Yvonne Rainer Work 1961-73

A fascinating account of Lankton's inquisitive, sociological and emotional ruminations in advance of her gender-affirming surgery.

This is one of the earliest of Greer Lankton's (1958-96) journals, sketchbooks and daybooks to appear in the artist's archives, and the first to be published in facsimile form. Written during her time as an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the journal offers key insights into Lankton's mind at work before her career-defining move to New York in 1978, where she would become an important figure of the East Village art scene in the 1980s and early '90s with her lifelike dolls and theatrical sets.

Containing drawings, behavioral diagrams and aspirational, occasionally confessional writing, the journal is a record of imagining the body and mind reconciled through transformation. In these pages, the 19-year-old turns an inquisitive, sociological eye toward the emotional landscape and somatic effects of the days recorded here; days leading up to her decision to undergo hormone treatment and gender-affirming surgery in 1979. Lankton reflects with raw vulnerability and keen self-awareness on critical questions of self-image, social perception, gender normativity and human behavior.

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.

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.

Contextures was originally published in 1978 by New York City’s legendary Just Above Midtown gallery. Edited by gallery founder Linda Goode Bryant and Marcy S. Philips, the publication provides an extensive history of Black artists working in abstraction from 1945 to 1978, while also articulating a newly-emerging movement of Black Conceptual Art in the 1970s.

The publication contains extensive writing by Goode Bryant and Philips drawn from interviews with the featured artists, as well as 58 black-and-white and 16 color images documenting the work of 25 artists: Banerjee, Frank Bowling, Donna Byars, Ed Clark, Houston Conwill, John Dowell, Mel Edwards, Wendy Ward Ehlers, Fred Eversley, Susan Fitzsimmons, Sam Gilliam, Gini Hamilton, David Hammons, Manuel Hughes, Suzanne Jackson, Noah Jemison, James Little, Al Loving, Senga Nengudi, Howardena Pindell, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, Sharon Sutton, Randy Williams, and William T. Williams. A newly commissioned afterword by Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, curator of the exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces at the Museum of Modern Art, is also included.

Goode Bryant and Philips originally conceived Contextures to accompany The Afro-American Artists in the Abstract Continuum of American Art: 1945–1977. Functioning more like a textbook than a traditional catalog, the book nonetheless realizes a vital mission of their curatorial vision, placing Black artists within the still-prevalent, white-dominated canon of post-war abstract art. Despite its historical importance and visionary scholarship, Contextures was originally produced in a limited run of just a few hundred copies by the gallery and remains rare and largely unknown.

This new edition is produced in facsimile form and is a co-publication with Pacific.

A re-examination of Yvonne Rainer's Parts of Some Sextets, a radical performance and pivotal piece in the American choreographer's career, which led her to theorize her conception of dance in the 1960s, before being revived in 2019.

Parts of Some Sextets, Yvonne Rainer's 1965 performance for ten people and twelve mattresses, represents a turning point in the American choreographer's oeuvre. "My mattress monster," as Rainer calls it, was built in her formative years with the experimental downtown New York group Judson Dance Theater. In this work, she asserted her exploration of "ordinary" actions as well as her disregard for narrative constructions to create an intricate choreography that unfolded with a new scene every thirty seconds.

More than half a century after its premiere, Rainer, in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Emily Coates, directed the 2019 revival of the piece for the Performa 19 Biennial in New York, grappling with the changing contexts of a new presentation of her radical performance. Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 delves into every aspect of this dance, from its original manifestation to its reconstitution.

This book, designed by visual artist Nick Mauss, includes previously unpublished archival images and documents from the 1965 stagings at the Judson Memorial Church in New York and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Texts by Emily Coates, RoseLee Goldberg, Jill Johnston, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson, Lynne Tillman, and Soyoung Yoon, as well as a new interview with Rainer, pose questions about the trajectories of artworks, performers, and audiences, all while tracing the life—and afterlife—of a dance.

Edited by Emily Coates. 
Texts and contributions by Emily Coates, RoseLee Goldberg, Jill Johnston, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson, Lynne Tillman and Soyoung Yoon; conversation between Yvonne Rainer, Emily Coates and Nick Mauss.

A monograph / artists' book that engages with the recent film installations of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Installation shots, research material, scripts, and film stills give an insight into the artists' investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound, and underground (drag) performances.

The book's title alludes to an interest in opaque events that are belated, left backstage or off-screen. A number of (fictitious) letters to friends and collaborators such as Sharon Hayes, Yvonne Rainer, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi, and Jack Smith place the work of Boudry & Lorenz in a context of debates around temporalities, activism, the archival, decolonizing practices, and queer histories. Published following the exhibition “Patriarchal Poetry” at the Badischer Kunstverein, September 27– November 24, 2013.

Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough’s, "The Western" is a speech-act, an oral poem to be told aloud. As Goldsborough writes in his 1080PRESS newsletter (reproduced with the book), “are we willing to salt the field of USAmerica in order to grow sth somewhere else?//” The Western mines the history of the WEST—reimagining its landscape within a gluttony of images. But what happens when the wrongs of the AMERICAN WEST meant to be right-ed, are so large, so intensely evil and vile that the English language itself spaghettifies around it? What new histories will be erected—of Samuel R. Delany, Walter Rodney, and others trampled and run over by the wet tech ravages of future-past, to take us all across the river?

"In THE WESTERN, Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough composes to facilitate decomposition, setting a place for language, reader in tow, to reimagine itself, to become the space and act of reimagination. From out of the dark:

[,,,, a vision ::

the future arrives ::

barefoot & confident /

fondue oozing a triumphant grin"

— Yeukai Zimbwa (The Columbia Review)

This publication is presented as an object-book-manifesto of a ‘desespiegles’ way of thinking. It “translates” the trains of thought that architect-artists Anne Philippe and Jolien Naeyaert exchanged via videoletters. The videoletters mainly occurred during the covid period. Questioning the scope of the addressed images, these exchanges revealed a play of symmetries. It shows a series of interrogations, linking the intimate with the collective. The move towards a publication was obvious after conversations with Loes, Phyllis, An and Teresa of nadine. The desire to activate reading in a performative way, mirrors the exchange of videoletters. It continues the process-based methodology that inventively gave birth to a publication through the physical manipulation of the work. The riso-technique proved particularly suitable for this project, as the hands, the gaze and the exchange all played a role during the object-making process.

Dannie.n is an art-zine, published by nadine, about the artistic research, themes, and topics of discussion of the artists involved in nadine. nadine invites an artist or collective to create each new edition.

Dannie.p is a limited-edition artist's book by desespiegles (57 copies). nadine is supported by Vlaamse Gemeenschap, VGC, Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest.