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Previously unpublished texts by the artist lay out significant events in her personal history and her deeply felt ideas about the relationship between viewer and art object.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.

Issue 5 looks at ideas of restraint including interviews with HARVEY YOUNG about stillness and the Black body (18); KELINA A. GOTMAN about the myth of choreomania (34); CLAIRE SMITH* about her experience as a prison officer (62); and MAXINE LEEDS CRAIG about why straight, white men don’t dance anymore (76). It also includes a text from HENRI LEFEBVRE on dressage (2); tales from guardsmen about fainting and laughing on parade (29); photographs by EMMA BACKLUND of play wrestling (50); vintage images and contemporary stories of bondage from THE PRIVATE CASE (87); and a poem by HANNE GRASMO about piss play (101). Cover photo by Emma Bäcklund.

Contains sexually explicit material.

We begin with the image of an idea in ruin. A small field of assumptions disassembled. A question no longer in need of its mark. A thought not sure where it began. It starts from the body and language. The debris of these three words, crumbling already at and, did not break apart but congealed the separations once made. We start from a research (project) undone and just beginning. 

Typesetting and design: Will Holder
Produced by: A.pass

Chloe Chignell works across choreography and publication taking the body as the central problem, question and location of the research. She invests in writing as a body building practice, examining the ways in which language makes us up.

A collection of brief descriptions of Toine's movement performances- and installations since 1979. The book, that started four years ago as a possible form in which Toine's ephemeral works could live on, gradually developed into a writing project about movement and the imaginative power of language.

Each of the 120 selected works has been translated in the most concise way into words and sentences.

Because of the possible role that the book could play in the discussion about conserving and documenting volatile works of art, Toine included related texts by other writers who directly or indirectly responded  to my writing: Marcus Bergner  Hannes Böhringer  Florian Cramer  Jan Van Den  Dobbelsteen  Nell Donkers  Tim Etchells  Ger Groot  Geert Koevoets Thomas Körtvelyessy  Dom H. van der Laan  Dick Raaijmakers  Jan Laurens Siesling  Sandra Smets  Hans Stevens  ieke Trinks  Samuel Vriezen  Ciel Werts - Emilie Gallier
Editing and text advice   Kathrin Wolkowicz  Dick van Teylingen

translations:  Simon Benson  Maaike Trimbach  Samuel Vriezen  Helen Adkins  Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

English version

graphic design: Koos Siep
Edition: 2 x 250 copies

A collection of brief descriptions of Toine's movement performances- and installations since 1979. The book, that started four years ago as a possible form in which Toine's ephemeral works could live on, gradually developed into a writing project about movement and the imaginative power of language.

Each of the 120 selected works has been translated in the most concise way into words and sentences.

Because of the possible role that the book could play in the discussion about conserving and documenting volatile works of art, Toine included related texts by other writers who directly or indirectly responded  to my writing: Marcus Bergner  Hannes Böhringer  Florian Cramer  Jan Van Den  Dobbelsteen  Nell Donkers  Tim Etchells  Ger Groot  Geert Koevoets Thomas Körtvelyessy  Dom H. van der Laan  Dick Raaijmakers  Jan Laurens Siesling  Sandra Smets  Hans Stevens  ieke Trinks  Samuel Vriezen  Ciel Werts - Emilie Gallier
Editing and text advice   Kathrin Wolkowicz  Dick van Teylingen

translations:  Simon Benson  Maaike Trimbach  Samuel Vriezen  Helen Adkins  Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

Dutch version

graphic design: Koos Siep
Edition: 2 x 250 copies

A Lingua Press Bookplay, 1990

Introduction by Kenneth Gaburo,Herbert Brun, Annea Lockwood, David Dunn,John Cage.

Chris Mann (March 9, 1949 Australia–September 12, 2018 New York NY) was an Australian composer, poet and performer specializing in the emerging field of compositional linguistics, coined by Kenneth Gaburo and described by Mann as "the mechanism whereby you understand what I'm saying better than I do".[1] He was, in the last 2 decades of his life, based in New York City.

Mann studied Chinese and linguistics at the University of Melbourne, and his interest in language, systems, and philosophy is evident in his work. Mann founded the New Music Centre in 1972 and taught at the State College of Victoria in the mid-1970s. He then left teaching to work on research projects involving cultural ideas of information theory and has been recognized by UNESCO for his work in that field.[1]

Mann moved to New York in the 1980s and was an associate of American composers John Cage and Kenneth Gaburo. He performed text in collaboration with artists such as Thomas Buckner, David Dunn, Annea Lockwood, Larry Polansky, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Mann recorded with the ensemble Machine For Making Sense with Amanda Stewart, Rik Rue and others, Chris Mann and the Impediments (with two backup singers and Mann reading a text simultaneously while only being able to hear one another), and Chris Mann and The Use. His piece The Plato Songs, a collaboration with Holland Hopson and R. Luke DuBois, features realtime spectral analysis and parsing of the voice into multiple channels based on phonemes. Mann has also participated in the 60x60 project.[2]

Mann taught in the Media Studies Graduate program at The New School. He died in September 2018 after a recurrence of cancer. He is survived by his wife and two children.

Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain collects a decade of work from artist, musician, and author of On Hell, Johanna Hedva. In plays, performances, an encyclopedia, essays, autohagiography, hypnagogic, and hypnapompic poems—in texts whose bodies drift and delight in form—Minerva tunnels into mysticism, madness, motherhood, and magic. Minerva gets dirty with the mess of gender and genius. She does the labor of sleep and dreams. She odysseys through Los Angeles, shapeshifting in stygian night and waking up to wail in the light.

This edition is published on the occasion of the YES sessions by Slow Reading Club (Bryanna Fritz & Henry Andersen with the participation of Maud Jacquin) organized by Lafayette Anticipations as part of EXTRA! Le festival de la littérature vivante (4th edition, from September 11 to 27, 2020 at the Centre Pompidou).

The first comprehensive monograph on the work of Krõõt Juurak

In the past fifteen years, Krõõt Juurak has developed a series of practices and performances that do not necessarily take place in a theatre or a gallery, at a predictable time or space, but rather come to existence as performative conditions through certain other triggers. This volume is both a record and a performative expansion of Juurak’s practice. Through four themed chapters (Animal, Family, Bad Mood Audience and Sleeping Bad Mood), the publication features a rich array of text-based works, essays, interviews, documentation and ephemera that will provide an insight into Juurak’s singular body of work including Internal Conflict, Sleeping Performance, Autodomestication, Performances for Pets and Bad Mood.

Edited by Galerie / Adriano Wilfert Jensen and Simon Asencio

Text contributions by Krõõt Juurak, Alex Bailey, Kate Strain, Noor Mertens, Suzan D. Polat, Jessica Ullrich, Guendalina Pirelli, Donny Mahonney, Simon Asencio and Adriano Wilfert Jensen.

Published October 2020

Different archive editions of the journal available to consult in our space (not for sale). With editions ranging all through the history of the journal.

Available editions :

#03
#05
#14
#15
#19
#20
#22
#26
#50

Movement Research announces Issue 52/53 of its print publication, the Movement Research Performance Journal. For this issue, Sovereign Movements: Native Dance and Performance, guest editor, choreographer Rosy Simas invited writer, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, to work with her. Together they assembled contributors from Native and Indigenous communities to reflect upon their practices, the historical conditions out of which they operate as well as movement, performance, and choreography as a socio-political project. Just as it is important for physical institutions to acknowledge that they sit upon occupied land of Native and Indigenous people, so too must institutions of history, practice, and epistemology acknowledge their occupation of knowledge and memory.

Throughout this issue, dance and movement is posited as a powerful strategy against settler-colonial mindsets and as an effective tool against erasure of Native and Indigenous cultural traditions. These pages discuss the importance of Native sovereignty and analyze various histories of resistance to settler-colonialism. Artists in the issue propose alternative artistic models to probe the roles of art and artists in society towards a more expansive constellation that fundamentally critiques the Western reward system in culture as well as the often celebrated cult of authorship.

Movement Research announces Issue 54 of its publication, the Movement Research Performance Journal. Continuing to experiment with approaches that engage contemporary choreography and performance through the medium of print—poem, prose, image, interview and a wide range of formats give form to critical and self-reflexive discourses and material histories. Movement Research Performance Journal acts as a site of convergence between publication, editors, writers, designers, and artists to consider the place of dance, performance, and choreography in relation to the contemporary moment.

For MRPJ54: Spatial Practice, guest editor, artist Alan Ruiz invited contributors to examine the ongoing legacy of neoliberalism and the cultural production it engenders, specifically focusing on the relation between bodies and the built environment. Contributors have explored the contexts and histories in which we dwell, create, and coexist to interrogate how space is produced both as material and ideology during the hyper-development and hyper-exploitation of the urban environment, predominantly in New York City. Spatial Practice asks: how does this impact the bodies that labor and move to keep the kinetic machine of “progress” moving? Contributions offer multiple perspectives—through a variety of genres—on the ways in which the political project of neoliberalism has, in part, shaped the designation and use of public space as well as enthroned the philanthropic class and the cultural institutions associated with them. Alongside the consolidation of wealth and power, neoliberalism’s underlying insistence on individualism has also reinforced and normalized the braided conditions of capitalist exploitation, structural racism, and patriarchal domination. Unraveling this logic allows us to collectively imagine alternatives to the prevailing systems of property, dispossession, ableism, and incarceration that parcelize existence.

Contributions from:

Critical Resistance, Alan Ruiz, Lluís Alexandre, Casanovas Blanco, Julie Tolentino and Sadia Shirazi, Kaegan Sparks, Martha Rosler, Suzanne Stephens, Joshua Lubin-Levy, Lo-Yi Chan and Tim Hartung, Olive McKeon, Alice Sheppard, Biba Bell, Erik Thurmond, BRANDT : HAFERD, V. Mitch McEwen and Olivier Tarpaga, Sarah Oppenheimer, Jimmy Robert and Mario Gooden, Dominic Cullinan, Angela Davis J. Bouey and Melanie Greene, Lisa Nelson, Diana Crum, Kristopher, K.Q. Pourzal, Jess Barbagallo, John Hoobyar and Simon Asencio, Layla Zami, Cristiane Bouger, Daria Faïn and Marjana Krajač, Germaine Acogny, Helmut Vogt and André Zachery, Milka Djordevich and Tim Reid, Melanie Maar.

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