Pages 10 - Inhale

This issue of Pages assumes seep as a post archival mode: in the Merriam-Webster dictionary the verb 'seep' is translated as follows: to flow or pass slowly through fine pores or small openings, to enter or penetrate slowly, to become diffused or spread.

The biology or politics of seeping is like that of raw petroleum oozing at natural oil seeps. Unlike refined oil which has sponsored modernization and its aligned archives, crude oil pours beyond historical purpose and defies structural elevations. It instead disfigures the ground through which it dubiously spreads.

Seeping is a posthumous affair. It is the gradual leaking of a long withdrawn interior. Like the bleeding of a punctured corpse, when the pumping of the heart has stopped, when the body is lifeless and apathetic to any 'hail', yet continuing to bleed. Seep as archive is an eternally post-apocalyptic expansion, retraction, deviation, subtraction, or simply the arrival of (non-)things.

With contributions by:

- Mariam Motamedi Fraser / Geo-Archive
- Richard Goldstein / Dennis Oppenheim's Dilemma: Should he Sell Art to the Shah?
- Babak Afrassiabi, Nasrin Tabatabai / Contemporary Hole / Unfilmable 
/ Seep
- Saleh Najafi / Wounds of Archive¹
- Mark von Schlegell / The Artist Abstract #6
- Nima Parzham / The underground
- Adam Kleinman / Vanished Theories
- Suzanne Treister / Algorithm
- Alexi Kukuljevic / The Dissolute Subject
- Matts Leiderstam / Andy Warhol, Suicide (Purple Jumping Man), 1963
- Eugene Thacker / Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans
- Vivian Ziherl, Natasha Ginwala / Infrastructural Suspensions: Global Spanning, Atmospheric Seepage and Measures of the Undecidable

The new issue consists of 8 plays and performance texts by Iranian women writers living in or outside Iran. Whether based on actual experience, fictional, or drawn from archives, these texts deal in one way or another with the question of the stage. They produce a contested space of performance that is inevitably linked to the performer's body, whose thresholds are stretched and contracted into potentially new forms of staging. The authors in this issue place their writing in performative relation to the specific historical and sociopolitical conditions in which they live and work. In many ways, the writings interrogate the politics that delineate the stage itself.

The authors in this special issue are: Nasim Ahmadpour, Nil (Alista) Aghaee, Naghmeh Manavi, Athena Farrokhzad, Nazanin Sanatkar, Azade Shahmiri, Zahra Mohseni and Naghmeh Samini.

In Kish, An Island Indecisive by Design, artists Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi explore the modern development of an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf. Removed from mainland Iran, Kish is a place where extremes in politics, ideology and urban design intersect. The island's many years of infrastructural indecision is distinctly evident in its architecture, which lacks any trace of coherence or feel for locale. This volume gives an often moving account of the chaos of middle-eastern modernity.

Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016 is a collection of essays by Peter Gidal that includes “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film” and other texts on metaphor, narrative, and against sexual representation.

Also discussed in their specificity are works by Samuel Beckett, Thérèse Oulton, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol. Throughout, Gidal’s writing attempts a political aesthetics, polemical as well as theoretical. One of the foremost experimental film-makers in Britain since the late 1960s, Peter Gidal was a central figure at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, and taught advanced film theory at the Royal College of Art. His previous books include Andy Warhol: Films and Paintings (1971), Understanding Beckett (1986) and Materialist Film (1989).

Les Voies du Paradis rassemble ce qui subsiste d’une œuvre perdue : les seules notes de bas de page d’un texte manquant, laissées par un chercheur après son décès et éditées par Peter Cornell. Ces notes et leurs illustrations forment un ensemble incomplet, qui se donne ici à lire à travers ses manques. Un fil – d’Ariane ? – se tisse entre les diagrammes, les figures de spirales et de labyrinthes – de Cesare Ripa à Ernst Josephson et Robert Smithson, des Templiers aux spirites et aux surréalistes – qui parcourent le texte et se font écho, comme les éléments d’une énigme ou des figures ésotériques. Le « Paradis » dont il est question ici, c’est le rêve de la connaissance absolue, la saisie de l’ordre caché des choses, à laquelle aspirent autant poètes et artistes que mystiques et scientifiques…

Paru en Suède en 1987, Les Voies du Paradis y a acquis la réputation d’un livre culte. Peter Cornell y propose une perspective inédite sur les liens entre art, littérature, spiritualité et occultisme, dans un texte à mi-chemin de l’essai et de la fiction, de l’érudition et de la mystification. La volonté de savoir y est mise en scène comme une quête prise au piège de l’irrationnel ; les notes s’assemblent par logique associative, programme éclectique qui tente encore de retrouver un centre perdu – comme les algorithmes auxquels est confiée aujourd’hui la tâche fantasmée de mettre en ordre les connaissances humaines.

Here Is Information. Mobilise collects key critical writings by artist and curator Ian White (1971-2013), ranging from reviews and catalogue essays to entries from his blog Lives of Performers.

This volume brings together for the first time a selection of Ian White’s hugely influential writing on art and the moving image. It includes essays on animation and visual art, cinema’s relationship to conceptual art, and the idea of ‘liveness’ in performance and film, as well as texts on individual artists including Ruth Buchanan, Gabriel Byrne, Isa Genzken, Peter Gidal, Martin Gustavsson, Oliver Husain, Sharon Lockhart, Stuart Marshall, Yvonne Rainer, Jimmy Robert and David Wojnarowicz.

Curator, writer and dealer Seth Siegelaub (1941–2013) is legendary for his promotion of Conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Acknowledging the unusual scope and essentially unclassifiable nature of his manifold interests and activities, this volume shows how Siegelaub’s projects and collections are underpinned by a deeper concern with printed matter and lists as ways of disseminating ideas. The book’s chapters explore the various facets of and connections in Siegelaub’s work, from his groundbreaking projects with Conceptual artists and his research and publications on mass media and communications theories to his interest in handwoven textiles and non-Western fabrics. It also highlights his collecting activity, which culminates in a unique ensemble of books on the social history of textiles and a textile collection comprising over 750 items from around the world. The survey also reflects on current practices through contributions by contemporary artists, such as Mario Garcia Torres and writer Alan Page, who co-created a new work inspired by Siegelaub’s bibliographic project on time and causality.

With essays by art historians and curators, a previously unpublished conversation between Siegelaub and artist Robert Horvit and an annotated chronology, this comprehensive survey pays homage to one of the most distinctive characters in 20th-century exhibition-making.

Is it the computerization of the planet
Or a loosening of my fidelity to suffering
I don’t understand the intensity
I’ve hidden here but I know I despaired
Of finding a physical place to keep
My tears. Now what. Seas that go turquoise
When you stop looking at them . . .
 
Wrestling with the mind of war, at times shocking in its self-analysis, Wave of Blood is a furious and sincere essay, an eclipse notebook, a family chronicle, all told in the poetry of witness.

Praise for Ariana Reines:

Ariana Reines is a go-for-broke artist who honors her traditions by being like no one else. Some of us have made a fetish of our stupidity, pretending to forget history, and some of us have made a fetish of despair, congratulating ourselves on melancholia, but Ariana is too brilliant and too alive for either of those sad luxuries... I am convinced of the authenticity of the summonses she receives and the summonses she issues and when I read her I am reminded that all of this is a calling before it's an identity or career. Her voice-which is always more than hers alone is a dialectic between the very ancient and the bleeding edge. - Ben Lerner

Reines's books are works of intellectual commitment and structural sophistication; at the same time, they allow the raw stuff of being, in all its messiness, to enter the page. -The White Review

Mind-blowing. - Kim Gordon

Her writing is queer and raunchy, raw and occult, seemingly never pulling away from her deepest vulnerabilities. Yet Reines simultaneously maintains a feeling of epic poetry, of ancient intention. She moves between worlds in search of the divine and the self. - The New York Times

These are the kinds of poems that reorient you in the world, make you understand how little you know, but how much is inside you. - NYLON