I Am Abandoned

Pippa Garner’s Better Living Catalog, originally published in 1982, takes the form of a mail order catalog featuring clever and whimsical inventions that parody consumer goods while simultaneously critiquing America’s obsession with ingenuity, efficiency, leisure, and comfort. These works, which were made as prototypes and photographed for the publication, take the form of improbable accessories, clothing, footwear, home appliances, and office gadgets.

For example, the “Reactiononometer,” a portable wristband, instantly measures social success, while the “Digital Diet Loafers” display the wearer’s weight with every step. If the “Munch-o-Matic” reduces deskwork interruptions by flinging a snack right into the user’s mouth, other items promise financial solvency (the controlled cash flow “Autowallet”), sustainable waste management, or mess-free companionship (the “Pet-a-Vision” TV console). The artist asserts that all of the products in the book are “absolute necessities for contemporary survival.”

The Better Living Catalog was a pop hit when it was published, earning Garner spots on nighttime TV talk shows and attention from magazines like Vogue and Rolling Stone. In a meme-filled culture, the works still resonate today, finding their analog in widely-circulating consumer products, and—in the case of the “High Heel Skates”—even appearing unattributed in the runway collection of a major luxury fashion brand.

A few years after the Better Living Catalog was published, Garner began her gender transition, which she has characterized as an artistic project that draws conceptual parallels to the altered consumer goods she has continued to create since the 1970s. The artist’s practice has always been about hacking—gender hacking, she stated, was “an excellent premise for maverick conceptual art and diametrically opposed to anything I’d ever done.”

Many of the prototypes Garner created for the publication were repurposed or recycled, making this previously rare gem of an artist book one of the artist’s few works to now be widely available.

Born in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, Pippa Garner (formerly known as Philip Garner) began her practice in the late sixties as a member of the highly regarded Transportation Design department at ArtCenter, California, with plans to become a car stylist, and was drafted to Vietnam to serve as a combat illustrator. In the mid-80s, Garner began her gender transition, which she considers a conceptual artwork, marking an extension of her practice from twenty years of altering cars, garments, and consumer products to using her own body as raw material. Garner appeared on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and other talk shows, showcasing her satirical consumer product inventions, and her artwork has been featured in Car & Driver, Rolling Stone, Arts & Architecture, and Vogue, among other publications. In the 1980s, her performance, design, and video work was exhibited in institutions including the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; since 2015, she has had exhibitions at STARS, O-Town House, Redling Fine Art, and Parker gallery in Los Angeles; Jeffrey Stark in New York; JOAN, Los Angeles; Kunstverein München; 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, Metz; Kunsthalle Zurich; and Art Omi, Ghent, New York. She is the author of three other books: Utopia… or Bust! Products for the Perfect World (1984), Garner’s Gizmos & Gadgets (1987), and the zine Beauty 2000 (1992/2021).

This eponymously titled publication by fierce pussy brings together thirty-nine of the legendary art collective’s posters, from works made in the urgent early days of the AIDS crisis to present-day advocacy for Queer and Trans rights. In keeping with fierce pussy’s activism in public spaces, the publication is designed to allow readers to tear out any of the posters to share, wheatpaste, scan, photocopy, and distribute or to easily open the book to any page to hang it on a wall. Combining calls for political and social action, proud reclamations of derogatory language, and pointed questions, the posters in fierce pussy address pressing sociopolitical issues in the group’s distinctive voice.

Emerging during a decade steeped in the AIDS crisis and LGBTQ+ activism, fierce pussy brought Queer identity directly into the streets in a manner characterized by the urgency of those years. In recent years they have expanded to also present their work in galleries and museums, while continuing to intervene in the public space, always working with an economy of means and a collective ethos of inclusion and solidarity.

This publication was originally published by Printed Matter in 2008 to coincide with a retrospective exhibition of the collective’s work. This new expanded edition includes twenty-five additional posters.

fierce pussy is an art collective formed in New York City in 1991. Originally composed of a fluid and often-shifting cadre of dykes, the collective was active through 1994. In 2008, the four core founding members Nancy Brooks Brody (1962–2023), Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka began working together again. Adamantly low-tech and low-budget, fierce pussy has always relied on modest resources: old typewriters, found photographs, and their own baby pictures. In the early days, much of the work was produced using materials and resources they had on hand and the equipment at their day jobs. This publication exemplifies the ethos of the group—to share their work and messaging with the masses.

Managing Editor: Jules Spector
Designers: Garrick Gott and Bryce Wilner

A facsimile of the GALA Committee's mock auction catalog for an artistic intervention into the props and plots of Melrose Place.

Originally published in a limited run in 1998, Primetime Contemporary Art documented In the Name of the Place, a radical two-year intervention by a group of artists, initiated by Mel Chin and known as the GALA Committee, on the primetime television show Melrose Place. This extremely rare artist's book is reproduced for the first time as a facsimile edition.

The artists comprising the GALA Committee worked with the producers of Melrose Place to develop a series of political works that were used as props and plot devices across two seasons of the show, providing surreptitious commentary on reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS, the Gulf War, domestic terrorism, corporate malfeasance and substance abuse. Some of these topics were banned by the FCC at the time, and the group's works allowed for the artists and the show to create political commentary that went unnoticed by censors. The artworks they produced were exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1997 and then sold at an auction at Sotheby's to support several charities. Primetime Contemporary Art was created by Mel Chin and Helen Nagge as a mock auction catalog documenting the artwork made for the show and the conceptual framework of the GALA Committee.

A fascinating account of Lankton's inquisitive, sociological and emotional ruminations in advance of her gender-affirming surgery.

This is one of the earliest of Greer Lankton's (1958-96) journals, sketchbooks and daybooks to appear in the artist's archives, and the first to be published in facsimile form. Written during her time as an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the journal offers key insights into Lankton's mind at work before her career-defining move to New York in 1978, where she would become an important figure of the East Village art scene in the 1980s and early '90s with her lifelike dolls and theatrical sets.

Containing drawings, behavioral diagrams and aspirational, occasionally confessional writing, the journal is a record of imagining the body and mind reconciled through transformation. In these pages, the 19-year-old turns an inquisitive, sociological eye toward the emotional landscape and somatic effects of the days recorded here; days leading up to her decision to undergo hormone treatment and gender-affirming surgery in 1979. Lankton reflects with raw vulnerability and keen self-awareness on critical questions of self-image, social perception, gender normativity and human behavior.

Facsimile compilation of the late-'70s journal on diasporic and colonial histories that paved the way for the British Black Arts Movement.

Published in three issues between 1978 and 1979, Black Phoenix: Journal of Contemporary Art & Culture in the Third World (the subtitle was changed to Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture for its second and third issues) stands as a key document of its time. More than a decade after '60s liberation movements and the historic Bandung and Tricontinental Conferences that called for social and political alignment and solidarity to dismantle Western imperialism and (neo)colonialism, Black Phoenix issued a rallying call for the formation of a Third World, liberatory arts and culture movement on the eve of Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979.

Based in the UK, and both international and national in scope, Black Phoenix positioned diasporic and colonial histories at the center of an evolving anti-racist and anti-imperialist consciousness in late 1970s Britain—one that would yield complex and nuanced discourses on race, class and postcolonial theory in England in the decade that followed.

A precursor to the British Black Arts Movement that formed in 1982 (which encompassed such cultural practitioners as the Black Audio Film Collective and cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall), Black Phoenix proposed a horizon for Blackness beyond racial binaries, across the Third World and the colonized of the interior in the West.

This single-volume facsimile reprint gathers all three issues of the journal, which include contributions by art critics, scholars, artists, poets and writers, including editors Rasheed Araaen and Mahmood Jamal, Guy Brett, Kenneth Coutts-Smith, Ariel Dorfman, Eduardo Galeano, N. Kilele, Babatunde Lawal, David Medalla, Ayyub Malik, Susil Sirivardana and Chris Wanjala.

Special issue of this US magazine dedicated in its entirety to the late Australian artist/compositional linguist/raconteur Chris Mann, who died in 2018. The magazine contains tributes from Mann associates and admirers, including Warren Burt, Amanda Stewart, Pi-0, Ronald Robboy, Linda Kouvaras, Alvin Lucier, Ruark Lewis, Annea Lockwood, as well as Mann’s own writing and an interview with him by Philip Blackburn.

88 pages bound in soft-cover glossy colour cover by Brigid Burke.

Through a voice at once intimate and collective, Lucas Juárez expands the powerful presence of Tutunakú roots to open up territories and to interweave desirous bodies, dream relationships, and the memories of women ancestors. This beautiful translation by Wendy Call and Whitney DeVos, in a precious handmade edition, affirms the trilingual (Tutunakú, Spanish and English) as an ethical strategy of listening to and translating the world. Red Seed collects twelve poems of women's sexualities and spirits in which body, language and territory are political spaces that Indigenous memory expands within and renews.

—Maricela Guerrero, author of The Dream of Every Cell

The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers blends the narratives of the travelog and the coming of age novel. It is written by a young Indian woman whose travels take her between homes in two countries, India and England, and through parts of the United States. These short pieces reveal new ways of belonging in the world and possibilities for an art grounded in a localized cosmopolitan culture.

Bhanu Kapil has written three full-length prose/poetry works, THE VERTICAL INTERROGATION OF STRANGERS (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), INCUBATION: A SPACE FOR MONSTERS (Leon Works, 2006), and HUMANIMAL [A PROJECT FOR FUTURE CHILDREN] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009). Born in the UK to Indian parents, Bhanu lives in Colorado, where she teaches in The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. 

Published 2001

Winter Night Rabbit Worries is Yoo Heekyung’s fifth poetry collection, published in Korean in 2023. Structured as a series of stories, the book presents narrative and linguistic architectures that dissolve the opposition between those materials that construct the this and the that side of life—past and future, truth and falsehood, memory and fantasy. As readers move from one story to another, they will encounter a dizzying yet tender experience in which the boundaries between self and other unravel, and new stories begin to take shape.

“The story arrives like an overcoat emerging from a blizzard, its shoulders heavy with worries piled like snow. You shake off the snow, remove your wet coat, and pause to warm yourself by the stove. That pause is where Yoo Heekyung’s poems come into being: a moment when a kind heart stands quietly by the stove with its back turned to us.” —Kim So Yeon

Yoo Heekyung (b. 1980) is an acclaimed Korean poet, playwright, and essayist. He is the author of over ten collections of poetry and prose, including Today’s Morning Vocabulary (『오늘 아침 단어』), Photography and Poetry (『사진과 시』), and And Next Spring We Will (『이다음 봄에 우리는』). He is a playwright with the theater company dock (독) and a member of the poetry collective jaknan (작란). A recipient of Today’s Young Artist Award from the South Korean Ministry of Culture and Hyundae Munhak Literary Award (2020), Yoo lives in Seoul where he runs the poetry bookshop and project space wit n cynical.

Stine An is a poet, translator, and performer in New York City. Her poems and translations appear in Best Literary Translations 2024, Poem-a-Day, Best Experimental Writing 2018, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and elsewhere. A 2024 NEA Translation Fellow and 2022–2023 Emerge—Surface—Be Fellow, Stine is the author of SMMER CRSH (Sarabande Books) and the translator of Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (Zephyr Press).

In 1971, Michael Morris and Vincent Tarsov—founders of the Vancouver-based artist network Image Bank—invited Eric Metcalfe, Gary Lee Nova, Glenn Lewis and Paul Oberst to create their own, unique alphabet. NowForty years later, with the permission of the participating artists and the help of Image Bank, these historic silk-screened alphabets have finally been published together. The Alphabet Book is designed by Marc Hollenstein, who was inspired to reinitiate the alphabet publication project after having a conversation with Glenn Lewis during the opening of Lewis’ retrospective exhibition at Kunstverein back in 2014.