I am Welton Santos reenacts a dialogue between the Brazilian geo-bio-architect Welton Santos and an Interviewer. The book, which is always read collectively, is used in reading performances by groups of at least 3 people.
Printed on the occasion of an artist residency at PAV, Parco d’Arte Vivente, Turin, July 2016. Texts based on transcripts of interviews with Welton Santos.
It goes without saying that a dance is a dance and a book about dance is a book. Though they may meet at the intersection of Art and Good Intentions, I find myself greedy. I have a longstanding infatuation with language, a not-easily assailed conviction that it, above all else, offers a key to clarity. Not that it can replace experience, but rather holds a mirror to our experience, gives us distance when we need it. So here I am, in a sense, trying to 'replace' my performances with a book, greedily pushing language to clarify what already was clear in other terms. But, alas, gone. This has seemed one good reason to compile a book out of the remains of my performances, letting the language fall where it may. Let it be said 'She usually makes performances and has also made a book.' -Yvonne Rainer
Forty-five years after its publication, Primary Information brings Yvonne Rainer's classic book back into print in an exact facsimile.
In 1974, Yvonne Rainer published Work 1961-73, an illustrated catalog of her performance works up to that point. In these years, as the art world turned toward minimalism, Rainer and her Judson Dance Theater colleagues were engaged in a parallel, and equally radical, redefinition of dance. Stripping dance of its pomp and self-serious virtuosity, they created what dancer and choreographer Pat Catterson has called "the people's dance." Or, as Rainer put it, instead of the "overblown plot" of traditional dance, she explored the "obvious" alternative: "stand, walk, run, eat, carry bricks, show movies, or move and be moved by some thing other than oneself."
Work 1961-73 chronicles the years when Rainer found herself and her work at the heart of a revolution in dance, performance and art. Written in Rainer's wonderful frank, funny and perceptive prose, and illustrated with photographs, handwritten scores, sketches, press articles and ephemera, Work 1961-73 is a period document and an instruction manual, an archive and a manifesto.
A sought-after, rare classic, Work 1961-73 is brought back into print in a true facsimile edition by Primary Information; the only change is the small addition of new notes at the back of the book.
One of the most influential artists of her generation, dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer (born 1934) was a founding member of Judson Dance Theater in New York City and a leading figure in the development of minimalist and postmodern dance.
Adrian Piper: Performing Objects I Have Been, 1972-2018, is a collection of documents from, or potentially relevant to Adrian Piper's performance Some Reflective Surfaces (1975-76) that has been edited by art historian and curator Rhea Anastas. This publication sits within If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution's Peformance in Residence Series, and its seventh artistic program, Social Movement (2017-18).
Adrian Piper, who lives in Berlin, at the age of seventy-two, is one of America's best-known artists. It so happens she is also one of America's best-known female artists. And yet, to use such a qualifier is to make the mistake of accepting limitations, coerced and containing, for artists and thier work— and, to quote Jacqueline Rose, "to dissolve the very possibility for women of any purchase on historical time."
This publication focuses on an early performance called Some Reflective Surfaces (1975-76). In it, as Piper dances under spotlights, she stages multiple images and sounds. Over the work's duration, the audience follows the performer's images, physical performance, and sound. In "Artist's Statement" (1999), Piper descrvibes her 1960's work that led up to this one as "concered with duration, repetition, and meditative conciousness of the indexical present." Some Reflective Surfaces was produced in New York at the Fine Arts Building, New York University, in 1975, and then at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1976. The performance has not been staged since. A collection of the documents of Some Reflective Surfaces is reissued in this publication for the first time, along with other writings spanning Piper's work from 1972-2018.
Published 2021.
It is less a lecture, more like a cartography.
Parts may or may not sync up, we will see.
Ce qui suit est “Une conférence sur la stagnation”
Il s’agit moins d’une conférence que d’une
cartographie. Ses parties peuvent ou non
se synchroniser, nous verrons bien.
Dit is “Een lezing over stagnatie.”
Het is minder een lezing, dan een cartografie.
De onderdelen hiervan kunnen wel of niet
synchroon lopen, we zullen zien.
Trilingual (!) edition. Loose sheets in an envelope. On the same model as Resistance.
Project developed in conversation with Mette Edvardsen.
Design by Maria Camila Alfonso.
Published 2020.
Close to spiritual anarchism, Georgia Sagri’s writing happens in the heat of negotiation. Starting in the months leading up to the occupation of Zuccotti Park in 2011, which became the movement for people’s self-governance known as Occupy, this book carries the energy and commitment of open struggle, direct address, self-organisation and public assembly. It is a critique of representation and its implicit oblivion, told through a decade of artistic and activist practice. The writing is a mode of recovery, it is pre-content shared to encourage open processes in art, thinking and action.
Georgia Sagri (born Athens, 1979) lives and works in Athens and New York. Her practice is influenced by her ongoing engagement in political movements and struggles on issues of autonomy, empowerment and self-organisation. From 1997 to 2001 she was a member of Void Network, a cultural, political and philosophical collective operating in Athens. In 2011 she was one of the main organisers of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. Since 2013 she has been a member of the assembly of the Embros Theatre Occupation, and in 2014 she initiated Ύλη[matter]HYLE, a semi-public cultural space in the heart of Athens. She is professor of performance at the Athens School of Fine Arts.
Delta is a coming together for choreographic and performative work to be shared and exercised, a place for sharing work by doing the work. A container for participatory projects, dancing, exchange and choreographic inquiries. Delta is organised as evening dance classes, artist zines and thematic publications, like this one: On water histories, narratives and practices.
Water both divides and merges, varies and manifests in different kinds of shapes and structures, acquiring different relations with its surroundings. As a transformative material, could one say that water has a different kind of logic, another kind of dance? In this publication, the contributors Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Paul Maheke, Axel Andersson, Sindri Runudde, Vibeke Hermanrud, Elly Vadseth, Daniela Bershan, Sabrina Seifried, D.N.A. (Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, Neda Sanai and Anita Beikpour), Every Ocean Hughes, Adham Hafez, Pontus Pettersson, and Alice MacKenzie share their multi-layered practices, writings, memories and scores on water. Inviting you to submerge!
With contributions by: Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Paul Maheke, Axel Andersson, Sindri Runudde, Vibeke Hermanrud, Elly Vadseth, Daniela Bershan, Sabrina Seifried, D.N.A. (Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, Neda Sanai and Anita Beikpour), Every Ocean Hughes, Adham Hafez, Pontus Pettersson and Alice MacKenzie.
Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris: First Move, Original Rains: a Score for Sensing the Precipitational
Pontus Pettersson: Dripping from my fingertips
Adham Hafez: To dance about nature?
Daniela Bershan in collaboration with Sabrina Seifried: Mapping OCEAN
Sindri Runudde: Chosen by the barnacles
Vibeke Hermanrud in conversation with Elly Vadseth: Submerged
Axel Andersson: Confessions of a swimmer
D.N.A: Hydrocapsules.love
Paul Mahek:e As the Waters Recall
Alice MacKenzie: I know that smell
Every Ocean Hughes: Ocean
Pontus Pettersson: 100 ways of water
Graphic design by Sara Kaaman
Hailed as British dance's true iconoclast, Michael Clark is a defining cultural figure in the contemporary dance world. Since emerging in the early 1980s as a prodigy at London's Royal Ballet School, Clark has remained at the forefront of innovation in dance, working in close collaboration with a broad range of pioneering artists such as Sarah Lucas, Leigh Bowery, Charles Atlas, Cerith Wyn Evans, Peter Doig, Elizabeth Peyton, Wolfgang Tillmans and musicians such as Mark E. Smith, Wire, Scritti Politti, and Relaxed Muscle.
As a young choreographer, Clark brought together his classical ballet training with London's club culture, fashion, and punk rock to establish himself as one of the most innovative artists working in modern dance. His work, variously referencing punk, rock, and pop--is marked by a mixture of technical rigor and experimentation in a way that disrupts and reimagines our understanding of dance.
This book features a series of enlightening essays and vivid illustrations of Clark's best-known performances, alongside archival material. Loosely tracing the chronological evolution of his career, a variety of cultural figures, ranging from Jarvis Cocker to Charles Atlas, write about the countercultural undercurrents with which Clark's work connects.
Some years ago, Will Holder and Alex Waterman proposed to Robert Ashley that musicians and non-musicians might produce new versions of his operas, by way of typographical scores. The bulk ofYes, But Is It Edible? is a result of that proposal: scores for Dust (1998) and Celestial Excursions (2003). These operas’ characters have, until now, been solely produced by and are the stories exchanged between Ashley and his “band” (singers Sam Ashley, Joan La Barbara, Thomas Buckner, and Jacqueline Humbert); and in landscapes produced by “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Tom Hamilton, David Moodey, Cas Boumans, and Mimi Johnson—the result of a thirty-year relationship.
The scores for Dust and Celestial Excursions are preceded by a selection of Ashley’s work, from 1963 to 2008, drawing attention to the varying relations between instruction and score, and the tones of instructional address. Working with these scores gave us a better sense of how each one produces a specific mode of decision-making, telling us what to put on the pages of the scores, for any reader who follows.
Yes, But Is It Edible? is the fourth in a series of publications produced with or by Will Holder and Alex Waterman that a musicological perspective on scoring speech, and the role of printed matter in collective forms of reading and writing: Agape (Miguel Abreu Gallery, 2007); Between Thought and Sound (The Kitchen, 2008); and The Tiger’s Mind (with Beatrice Gibson; Sternberg Press, 2012).
'To discover a fossil on your tibia: scories and other mutations of scores' is a collection of texts exploring the score as a choreographic tool for writing.
Magdalena Ptasznik, worked on several scores to introduce, instigate, and reflect upon the network of relations with other- than- human existences. She approaches choreography as a generative practice to speculate about future fictions for a world in environmental crisis. By using somatic practices, site-specific materials, storytelling in workshop settings, Magda seeks to empower change through activating collective imaginaries with the audience. For her End Presentation, a publication will be launched with a collection of writings that circulate around the idea of the score as a form of activating self-choreographic agencies.
Magdalena Ptasznik has been exploring choreography and dance through creating performances, dancing in the work of other makers, creating choreography for drama theater, and teaching. Through the last years, she focused on contexts of practice that turn towards creating shared spaces and experiences – teaching, collaborating, and creating performances for the limited public.
The scripts of Rainer's five films, presented here along with essays, an interview, and bibliography, demonstrate the evolution of her political consciousness as well as her creative engagement with the contemporary film and cultural scene. These texts challenge the illusionist and ideological presumptions of mainstream culture and cinema.
Film Scripts included:
Lives of Performers
Film About a Woman Who...
Kristina Talking Pictures
Journeys from Berlin/1971
The Man Who Envied Women
Jupiter is the monograph of the artist Andreas Sell by the curator Joel Mu and the outcome of their collaboration. It includes a selection of Andreas’ work of the last fifteen years, an essay in five parts by Joel and a poem by Alice Heyward. Andreas’ work often coincides with his life story, composing both a material and immaterial narration. Joel shares biographical and autobiographical stories in his writing about Andreas’ work. The narratives intertwine.
Personal experiences, memories and relationships take shape with matter, images and words trying to make sense of the world—its social conditions and politics, other people and life itself.
Jupiter is about Andreas Sell’s ‘Life Performance’ as the title of the book suggests; it explores life performance from the constant position of a foreigner, from a viewpoint on the side. Andreas and Joel reflect on identities and challenge categorization; they seek for a more inclusive sense of belonging and defend the multiplicity of oneness. Jupiter also defies categorization; it is a monograph, but also a biography, an autobiography, a catalogue, an artist book, a diary, a collective work on one person’s work. — Text by Galini Noti
Every Monday in 2017 and 2019, comedic performance artist Morgan Bassichis created a to-do list. THE ODD YEARS is a collection of those lists, which served both as a way to generate material for live performances and as a place to archive the logistical, emotional, and political business that just kept piling up throughout this two-year project. A record of routine and impossible tasks—some completed and others left unfinished—THE ODD YEARS is one response to the oddness of times in which intensified crisis becomes ordinary.
THE ODD YEARS is the fourth title in the Document Series, an interdisciplinary publishing initiative that highlights work by time-based artists in printed form.
Morgan Bassichis is a comedian and musician living in New York City. Morgan's performances include Nibbling the Hand that Feeds Me (Whitney Museum, New York 2019), Klezmer for Beginners (Abrons Arts Center, New York, 2019), More Protest Songs (Danspace Project, New York, 2018), and The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions: The Musical (New Museum, New York, 2017).
Adrian Piper has consistently produced groundbreaking work that has profoundly shaped the form and content of conceptual art since the 1960s. Strongly inflected by her longstanding involvement with philosophy and yoga, her pioneering investigations into the political, social, psychological and spiritual potential of conceptual art have had an incalculable influence on artists working today.
Published in conjunction with the most comprehensive exhibition of her work to date, this catalog presents more than 280 artworks that encompass the full range of Piper's mediums: works on paper, video, multimedia installation, performance, painting, sound and photo-texts.
Essays by curators and scholars examine her extensive research into altered states of consciousness; the introduction of the Mythic Being, her subversive masculine alter-ego; her media and installation works from after 1980, which reveal and challenge stereotypes of race and gender; and the global conditions that illuminate the significance of her art.
Previously unpublished texts by the artist lay out significant events in her personal history and her deeply felt ideas about the relationship between viewer and art object. This publication expands our understanding of the conceptual and post-conceptual art movements and Piper's pivotal position among her peers and for later generations.
Adrian Piper (born 1948) is a first-generation conceptual artist and analytic philosopher. She received an AA in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts in 1969, a BA in Philosophy with a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Musicology from the City College of New York in 1974 and a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1981. Piper's artwork is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Generali Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles, among others.
Marking The Occasion represents the final movement in a year-long engagement with the question, Can a performance be a rough draft of a written work? In this case, the rough draft took place at Mount Tremper Arts during a 2019 Watershed Residency.
Taking the practices of choreography and co-writing as methods of investigation, curator-editors Jaime Shearn Coan and Tara Aisha Willis introduce new trajectories for live work and text by bringing together dance and performance artists from across the US who occupy multiple roles within art economies and in whose work language and writing are prevalent.
Exploring a multiplicity of lived, embodied experiences within a single event, Marking The Occasion gathers together archival materials from the residency alongside new contributions from participants David Thomson, Julie Tolentino, Mariana Valencia, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Mlondi Zondi.
The publication also marks the events of 2020, and traces their reverberations through each artist's practice as time, movement, action, and collaboration take on new meanings.
The book groups Lore Stessel's photographic research on dance and movement of the past six year. It can be read as a choreography in which the rhythm of the dance is accompanied by the pace of turning each page.
Phylactère is born from a deep desire to transcribe performance, with authentic, subjective and spontaneous point of views; giving voice to amateurs, artists, designers and thinkers alike. Phylactère is published once a year. Each issue takes an onomatopoeia as its theme. Phylactère publishes transitional writings and in turn welcomes the discrepancies between a script, the performed action, to its translation; with an extreme and adventurous attention given to contexts, gestures, emotions and spaces put at stake during this transcription.
Phylactère is digging into post-performance, allowing those who weren’t present to get a reading of it and experience it from another perspective. This first issue has the theme of the French onomatopoeia Patati Patata: an inexhaustible and endless chatter, long or short discourse, gossip, word of mouth, whispers… Patati Patata or «Yada Yada Yada» in English, is a too much of speech, an endless story, an et cetera expressed out loud. Phylactère is a journal composed of multiple voices, initiated by Roxanne Maillet and Auriane Preud’homme, produced by RondPoint Projects and published by Immixtion Books.
Contributors : Alexandru Balgiu, Anna Tuccio, Anne Marchis Mouren, ArianE Sirota, Barbara Quintin & Liv Schulman, Barthélémy Cardonne, Camille Soulat, Dorota Gaweda & Egle Kulbokaite, etaïnn zwer, Ilke Gers, Josèfa Ntjam, Laure Vigna, Louise Siffert, Lou-Maria Le Brusq, Maria Barnas, Marouchka Payen, Martha Salimbeni, officeabc, Philippe Goguely, Sarah Korzec, Simili Gum, Sven Dehens et Uta Eisenreich.
Texts in English and French
Graphic Design : Auriane Preud'homme et Roxanne Maillet
This first publication brings together texts, documentation, scripts and reference material relating to the body of work Jones started in 2013. Marking a new cycle in his work the book makes a claim about the status of performance in the context of his wider practice and the function of documentation and image regimes in our current times.
The book is claimed to be a form of ‘paraperformance’, meaning a collection of materials that have circulated alongside or chosen to represent the live moments created in his work over a five year period. It represents seven distinct works of installation, sculpture, and performance by Jones including a new work that is made specifically for the pages of this book.
This collection of materials touches on diverse sources and references including the Radical Faerie movement, the Spanish magazine ‘Party’, Liberace’s libel trials, images of uncontacted Amazonian tribes, the political writing of Jean Genet and an early performance work of Vito Acconci to name but a few.
The thread amongst all of the works included in this book is the subtle interweaving of discourses around theatre, performance, the law, representation and politics and the oscillation between urban space, the public sphere and a queer wilderness. More widely the book uses the specificities within Jones’ research to consider the role that performance could play within the art field and, by extension, how documentation and representation of our everyday lives impacts on how we understand our world at large.
This book is part of the series www.anywhereoutofthebook.com series
A conversation about performance, genre and cinema in the subversive work of Brice Dellsperger.
In this conversation between Dellsperger and Marie-France Rafael, following current (post)gender discussions, the artist describes sexuality and (sexual) identity as products of a cultural construction informed by audiovisual technologies. Film, video, and the Internet do not depict a preexisting sexuality but establish an image of it and its (normative) framework. Throughout this exchange, the artist highlights how he, starting from travesty and doubles, undermines existing identity systems in order to develop new artistic strategies for subjectivity.
Brice Dellsperger (born 1972 in Cannes, France, lives and works in Paris) pushes the boundaries of genre and gender. In his multifaceted reprises of iconic film sequences—all assembled under the generic title Body Double—the cineast and artist reenacts the selected scenes frame for frame and lets his “body doubles” perform all of the roles, be they male or female.
Marie-France Rafael (born 19984 in Munich) is a tenure-track professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). She holds a PhD in art history; she studied art history and film studies in Berlin and Paris. From 2011 to 2015, she was a research associate at the Free University of Berlin and until 2019 at the Muthesius University Kiel, Department of Spatial Strategies/Curatorial Spaces. She is notably the author of Reisen im Imaginativ: Künstlerische Situationen und Displays (Travel in the Imaginary: Artistic Situations and Displays, 2017) and Ari Benjamin Meyers: Music on Display (2016).
Published Oct 2020.
Drawing from notions of "bad poetry" as the critical undoing of normative taste, Antilogy brings together works by the Brazilian artist and poet Alex Hamburger.
Central to Hamburger's practice and engagement with poetry is a focus on writing as the expression of a performative disruption and playful reworking of semiotic systems. With references to Fluxus intermediality, Brazilian concretism, experimental music, and sound poetry, Hamburger's work dynamically collapses the distinctions between fact and fiction, theory and performance, system and noise. From visual poems to abstract narrative to personal fantasy, Antilogy reminds us about the potent sense of refusal and experimentation that all art should carry.
Alex Hamburger was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1948. From the 80s onward his researches and proposals turned to the possibilities of fusion and intertwining of languages, developing works in Verbal, Visual and Sound Poetry, Object-Poem, Artist's books, Installation, Performance art, etc. He has published seven books in various poetical genres, three CDs of Sound Poetry and has performed several performance pieces, some in partnership with the visual artist Marcia X, with whom he established a fruitful relationship throughout the 80s, contributing decisively for a better understanding and acceptance of the above practices in the local art circuit of Rio de Janeiro. His work is held in the collections of contemporary art institutions, in Brazil and abroad, including The Museum of Modern Art, RJ, The Museum of Modern Art, SP, Printed Matter Bookstore, New York, Compendium of Contemporary Fine Prints, Hamburg, ICA, London among others. Alex Hamburger continues to live and work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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
DUCTUS is the latest solo project by Paul Abbott, featuring 51 minutes of audio, across 12 tracks, and a 42 page booklet featuring new writing. DUCTUS was written and recorded in Edinburgh and Porto in 2019.
DUCTUS presents a playful weave of collapsing time through a number of speculative elements and fictional characters. Abbott feels his way through learning drums, rhythm and writing as fleshy research technologies. DUCTUS is the latest stage in a process considering sound, the body, imagination, and language through music. This features as part of ongoing investigations using real and imaginary drums, synthetic sounds, performance and writing.
