Modern Love

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.

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

Made in 1969 but never published, Terminal Boundaries is an artist book by Lawrence Weiner, a sculptor whose medium was language. The manuscript for the publication, which was recently brought to light, contains two related bodies of work represented as typewritten statements on paper that Weiner pasted to the pages of a small composition notebook. The book’s absence from Weiner’s oeuvre plagued him as it marked a terminus of his relationship to the physical construction of his artworks, and illustrated the principle of “specific” and “general” which he applied to his art.

Created from a standard notebook purchased in a stationery store, the manuscript is two books in one: Terminal Boundaries and A natural watercourse diverted reduced or displaced. A tête-bêche with two front covers, the book can begin from either cover by turning it upside down.

Weiner was a traveler by nature and the materials he refers to in these works are those that one can encounter on a road trip. The artist was traveling across Europe when this manuscript was composed. Struck by the tumultuous times and the critical illuminations about the climate from the Club of Rome discussions, the works in this book are in Weiner’s words, “concerned with the relationship of natural resources in relation to human beings.” Distinct from his contemporaries associated with the Land Art movement, in Terminal Boundaries and A natural water course diverted reduced or displaced, Weiner constructs his landscape interventions in language—the specific and/or general act and the location are stated—offering the reader/viewer the opportunity to consider each work’s existence, to build it in their mind’s eye. One can only wonder what Weiner did to divert, reduce, or displace a natural water course in Saltsrumen, Norway, the location of the world’s strongest maelstrom, or in nearby Bodø at the site of Svartisen glacier. A work in Terminal Boundaries titled The joining of France Germany and Switzerland by rope demonstrates the geopolitical perspective of Weiner’s land art. Requiring physical and mental borders to be transgressed in performing this work; how and where could this happen?

Terminal Boundaries finds Weiner just off the cusp of his decision to make art that lived centered in language, emphasizing the viewer’s responsibility to engage with it to make it whole. The book marks a crucial inflection point in the artist’s practice, defining his direction to make work that “attempts to present something to people that is not just about me,” but about materials and the world we find ourselves in here and now.

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.

Otherhow brings together four decades of writings, lectures, interviews, and documentation of work by the artist Joseph Grigely. Deaf since the age of ten, his art and writing have long questioned and made use of various modes of communication—photographs, handwritten notes, lipreading, newspaper headlines, paintings, and TV captions—to examine and scrutinize the ableism embedded in cultural and media production. From his brilliant series of postcards addressed to Sophie Calle, where he began to formulate a theory on the intersection of disability and art, to his epic lecture “On Failure,” which brings together the poet Keats, “the first woman of fly tying” Helen Shaw, and the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky to the same table for a conversation on beauty, Grigely’s writing is erudite, but clear; righteous with fury, but dryly humorous.

An underlying theme throughout are modes of access and how issues of accessibility and their resolution provide a benefit to everyone, not just the disabled. Chapters devoted to art, access, and advocacy underpin the interconnected nature of these issues in a maddening, but ultimately enlightening manner. Letters of complaint, faxes and emails, unpublished op-eds, exhibition proposals, statements on equality and access; each provide a glimpse into how Grigely’s work has been shaped by—or constructed from—the “tangled process” of opening access.

Joseph Grigely, artist, educator, and activist, is currently a Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford in English literature and has taught at Gallaudet University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan. Exhibiting widely in the US and Europe, his most recent show In What Way Wham? was presented at MASS MoCA in 2023–24. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate Modern, and the Stedelijk Museum, among others.

The Weight of the Concrete explores the legacy of the Turinese artist and publisher Ezio Gribaudo (1929–2022), examining his multifaceted oeuvre at the confluence of image and language. This publication, named after Il Peso del Concreto (1968)—a seminal work that featured Gribaudo’s early graphic creations alongside an anthology of concrete poetry edited by the poet Adriano Spatola (1941–88)—places Gribaudo’s work in conversation with approximately forty artists and poets from different generations, all of whom similarly engage with explorations of text, form, and visual expression.

Reflecting the editorial premise of Il Peso del Concreto, The Weight of the Concrete revisits the influential anthology, including archive material that documents its production, and reimagines it, pairing Gribaudo’s graphic work with a new selection of historical and contemporary concrete and experimental poetry.

At the heart of the volume is Gribaudo’s emblematic Logogrifi series, developed from the 1960s onward. The Logogrifi reveal his deep engagement with the art of bookmaking and fascination with industrial printing processes, relief matrices, typefaces, and language games.

In this new edition, the editors take the opportunity to revisit Gribaudo’s pioneering work, examining previously overlooked dimensions—gendered, geographical, and technological—and exploring contemporary associations beyond the original context. The book also includes essays that elucidate the poetic and political interplay between image, language, and materiality.

This publication is released following Ezio Gribaudo – The Weight of the Concrete, an exhibition held at the Grazer Kunstverein in Graz, Austria (2023–24), and at the Museion—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy (2024).

Edited by Tom Engels and Lilou Vidal
Published by Axis Axis and Grazer Kunstverein

Contributions by Anni Albers, Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Irma Blank, Al Cartio, Paula Claire, CAConrad, Natalie Czech, Betty Danon, Constance DeJong, Mirtha Dermisache, Johanna Drucker, Bryana Fritz, Ilse Garnier, Liliane Giraudon, Susan Howe, Alison Knowles, Katalin Ladik, Liliane Lijn, Hanne Lippard, Sara Magenheimer, Françoise Mairey, Nadia Marcus, Giulia Niccolai, Alice Notley, Ewa Partum, sadé powell, N. H. Pritchard, Cia Rinne, Neide Dias de Sá, Giovanna Sandri, Mary Ellen Solt, Alice Theobald, Colleen Thibaudeau, Patrizia Vicinelli, Pascal Vonlanthen, Hannah Weiner, and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt

Essays by Alex Balgiu, Tom Engels, Nadia Marcus, Luca Lo Pinto, Mónica de la Torre, and Lilou Vidal

From its anatomy and autonomy to its death and diet, this issue focuses on the motif Body and all its meanings, direct and indirect, for instance as in relation to human and non-human bearers of bodies, its inhabitants like bacteria and organs, its social, medical and juridical conditions, its intoxications, chemical processes, traumas, transitions, well-being, replacements, weaknesses, and its opposites.

Contributors: Adam Dickinson, Andrea Éva Győri, A.L. Steiner, Alexandra Ivanciu, Barak Zemer, Bernhard Willhelm, Clara Lena Langenbach, Clémentine Bedos, Constance DeJong, Daisy Hildyard, Fanny Howe, Hanne Loreck, Hasti, Holly Hunter, Ingrid Jäger, Jannis Marwitz, Jess Arndt, Johannes Kuczera, Jolanta Nowaczyk, Henriette Maier, Mag Gabbert, Maja Smrekar, Manuel Vason, R.I.P. Germain, Rebekka Endler, Sonja Yakovleva 

Within the format of a magazine, each page of Pfeil represents the floor, walls, or ceiling which together create an imagined room displaying a printed exhibition. Each issue is dedicated to a specific word, and artists are invited and given space to work on and with this term, and to construct or deconstruct the architecture around it. Combined, the contributions transform into an organic display surrounding the leitmotif.

Revue du Master de Textes et de Création Littéraire de la Cambre*

Avec les textes de: Sam Bouffandeau, Chloé Clemens, Chloé Delchini, Perrine Estienne, Robin Faymonville, Gabriel René Franjou, Justine Gensse, Adèle Goardet, Bastien Hauser, Giulia Lazzara, Cyprien Muth, Sephora Shebabo.

* Le Master en Textes et Création Littéraire de l’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre propose un programme de formation aux étudiants qui visent à faire des métiers du texte et de la création littéraire leur avenir professionnel. Il s’adresse principalement aux jeunes écrivains et, plus généralement, à l’étudiant qui souhaite professionnaliser sa démarche artistique en lien avec la pratique de l’écrit en la confrontant à d’autres écrivains, à des éditeurs et à des professionnels reconnus de la littérature, l’informer et l’enrichir de nouveaux savoirs et de nouvelles compétences. Considérant le travail du texte et ses différentes formes comme des expressions majeures de l’homme à travers l’histoire, et les littératures des différents continents comme un art à part entière dans le champ des pratiques artistiques contemporaines, ce Master s’inscrit dans une démarche ouverte de production, de réflexion et d’instruction de l’écrit dans un monde en devenir.

Max Rabinowitz, a butch lesbian bartender at an East Village club, is shaken when her friend, a transvestite, is murdered. As the community of cross-dressers, drag queens, lesbians, and gay men stand together in the face of this tragedy, Max taps into the activist spirit she thought had disappeared.

Leslie Feinberg is an editor, writer, and political organizer. Stone Butch Blues, Feinberg's first novel, is an internationally acclaimed classic of trans literature. It won the Lambda Award and the American Library Association Lesbian and Gay Book Award. Feinberg's other works Trans Liberation, Trans Gender Warriors, and Transgender have also been at the forefront of the trans movement. Feinberg lives with her wife, Minnie Bruce Pratt, near New York City.

Oscar Tamai and Elvio Miranda, the patriarchs of two families of brickmakers, have for years nursed a mutual hatred, but their teenage sons, Pájaro and Ángelito, somehow fell in love. Brickmakers begins as Pájaro and Marciano, Ángelito's older brother, lie dying in the mud at the base of a Ferris wheel. Inhabiting a dreamlike state between life and death, they recall the events that forced them to pay the price of their fathers' petty feud. 

The Tamai and Miranda f-amilies are caught, like the Capulets and the Montagues, in an almost mythic conflict, one that emerges from stubborn pride and intractable machismo. Like her heralded debut, The Wind That Lays Waste, Selva Almada's fierce and tender second novel is an unforgettable portrayal of characters who initially seem to stand in opposition, but are ultimately revealed to be bound by their similarities. 

Almada enlarges the tradition of some of the most distinctive prose stylists of our time. In Brickmakers, she furthers her extraordinary exploration of masculinity and the realities of working-class rural life. This is another exquisitely written and powerfully told story by a major international voice. 

A reclusive graduate student is forced into a friendship that destabilizes her life in this surreal, allegorical romance. 

In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by nature, where power is held in a fragile balance between academics and a contingent of rogue gardeners, the reclusive narrator of The Vivisectors spends her days propping up the career of her needy and fraudulent professor boss. Then a controversy ruptures her careful routine: Adam, a contrarian student and an obsession of the boss, comes into heated conflict with a young professor, with both men claiming discrimination. The crisis subsumes the university, though the narrator is unmoved—not even the attempted suicide of her estranged mother has been enough to dispel her lack of engagement with the world. But when her boss commands her to befriend Adam, the narrator finds herself both caught up in the events threatening to tear the city apart and increasingly drawn to the alluring student at the heart of it all. 

Coursing with icy suspense and told with violent precision, The Vivisectors is a new kind of love story for an age of deteriorated communication. With the unsparing style and intellectual ambition that made her award-winning debut The Doloriad a celebrated provocation, Missouri Williams holds a mirror up to humanity’s most intimate contradictions and reflects them back through a novel of profound, spiky spiritual reckoning.

Insula est un roman d’anticipation aussi intime que spéculatif qui mêle autofiction, confession intime, esthétique queer, jeu vidéo, et une formidable vision apocalyptique du monde contemporain. Insula (île, en latin), c’est d’abord le nom d’un jeu clandestin de réalité augmentée d’un nouveau genre : il suffit d’ingérer une pilule stupéfiante et illégale pour accéder à la simulation. Théo, le narrateur, en apprend l’existence lors d’une fête de cruising queer, au sommet d’un immeuble désaffecté du centre de Londres, dans une atmosphère d’apocalypse. Un garçon s’effondre à ses pieds quelques minutes après avoir consommé la substance, et pleure des larmes de sperme. Mais Théo doit tout interrompre pour se rendre au chevet de son père mourant, dans un hôpital parisien. C’est le moment de la dernière nuit, du dernier souffle et des derniers aveux. Le mot insula revient, cette fois dans la bouche des médecins, pour désigner une partie flottante du cerveau ravagée par la maladie, comme une île qu’on a dans la tête. Alors que les médias annoncent la disparition de plusieurs personnes qui auraient pris une pilule d’insula, l’étau se resserre sur Théo qui se résout à son tour à prendre un cachet prohibé avec l’intuition que les avatars ne sont que des fantômes, et qu’il pourra ainsi retrouver son père dans l’autre monde.

Ce roman aux accents dantesques (vision d’un enfer digital qui n’est que le double du monde réel), entre vertige technologique et exploration du désir, est marqué par la pensée critique du réel et la pop culture (Final Fantasy, Kanye West). Il ouvre un univers parallèle pour raconter l’histoire d’une traversée intime, convoquer des époques, des territoires et des identités multiples, dans une seule et même histoire qui navigue entre témoignage et fantasme. Dystopie, histoire d’amour et de fantômes, enquête et cauchemar, Insula est un portail entre plusieurs dimensions, le vrai et le faux, le réel et le digital, la vie et la mort.