Absence of Clutter: Minimal writing as art and literature

Wind & De Wilgen (English/Dutch) was designed by Lawrence Weiner and published on the occasion of the execution of his work Wind & The Willows in the Openluchtmuseum voor beeldhouwkunst Middelheim, Antwerp.

Lawrence Weiner was an American artist and one of the central figures in the formation of conceptual art in de 60s. His work was strongly language-based and often took form in typographic texts, also visible in this artist book. 

Edition of 1000 copies

Read Me gathers the tools necessary to make sense of contemporary problems so ubiquitous they seem too big to name. Spanning a multiplicity of genres, media, and tonal registers, this book surveys Holly Melgard’s formally experimental poetic works produced between 2008 and 2023, including sound poems, essays on poetics, and books that exploit print on demand to, for example, counterfeit money. In often wildly comic turns of thought, Melgard’s work cleaves personal agency from automated defaults by mapping trauma and technocracy from the inside out.

From critical talks to fictional monologues, the poet translates into language the unremarkable torments of neoliberalization in the digital age.

A weaving draft is a kind of notation for planning and sharing woven textil structures. The threading, along the top, shows how the warp is threaded through the heddles and frames; the treadling, along the right-hand side, show the order in which the treadles of the loom are to be pressed; and the tie-up, in the upper right-hand corner, shows how each treadle interacts with the loom’ frames. The drawdown, in the lower left, shows whether the warp or weft will be on top at any particular intersection of threads—thereby providing a “preview” of the completed textile. Often a draft diagram will indicate the intended color of the warp and weft threads, and the drawdown will show the completed textile’s color patterns. In “Drafts,” Allison uses letters instead of colors, melding digital weaving with writing.

WITHOUT THE E is a series of pamphlets responding to a presence or an absence felt in contemporary digital culture.

Weaving Language I: Lexicon is the first book in the Weaving Language series, which examines the poetics of weaving traditions through historical research as well as contemporary practices. Attempting to dismantle and rebuild commonplace understandings of the history of writing, Weaving Language focuses on fiber-based forms as a longstanding but often overlooked medium for record-keeping, storytelling, and poetry.

In Weaving Language I: Lexicon, weaving processes are mapped onto English grammar to suggest a method for reading woven works. Offering visual vocabularies as both discrete concrete poems as well as a collection of translatable terms, this book invites readers, writers, and weavers to participate by considering weaving as a system that can be decoded. Textile forms are broken into the basic building blocks of language, presented as a visual/textual lexicon.

Weaving Language I: Lexicon was initially self-published by Capone in 2012 and in 2015 re-issued in an edition of five as an artists’ book, which was awarded the Frances Mason Harris ’26 Prize from Brown University.

Essay Press’s edition makes this important work available for the first time in a trade edition. The edition has also been newly edited and significantly expanded into a multivocal work that represents the contributions of a small collective of artists including Martha Tuttle, Allison Parrish, Sarah Zapata, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Amaranth Borsuk, and Imani Elizabeth Jackson, thanks to funding from the Oregon Arts Commission and the Ford Family Foundation. The book also includes an afterword by Kit Schluter and diagrams by Anni Albers (with permissions from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation).

Plans are underway to similarly expand and reissue the two additional books in the series both previously published in limited editions currently out of print: Weaving Language II: Language is Image, Paper, Code, & Cloth (information as material, York, UK, 2018) and Weaving Language III: Writing in Threads (Center of Craft, Asheville, NC, 2017). The Weaving Language project has been accompanied by numerous gallery shows, including “Material Memory,” a show running from October 7 through November 9, 2022, at Nationale in Portland, Oregon, to accompany the release of the Essay Press edition of Weaving Language I.

Artists’ books from the Weaving Language series are held by the collections of the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York, NY; the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY; the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays at the John Hay Library at Brown University in Providence, RI; and at the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL.

Why do we yearn to be seen when we are already far too visible? How do we want to be perceived, and how are we exposed? Could we ever really see for ourselves?

In memoir, vignettes, poetry and essays, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan records her observations from the stands at the dizzying circus of being seen and unseen. She surveys the criminalising stadium of civic life, the open-air arenas of family, friendship and grief, the performative pageantry of the public eye and the unclad secrets of the self in solitude, paying attention to what’s on show and what goes undetected.

Perhaps the strangest, most exciting possibilities are opened when we surrender to another kind of sight. Submitting to the gaze of the Unseen and the All-Seeing, Manzoor-Khan invites us to close our eyes and discover what it would mean to look with our souls instead.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a poet and writer whose work disrupts assumptions about history, race, violence and knowledge. She is the author of Tangled in Terror and the poetry collection Postcolonial Banter; a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University; and a contributor to the anthologies Cut from the Same Cloth? and I Refuse to Condemn. She is based in Leeds and is currently writing for theatre.

Beyond Personhood provides an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship between gender and identity. Until now, trans experience has overwhelmingly been understood in terms of two reductive frameworks: trans people are either “trapped in the wrong body” or they are oppressed by the gender binary. Both accounts misgender large trans constituencies while distorting their experience, and neither can explain the presentation of trans people as make-believers and deceivers or the serious consequences thereof. In Beyond Personhood, Talia Mae Bettcher demonstrates how taking this phenomenon seriously affords a new perspective on trans oppression and trans dysphoria—one involving liminal states of “make-believe” that bear positive possibilities for self-recognition and resistance.

Undergirding this account is Bettcher’s groundbreaking theory of interpersonal spatiality—a theory of intimacy and distance that requires rejection of the philosophical concepts of person, self, and subject. She argues that only interpersonal spatiality theory can successfully explain trans oppression and gender dysphoria, thus creating new possibilities for thinking about connection and relatedness. 

An essential contribution to the burgeoning field of trans philosophy, Beyond Personhood offers an intersectional trans feminism that illuminates transphobic, sexist, heterosexist, and racist oppressions, situating trans oppression and resistance within a much larger decolonial struggle. By refusing to separate theory from its application, Bettcher shows how a philosophy of depth can emerge from the everyday experiences of trans people, pointing the way to a reinvigoration of philosophy.

Five Stars: Selected Amazon Reviews, Volume 4 by Kevin Killian, selected by Ted Rees & David Buuck, with introductory words from Kevin edited by Dodie Bellamy. Curated from the over 2500 reviews that William Hall has lovingly archived, this latest edition showcases Kevin’s incomparable mix of wit and sincerity, pleasure and playfulness, his deep love of popular culture, and his unique critical voice.

Close to spiritual anarchism, Georgia Sagri’s writing happens in the heat of negotiation. Starting in the months leading up to the occupation of Zuccotti Park in 2011, which became the movement for people’s self-governance known as Occupy, this book carries the energy and commitment of open struggle, direct address, self-organisation and public assembly. It is a critique of representation and its implicit oblivion, told through a decade of artistic and activist practice. The writing is a mode of recovery, it is pre-content shared to encourage open processes in art, thinking and action.

Georgia Sagri (born Athens, 1979) lives and works in Athens and New York. Her practice is influenced by her ongoing engagement in political movements and struggles on issues of autonomy, empowerment and self-organisation. From 1997 to 2001 she was a member of Void Network, a cultural, political and philosophical collective operating in Athens. In 2011 she was one of the main organisers of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. Since 2013 she has been a member of the assembly of the Embros Theatre Occupation, and in 2014 she initiated Ύλη[matter]HYLE, a semi-public cultural space in the heart of Athens. She is professor of performance at the Athens School of Fine Arts.