Great is the Power of the Name

The Order of Release gathers and comments upon a number of press releases written by artists. The format of the press release came to the author’s attention through her work at an exhibition space where she was writing such texts. In The Order of Release, Brandt explores different ways that artists have used or appropriated the press release as a proper medium or as an active part of the exhibition itself.

A. E. Brandt is based in Paris. Her recent work deals with the circulation and profusion of writing.

The theme was built around the idiom “VOSTOK”, the title given by Stéphanie Pécourt to her cycle dedicated to performative semantics, in which carte-blanches signed by guest curators at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles are deployed. Buried beneath several kilometers of ice, Lake Vostok acts as an invitation that both fascinates and refuses us. This sub-glacial lake on the edge of Antarctica, the largest identified, becomes the mirror-object of our desires and fears for the abyssal depths. The title of the program, Now I am a Lake, is taken from Sylvia Plath's poem Mirror (1961).

This booklet includes the scripts and texts of the performances, translated exclusively into French for the occasion, as well as images from the videos presented at the eponymous event. The compilation focuses on Sylvia Plath's poem Mirror, and includes an introductory text by curator Pauline Hatzigeorgiou. 

edited by SB34
graphic design by Raphaëlle Serres / Solid Éditons

Contributions by Signe Frederiksen, Pauline Hatzigeorgiou, Margaux Schwarz, Hagar Tenenbaum, Sylvia Plath & Eleanor Ivory Weber

This publication is a compilation of Lee Lozano’s notebooks from 1967 to 1970. The three notebooks included here contain her seminal “Language Pieces” and drawings for her paintings, including 12 studies for her 11-panel masterpiece, “Wave Series.”

Lee Lozano (1930-1999) was an enigmatic artist making a diverse body of drawings, paintings, and conceptual works. While prolific, her production was limited to her time in New York from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. She was very actively engaged with other artists in New York until she decided to leave the art world in 1972. Until recently, much of her work has been difficult for the public to access. From the time of her boycott of the art world until her death, Lozano was an artist working conceptually even though she did not participate actively in the commercial art world for the last three decades of her life.

The pages of the notebooks contain notes and sketches related to her abstract paintings and also contain her texts, which were known as “Language Pieces.” The artist’s work in the books reveal her desire to live and create art within a structured system. Lozano considered the individual pages of her notebooks to be drawings, and they were sometimes separated and exhibited. Twenty-five years ago, the notebooks were photocopied and it is that record which serves as the basis for this book.

Notebooks 1967-70 was first published by Primary Information in 2010. This is the second printing.

The fifth issue of Rab-Rab: Journal of Political and Formal Inquiries in Art includes stories about nation traitors, fierce masses, socialist women struggles, love-forms, psychedelic counter-revolutionaries, workers unions, Brecht fiddlers, jazz surrealism, Soviet trains, and anti-fascism.

Among the contributors to the fifth issue are Anna Thew, Yehuda Safran, Peter Gidal, Cana Bilir-Meier, David Black, Marjo Liukkonen, Alejandro Pedregal, Peter Hallward, Minna Henriksson, and Jyrki Siukonen.

It has also two extensive dossiers. One dedicated to Franklin Rosemont is presented by Joe Feinberg and is introducing some unpublished and difficult to find texts parallel with writings of T-Bone Slim and Joe Hill. The other dossier on Robert Linhart is presented by Tevfik Rada, and it includes a translation of a chapter from Linhart's book on productivism, an article against Western bourgeois dissidents, and an interview with him.

An Expert Array of Talks & Essays by One of Our Greatest Living Poets.

One of our greatest living poets, Alice Notley, the author of more than 40 books of poetry, has delivered an expert array of talks and essays over the last three decades.

The publication offers a significant contribution to literature, reimagining the possibilities of writing in our time and the complicated business of how and why writers devote their lives to their craft. Whether she is writing about other poets—Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Homer, bpNichol, Douglas Oliver, or William Carlos Williams—noir fiction, the First Gulf War, dreams and what they're for, or giving us insight into her own work, Notley's observations are original, sobering, and always memorable. This collection often eschews the typical style of essay or lecture, resisting any categorization, and is consciously disobedient to academic structures in form. The results are thrilling new modes of thinking that may change the ways we read and write.

In this essay, written in English and French, Vilnius-based artist Anastasia Sosunova unfolds her research on the history of printing, from Daniel Hopfer’s etchings to underground printers from the Soviet era, and connected the printing “matrix” to the mother figure, referencing Ocean Vuong and Guadalupe Nettel.

Ocean Vuong writes, “I’m not a monster. I’m a mother”; Jeanette Winterson: “She was a monster but she was my monster.” And thus, the monster I refer to is the one that gives birth to the prints that shape the tongues, fears, and beliefs of vast groups of people. Books of marvels and beasts, now considered emblems of a dark age of ignorance and superstition, proliferated in the 15th and 16th centuries thanks to emergent printing technologies and the influential naturalists they helped create. In the illustrations of scientific explorations by Fortunio Liceti, Athanasius Kircher, or Ulisse Aldrovandi, the lines between fact and fiction were irrelevant as they were impossible to discern.

This chapbook is published as part of the project “Mi-Monstre Mi-Livre,” organised by After 8 Books, Ariel Ink, Publication Studio Paris and Six Chairs Books, during a residency at Aperto, Paris, in the framework of the Lithuanian Season in France.

Real state is the first publication by artist Asta Meldal Lynge, a visual essay with text by Eleanor Ivory Weber, that takes a critical stance towards the subjects of housing, urban development and image production. Employing video-stills, photographs and found images, Lynge explores the social and political value of the image, in a specifically urban context, emphasising the fictions present in the (re)production of space.

In particular, Real state investigates the ramifications of architectural renderings within the public sphere, documenting building site hoardings, symbolic points at the threshold of construction, where a yet-to-exist everyday and a predicted image of the city meets the real one.

Processing this documentation through layering, editing and retouching, Lynge highlights (and challenges) both the intensifying tendency of ‘image-building’ or the production of buildings as icons and the subsequent transformation of public space into an infinite extension of image surfaces.

As the content is framed and re-framed, trackpad gestures are overlaid, ultimately bringing the stability of any image surface into question. This destabilising approach is mirrored in Weber’s text which combines excerpts from e-mail conversations, with differing registers of fiction, expanding on the disconnection between the idea of housing as a basic human need and its position within market logic and neoliberal ideology.

The book’s title alludes to these systems at play, both the power structures of governed entities and the business of real estate; whilst troubling the promise that there is something real or true to be revealed.

M was exasperated by her friend's frivolous attitude toward the tragedy of losing a role. She was not trained to read the potential in R's wild imagination. Was it a commitment to realism, trained by the ideological morality of activism, that made her unresposive to the fantasy genre and vigilante characters? R's instinct was to court the unfamiliar, whereas M's training was to engage with criticality. Both these attributes could have interfaced in interesting and colourful ways, with sparks and currents, if and only if the social conditions of the time had been conducive to the arrival of a vigilante.

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, curator and author based in Mumbai and Berlin. She has been the executive director of Majlis Culture, a centre for rights discourse and art initiatives in Mumbai, 1998-2016; and artistic director of Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne, 2018-2021. Her areas of interest are documentary practices, urban cultures, migration movements, transient identities, and lived-in hybridity.