Beyond Conceptual Art

A collection of interrelated short stories by Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael. First published in private limited edition, it was intended as a cheap holiday read to titillate and entertain summer visitors to the Mediterranean island of Stromboli, and as a piece of site-specific work; the location of the action and the place in which it is read being the same.

The visual art subsequently generated by Unlawful Assembly includes work by Josephine Pryde, with whom the artists collaborated to produce this second edition’s cover image.

The artist’s book ‘#GIVEPOETRYATRYCOLLECTEDPOETRY1990-2020…’ features thirty years of Karl Holmqvist’s artist’s writing in the form of spoken word and concrete poetry, together with signature “cover versions” of lyrics from singer-songwriters such as Robyn and Taylor Swift. The book’s tightly written A4 format pages and cardboard-box-brown no-nonsense cover has been designed in a collaborative effort between the artist and designer Dan Solbach.

‘#GIVEPOETRYATRYCOLLECTEDPOETRY1990-2020…’ Karl Holmqvist’s artist’s book of collected poetry is published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König on the occasion of projects at the Fridericianum, Kassel and gta exhibitions, ETH Zurich.

Jack Smith presented his performance Irrational Landlordism of Bagdad as part of the Cologne Art Fair fringe in the summer of 1977. Many other events were documented photographically and can now be found in the Cologne Art Fair archives - not so Smith's performance.

This book shows him in his fair stall and during his performance for the first time. The pictures are perfect documents of a completely eccentric transaction by this pioneering director and performance artist.

Past Words is three books in one: a collection of previously published texts and two exhibition-like experiments: A Year with Prem Krishnamurthy at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and Endless Exhibition at the Kunsthal Gent. These parts are iinterconnected but distinct, not least because each is designed by a different designer—Ann Richter, David Knowles, Mark Foss & Valentijn Goethals. Together, they chart the past—and future—of a peripatetic performance of a practice, taking stock of a fifteen-year period through writing, a medium that 1s both primary and secondary. This writing is about design, about curating, about exhibition-making, and about how all three are themselves forms of storytelling. They allow us to draft narratives that stand just to the side of accepted realities, to sneak wild ideas into the world with the hope they may—with time—turn into facts. 

Based in Berlin and New York, designer and curator Prem Krishnamurthy (born 1977) is head of the artist group Department of Transformation and of the design consultancy Wkshps. In 2015 he was the recipient of the Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Award for Communication essDesign. As both creator and curator, Krishnamurthy aims to discover “how art & design can be agents of transformation for individuals, communities and institutions.” 

With an introduction by Krist Gruijthuijsen.

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge.

Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humour and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people. Our comedy is fraught with tension like never before, and so too is our social life. We often hear the claim that no one can take a joke anymore.  But what if we really can’t take jokes anymore?

This book argues that the spirit of comedy is the first step in the building of society, but that it has been lost in the era of divisive identity politics. Comedy flares up debates about censorship and cancellation, keeping us divided from one other. This goes against the true universalist spirit of comedy, which is becoming a thing of the past and must be recovered.

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.

In 2018, a group of three visual artists — Agathe Boulanger, Signe Frederiksen and Jules Lagrange— started a year-long conversations with Laurence Rassel, exploring her social and educational background, her ways of working, and examining the tools she applies in her daily practice of running institutions: feminism, the open source and free software movements, and the institutional psychotherapy developed by François Tosquelles and Jean Oury in the psychiatric field around the mid-20^th century.

A manifesto against the current moralizing trend in the arts.

Should art be determined by political ideals? In recent decades art institutions have sought to embody liberal values of universal equality and social justice. This move toward greater inclusivity has borne witness to a countervailing trend: artworks are increasingly scrutinized for their political implications, and artists must take care not to transgress particular moral fault lines.

Examining contemporary exhibitions as well as works of art and film, and the broader cultural reactions to them, Rosanna McLaughlin investigates the consequences of this moralizing approach to creative work. She invites us to rethink the connection between political values and art—and to ask whether a relationship between them should exist at all. In arguing against morality in the arts, McLaughlin lays the groundwork for a more expansive concept of difference in twenty-first-century art making.

"What if ambivalences were seen as productive, and not a danger to erase? Would we not begin to know ourselves better? What is it that we are so afraid of finding out? Art is a testing ground for ideas, a means of reaching. What a shame, if we use the space it offers to destroy it entirely."

Rosanna McLaughlin is a writer based in East Sussex and the author of Double-Tracking: Studies in Duplicity (2019) and Sinkhole (2023). Her writing on art and culture has featured in ArtReview, Frieze, Granta, The Guardian, and The White Review, among other publications. Between 2021 and 2023 she was co-editor of The White Review.