The Annotated Reader

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.

For the Interjection Calendar each month Montez Press invites an artist, a writer, a poet or a doer of some sorts to say things. All 12 pieces have introspection and reflection in common. They are a subjective overview of writing in the expanded field of contemporary art and writing in the year 2019. This is the Interjection Calendar 2019, the fifth collection in this series. 

With contributions by sabrina soyer, Lisa Robertson, Hatty Nestor, Adrianna Whittingham, Sondria, Claudia Pagès, Laetitia Paviani, Bella Milroy, Georgina Tyson, Son Kit, Alix Jean Vollum, Rene Matic and bleubaglife. 

Find the last 12 PDF's on montezpress.com.

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.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, edited by Will Holder, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. This 13th issue of F.R.DAVID is edited with Riet Wijnen, and has its origins in her Registry of Pseudonyms, an online database which accounts for who is who and why who is who. ‘Inverted Commas’ follows ‘pseudonym’ through names, naming, bodies, brains, self, author, other, reader, labour.

‘I am concerned with the power of sound! and what it can do to the body and the mind,’ wrote composer Pauline Oliveros. In the body, histories and politics come together with sound and listening, memory and feeling. Bodies of Sound offers a resonant exploration of feminist sonic cultures and radical listening in over fifty contributions. In this book of echoes, a variety of forms – from essays to text scores to art, fiction and memoir – speak across gender, ways of knowing, witnessing, sounding and voicing, translation, displacement, violence and peace.

With contributions from: 

Sara Ahmed, Ximena Alarcón, Svetlana Alexievich, Ain Bailey & Frances Morgan, Anna Barham, Xenia Benivolski, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson & Kite, Elena Biserna, Karen Barad & Black Quantum Futurism, Anne Bourne, Daniela Cascella, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maria Chávez, Don Mee Choi, Carson Cole Arthur, Petero Kalulé & AM Kanngieser, Lindsay Cooper, Julia Eckhardt, Lucia Farinati & Claudia Firth, Ella Finer, Annie Goh, Louise Gray, Christina Hazboun, Johanna Hedva, Sarah Hennies, Tomoko Hojo, IONE, Lee Ingleton, Hannah Catherine Jones, Christine Sun Kim, Nat Lall, Cathy Lane, Jeanne Lee & Lona Foote, Marysia Lewandowska, Annea Lockwood & Jennifer Lucy Allan, Cannach MacBride, Elaine Mitchener & Hannah Kendall, Alison O'Daniel, Naomi Okabe, Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram, Gascia Ouzounian, Holly Pester, Roy Claire Potter, Anna Raimondo, Tara Rodgers, Aura Satz & Barbara London, Shortwave Collective, Sisters of the Order of Celestial Nephology, Sop, Syma Tariq, Marie Thompson, Trinh T. Minh-ha & Stoffel Debuysere, Salomé Voegelin

The Flesh is a collection of Yves B. Golden's poems, lyric essays and social criticism – and often these generic distinctions become blurred. Published by Ediciones La Escocesa (Barcelona, ES), TABLOID facilitated this book's production as editors and book designers. A selection of Golden's texts are also translated by Leto Ybarra, rendering the author's work into Spanish for the first time.

“Respectfully! The Flesh feels like a conjuring and a force of nature—unyieldingly raw, full of delectable sensitivity that shapes a world Yves B. Golden deliveries with formidable honesty—where her word is the journey, the body and the bond. Yves writes: ‘not one bird is declined entry into heaven’. The Flesh is succulent in the mouth of the mother— Yves is a steward of time machines, celestial bliss and untethered healing. The Flesh unties the tongue, waters the mouth and the garden. Within Yves’ 5th book she offers us a timeline in recognizing that all birds and angels alike can touch the sky. We are always, already, held and drenched in glory and deserving of love and safety. The Flesh is Black like obsidian. May our love bloom like the flesh in every lifetime.”
- keioui keijaun thomas

“Yves B Golden has given us a protection spell against tyranny; a Blue Guide for the conscious and the daydream; raw free jazz that knows the standards as well. Golden’s linguistically liberated fantasies can transmute into a body of politically imperturbable ethoses in the same sentence. This book offers information for an evolutionary sensitivity, for the next level of sense-making and particularity of the human being. Though the poet urges us to de-realize the flesh, to split our own heads open, we must also accommodate the flesh’s intangibles that interlock, conjoin, negate, and negotiate: such ‘outward and inward facing conundrums’ go on and on. Welcome this ‘bearer of turbulent news.’”
- Losarc Raal

The artist's travel diary in New York.

Where will my mouth lead me? This question arises already in the first days of Hamza Halloubi's residency in New York. It characterises his diary entries from August to November 2024. He observes the art world, comments on cultural and political events and thinks about writers and artists who have long intrigued him and what his body and their ideas are doing in this city–and what this city does not do to him and them: David Hammons, Edward Saïd, Mohamed Choukri, Félix González-Torres… How they also appear like ghosts in his work. Hamza Halloubi approaches the viewer of his visual work, and here also the reader, as a social and political presence. In addition to his diary and image fragments from his films and exhibitions, this pocket book also includes two interviews with the artist.

Hamza Halloubi (born 1982 in Tangier, Morocco, lives and works between Brussels, Tangier, and Amsterdam) is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on video and painting.

Precipitous philosophies. Synaptic-nerve narrations. Syntactic spirals. Hyper-coiled horizons. Will Alexander’s mental range has arrived. An anomalous scripting of the word “automatic,” Aunonomic Reasoning is a whirlwind of lingual torrents triggered by creative mishearing that at once exposes the occupations of orthodox surrealism, summons a voice for the scathed populace of imperial affliction, and forges new paths of phonetic potentiality to mend semantic injury. Pushing prosaic margins beyond their boundaries, these texts take on the etymological condition of the essay as “attempt” with iridescent siege, prepositional frenzy, paratactic provocation, noetic disreckoning, and a critical demand to dismantle: all of which signatures of Alexander’s unilateral poetic innovations.

In this special edition, double-cover issue of Worms, we bring you not one, but two cover stars. The  indelible Tyson Yunkaporta and the iconic Anne Waldman adorn both sides of Worms 8 which can also be thought of as ‘The Elements Issue’. It was dreamt up in a dreary and grey August in London, while the rest of the world suffered through the hottest days on record. As we witnessed, and continue to witness, such climate catastrophe, we turned to the literature we love to help us understand, to challenge us, and to offer us some comfort. 

The issue is split into four sections—earth, fire, air and water—but its roots and webs push beyond what we typically think of as ‘the natural’: tales from the kitchen from Rebecca May Johnson and Slutty Cheff, reflections on gardening and colonialism, writer's block and clogged pipes, how to blow up pipelines with Andreas Malm, grief and writing, recovery and nature with Octavia Bright, social mobility with Isabel Waidner, the wide range of issues raised by the underrepresentation of First Nations people in literature with Evelyn Araluen and much, much more. 

We hope that this issue can be a flame of hope, inspiration, or something that simply sustains in such turbulent times.

Featuring 
Tyson Yunkaporta, Isabel Waidner , Jamaica Kincaid, Melissa Broder , Evelyn Araluen, Bruce Pascoe, Octavia Bright, Nora Treatbaby , Nerea Calvillo , Anne Waldman , Alexis Pauline Gumbs , Léuli Eshrāghi, Madeline Cash , Andreas Malm, Rebecca May Johnson 

Contributors
Stella Murphy , Ben Redhead, Phoenix Yemi, Sam Moore, Devils Claws, Pierce Eldridge, Manon Mikolaitis, Caitlin McLoughlin, Isabel MacCarthy, Elodie Saint-Louis , Nettle Grellier, Amelia Abraham, Ryan Pfluger, Rose Higham-Stainton , Emma Crabtree, Ignota, Lydia Luke, Chloe Sheppard , Clem MacLeod , Carolyne Loreé Teston , Emma Cohen, Olive Couri, Raheela Suleman , No Land , Jacqueline Ennis-Cole , Sufia Ikbal-Doucet, Rhett Hammerton, Zara Joan Miller , Kate Morgan , Bug Shepherd-Barron, Zoe Freilich , Slutty Cheff , Clemmie Bache , Violet Conroy , Sarah White , Jemima Skala , Stephanie Francis-Shanahan

In The Completion, legendary philosopher Franco 'Bifo' Berardi offers his analysis of cognitive automation and artificial intelligence. Of the possible worlds imagined in Silicon Valley and in the media discourse around tech boosterism, none will likely materialise. Instead, the unpredictable will intervene in the future of predictive technology. 

In this new edition, in a new venture for Everyday Analysis, Berardi's essay is accompanied by an introduction by Alfie Bown and a series of artworks and illustrations, new and historic- from Borges's labyrinths to the I-ching - offering a reading experience in the spirit of Berardi's work.