Martin Wong: Das Puke Book

An artist's book presenting a photographic study of onions.

On Onions is a photographic study of onions by artist Elad Lassry (born 1977). Characteristically highlighting the spectrum of hues and shapes for the vegetable, Lassry's selected taxonomy includes sections on red, yellow and white onions, each of which possesses its own distinct taste and benefits. On Onions is Lassry's first artist's book, and the work will exist only in book form; it is at once wry, refreshing and disorienting in its biology workbook style, which makes fruitful use of "the confusion that results when there is something just slightly wrong in a photograph" (as the artist has described his practice in general).

Composed by the artist and arranged by Stuart Bailey, the book includes an essay written by Angie Keefer about the effects of sliced onions on human tear ducts.

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.

A facsimile of Graham's ultra-rare artist's book documenting early performance works.

Originally published in 1978 and produced here in facsimile form, Theatre is an artist's book documenting seven early performance works by Dan Graham (born 1942) taking place from 1969 to 1977, with notes, transcripts and photo documentation for each performance. These performances catch the artist at a unique moment, as he shifts away from his early media works and towards his hallmark video and written work around underground music and youth culture.
The works in Theatre focus primarily on the psychological and social space between individuals and the roles they serve inside the arena of performance, subverting them by creating conditions by which a performer or audience simultaneously functions as both (creating a type of feedback loop through social transgression). Like most of Graham's work, these performances also serve as a critique of cultural norms, with many of the performances utilizing quotidian, social acts that are amplified over time.

Self-published in 1968, Footprints, Poems, and Leaves collects dozens of poems written by Martin Wong between 1966 and 1968. Hand-written in a signature calligraphic style that he was just beginning to develop, the poems ebb and flow visually across the page, much like the fluctuating characters, scenes, and moods that inhabit them. This was Wong’s first book of poetry and it contains a double cover showcasing intricate drawings of skeletal angels and other tableaux, as well as a folded, looseleaf broadsheet containing two poems and a drawing of a boney leaf.

The poems were written during a relatively free period for the artist, shortly after he dropped out of Berkeley and began exploring San Francisco at the height of the hippy movement. The poems range from surrealist and pastoral descriptions of the urban subculture that surrounded him to downtrodden, travel-weary biographical entries that are both lonely and tender. Footprints, Poems, and Leaves functions like a journal capturing Wong’s tumultuous life in this period, which included being arrested at a queer, drug-fueled house party (along with Rudolf Nureyev and Dame Margot Fonteyn) and a stay in a mental institution in late 1967 and early 1968. Around the time of the book’s publication, Wong enrolled in Humboldt State University to finish his degree, beginning a new chapter for the artist.

Despite the dark backdrops of many of the works, the writing displays a playfulness with form and language and a sense of humor that can be seen throughout Wong’s later work as well. Altogether, Footprints, Poems, and Leaves creates a rich tapestry of visual poetry that is both a product of its time and the budding artistic mind of a young Martin Wong.

As a cofounder of Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, Emmy Hennings, with her partner, the Dadaist Hugo Ball, is recognized as having established and environment for collective experimentation. This book gathers an extensive collection of Hennings's writings, ephemera, and art, to give shape to a practice and an individual so ofter flattened for the sake of art historical narrative.

In the exhibitions held at Cabaret Voltaire and at the Swiss Institute in 2020, Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi made evocative displays that created space for a deeper engagement with Hennings's life and art. For this publication, she has made new collages, combining found materials and working tools suck as adhesive strips, supplemented by graphic gestures and subjective indexes such as cigarette butts. By bringing the Hennings archive into dialogue with her own work, Ghaznawi considers the manner in which an individual's multiple identities guide the accumulation of personal experience, be they her own or those of a woman she never met. Commissioned on the occasion of her exhibitions, and published together here for the first time, are texts by Ghaznawi's friends and collaborators Michael Zimmerman, Samuel Lala, Nils Amadeus Lange, Sophia Rohwetter, Der Serpas, Olamiju Fajemisin, Samiran Istifan, Timur Akhmetov and Furqat Palvan-Zade.

Published following the exhibitions Emmy Hennings / Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, and the Swiss Institute, New York, in 2020-2021.

Emmy Hennings (1885–1948) was a writer, actress, cabaret artist and co-founder of the artists' bar with Hugo Ball, and probably the most present figure at Cabaret Voltaire. The fact that she received little attention as a writer and artist may be due to various reasons. Perhaps it was the distinct language, or the general uneasiness at dealing with her Catholicism; whatever it was, her trace is missing in the male-dominated Dada historicisation. Only recently has Hennings received recognition, and indeed beyond the role of cabaret star. Whoever reads her novels, poems, and reviews will encounter a woman for whom writing was a survival strategy. She astutely analyses her existence and stages herself as a multiple.

Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi (born 1995 in Ghazni, Afghanistan) lives and works in Zurich and Obwalden. Her assemblages transgress forms and space, revealing a questioning of institutional structures and accepted ideas of craft and taste. In her sculptural transformations her processes insist on maintaining the visibility of the lowly beginnings of her materials, forming strong, shameless and rigorous poetries.

Edited by Simon Castets and Salome Hohl.
Texts by Salome Hohl, Laura McLean-Ferris, Michael Zimmerman, Samuel Lala, Nils Amadeus Lange, Sophia Rohwetter, Der Serpas, Olamiju Fajemisin, Samiran Istifan, Timur Akhmetov, Furqat Palvan-Zade.

faits divers are the various reports in a news bulletin, miscellaneous human interest stories, theorised by Roland Barthes as ‘total’ and ‘immanent’ information.

ferrara deux (faits divers) scrolls around the discovered corpse of a talented street musician named Landau, mangled and sealed into vacuum bags in the walk-in of a modern Italian-American restaurant. Street performance is content for an attention economy, playing on authenticities and profiting from recognition.

In this debut novel, artist Ivan Cheng reconfigures recent performance texts into an approximation of a murder mystery.

Contributions by: Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, Georgia Sagri, John Kelsey, Matthew Pang, Cathy Wilkes, Sarah Rapson, Nick Irvin, Gene Beery, Anne Dressen, Anne Pontégnie, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Sara Deraedt, Anne Rorimer, Kari Rittenbach, Olga Balema, Maria Nordman, Louise Lawler, Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Adrian Morris, Matt Browning, John Miller, Envers Hadzijaj, Enzo Shalom, Bedros Yeretzian, Morag Keil, Helmut Draxler, Gianna Surangkanjanajai, Steve Cannon, Rae Armentrout, Zoe Hitzig, Pierre Guyotat, Lola Sinreich, Fanny Howe, Hélène Fauquet, Marie Angeletti, Richard Hawkins, Andy Robert, Alexander García Düttmann, Daniel Horn, El Hadji Sy, Henrik Olesen, Aurélien Potier, Richard John Jones, Stéphane Barbier Bouvet, Nora Schultz, Peter Fend, Megan Francis Sullivan, Jill Johnston, Sturtevant, Tonio Kröner, Bernard Bazile, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Jérome Pantalacci, Gérard Traquandi, Gladys Clover, Maria Wutz, Jimmie Durham, Richard Sides, Camilla Wills, Michael Callies, Steven Warwick, Matthew Langan-Peck, Dan Graham, Nina Könnemann, Hans Christian Dany, Valérie Knoll, Win McCarthy, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Anna Rubin, Heji Shin, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Inka Meißner, Simone Forti, Morgan O’Hara, Angharad Williams, Ye Xe, Lily Van Der Stokker, Yuki Kimura, Peter Wächtler, Eva Steinmetz, Michael Van den Abeele, Marc Kokopeli, Bradley Kronz, Robert Grosvenor, Samuel Jeffery, Charlotte Houette, Adam Martin, Wade Guyton, Chloe Truong-Jones.

Edited by Marie Angeletti with Gianmaria Andreetta and Camilla Wills.

Printed in December 2022.
416 pages, Edition of 840.
© 2022 Claude Balls Int. / the author(s).

Catalog is a serial publication about cataloging written by Lieven Lahaye and designed by Ott Metusala. This is Catalog issue 21, ‘Impressed’, it’s part of a sub-series on near invisibility. Published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Dear Friend’ at EKA Gallery, Tallinn in September 2022. This issue of Catalog was produced during a residency period at Air Berlin Alexanderplatz, May-August 2022.