Reader

I Am Abandoned documents a little-known, but visionary performance by Barbara T. Smith. Taking place in 1976, it featured a conversation in real time between two psychoanalytic computer programs (known today as two of the earliest chatbots) alongside a staging of Francisco Goya’s The Naked Maja (1795–1800) and The Clothed Maja (1800–1807), in which the artist projected an image of the famous painting on top of a female model. The publication includes a full transcript of the “conversation” between the two programs; documentation and ephemera from the performance; Smith’s reflections on the night; and an afterword by scholar and artist Mashinka Firunts Hakopian.

I Am Abandoned was part of the exhibition The Many Arts and Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and rather than simply celebrate new technology, Smith also sought to challenge what she saw as a “built-in problem” that “computers were only a new example of the male hypnosis.” In collaboration with computer scientist Dick Rubinstein, she enlisted the computer science teams at Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to mount a conversation between a program named DOCTOR, which was designed to be a surrogate therapist, and another named PARRY, which was trained to mimic a paranoid schizophrenic patient.

While the computer operator worked in the next room, each new page of the conversation was projected on the wall where a model dressed as The Clothed Maja reclined beneath the text, with a slide of the nude version of the same painting, The Naked Maja, projected onto her. The audience was rapt with attention for the livestreamed conversation. The performance went on for nearly two hours, before the model eventually grew furious from being ignored (abandoned) by the computer operator, stormed over, and attempted to seduce him. Shortly after, the gallery director pulled the plug on the entire event, claiming it distracted the audience for too long from the other works on view.

To revisit I Am Abandoned today is to see the artistic and truly liberatory potential that art can have when it intervenes in new technologies. Much like the original performance, in which the model grew alienated from the proceedings, what gradually emerges are the stakes these new technologies present. Against today’s backdrop of AI and a still male-dominated tech field, Smith’s early work with emerging technologies, and in this case chatbots, is prophetic and hints at the contemporary conversation around the gendered and racialized machinic biases of our current computational landscape. Though Smith, like many women of her generation, was overlooked by the landmark surveys of art and technology during the 1960s and 70s, her career incisively probed new technologies, using them to question gender dynamics, community, and self. Her projects from the Coffin books (1966–67), created with a 914 Xerox copier in her dining room, to performances like Outside Chance (1975), which created a small snow squall in Las Vegas out of 3,000 unique, computer-generated snowflakes, and the interactive Field Piece (1971), where participants’ movements altered the soundscape of a fiberglass forest, all exemplify her open-ended approach to art and tech. “Each person lit their own way,” Smith remembers, “And produced their own soundtrack.”

Barbara T. Smith is an important figure in the history of feminist and performance art in Southern California. Her work—which spans media and often involves her own body—explores themes of sexuality, traditional gender roles, physical and spiritual sustenance, technology, communication, love, and death. Smith received a BA from Pomona College in 1953, and an MFA in 1971 from the University of California, Irvine. There she met fellow artists Chris Burden and Nancy Buchanan, with whom she co-founded F-Space in Santa Ana, the experimental art space where many of her performances were staged. Smith’s work has been exhibited since the 1960s in solo exhibitions, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024), the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2023), and Pomona College Museum of Art (2005), and featured in group exhibitions, including how we are in time and space: Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif, Barbara T. Smith, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2022), State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970, Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana (2012); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007); and Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998). Smith is the recipient of the Nelbert Chouinard Award (2020), Civitella Ranieri Visual Arts Fellowship, Umbria, Italy (2014); Durfee Foundation’s Artists’ Resource for Completion (2005, 2009); Women’s Caucus for Art, Lifetime Achievement Award (1999); and several National Endowment for the Arts Grants (1973, 1974, 1979, 1985). The Getty Research Institute acquired Smith’s archive in 2014 and published her memoir, The Way to Be, in 2023. Her survey catalog, Proof: Barbara T. Smith was published by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2024.

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.

Constance DeJong’s long-neglected 1977 novel, Modern Love, is one thing made up of many: It is science fiction. It is a detective story. It is a historical episode in the time of the Armada and the dislocation of Sephardic Jews from Spain to an eventual location in New York’s Lower East Side. It is a first-person narrator’s story; Charlotte’s story; and Roderigo’s; and Fifi Corday’s. It is a 150-year-old story about Oregon and the story of a house in Oregon. Modern Love’s continuity is made of flow and motion; like an experience, it accumulates as you read, at that moment, through successive moments, right to the end.

An important figure of downtown New York’s performance art and burgeoning media art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, DeJong designed Modern Love herself and published it with help from Dorothea Tanning on the short-lived Standard Editions imprint. Critically acclaimed in its time, Modern Love is now back in print on the 40th anniversary of its original publication.

Constance DeJong is an artist and writer who has worked for thirty years on narrative form within the context of avant-garde music and contemporary art. Considered one of the progenitors of media art, or “time-based media,” DeJong shapes her intricate narrative form through performances, audio installations, print texts, electronic objects, and video works. Since the 1980s, DeJong has collaborated with Phillip Glass, Tony Oursler, and the Builders Association on performances and videos at Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; the Wexner Center, Columbus, OH; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in New York, at The Kitchen, Thread Waxing Space, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Dia Center for the Arts. Her books include I.T.I.L.O.E. and SpeakChamber, and her work is included in the anthologies Up is Up, But So is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974–1991 (NYU Press, 2006); Blasted Allegories (New Museum/MIT, 1987); and Wild History (Tanam Press, 1985).

COOP documents Swedish artist Fia Backström's (born 1970) performances of two recent scripts, continuing her exploration of language, marketing, disorders and performance. The first script operates according to two distinct logics: a four-part linear base structure and text material that was chosen and read during the performance through chance movement of the performer's body across a grid.

This publication was especially designed to reflect this type of unpredictable and spontaneous movement. Mathematical symbols have been embedded into the text and these symbols link to ones on the upper corner of pages with nonlinear material. These indicate where the text could be inserted during a performance, thus incorporating the form of performance into the book. The second script serves as an epilogue to the first and was performed by four voices, reading from beginning to end without assigned lines, sometimes simultaneously.

Started in 1989 by designer and writer Robert Ford, THING magazine was the voice of the Queer Black music and art scene in the early 1990s. Ford and his editors were part of the burgeoning House music scene, which originated in Chicago’s Queer underground, and some of the top DJs and musicians from that time were featured in the magazine, including Frankie Knuckles, Gemini, Larry Heard, Rupaul, and Deee-Lite. THING published ten issues from 1989-1993, before it was cut short by Ford’s death from AIDS-related illness. All ten issues of THING are collected and published here for the first time.

As House music thrived, THING captured the multidisciplinary nature of the scene, opening its pages to a wide range of subjects: poetry and gossip, fiction and art, interviews and polemics. The HIV/AIDS crisis loomed large in its contents, particularly in the personal reflections and vital treatment resources that it published. An essay by poet Essex Hemphill was published alongside the gossip columnist Michael Musto and Rupaul dished wisdom alongside a diary from the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. Joan Jett Blakk’s revolutionary presidential campaign is contained in these pages, as are some of the most underground, influential literary voices of the time, such as Dennis Cooper, Vaginal Davis, Gary Indiana, Marlon Riggs, David Wojnarowicz, and even David Sedaris.

THING was very much in dialogue with the club kids in New York and other Queer publishing ventures, but in many ways, it fostered an entirely unique perspective—one with more serious ambitions. In a moment when the gay community was besieged by the HIV/AIDS crisis and a wantonly cruel government, the influence and significance of this cheaply-produced newsprint magazine vastly exceeded its humble means, presenting a beautiful portrait of the ball and club culture that existed in Chicago with deep intellectual reflections. THING was a publication by and for its community and understood the fleetingness of its moment. To reencounter this work today, is to reinstate the Black voices who were so central to the history of HIV/AIDS activism and Queer and club culture, but which were often sidelined by white Queer discourse. In many ways, THING offered a blueprint for the fundamental role a magazine plays in bringing together a community, its tagline summing up the bold stakes of this important venture: “She Knows Who She Is.”

The magazine included contributions from Trent D. Adkins, Joey Arias, Aaron Avant Garde, Ed Bailey, Freddie Bain, Basscut, Belasco, Joan Jett Blakk, Simone Bouyer, Lady Bunny, Bunny & Pussy, Derrick Carter, Fire Chick, Chicklet, Stephanie Coleman, Bill Coleman, Lee Collins, Gregory Conerly, Mark Contratto, Dennis Cooper, Dorian Corey, Ed Crosby, The Darva, Vaginal Davis, Deee-Lite, Tor Dettwiler, Riley Evans, Evil, The Fabulous Pop Tarts, Mark Farina, Larry Flick, Robert Ford, Scott Free, David Gandy, Gemini, Gabriel Gomez, Roy Gonsalves, Chuck Gonzales, Tony Greene, André Halmon, Lyle Ashton Harris, Larry Heard, Essex Hemphill, Kathryn Hixson, Sterling Houston, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Gary Indiana, Candy J, Jamoo, Jazzmun, Gant Johnson, Owen Keehnen, Lady Miss Kier, Spencer Kincy, Iris Kit, Erin Krystle, Steve LaFreniere, Larvetta Larvon, Marc Loveless, Lypsinka, Malone, Marjorie Marginal, Terry A. Martin, Rodney McCoy Jr., Alan Miller, Bobby Miller, Michael Musto, Ultra Naté, Willi Ninja, Scott “Spunk” O’Hara, DeAundra Peek, Earl Pleasure, Marlon Riggs, Robert Rodi, Todd Roulette, RuPaul, Chantay Savage, David Sedaris, Rosser Shymanski, Larry Tee, Voice Farm, Lawrence D. Warren, Martha Wash, LeRoy Whitfield, Stephen Winter, David Wojnarowicz, and Hector Xtravaganza.

Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah invites 38 writers, artists, scholars, and activists to offer accessible reflections on 36 questions to help young Jews—and anyone else who picks up this book—feel grounded in the Jewish radical tradition, unlearn Zionism, and deepen their solidarity with Palestinians, offering the B’nai Mitzvah as an opportunity for political awakening open to all. Edited by comedic performance artist and activist Morgan Bassichis with artist and educator Jay Saper and writer Rachel Valinsky, with a foreword by seminal scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis, and illustrations by the artist Nicole Eisenman, this essential volume offers an accessible and challenging set of personal and collective responses to critical questions for our time. 

Questions included range from “What even is a Bat Mitzvah?” and “I’m queer/nonbinary/secular/old/not even Jewish—are Bat Mitzvahs for me?” to “Why are there Israeli and American flags in my synagogue?” and “Why do people plant trees in Israel as a Bat Mitzvah gift?” and “What does the olive tree symbolize to Palestinians?” and “What does the watermelon symbolize to Palestinians?” and “What do Palestinian kids do when they turn thirteen?” and “How do I talk to my family about this stuff?”

Since the 1970s, Cynthia Hawkins has investigated the potentials of abstract painting. While often beginning a work or series with a predetermined concept or strategy, Hawkins’s process-oriented practice simultaneously embraces the improvisational to create a systemized space for her continually evolving vocabulary. From 1979 to 1981, important early years in the elaboration of her work, Hawkins documented these developments in a journal. A record of routine and the everyday, the journal also gathers sketches, notes for new and in-progress works, and responses to contemporary art and criticism, bringing the artist’s process, experimentation, and reflections on materials, formalism, abstraction, and figuration into relief. 

Art Notes, Art also offers a picture of the burgeoning Black-owned gallery scene in 1970s and ‘80s New York that Hawkins was an important participant in—including Cinque Gallery, Kenkeleba Gallery, and Just Above Midtown, where she had her first solo exhibition in 1981–as well as the women artists’ circle she was an active member of, which hosted weekly shares, critiques, exchange, and amplification of each others’ work. An important glimpse into Hawkins’s creative process and artistic community, Art Notes, Art is richly illustrated with works by the artist produced during this key period–some of which are now lost–photographs and ephemera, and a visual archive of contemporaneous work by her peers.

Editor: Ananth Shastri
Managing Editor: Rachel Valinsky

Poet, editor, filmmaker, actor, child star in Mussolini’s Italy, founder of The Dead Language Press and of the Paris Filmmakers Cooperative, Piero Heliczer (1937–1993) was an essential yet secret agent of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture. In the course of his nomadic existence in Rome, New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Préaux-du-Perche, where he spent the last few years of his life, he met and worked with a constellation of avant-garde writers, forged friendships with figures from the Beat Generation and the British Poetry Revival as well as the New York art scene. At the crossroads of many underground experiences, Heliczer’s name appears in books dedicated to the artists and poets he collaborated with during his lifetime—names by the likes of Gregory Corso, Barbara Rubin, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Ira Cohen, or The Velvet Underground, a band he participated in creating with his friend Angus MacLise.

This myth obscures the fact that Piero Heliczer was first and foremost a poet. Today, this part of his work is overlooked; it is all the more difficult to encounter because Heliczer himself never collected it. So it was scattered, or lost, in the course of his wanderings. Heliczer favored the circulation of his works rather than their archiving: he was committed to the production of mobile forms—flyers, broadsides, and other ephemera—disseminated his verses in magazines, and preferred public readings and performances to the finished form of the book.

The present volume gathers a significant number of Heliczer’s poetic works through facsimile reproduction of his contributions to more than thirty periodicals—mostly stemming from poets’ presses or universities—published between 1958 and 1979. This collection isn’t “complete”—but it makes available again poems that, in some cases, never circulated after their initial publication. 

Un recueil de poèmes de Piero Heliczer (1937–1993), auteur, éditeur et cinéaste, figure de l’underground et de la contre-culture, proche de Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, et Jack Smith. Sa poésie, héritière de la Beat Generation, restitue en métaphores et images saisissantes des expériences et des visions personnelles, tout en s’appuyant sur des formes héritées de la tradition anglaise et des partis-pris typographiques originaux. Ce recueil rassemble des facsimilés des publications originales de poèmes de Heliczer – périodiques d’artistes, revues miméographiées, petits magazines… – accompagnées de leurs traductions en français, ainsi que de plusieurs documents, parmi lesquels une reproduction intégrale d’une publication rare de 1961, Wednesday Paper, et, en insert, un facsimilé d’un placard de 1975, The Handsome Policeman.

Traduction des poèmes: Rachel Valinsky
Publié avec l’aide du CNAP