Books

LIBRARY contains four essays and two interviews, with the pre-dominant concern of sexual questions: the subjects in art, film, and literature—the issues tied to Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, Madonna’s sexual assault in Dangerous Game, Clunie Reid’s use of language, Richard Prince’s obsession with books, and Paul Meyersberg’s articulation about sex.

‘Like Carol Reed’s crippled trapeze artist now devoted to sensuality, Paul Buck is more than a suitable case for treatment. A personable deviant, Buck’s culpable, desiring proximity steeps these writings, inasmuch as they are apostrophised by his appearance in cameo, inside and outside the text. Buck stalks his work, addressing us in collusive asides. Rather than the disinterest of resistable objectivity, Buck’s criticism is moved by a profound personal investment in his subjects; he does not elide his complicity, nor does he quiet moral considerations. Discussing Richard Prince’s library or Madonna’s instrumentality, Buck makes the possessive, accountable case throughout. His underlying subject is the snarl of art and life, and the perils that abound in their confusion in the personal and their forced dichotomy in culture at large. Art, for Buck, cannot be an apology for the failures of experience, but instead is a compulsive and risky exposure, like a heretical grace, modelling life for our benefit.’ - Ed Atkins

‘Translator, poet, collagist, archivist, novelist, and all-around intellectual impresario, Paul Buck has a formidable knowledge of culture that he shines like a laser in LIBRARY on Richard Prince, Madonna, Abel Ferrera, and the erotics of painting and representation.  He approaches the critical essay like a crime scene investigation. LIBRARY is a fantastic read’. - Chris Kraus

 

Winter 2019. SLEEP.

Contributions by: NAVILD ACOSTA, CLAY AD, MANDISA APENA, KHAIRANI BAROKKA, LINDA BESNER, LEAH CLEMENTS, PENNY GORING, LEWIS HAMMOND, ELAINE KAHN, GARETH DAMIAN MARTIN, LIV MENDEZ, BELLA MILROY, EILEEN MYLES, PRECIOUS OKOYOMON, LAUREN O’NEILL, RUTH PILSTON, HANNAH QUINLAN & ROSIE HASTINGS, FANNIE SOSA, ROMILY ALICE WALDEN, IAN WOOLDRIDGE and ANNA ZETT

If Our Wealth Is Criminal Then Let's Live with the Criminal Joy of Pirates collects two short stories and an essay by Jacob Wren. In the first story, 'The Infiltrator, ' certain ongoing, rarely mentioned, difficulties for the activist Left are explored with unlikely candour. In 'Four Letters from an Ongoing Series, ' the postal service becomes an unwitting accomplice to the gatekeepers of potential culture. Finally, in the essay 'Like a Priest Who Has Lost Faith, ' questions of art and emptiness shift focus in relation to the agency that at all times surrounds us.

Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART is a compelling hybrid of history, memoir, and performance theory. It tells the story of the interdisciplinary performance group PME-ART and their ongoing endeavour to make a new kind of highly collaborative theatre dedicated to the fragile but essential act of "being yourself in a performance situation."

This book assembles the scripts of two solo performances levitations (2017) and New Skin (2018). Hannah De Meyer's work connects with the eco-feminist tradition and investigates the connections between femininity, ecology and decolonization. She merges text and movement into a quirky, hybrid theater language. Levitations is an enchanting trip along the peaks and valleys of De Meyers imagination. The recent new skin is an overwhelming feminist and ecological statement.

Celebrated as a courtesan and poet, and as a woman of great intelligence and wit, Tullia d'Aragona (1510-56) entered the debate about the morality of love that engaged the best and most famous male intellects of sixteenth-century Italy. First published in Venice in 1547, but never before published in English, "Dialogue on the Infinity of Love" casts a woman rather than a man as the main disputant on the ethics of love.

Sexually liberated and financially independent, Tullia d'Aragona dared to argue that the only moral form of love between woman and man is one that recognizes both the sensual and the spiritual needs of humankind. Declaring sexual drives to be fundamentally irrepressible and blameless, she challenged the Platonic and religious orthodoxy of her time, which condemned all forms of sensual experience, denied the rationality of women, and relegated femininity to the realm of physicality and sin.

Human beings, she argued, consist of body and soul, sense and intellect, and honorable love must be based on this real nature. By exposing the intrinsic misogyny of prevailing theories of love, Aragona vindicates all women, proposing a morality of love that restores them to intellectual and sexual parity with men. Through Aragona's sharp reasoning, her sense of irony and humor, and her renowned linguistic skill, a rare picture unfolds of an intelligent and thoughtful woman fighting sixteenth-century stereotypes of women and sexuality.

Real-Time Realist is a serial publication of J-LTF PRESS. This issue of Real-Time Realist explores Ecstasy, Joy, Serenity, and Love, The Yellow Wheel, with contributions from invited artists distilling the aforementioned emotions.

This first issue of Real-Time Realist explores amazement, distraction, surprise and awe (the blue sector of Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions) with contributions from invited artists distilling the aforementioned emotions. [publisher’s note.]

Real-Time Realist gathers contributions by graphic designers, writers, and artists, most of them living in the NL and former students of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie or the Werkplaats Typografie.

Contributors: Jungmyung Lee, Josse Pyl, Carson Lee, Charlie Clemoes, Laura Pappa, Lieven Lahaye, Will Pollard, Mathew Kneebone, Max Gershfield, Rudy Guedj. 

Originally published in 1973, The New Woman's Survival Catalog is a seminal survey of the second-wave feminist effort across the US. Edited by Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie in just five months, The New Woman's Survival Catalog makes a nod to Stewart Brand's influential Whole Earth Catalog, mapping a vast network of feminist alternative cultural activity in the 1970s.

A Cookbook of Invisible Writing, by Dutch artist, designer and teacher Amy Wu, is an introduction to analog steganography—a type of secret writing that is hidden in plain sight. This book serves as a starter pack to run workshops with groups who are interested in alternative forms of communication. It contains invisible ink recipes and other invisible communication techniques that may be used to subvert surveillance and bypass censorship, but also inspire your community to develop poetic and playful forms of communication to nurture social bonds. In the tradition of esoteric manuals published on secret writing, this cookbook also channels the spirit of everyday access and the easy distribution and sharing of practical knowledge.

Following Giambattista della Porta's 1558 popular science book Natural Magic—one of the first major publications that detailed simple but diverse recipes of invisible inks for public consumption—this cookbook aims to bring this obscure field to a wider audience. The publication includes a critical essay about the history of surveillance through a feminist and postcolonial lens. The last chapter presents Wu's own body of work that aims to revive analog techniques as a counter to today's digitally surveilled mediascape.

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.

At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.

Livret de 56 pages; format 13x21; illustré; couverture souple; cousu. Traduction originale du portugais ("Teoria do indiscernível" texte figurant dans le vol. "Abissologia - Teoria do Indiscernível", Lisboa - 2012). Édition bilingue portugais-français.

Quelques textes de Kathy Acker, écrits avant ses trente ans, traduits par Elodie Petit et Claire Finch.

A book from A Nos Amours gathering up all the research and writing that went into making the London Chantal Akerman retrospective possible.

Between 2013 and 2015,  A Nos Amours presented in London a complete retrospective of the films of the celebrated film-maker Chantal Akerman. This was a complex and demanding project as rights and screening copies turned out to be widely scattered and difficult to access. The research needed to present this retrospective is offered in this book so that others may easily follow suit.

Also included are the texts, journalism and blogging that was offered to the audience as a means to engage with film-works that are at once radical, heterodox and, in many cases, little known. The book aims to be accurate and a reliable source of detailed information about the films.

Texts are included that provide invaluable insight, including by:

Raymond Bellour, Richard Brody, Ivone Margulies, Marion Schmid and Ginette Vincendeau.

Laura Mulvey has written an expansive foreword, surveying Akerman's achievement, making use of the book as an aide-mémoire for what stands as one of the astonishing bodies of work in all cinema:

"As a collage of writing of many different kinds, the Handbook crucially bears witness to the effect that Akerman has had on the film community, from her earliest movies until her last... The high quality of the texts included in the book are all a reminder of the way that her ‘cinematic’ qualities have advanced our understanding of film." (Laura Mulvey preface)

Unafraid of exploring the potentials of technology, both its tyrannical and emancipatory possibilities, the manifesto seeks to uproot forces of repression that have come to seem inevitable—from the family, to the body, to the idea of gender itself.

The Dream of a Common Language explores the contours of a woman s heart and mind in language for everybody language whose plainness, laughter, questions and nobility everyone can respond to.

In a bathtub in a rooming house in Montreal in 1980, a woman tries to imagine a new life for herself: a life after a passionate affair with a man while falling for a woman, a life that makes sense after her deep involvement in far left politics during the turbulent seventies of Quebec, a life whose form she knows can only be grasped as she speaks it. A new, revised edition of a seminal work of edgy, experimental feminism. With a foreword by Eileen Myles.

Four young cats with wings leave the city slums in search of a safe place to live, finally meeting two children with kind hands.

First critical edition of Kathy Acker’s unpublished early writings from (1969-1976). Comprises almost all the typescripts from that period present in the Kathy Acker’s archives. Features also the transcription and presentation of Acker’s two 1974 experimental videos.

Editor: Justin Gajoux. Critical notes: Justin Gajoux & Claire Finch. Also with texts of: Alan Sondheim, Emily Cheng, Jill Kroesen, Peter Gordon, Claire Finch, Anna Maria Pinaka, Matias Viegener, Justin Gajoux.

Adriana Gheorghe works with performance and writing and a gravely irreverent sense of indeterminacy, while in relation to contexts (conceptual, physical, political, human), and for the reformulation of the same ongoing artistic and living practice – the performative imagining of the humans in relation to language and representation, hijacking subjectivity and identity with the crack of endless potentiality.

A collection of texts, notes and drawings from Alina Popa (1982-2019), edited as a tribute publication by her longtime accomplice, the artist Florin Flueras. A political and theoretical work that questioned both the intimate and social mechanisms of the contemporary.

Square of Will in Square of Love gathers a selection of texts, notes and drawings by Alina Popa, edited by Florin Flueras. Most texts are more poetic and more personal than Alina’s previously published writing, “...a mixture of styles, subjects and mediums—theory, poetry, drawings, diary notes, it's unclassifiable, as she liked it.” (Florin Flueras).

Alina Popa (1982-2019) was a Romanian artist who moved between choreography, theory, and contemporary art.

CORNER football+society VOL.1 comprises all contributions from the first six issues of the eponymous artist-run magazine, published in Romanian between 20015-2017. 

With texts and conversations by: Mihnea Anţilă, Octav Avramescu, Violeta Beclea-Szekely, Matei Bejenaru, Declan Clarke, Irina Costache, Ion Dumitrescu, Florin Flueras, Bogdan Ghiu, Christopher Johnson, Cosima Opârtan, Florin Oprea, V. Leac, Andrei Mihail, Vasile Mihalache, Anca Verona Mihuleţ, Petrica Mogoş, James Montague, Cat Năstăsoiu, Pompiliu Nicolae-Constantin, Alexandra Pirici, Florin Poenaru, Ovidiu Pop, Powerpuff, Corneliu Porumboiu, Anamaria Pravicencu, Claudiu Revnic, Matei Sâmihaian, Ben Shave, Ştefan Tiron, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu and artworks by: Enric Fort Ballester, Alex Bodea, Irina Botea + Jon Dean, Ion Grigorescu, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Cătălin Mihalache, Monotremu, Dan Perjovschi, Alexandra Pirici & Jonas Lund, Raluca Popa, Gabriele de Santis, Sergiu Sas.

CORNER fotbal + societate is a periodical publication that proposes a crossdisciplinary approach, taking football and its complex contemporary and historical context as a starting point. This material foregrounds less (re)presented subjects and follows its evolution and social determinations. Aiming to intersect the culture of sport with various fields of knowledge such as anthropology, art, contemporary dance, architecture and economics, it follows less discussed aspects such as horizontal organisation, representation of minorities, gender power relations, subcultures and the relationship between the individual, group and society - amongst other topics. Under the current conditions, where both sport and art are being confiscated by the media and transformed into commodities, CORNER reclaims the democratic and emancipatory aspects of football, alongside a critical analysis of its functioning and reception modes.

Various artists and authors use two writers' correspondence as a primary source to develop an artistic and literary falsification. In this collaborative volume, the writer and artist Paul Buck works with the late 29 Kathy Acker. Using as source the raw materials of their correspondence from the early Eighties, a period when Acker was writing Great Expectations and trying to leave America for London, Buck confronts issues of appropriation, sampling, and plagiarism, relevant then and now.

Further encounters are triggered by writer Rebecca Stephens, artist John Cussans... and playwright Richard Foreman, artist Susan Hiller, musician David Coulter. Kathy Acker (1947-1997) was at the forefront of transgressive writing from the Seventies until her death. Her provocative intertextual narratives—halfway between autobiography and pornography—were developed in lectures, performances and films (Variety, Bette Gordon).

Her published work includes Blood and Guts in High School (1984), Don Quixote (1986), and Empire of the Senseless (1988). Rebecca Stephens escaped the chains of theology teaching to write on Saints and Courtesans, subjects on which books are in the pipeline.

John Cussans is a writer, artist and researcher who has exhibited regularly in London, Berlin, Slovenia, Vienna, Vancouver. In 2001 he founded The Bughouse, an art-event generator inspired by the work of Philip K. Dick. Paul Buck (born 1942, United Kingdom) is a British poet, performer and author of more than fifty crime novels. He has been challenging notions of writing, narrative, and the limits of the feasible since the late Sixties in books like The Honeymoon Killers, Violations and Lust, Walking into Myself... Chief editor of Curtains magazine, he introduced many French authors to the English audience.

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.