Essays

In this third Why I Write volume, Eileen Myles addresses the social, political, and aesthetic conditions that shape their work.

In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity's immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time.  

For Myles, time's "optic quality" is what enables writing in the first place, as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologized vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists.

Don Mee Choi is the author of three books of poetry and hybrid essays, and an award-winning translator of contemporary Korean women’s poetry. In this pamphlet, Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode, she explores translation and language in the context of US imperialism—through the eyes of a “foreigner;” a translator; a child in Timoka, the made-up city of Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence; a child from a neocolony.

This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral.

The More-than-Human reader brings together texts that reflect on the state of post-anthropocentric thinking today, by writers from a wide range of disciplines. Focusing on the ecologies and technologies of climate injustice and inequalities, as well as the destructive structures lurking within anthropocentrism, More-than-Human proposes complex entanglements, frictions, and reparative attention across species and beings.

Thinking past the centrality of the human subject, the texts that compose this reader begin to imagine networks of ethics and responsibility emerging not from the ideologies of old, but from the messy and complex liveliness around and beneath us. 

Rather than attempting to be a comprehensive compendium on the topic (which would be virtually impossible), More-than-Human provides a cross-section of the breadth and vitality of a literary, scientific, and conceptual milieu where multiple strands of work intersect even as they are frequently regarded as belonging to separate disciplinary discourses.

Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, Ramon Amaro, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Octavia Butler, Georges Canguilhem, Marisol de la Cadena, NASA History Department, Silvia Federici, Scott F. Gilbert, Édouard Glissant, Jack Halberstam, Donna Haraway, Myra J. Hird, Kristina Lyons, Patricia MacCormack, John T. Maher, Michael Marder, Timothy Mitchell, Reza Negarastani, Jussi Parikka, Elizabeth Povinelli, Paul B. Preciado, María Puig de la Bellacasa, Filipa Ramos, Isabelle Stengers, Elly R. Truitt, Anna L. Tsing, Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, Jason Wallin, Kathryn Yusoff and Joanna Zylinska.

Bezna is darkly glowing dead thinking, cosmic pessimism, hairy autonomy, inner reptilians, limbo sighs, horrendous pink volumes, underground nematodes, happy dismemberment, haunting prehumanism, compassion crises, glowing horror, sinister moods, aesthetic autophagia, postspectacle shelters, eternal stillness, future plague, decomposing knowledge, ouroboric moves, idiot nonknowing, shadow bodies, netherworld excavations, imperceptible evil, hyperbolic specters and news from Cioran.

Bezna's first issues were edited by Florin Flueras, Veda Popovici and Arnold Schlachter, the last ones by Florin Flueras, Irina Gheorghe and mainly by Alina Popa, in the memory of which this anthology is published.

'Bezna' in Romanian means consistent darkness + diffuse fear

Edited by: Alina Popa, Florin Flueras, Irina Gheorghe, Veda Popovici, Arnold Șlahter, Claudiu Cobilanschi

Contributions by Roi Alter, Aparat Security, Aulos, Brynjar Abel Bandlien, Emil Cioran, Ciumafaiu, ClaudiuCobilanschi, Octavian-LiviuDiaconeasa, Valentina Desideri, Bogdan Draganescu, Ion Dumitrescu, Florin Flueraş, Irina Gheorghe, Amy Ireland, Sarah Jones, Anastasia Jurescu, Kroot Juurak, Deanna Khamis, Mihai Lukacs, Nicola Masciandaro, G.A. Neagu, Dorothee Neumann, Cosima Opartan, Paradis Garaj, Alina Popa, Veda Popovici, Arnold Slahter, Taulipang Indians of Guyana, The Bureau of Melodramatic Research, The Presidential Candidate, Eugene Thacker, Stefan Tiron, Dylan Trigg, Tea Tupajic, Akseli Virtanen, Ben Woodard.

Brush Fires in the Social Landscape began in collaboration with the artist before his death in 1992 and first published in 1994, engaged those who Wojnarowicz would refer to as his tribe or community.

Now, on the twentieth anniversary of Brush Fires, when interest in the artist's work has increased exponentially, Aperture has expanded and redesigned this seminal publication to be even more inclusive. It is the only book that features the breadth of Wojnarowicz's work with photography.

The contributors, from artist and writer friends to the lawyer who represented him in his case against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association, to the next generation of artists who were influenced by Wojnarowicz's sensibility, together offer a compelling, provocative understanding of the artist and his work. 

Contributors include: Vince Aletti, Barry Blinderman, Cynthia Carr, David Cole, Shannon Ebner, Leonard Fink, Karen Finley, Nan Goldin, Félix Guattari, Wade Guyton, Melissa Harris, Elizabeth Hess, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Peter Hujar, Fran Lebowitz, Lucy R. Lippard (introduction), Sylvère Lotringer, Carlo McCormick, Henrik Olesen, Wendy Olsoff, Adam Putnam, Tom Rauffenbart, James Romberger, Emily Roysdon, Marion Scemama, Gary Schneider, Amy Scholder, Kiki Smith, Andreas Sterzing, Zoe Strauss, Marvin J. Taylor, Lynne Tillman, and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines is an anthology that centers mothers of color and marginalized mothers' voices, women who are in a world of necessary transformation. The challenges faced by movements working for antiviolence, anti-imperialist, and queer liberation, as well as racial, economic, reproductive, gender, and food justice are the same challenges that marginalized mothers face every day.

Motivated to create spaces for this discourse because of the authors' passionate belief in the power of a radical conversation about mothering, they have become the go-to people for cutting-edge inspired work on this topic for an overlapping committed audience of activists, scholars, and writers. Revolutionary Mothering is a movement-shifting anthology committed to birthing new worlds, full of faith and hope for what we can raise up together.

Contributors include alba onofrio, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ariel Gore, Arielle Julia Brown, Autumn Brown, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, China Martens, Christy NaMee Eriksen, Claire Barrera, Cynthia Dewi Oka, Esteli Juarez Boyd, Fabielle Georges, Fabiola Sandoval, Gabriela Sandoval, H. Bindy K. Kang, Irene Lara, June Jordan, Karen Su, Katie Kaput, Layne Russell, Lindsey Campbell, Lisa Factora-Borchers, Loretta J. Ross, Mai'a Williams, Malkia A. Cyril, Mamas of Color Rising, Micaela Cadena, Noemi Martinez, Norma A. Marrun, Panquetzani, Rachel Broadwater, Sumayyah Talibah, Tara CC Villaba, Terri Nilliasca, tk karakashian tunchez, Victoria Law, and Vivian Chin.

This book combines loosely "autobiographical" texts by two of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. "Savoir," by Hélène Cixous is an account of her experience of recovered sight after a lifetime of severe myopia; Jacques Derrida's "A Silkworm of One's Own" muses on a host of motifs, including his varied responses to "Savoir."

Hélène Cixous is Professor of Literature and Director of the Centre d'Etudes Feminines, Paris VIII. Jacques Derrida is Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Stanford has published nine of his books, most recently Of Hospitality, which also includes a text by Anne Dufourmantelle (Stanford, 20

Visibility Machines explores the unique roles that German filmmaker, video artist and author Harun Farocki (1944-2014) and American artist and author Trevor Paglen (born 1974) play as meticulous observers of global military operations. Investigating forms of surveillance, espionage and weaponry, Farocki and Paglen both examine the ways in which military activities transform and politicize our relationship to images and the realities they appear to represent.

The publication contains a number of newly commissioned essays by esteemed scholars who approach the work from diverse thematic perspectives, in addition to texts by Farocki and Paglen, as well as three exclusive visual essays exploring themes emerging from a dialogue between their work.

A body of essays and visual contributions by radical theorists around the prosthesis and the "augmented body" issues.

"We all need means of supplementing our natural capabilities, since nature is indifferent, inhuman (extra-human), and inclement; we are born naked and with insufficient armour."  — Le Corbusier

Once confined to the narrow circle of "medicalizing" practices, the prosthesis finally colonized our imagination thanks to the promise of an "augmented body" capable of undermining traditional dichotomies such as artificial vs. natural and organic vs. non-organic. But what are their speculative, theoretical and political repercussions? In this selection of original papers, the authors of Insufficient Armour reflect on the subject from their own peculiar perspectives, each of them contributing essays, political-philosophical analysis and theory fiction experiments.

Texts and contributions by Luigi Alberto Cippini, Matt Colquhoun, Helen Hester, Simon Sellars.

A phenomenology of voice and hearing.

Contemplative, intricate, here the philosopher Vivian Darroch-Lozowski develops a phenomenology of hearing. Where theorizing is a present-tense action. Where a landscape teaches waiting. Where to be in a body is to gesture to another. Where subjectivity is the transformation of language. Where attention releases nascent energy. Where to hear is also to transform. Where myth is a gate. A close attending to this text, which is also a unicorn, will delicately open the reader's time-sense. —Lisa Robertson, author of Cinema of the Present, The Weather, Nilling, and The Baudelaire Fractal.

Vivian Darroch-Lozowski is Professor Emerita of the University of Toronto. Her writings and visual works cover different genres: scholarly, literary, creative non-fiction, artist books, painting/drawing and film. Her books include Notebook of Stone, Antarctica Body, Blue Cloud, Surface of the Living World, and The Uncoded World. Her recent project was returning 160 acres of agricultural land to natural prairie with wetlands. She lives in Moose Jaw, Treaty 4 Territory, Saskatchewan (Canada).

Published Nov 2020

Dambudzo Marechera’s death on August 18, 1987 is an event that remains unremarked. In Reincarnating Marechera: Notes On a Speculative Archive, Mushakavanhu interprets this event as a moment of radical praxis in the Zimbabwean imaginary, mining three overlapping archives—Marechera’s own writings, his historical and theoretical legacy, and an imaginative archive that responds creatively to gaps in the first two. Here, Mushakavanhu also explores the affective relationship between a critic and his object of study, grappling with the transit between the historical archive and the critical present. In doing so, through text and visuals, the book is a revelation of countless ruptures and of the inexhaustibility of documenting a mercurial subject like Marechera.

This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a Zimbabwean writer, scholar, and founding partner of Black Chalk & Co., a fugitive creative agency that operates between Harare and Richmond, VA. His most recent publication is Some Writers Can Give You Two Heartbeats (2019). He has also co-edited Visa Stories: Experiences Between Law and Migration (2013) and State of the Nation: Contemporary Zimbabwean Poetry (2009). He holds degrees from English, Welsh and Zimbabwean universities. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Published July 2020

Does music have to be smart or does it just have to go to the heart? In dazzling, erudite prose Chilly Gonzales’ musical memoir delves beyond the innumerable gold discs and millions of fans to excavate his own enthusiasm for Enya’s singular music and the mysterious musical herself, and along the way to uncover new truths about the nature of music, fame, success and the artistic endeavour.

Chilly Gonzales is one of the most exciting, original, hard-to-pin-down musicians of our time. Filling halls worldwide at the piano in his slippers and a bathrobe—in any one night he can be dissecting the musicology of an Oasis hit, giving a sublime solo recital, and displaying his lyrical dexterity as a rapper. In his book about Enya, he asks: Does music have to be smart or does it just have to go to the heart? In dazzling, erudite prose Gonzales delves beyond her innumerable gold discs and millions of fans to excavate his own enthusiasm for Enya’s singular music as well as the mysterious musician herself, and along the way uncovers new truths about the nature of music, fame, success and the artistic endeavour.

The second issue of MsHeresies includes collages, paintings, and hommages to the work of sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, whose collaboration defied preconceived ideas of both text/image hierarchies, as well as rivalry at the cost of sisterhood. This visual essay is published alongside William Morris’s lecture Useful Work versus Useless Toil from 1884 which introduces the idea of the ornamental and its relationship to work and rest.

The ornamental can only come about under certain conditions: enough rest, agency, and variation of work. The ornamental is never an outcome or product of these conditions; but something intrinsically intertwined therein.

Excerpts from Caren Beilin’s 2019 essay/memoir about reproductive health and the IUD, gendered illness, medical gaslighting, and activism in the chronic illness community.

“The moon is hollow. The moon is hollow says a certain contingent of people, because of aliens (and, also, the moon has experienced bangs on its surface that have apparently made it ring just like a bell).
These people are conspiracy theorists. Paranoid, conclusive, certain. Too certain. They connect the dots with their eager, enormous chalk. They want something to be true. They want, I think, something new to be true, and they are taken (as I am) with the moon being like a bell, two phonemes, moon, bell, beautiful and struck across each other’s false armor, mutable and beautiful.
The moon is a bell, as the theorist Georges Bataille, in 1931, said, ‘The sun is an anus.’ He was arguing about the beauty – the absolute energy – of the copula.

‘The verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy,’ he wrote, the year that Benjamin unpacked his library, alone. The moon is a bell, and I believe this absolutely, sure. The IUD is the RA. The sexual force of the verb, is, to be, of my verbacious being, will knock any noun into the moon and beyond. Everything is a parody, can be anything. The moon is hollow and made of muleskin. The moon is hollow, insofar as it is coated with the agglutinate, the shining coat, of a limit. I cannot go into the moon with my eyesight. I can’t enter my womb from that time (in November 2015) and sit crosslegged by the device, at the base of its suspending embedding, in the oaty red fist of my uterus, and watch the metal loam off its rigid cross-branch – and leech into tissues and activate, or reanimate, flare, or push over my problem. I can’t spy the center of the inception or the core of my being. I only know the timing. My health deteriorated rapidly after it was in, and I know how horrible it is, to cease planning for trips, outings, applications, or children, waiting and watching for how bad and how soon, and that the moon is hollow

This pamphlet excerpts from Blackfishing the IUD, published in 2019 by Wolfman Books, Oakland. With thanks to Caren Beilin, Jacob Kahn, and Justin Carder.

Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs's Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to the ways echolocation changes our understandings of "vision" and visionary action, this is a masterful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice.

With Foreword by adrienne maree brown

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, M Archive: After the End of the World, and Dub: Finding Ceremony; coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines; and the founder of Brilliance Remastered, an online network and series of retreats and online intensives serving community accountable intellectuals and artists.

The first of a two-volume publication dedicated to the artist's novel, this theoretical essay aims to elucidate the pressing questions posed by the emergence of this new artistic medium with a number of key case studies and interviews.

Why do artists write novels? What impact does the artist's novel have on the visual arts? How should such a novel be experienced? In recent years, there has been a proliferation of visual artists who create novels as part of their broader art practice. They do so in order to address artistic issues by means of novelistic devices, favoring a sort of art predicated on process and subjectivity, introducing notions such as fiction, narrative, and imagination. In this sense, it is possible to see the novel as a new medium in the visual arts; yet very little is known about it. This two-volume publication is the first to explore in depth the subject of the artist's novel.

Part 1, A New Medium, is a theoretical examination that looks critically at the different ways contemporary artists employ the artist's novel, focusing mainly on four key case studies: Benjamin Seror's Mime Radio, Cally Spooner's Collapsing in Parts, Mai-Thu Perret's The Crystal Frontier, and Goldin+Senneby's Headless. It seeks to situate the artist's novel within the broader context of the visual arts in the hopes of sparking a much-needed discussion about a practice that has long been ignored by critical strands in art discourse. It includes valuable resources, such as the only existing bibliography of artists' novels.

Interviews with Benjamin Seror, Cally Spooner, Mai-Thu Perret, Goldin+Senneby, Francis McKee, Vivian Ziherl, Natasha Soobramanien, Clive Phillpot, Alex Cecchetti, Łukasz Gorczyca, Jan Jasiński.

An essay by Holly Pester on prosody, “poet-voice,” and the politics of delivery.

“Following a political impulse that I cannot shake, I want to oppose poet-voice. Not to smirk, but to suggest that poet-voice, that is, to lay a given mutual voice on top of the text, is a kind of opting out. It’s a self-absolving move. What’s being opted out of is the rough stuff of delivery and the ethical shrapnel in intonation. Such materials of poetic intonation are not, I will argue, irrelevant to the political questions of one’s speech in society and its disputed freedoms.

I have a fully felt and fraught relationship with delivery. I care about delivery compositionally; I enjoy the effects of composition working on and into my voice. Sometimes it feels as if my voice is the victim of some impossible contract with the text. The effort and timbres of delivery are therefore potentially very significant to a political poet. This sounded aspect of my work often gets short-handed as performance, but it’s not that. Performance art and performance poetry are distinct art forms with histories and styles, learned and studied by talented performers. Delivery is as banal or as eccentric as the material, but not necessarily correspondingly. It is part of the craft of poetry that isn’t unrelated to the intrinsic vocal identity of the poet (accent, etc.) yet has as much to do with tensions within the communities, heritages, and civics of poetry as with the individual. ”

Schismatics consists of 10 short stories, in a fictitious way dealing with forgotten historical personas. Among them, artist Goda Palekaitė includes Mary Anning –– an amateur discoverer of dinosaurs, Emanuel Swedenborg –– a mystic who empirically explored the architecture of heaven, and Essad Bey –– a Jewish-Muslim writer and orientalist. Here their lives are revived and balance between the lines of history and story.

The book fuses elements of fiction, academic writing, and artistic research, and intertwines with rumors, forgeries, and inventions. Previously, its characters and narratives have already appeared in Palekaitė’s performances and installations, which are presented in the middle of this bilingual edition. In the introductory essay, Valerio Del Baglivo analyses the author’s exploration of facts and fiction, the mechanisms of knowledge production, and the trans-chronological perception of time. At the end of the book, Monika Lipšic ‘Riddle’ reflects on a ‘schismatic poetics’. 

Goda Palekaitė is a contemporary artist and researcher whose work combines visual, literary, performative, and anthropological practices. Exploring the politics of historical narratives, the agency of dreams and collective imagination, and social conditions of creativity, her work evolves around long-term projects that manifest as performances, scenographies, installations, and texts. Her performances, solo and group shows are being presented internationally. In 2019 Goda Palekaitė received The Golden Stage Cross and the Young Artist’s Prize for her artistic contributions across disciplines.

Published September 2020

Everywhere anarchism is on the upswing as a political philosophy—everywhere, that is, except the academy. Anarchists repeatedly appeal to anthropologists for ideas about how society might be reorganized on a more egalitarian, less alienating basis. Anthropologists, terrified of being accused of romanticism, respond with silence . . . . But what if they didn't?

This pamphlet ponders what that response would be, and explores the implications of linking anthropology to anarchism. Here, David Graeber invites readers to imagine this discipline that currently only exists in the realm of possibility: anarchist anthropology.

David Graeber (1961-2020) was an American anthropologist and activist. He was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement. His books include Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar, and Debt: The First 5000 Years.

It’s because feminism has become a fashionable commodity now, that we’re in desperate need of a more inclusive and varied reflection on contemporary girlhood, gender equality struggles, and the relationship between gender, politics and philosophy.

This book documents the production and thought processes of 6 engaging artists and designers regarding the theme, and features a collection of essays by artists and academics, writers and rioteers, curators and journalists.

With contributions by Mandy Roos, Gabriel A. Maher with Roberto Pérez de Gayo and Carly Rose Bedford, Olle Lundin, Janina Frye, Camille Auer, Barbara Bolt, Daantje Bons, Charlotte van Buylaere, Ece Canlı and Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Victoria Ledig, Alicja Melzacka, Nina Power, Barbara Smith for Nasty Women and Aynouk Tan.

Edited and curated by Pernilla Ellens
Graphic design by Virginie Gauthier

Made possible thanks to the municipality of Eindhoven and the province of Noord-Brabant.

A notebook based on Ursula Biemann's latest film, Acoustic Ocean, an expedition to the depths of the Arctic Ocean in search of interspecies communications.

32 p, ills colour, 14 x 23 cm, pb, French/English

This publication emerges from an effort to better understand the conditions of contemporary art in disparate places. Featuring new writings in a variety of discursive forms (commissioned essays, conversations, profiles), the book is organised around three key terms: local time, situated infrastructure, and “cotranslations”.

Furthermore, it gathers perspectives and approaches to “the local” from art initiatives that operate outside of conventional frameworks. As the authors consider place and context in terms of social, economic, political, and historical circumstances, their writings also reflect upon these notions as sites for different conceptions of the self in relation to the world.

Diagrams of Power: Visualizing, Mapping, and Performing Resistance, brings together the work of designers, artists, cartographers, geographers, researchers and activists who create diagrams to tell inconvenient stories that upset and resist the status quo.

Edited by Patricio Dávila. Words and works by Joshua Akers, Burak Arikan, Josh Begley, Joseph Beuys, Alexis Bhagat, Vincent Brown, Bureau d’Études, Teddy Cruz, Department of Unusual Certainties, Peter Hall, Alex Hill, W.E.B. DuBois, Patricio Dávila, Catherine D’Ignazio, Forensic Architecture, Fonna Forman, Terra Graziani, Iconoclasistas, Lucas LaRochelle, Eliana MacDonald, Julie Mehretu, Lize Mogel, Ogimaa Mikana, Margaret Pearce, Laura Poitras, Philippe Rekacewicz, Sheila Sampath, and Visualizing Impact. 

Aphasia is a work of art about racism and intolerance, exposing the banality and triviality of evil. The films challenges us to look (literally) more attentively and to question our own individual and collective position. Aphasia is a call, not for punishment or outrage about the crimes committed during colonial times, the Holocaust or the atrocities in Bosnia during the Yugoslavian wars. Rather, it is a call to break the collective silence, and to actually look at the blind spots that seem to have become a fundamental part of our European identity.

Texts by Branka Benčić, Berber Bevernage and Eline Mestdagh, Jelena Jureša, Barbara Matejčić, Asa Mendelsohn, Rolf Quaghebeur.