Pys, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center; and Vic Brooks, Senior Curator of Time-based Visual Art at Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (EMPAC).

Paul Chan (born 1973) is an artist, writer and publisher who lives in New York. Chan is the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize in 2014, a biennial award honoring artists who have made visionary contributions to contemporary art. Chan founded the independent press Badlands Unlimited in 2010. Badlands has published over 50 books, including the works of Yvonne Rainer, Calvin Tomkins, Lynne Tillman, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carroll Dunham, Claudia La Rocco, Dread Scott, Martine Syms, Craig Owens, Petra Cortright, Cauleen Smith, Ian Cheng, Rachel Rose, Aruna D'Souza and many others.

One of Plato's most controversial dialogues, Hippias Minor details Socrates' claims that there is no difference between a person who tells the truth and one who lies, and that the good man is the one who willingly makes mistakes and does wrong. But what if Socrates wasn't merely championing the act of lying—as the dialogue has been traditionally interpreted—but, rather, advocating the power of the creative act?

In this new translation by Sarah Ruden, Hippias Minor is rendered anew as a provocative dialogue about how art is a form of wrongdoing. The accompanying introduction by artist Paul Chan and essay by classicist Richard Fletcher argue that an understanding of the dialogue makes life more ethical by paradoxically teaching one to be more cunning.

Raised by a fascist father in Nazi Germany, the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) dedicated his œuvre to a perverse rewriting of the symbolic order. Famous for the two dolls he constructed in the mid-1930s, his transgressive ideas around the body as anagram were shared by his partner Unica Zürn. Both broke received codes of behaviour and the implicit rules of language, providing fertile ground for artists and other thinkers, including feminists, to similarly rewrite the body. ON FIGURE/S is published in parallel with the exhibition FIGURE/S: drawing after Bellmer (Drawing Room, London, September 2021). It gathers responses to its themes: body as letter, word and sentence; perversion and enjoyment; technical and forensic drawing in pursuit of pleasure; the other than human—becoming object, plant, animal. This book is a way to think through and with works of art and their histories, involving multiple textual forms, collage, and drawing, which take the radical and transgressive energy of Bellmer and Zürn in unexpected directions.

Contributors: Paul Buck,  Lola Bunting , Alice Butler, Paul Chan, Iris Colomb, Vincent Dachy, Zoë Dowlen, Rachel Genn, Aurelia Guo,  Mathew Hale, Tom Hastings, Rebecca Jagoe, Sharon Kivland, Sarah Lederman, Kate Macfarlane, Kumi Machida, Louis Mason, Reba Maybury, Jade Montserrat, John Murphy, Michael Newman, Bernard Noël, Tamarin Norwood , Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, Aura Satz, Sophie Seita, Anne Lesley Selcer,  Isabel Seligman, Sarah Wilson 

Event and Duration is a collection of texts that offer various perspectives on the notions of ‘event and duration’, and suggest ways that time can be thought and measured otherwise. The selection of texts are drawn from the field of performance studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, science fiction and the visual arts among others, all of which were read in If I Can’t Dance’s reading groups in Amsterdam, São Paulo and Toronto as part of the artistic programme VI – Event and Duration (2015–16).

Contributors: Octavia E. Butler, Paul Chan, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Elizabeth Freeman, Amelia Groom, The Invisible Committee, R.D. Laing, Henri Lefebvre, Jota Mombaça, José Esteban Muñoz, Peter Pál Pelbart, Paul B. Preciado; and artist pages by Becket MWN.

176 p, ills colour, 15 x 22 cm, pb, English, 2021