"be good"

This idiosyncratic publication assembled by Berlin-based dancer and visual artist Emma Waltraud Howes and her collaborators operates from the viewpoint that embodied history offers important information for survival. Through live performances and material works, Howes explores how notation and scores can be used to navigate the everyday and act as a basis for practical exercises that help to maintain a tether amidst the chaos. The paginated choreography Scores for Daily Living is the second K. publication by Howes, following Ankyloglossia (2014); by relaying variations on rhythm and gait, gravity and grace, this new volume shares with readers a series of poetic engagements focusing on different states of self-empowerment and the connections between labor, ritual, and civilization.

Emma Waltraud Howes works as a translator between movement and form. Her focus is on the development of an expanded choreographic practice that incorporates public interventions, kinaesthetic and architectural research, and graphic scores for performances. Her interdisciplinary works are informed by her background in dance, performance theory, and the visual arts and are guided by observations of bodily gestures.

Emma Waltraud Howes, Scores for Daily Living. With texts by Federica Bueti, Emma Wolf-Haugh, Anna Karpenko, and Maria Veie Sandvik. With editing by Mark Soo and photography by Trevor Good. German translation by Isabel Bredenbröker and Verena Buttmann. Concept & design by Emma Waltraud Howes and Franziska Morlok.

Explorations of the audio essay as medium and method.

With contributors including Justin Barton, Angus Carlyle, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, and Iain Sinclair, Sonic Faction presents extended lines of thought prompted by two Urbanomic events which explored the ways in which sound and voice can produce new sensory terrains and provoke speculative thought.

Three recent pieces provide the catalyst for a discussion of the potential of the "audio essay" as medium and method, a machine for intensifying listening and unsettling the boundaries between existing forms: documentary, music, ambient sound, audiobook, field recording, radio play….

Kode9's Astro-Darien (2022) is a sonic fiction about simulation, presenting an alternative history of the Scottish Space Programme, haunted by the ghosts of the British Empire. Justin Barton and Mark Fisher's On Vanishing Land (2006) is a dreamlike account of a coastal walk that expands into questions of modernity, capitalism, fiction, and the micropolitics of escape. Robin Mackay's By the North Sea (2021) is a meditation on time, disappearance, and loss as heard through the fictions of Lovecraft, Ccru, and the spectre of Dunwich, the city that vanished beneath the waves.

Alongside photographic documentation of the events and edited transcripts of the artists' discussions, Sonic Faction brings together contributors with diverse perspectives to address the question of the audio essay and to imagine its future.

Contributors
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lendl Barcelos, Justin Barton, Ben Borthwick, Angus Carlyle, Matt Colquhoun, Jessica Edwards, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Ayesha Hameed, Eleni Ikoniadou, Lawrence Lek, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, Emily Pethick, Iain Sinclair, Shelley Trower

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.

Remember that first time you were startled by a shrill screech, looked up and saw to your amazement a green parakeet perched on a branch in the middle of Brussels? There are some juicy and perhaps even instructive urban legends being told about the origins of the Brussels ring-necked parakeet.

Joren Peeters has collected and dramatized three of these urban legends, Antonino Triolo has illustrated them, and graphic designer Lise Leën has put them together in a kind of bird-watching book revealing the mythical origins of the Brussels ring-necked parakeet: De Vaders van de Brusselse Halsbandparkiet.

In these illustrated stories, the ring-necked parakeet appears to be a symbol of male hubris: the bird is born from the typically male, naive, unworldly and arrogant desire to impose a vision of Good on the world. The three fathers turn out to be three parodies of the hero, three tragic do-gooders.

(NL)

Weet je nog die eerste keer dat je opschrok door een schril gekrijs, opkeek en tot je verbazing een groene parkiet op een tak zag zitten – in het midden van Brussel? Er doen over de oorsprong van de Brusselse halsbandparkiet enkele sappige en misschien zelfs leerrijke urban legends de ronde.

Joren Peeters heeft er drie verzameld, uitvergroot en uitgeschreven, Antonino Triolo heeft ze geïllustreerd en Lise Leën heeft ze samengezet in een soort vogelspotboekje: “De Vaders van de Brusselse Halsbandparkiet”.

In deze geïllustreerde verhalen blijkt de halsbandparkiet een symbool voor mannelijke hoogmoed: ze zijn geboren uit het typisch mannelijke, wereldvreemde en arrogante verlangen om uw visie op het goede aan de wereld op te leggen. De drie vaders blijken drie parodieën op de held, drie fatale wereldverbeteraars.

Death Book is dedicated to Bruce LaBruce’s archive of rarely published or previously unpublished work characterized by morbid fascinations. Here photographs challenge the viewer to explore what lies beneath the veneer of Western society.

The book brings this body of work together for the first time, combining LaBruce’s performances, actions, film production stills and photography that explicitly outline his obsessions, with never-before exhibited archival works from projects including Hustler White, Otto; or Up with Dead People, and L.A. Zombie.

The book is edited as loosely connected vignettes, characterised by horror, the carnage accelerated rather than overcome, questioning existing values, hierarchies, and perceptions of good and evil. A variety of faces and body parts appear, including those of actors Francois Sagat and Tiger Tyson, model/actor Tony Ward, artists Kembra Pfahler and Slava Mogutin, and cameos by legendary figures such as performance artist Ron Athey, musician/artists Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye, artist Dash Snow, actor Brad Renfro, Asia Argento and Bruce LaBruce himself.

The Death Book also introduces the art director Max Siedentopf, who has designed the book as a paraphrase of the Bible, punctured with three bullet holes, piercing the book from front to back. The book contains an introduction by artist, photographer and writer Slava Mogutin.

Edited by Astrid Kaminski, Jeroen Versteele, Julie De Meester. A personal and intimate look behind the scenes of Meg Stuart's creative process over more than a decade. 

Since the early nineties, Meg Stuart, and her dance company Damaged Goods, based in Brussels, have produced a remarkable and audacious body of choreographic work. In 2010, Damaged Goods published Are we here yet?, which spans the first twenty years of Meg Stuart's career. In the follow-up book Let's not get used to this place, the choreographer looks back on more than a decade of works through reflections, interviews, scores, and notes on the practice of creating, performing, teaching and living dance. These are mixed with reports, essays and poetry by collaborators and other observers, photos, performance texts and archive material. The book's title, gleaned from one of Stuart's recent video works, ties together these multifarious sources in a desire to discard tried and tested strategies, explore new contexts, and transgress the edge of what we (do not) know. 
Let's not get used to this place gives a sense of the plentitude of motions, inspirations and personalities that energize Meg Stuart's creative cosmos. It offers a personal and intimate look behind the scenes of the creative process, and expands this to include the world around it. As a journey through her more recent career, an inspiring manual and a work of art in its own right, it has a wide appeal to an international base of artists, students and peers, and to anyone who is interested in performance.

Contributions by Jean-Marc Adolphe, Preethi Athreya, Mariana Tengner Barros, Sandra Blatterer, Esther Boldt, Márcio Kerber Canabarro, Varinia Canto Vila, Descha Daemgen, Jorge De Hoyos, Igor Dobricic, Brendan Dougherty, Doris Dziersk, Tim Etchells, Moriah Evans, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Jule Flierl, Alain Franco, Davis Freeman, Ami Garmon, Philipp Gehmacher, Jared Gradinger, Ezra Green, Claudia Hill, Maija Hirvanen, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Astrid Kaminski, Kiraṇ Kumār, Göksu Kunak, André Lepecki & Eleonora Fabiano, Jean-Paul Lespagnard, Marc Lohr, Matthias Mohr, Anne-Françoise Moyson, Anja Müller, Kotomi Nishiwaki, Jeroen Peeters, Alejandro Penagos, Léa Poiré, Leyla Postalcıoğlu, Ana Rocha, Tian Rotteveel, Hahn Rowe, Isabela Fernandes Santana, Maria F. Scaroni, Bernd M. Scherer, Kerstin Schroth, Gerald Siegmund, Charlotte Simon, Mieko Suzuki, Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Poorna Swami, Meg Stuart, Margarita Tsomou, Kristof Van Boven, Elke Van Campenhout, Myriam Van Imschoot, Jeroen Versteele, Doug Weiss, Stefanie Wenner, Jozef Wouters, John Zwaenepoel.

Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love is a genre-defiant sex-trip to post-human dimensions. If C.G Jung, magic-mushroom shaman Terence McKenna and Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae) had a three-way while binging on George Bataille and undergoing Hormone Replacement Therapy, their baby might be the erotic cocktail of Myth Lab. Its extreme theme is nothing less than the fate of the species.

“Brilliant and wild, Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab is a manifesto of exuberance disguised as a sci-fi sex test-center for the invention of communal futures. Skelley’s a mad scientist, scholar and poet.” - Chris Kraus, author of After Kathy Acker
 
“In Myth Lab, Jack Skelley adroitly molds an “Einsteinian elasticity between objects and ether” to the “clitoverse.”  If this formulation seems too vast, just think about a) the last time you felt good about power and b) all the ways to say yes to pleasure as a source of liberation. In conducting a “cosmologic psychoanalysis,” Myth Lab thrillingly hot wires our neurons to an endless mirror stage reflective of our own instinctual nature.” - Kim Rosenfield, author of Phantom Captain
 
"An explosion of clit-cock-and-pop-culture worship. Skelley’s eroto-celestial universe fights back not only against the denial of desire – “also known as fuckheadocracy and market forces” – but against death itself."  - Francesca Lia Block, author of Weetzie Bat
 
"A hallucinatory book that straddles gender studies, science-fiction, and cultural criticism (to name but three of many genres). Ever eager to use a newfound Skelley-ism, I urge everyone to read Myth Lab and be “Kardashian'd” with love (i.e buy it now, it's great)." - Susan Finlay, author of The Jacques Lacan Foundation
 
"In Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab, something weird and beautiful is forged in the crucible of infinite horny grief. It’s an epic, delirious descent into the inferno, navigating the concentric circles of romance and desire as literary malady, TikTok psyop, benevolent cosmological principle, and more. Simultaneously a quest, a physics experiment and an elegy. I loved following its narrator - a tender, erotomanic, Blakean particle - seeking and finding visionary head." - Daisy Lafarge, author of Love Bug

This text is an attempt to explain the importance of comfort regulation, through sensory stimulation. Whether that be from fidgeting, through masturbation to cuddling and other activities. This thesis is about self-regulation and the objects which visualise that need. From the Freudian psychoanalysis idea of child development through transitional objects introduced by Donald Winnicot to Dakimakura phenomena in otaku culture in a Japanese society that seeks closeness to cute pastelle vibrators which are overflowing the sex toys market. The attempt to answer this question: “Why do hoodie strings taste so good?” seeks to answer the overarching need for constant adjustment to the environment we live in.

I’m intrigued by the need for biting, sucking, and tapping random objects. The fidgeting era is here! We are overwhelmed by all kinds of spinners, popping toys, anti-stress devices, dopamine booster, etc. What is it all about and why have fidget spinners became such a hype in the recent years? Have you ever considered why your hoodie strings taste so good? Have you caught yourself while compulsively sucking them in the metro or at the bus stop? This thesis will endeavour to answer these questions. The answer might be much easier and more pragmatic than we think. In contradiction to my deep analysis in the following sections, one of the reddit users wrote in response to the above question: Why do hoodie strings taste so good?

“Just don’t do it! After sucking them a few times, they become bacteria factories/colonies, so taste (and probably smell) evolves over time. Don’t suck and chew them!! They do, however, work as good, reachable things to practise finger dexterity – to tie knots into and practice rope binding”

From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.

A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

Joan of Arkansas is an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video. Fifteen-year-old Joan has been tasked by God (They/Them) to ensure that Charles VII (R–Arkansas) adopts radical climate policy and wins his bid as the Lord’s candidate to become the president of the United States. Arkansas is flooding, the West is burning, and borders are closed: “Heaven or / internet—it’s / hard to be / good.”

Winner of the 2023 Whiting Award for Drama.

After three years online, the Berlin-based food culture magazine ‘famous for my dinner parties’ is going paper! For this first edition zine, the team selected their favourite stories, essays, fun facts and photo series of the last few years, and threw some new bits and bobs into the mix, too. It’s about fake news and futurism, fast food and food faux pas, food fights, furious foodies and the best film ever made. It’s about things that look good and things that taste good, and also about things that leave a bitter taste in one’s mouth.

famous for my dinner parties is a magazine and platform celebrating, portraying, questioning and discussing different aspects of the culture around food and eating.

An exhibition guide for a multi-part show conceived by Reliable Copy in India, featuring a range of cookbooks, videos, and artworks around food, by a strong grouping of practices.

Approaching curatorial practice from the perspective of publishing, At the kitchen table looks at how food has historically been—and continues to be—inscribed through various conventional formats, as well as the channels and platforms by which it continues to circulate as material, trace, memory, and culture. Imagined as a show of documents, the exhibition brings together a selection of cookbooks, video works, and artworks.

The selection of cookbooks feature recipes and narratives compiled from artists and art-spaces, anthologies of recipes from literary fiction, cookbooks that function as historical records, and some that are self-published by individuals or community groups. The video works highlight and examine the well-worn format of the instructional cooking class and its associated performativity. Meanwhile, the artworks, which are presented via peripheral, referential, or stand-in documents, respond to (and often assume) the forms of the marketed consumable product, the stand-alone restaurant, the family archive, the recipe book, the menu, the assembly, and the feast.

The proposal, the script, the poster, the photographic documentation, the resource list, the newsletter, the Keynote presentation, and the audio recording—elements that are traditionally left out of the work's exhibition display, but that are often included in catalogues, monographs, or other publications around the work—become stand-ins for the artworks conceptually on display. Through this introduction of artworks via the documents that surround, engender, and represent them, the exhibition seeks to collapse the space between the exhibition and its documentation, the library and the gallery, and the event and its eventual publication.

At the kitchen table is imagined as a travelling, multi-part exhibition that will expand through its responses to the contexts, sites, and venues of its iterations, including those of a publication.

Works by Candice Lin, Carolyn Lazard, Chinar Shah & Nihaal Faizal, David Robbins, Fazal Rizvi, Gavati, Jason Hirata, Lantian Xie, Leone Contini, nonfood, Pushpamala N, Rajyashri Goody, Rasheed Araeen.

Books by Abby Lloyd, Archana Pidathala, Enid Blyton, Esther David, Felicity Dahl & Josie Fison, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Happy Potato Press, Mrinalini Bordawekar, Norah M. Titley, S. Meenakshi Ammal, Salvador Dali, Studio Olafur Eliasson, Suresh Jayaram.

Le sonore excède nos capacités de pensée, il traverse toutes les échelles de la réalité et de la vie sociale, et nous permet d’expérimenter par avance les menaces du futur proche : ce sont les hypothèses que déploie dans sa Guerre sonore le DJ, producteur de bass music et théoricien Steve Goodman, mieux connu sous le pseudo Kode9, et formé au sein de l’Unité de Recherché sur la Cyberculture (CCRU) aux côtés de Kodwo Eshun et Mark Fisher. Guidé par les leçons des sound-systems et des raves, défiant le partage entre philosophie et science-fiction, il compose avec ce livre une vaste fresque fractale, qui analyse les limites de l’audible et les puissances sensorielles et spéculatives de la vibration. Guerre sonore décrit comment la maîtrise des infrabasses et l’occupation de l’espace sensoriel sont devenus l’enjeu d’une bataille secrète mais généralisée où les gouvernements, les spécialistes du marketing, les designers et les technoscientifiques s’affrontent au matérialisme des basses fréquences des artistes et des populations.

Steve Goodman (alias Kode9) est un musicien, écrivain et artiste. Il est l’auteur du livre Guerre Sonore et il codirigé les ouvrages Unsound : Undead (Urbanomic Press, 2019) et Ø (Flatlines Press, 2021). Il a fondé les labels Hyperdub et Flatlines, produit 5 albums, dont deux avec le regretté Spaceape (Memories of the Future, 2006 et Black Sun, 2012) et 3 en solo (Nothing, 2015, Escapology, 2022, Astro-Darien, 2022), de nombreuses compilations de mix DJ ; il a co-compilé et remixé Diggin in the Carts (2018), une collection de musiques rares de jeux vidéo japonais. Il a aussi, entre autres choses, conçu des installations sonores pour la Hyundai Commission à la Tate Modern en 2018 et pour l’exposition sur l’intelligence artificielle More than Human en 2019, au Barbican de Londres.

This publication presents research conducted by choreographer Mor Demer over two years, in the frame of the exerce MA in choreography and performance (National Choreographic Center of Montpellier / Occitanie). Against the backdrop of her artistic process, Mor Demer unfolds a reflection on the production and configuration of choreographic materials, as well as on the body and the practices and fictions of which it is composed.

Contributions by Anne Kerzerho, Christian Rizzo, Rostan Chentouf, Alix de Morant, Laurent Pichaud, Myrto Katsiki, Jocelyn Cottencin.

Mor Demer is an Israeli-born, Berlin-based choreographer and dancer. She is engaged in a holistic ecosystem of movement and performance practices with solo and collaborative works (she works with Tino Seghal, Meg Stuart / Damaged Good and Peter Player as a dancer and performer). His artistic approach cultivates and engenders states of high exposure, friction, poetics and precision. Mor crosses other forms of artistic expression alongside his dance practice such as writing, drumming, drawing, walking, running and stillness. Her global artistic research is at the crossroads of the profane and the sacred. She explores existential questions, probing endless possibilities in states of being.

The more I think about it, art theory is no place for straights. And contrary to popular opinion you can’t be really poor—or poor without a safety net—and bohemian. Or live in a capital city and have a fun time all the time or even some of it. There was no good reason why Someone Else and I split up besides different senses of humour and views on economics - which are two no good major reasons...

'In Vasari’s soaring vision of art, the most-used adjective is ‘beautiful’. In Finlay’s tarmac-hugging account it is ‘posh’. This book is not an appraisal of perfection of an artist’s output, but a rummage through an improvised life full of so much besides art. What a wry, unsparing weave of formative episodes and structural ironies. What devil-may-care tilts at authority. No redemption or overcoming all odds here! This unvarnished world is marbled through with brilliance and shit.' — Sally O’Reilly

An experiment in listening to frequencies beyond human sensorial range, Silent Whale Letters is a long-distance correspondence intimately attuned to the infravoice of a blue whale, a document held silent in the sound archive, and other so-called "silent" subjects.

As part of an ongoing collaboration between Ella Finer and Vibeke Mascini the letters consider how the silent document shifts the logic of the archive, figuring listening as a practice of preservation.

As the letters attune to the ocean loud with communications across time and space, the authors write about the movement of matter, of energies, wavelengths, currents and how the ocean preserves as it disperses what it carries. How does working with what we cannot see, or even hear within range, shift the parameters of attention? How does the energetic archival space of the ocean agitate and disrupt claims to knowledge, history, and power?

Moving through three years of call and response the book unfolds through "a joint meditation on the transformative potential of a note, a voice, carried from saltwater into the archive" (Rebecca Giggs).

They chart a process that is equally conceptual and intimate, theoretical and deeply personal, moving through discussions of (amniotic) undercurrents, call-and-response mechanisms, energetic wavelengths, oceanic and archival memory, mysterious scales, and the watery acoustic commons. 

Edited by Kate Briggs.
Contributions by Kate Briggs and Emma McCormick Goodhart.

The fourth book in the annual series A Series of Open Questions published by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press is informed by themes found in the work of Lorraine O'Grady, including diaspora, Black female subjectivity, racial hybridity, translation, intersectional feminism, institutional critique, Black representation in the art world, archives, music, Conceptualism, and performance art.

The Wattis Institute's annual reader, A Series of Open Questions, provides an edited selection of perspectives, images, and references related to the Wattis's year-long "On our mind" research seasons. Each volume includes newly commissioned writing by members of the research season's core reading group, as well as text and visual contributions by a diverse range of other artists and writers. The title of each reader takes the form of a question and becomes, as new books are published, a gradually evolving series of open questions.

Contributions by The Allman Brothers Band, Charles Baudelaire, Selam Bekele, Martin Bernal, Linda Goode Bryant and Rujeko Hockley, Camille Chedda, Gabrielle Civil, Kathleen Collins, Erica Deeman, Jeanne Finley & John Muse, Jacqueline Francis, Edouard Glissant, E. Jane, Bec Imrich, Charles Lee, Darrell M. McNeil, Denise Murrell, Sawako Nakayasu, Lorraine O'Grady, Yétúndé Olagbaju, Hsu Peng & Allison Yasukawa, Lara Putnam, Trina Michelle Robinson, Legacy Russell, David Scott, Peter Simensky, Carrie Mae Weems, Judith Wilson, Alisha Wormsley.

17 Mouvements collects traces of a project that Decoratelier - the workspace and arts platform of Jozef Wouters - did in the fall of 2022 around the ‘5 blocs’ area in Brussels (Rempart Des Moines/Papenvest).

When Nuit Blanche invited them to build a gym, Camille Thiry and other Decoratelier associates did not want to design another generic muscle cage. Together with the neighbourhoods inhabitants, they built 17 distinct movement spaces, each tailor-made to an individual’s size, needs, dreams and aches. The gym equipment has meanwhile been removed from public space, but this eponymous book (ed. by Jozef Wouters) combines notes and reflections (language: French) by Camille with beautiful photography by Enzo Smits, documenting the ingenious and unique negotiations that were a part of this collaboration.

Pippa Garner’s Better Living Catalog, originally published in 1982, takes the form of a mail order catalog featuring clever and whimsical inventions that parody consumer goods while simultaneously critiquing America’s obsession with ingenuity, efficiency, leisure, and comfort. These works, which were made as prototypes and photographed for the publication, take the form of improbable accessories, clothing, footwear, home appliances, and office gadgets.

For example, the “Reactiononometer,” a portable wristband, instantly measures social success, while the “Digital Diet Loafers” display the wearer’s weight with every step. If the “Munch-o-Matic” reduces deskwork interruptions by flinging a snack right into the user’s mouth, other items promise financial solvency (the controlled cash flow “Autowallet”), sustainable waste management, or mess-free companionship (the “Pet-a-Vision” TV console). The artist asserts that all of the products in the book are “absolute necessities for contemporary survival.”

The Better Living Catalog was a pop hit when it was published, earning Garner spots on nighttime TV talk shows and attention from magazines like Vogue and Rolling Stone. In a meme-filled culture, the works still resonate today, finding their analog in widely-circulating consumer products, and—in the case of the “High Heel Skates”—even appearing unattributed in the runway collection of a major luxury fashion brand.

A few years after the Better Living Catalog was published, Garner began her gender transition, which she has characterized as an artistic project that draws conceptual parallels to the altered consumer goods she has continued to create since the 1970s. The artist’s practice has always been about hacking—gender hacking, she stated, was “an excellent premise for maverick conceptual art and diametrically opposed to anything I’d ever done.”

Many of the prototypes Garner created for the publication were repurposed or recycled, making this previously rare gem of an artist book one of the artist’s few works to now be widely available.

Born in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, Pippa Garner (formerly known as Philip Garner) began her practice in the late sixties as a member of the highly regarded Transportation Design department at ArtCenter, California, with plans to become a car stylist, and was drafted to Vietnam to serve as a combat illustrator. In the mid-80s, Garner began her gender transition, which she considers a conceptual artwork, marking an extension of her practice from twenty years of altering cars, garments, and consumer products to using her own body as raw material. Garner appeared on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and other talk shows, showcasing her satirical consumer product inventions, and her artwork has been featured in Car & Driver, Rolling Stone, Arts & Architecture, and Vogue, among other publications. In the 1980s, her performance, design, and video work was exhibited in institutions including the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; since 2015, she has had exhibitions at STARS, O-Town House, Redling Fine Art, and Parker gallery in Los Angeles; Jeffrey Stark in New York; JOAN, Los Angeles; Kunstverein München; 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, Metz; Kunsthalle Zurich; and Art Omi, Ghent, New York. She is the author of three other books: Utopia… or Bust! Products for the Perfect World (1984), Garner’s Gizmos & Gadgets (1987), and the zine Beauty 2000 (1992/2021).

Deleuzine: A Zine for Nobodies Without Organs is an experimental publication inspired by the writings of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, as well as figures whose life or work can be said to exemplify aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy of life, including Antonin Artaud, Ezekiel Mphaphele’s Wanderers and Kathy Acker among others. Encompassing the fields of literature, philosophy, ethnography, archaeology, and the arts, the publication aims at a radical exploration (and exploitation) of word, image, and printed matter towards beauty, but also aesthetic and political freedom.

1 Laurence Pritchard, Memories of the Penes 6 Natascha Nanji, Crisis in Three Parts 16 Max Henninger, From Poems For Two Voices 18 Sascha Akhtar, Now, You Become D/eath, Destroyer 34 Karina Bush, Claws; I Spit; Sonnet VI 36 Francesca Dobbe, Dog Lady’s Becoming Animal 9 George Micah Kuhn, Pharmacophilia 54 Uma Breakdown, The Graveyard of Extension 60 MUCK, ‘IN A FOLD, THE OUTSIDE IS NEVER FULLY ABSORBED…’  73 Anouk Asselineau, Angel’s Share 78 Maria Sledmere, Zebra; Lens Flare; Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Kitchen Disco; Jewel Organza; New Weird Kirsty 82 Paola Valentina, Tube people 85 Dalia Maini, Water Lilies Syndrome 88 Hugo Hagger, Death Dissensus 95 Michal Leszuk, Curating Cruising Culture in the Anthropocene 108 Joshua Jones, Petřín Hill, Dusk 111 Chiara Gambuto 143 Isaac Harris, Helioelagablaus Reborn 163Helen Samuels, Winterize 174 Aimilia Efthimiou, A Recipe 176Simon Barraclough, Vampire in the Funhouse, Part I 178 Suki Hollywood, Mortal Combat 186 Louis Mason, The Executioner 198 Rebecca Close, The Acephale Sonnets 204Sites Of Horror RU, RmIH8 U 90’s Ancestors 206 MUCK, THE STORM 215 George Finlay Ramsay, Raven’s Reprise 228Mike Templeton, The Window Journal: Looking out my Window onto Court Street 232 Caitlin Merrett King, She Has No References; Dylan Thomas; For S 235 Phoebe Eccles, Hold Me in Your Watchful Presence 238 Isabelle Bucklow, Some Bears, Some Moves 244 Alistair McCartney, The Textual Animal 248 Caspar Bryant, Diffraction of a Waterfowl 249 Flo Josephine Goodliffe, Alive Border (Husk or Shell) front & back cover(s) Jean-Robert Alcindor (dispersed) drawings by Rossen Daskalov designed by Alessia Arcuri

Age! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! (Apart from greasing the wheels of capitalist reproduction.) In this queer manifesto, Simon(e) van Saarloos weaves a wealth of militant sex-liberationist, afrofuturist, transfeminist and decolonial imaginaries into their anti-ageist sails, charting a confident course across contemporary society’s generational hang-ups as well as visiting, in some more personal moments, their own.
-Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation and Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto starts with what it is not: it is not a socio-economic argument against ageism, celebrating “the elderly” as economically viable. Author Simon(e) van Saarloos is not interested in natural arguments about age, which portray different age groups as valuable because of assumed inherent qualities. Instead, this manifesto starts with an experience of childhood sexual abuse, and moves on to dissect the ways in which constructions of “age” and “youth” function to support and reproduce white supremacist patriarchy. The book includes two reproductions of works by painter Samantha Nye.

Simon(e) van Saarloos is the author of Take ‘em Down (Publication Studio Guelph) and Playing Monogamy (Publication Studio Rotterdam). They were the curator of the 2021 exhibition on Abundance (“We must bring about the end of the world as we know it” – Denise Ferreira da Silva) in Het HEM and are also the host of *The Asterisk Conversations podcast. Van Saarloos is currently a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric department at UC Berkeley.

At an otherwise forgettable party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter spots a woman who instantly controls the room: gorgeous and distant and utterly white, the centre of everyone’s attention. Haunted into adulthood by her Korean father’s abandonment of his family, as well as the spectre of her beguiling, abusive white mother, the painter finds herself caught in a perfect trap. She wants Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or some confusion of all the above. Since she’s an artist, she will use art to get closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model. As for Hanne, what does she want? Her whiteness seems sometimes as cruel as a new sheet of paper.

When the paintings of Hanne become a hit, resulting in the artist’s first sold-out show, she resolves to bring her new muse with her to Berlin, to continue their work, and her seduction. But, just when the painter is on the verge of her long sought-after breakthrough, a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds in the art community, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their imperialist and racist practices.

Torn between her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possess Hanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable and disorienting, unwilling to cut loose any one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all. Is it any wonder so many artists self-destruct so spectacularly? Is it perhaps just a bit exciting to think she could too?

Your Love Is Not Good stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.

Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and 
musician who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva is the author of the essay 'Sick Woman Theory', originally published in 2016, which has now been translated into ten languages. Hedva is also the author of the novel On Hell, which was one of Dennis Cooper's favourite books of 2018, and the nonfiction collection Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain. Their albums are The Sun and the Moon and Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House.

"This is a book of poetry that looks, really looks, at malign societal shapes and holds its stare. In the rhythmic scenes that are drawn like grotesques, we see the glistening, puke redolent props of normal life and its ‘bee-white’ regresses; we see an immersive performance art piece featuring a live job interview; the historical transfigurations of a bridge; we see MINT. CATS…Like all good, quick wit the ‘whatness’ of before and after spit back at each other. Thank goodness for this radical poetic satire, with line-breaks that bite into systems’ supposed inevitables; ‘an advert is / for what happens anyway’. The voice is not cold and cynical, but cunning and frangible, always kindling new ways to kick to pieces the the amygdala trick, if you love your job you’ll never work a day in your life!, and to kill the cop in your head. The crafted lyric sloshes between ballad forms, to Bill Griffiths-like textual play of talented sounds and nasty phrases that make you make observations, notice your feelings. In the excellent final poem of first water, ‘IN IT’ the speaker says, “my landlord is nervous when / we meet / at the centre of that nervousness / is a precious oil / I must extract”. This book is written with something like that oil, something like the toxins of meeting points; worker debt, worker time, worker body. I read this and wondered to the simmering, declarative void of myself, can a poem destroy admin!? Perhaps, but only on the basis that both a poem and an admin contain instructions to remember that someone existing after you has to do this too." – Holly Pester, author of Go to reception and ask for Sara in red felt tip

Robert Kiely is current Poet-in-Residence at University of Surrey. simmering of a declarative void is his first book, soon to be followed by a critical essay, Incomparable Poetry, from punctum.

This major new work is thought, spirit and sense (in every sense) ‘fleshed out’ in ‘all the corners’ by being unmade – as poetry, as music, as (black and white) images, and as attention to the interconnected circuitries the One has with the social, historical and environmental ‘to / link us outside’. These elements are no sooner embodied than they slip, shift, carousel and spin away. As Goodwin puts it: ‘no longer a bodily reference to an individual subject’s presence; not obliterated but made into an element, air or breath, as black poetry’s condition of im/possibility for, and refusal of subjecthood.’ Hence it is that this poetry achieves ‘flightacross precipitous intransigence’ (Will Alexander), perhaps flights of manifestations of spirit, ‘ghostly crowned / apogees’, like duppies, which is to say, sacred. Hence too the work’s urgent task to avoid ‘thingification’: the conscription and exploitation of thought &/or body for neo-colonialist, which is to say, neo-liberal ends. Goodwin eschews identity politics for a phenomenology that is more properly radical in both the etymological sense of the term – rooted and vital to life – as well as situated within a history of experimental black thought which, simultaneously, rejects normative traditions of meaning, signification and value. Both meanings are central to the anti-racist core of this important work – ‘when i don’t know you but you must know who i am’ – in a poetry that’s as breath-taking as it is breath-making. ‘Inexpressibly full with what words can do’.

— Emily Critchley, author of Home (London: Protoype, 2021), Arrangements (Shearsman Books, 2018) and Ten Thousand Things (UEA: Boiler House Press, 2017)

James Goodwin is a poet doing a PhD in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London with a thesis on the blacksociopoetics of marronage, breath, sacrality and emanation. His pamphlet, aspects caught in the headspace we’re in: composition for friends, was published by Face Press; and his debut book, Fleshed Out For All The Corners Of The Slip, is forthcoming with the87press. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.