Books

¶#3 consists of texts and images found on the online collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia, BIC pen drawings by Kim David Bots and the poem The Mental Traveller by William Blake. ¶#3 is assembled by Kim David Bots, designed by Tjobo Kho, edited by Jan-Pieter ‘t Hart and published in an edition of 150 by OUTLINE in May 2022. 

In what ways have women artists come together to investigate their own image? This publication delves into histories of feminist and queer collective practice, expanding on the various ways women claim agency of their identity, via collaborations that connect intergenerational and far-away friendships. Each chapter features artistic and theoretical case studies that discuss images produced by women artists, about women artists; proposing that to gaze upon someone represented with care and autonomy provides more affirmative ways to relate to ourselves. It discovers that to pay homage to overlooked knowledge of women artists builds a case for the artist as researcher. Only by engaging in both roles can we unveil what is not taught in the mainstream and inspire a more inclusive, generous future.

Each aspect of the book’s design is a collaborative endeavour, expanding the notion of individual authorship. It is with this sentiment that creating the publication became research in itself, via collaboration with both direct peers and an extended genealogy.

“Women Looking at Women Looking at Women” is designed by Marijn van der Leeuw, Esther Vane, India Scrimgeour, Hannah Williams and Annemarie Wadlow.

Annemarie Wadlow (1993, UK) is a research-led artist working between moving image, writing and photography. Her work explores the middle ground between image and imagination, questioning notions of inheritance, personal identity and belonging. She is the co-founder of Nice Flaps, an artist initiative that hosts experimental life drawing sessions.

Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies is an ongoing transdisciplinary artistic research, which encompasses the spectrum of experiences and practices that Anne Juren has developed as a choreographer, dancer and Feldenkrais practitioner. Her interest in anatomy and somatic practices grew out of multiple shoulder dislocations. The last dislocation happened in 2014 and, in retrospect, it functioned as a catalyst for this PhD and as one of its main methodologies. With the notion of “anatomies”, the interest sits more in operations on the body, than defining the body itself.

McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York's thriving queer rave scene, showing how raving to techno is an art and technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept, but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them.

Contents
1. Rave as Practice 
2. Xeno-euphoria 
3. Ketamine Femmunism 
4. Enlustment 
5. Resonant Abstraction 
6. Excessive Machine 

"How to write a book about raving as a practice that practices rave? From k-nights spent on Brooklyn's and Berlin's junkspace dance floors, McKenzie Wark abstracts a life practice of ressociation in a dance of autoconceptualization and allotheorization. In crossing toward the stranger's gift of 'letting go of ourselves as private property, ' Raving is nothing less than Wark's femmunist manifesto, her tractatus on techno's blackness, her treatise for a twenty-first-century trans ethics."—Kodwo Eshun

Catalog is a serial publication about cataloging, written by Lieven Lahaye and designed by Ott Metusala. This is Catalog issue 22, 'Beard. Man. Jug. Rubble. Woman. Vessel', it's part of a sub-series on near invisibility.

Dear Friend is a monthly letter format publication covering design events, issues, and ideas. This publication distributed via snail mail is initiated by Sandra Nuut and Ott Kagovere.

The publication edited by Sandra Nuut & Ott Kagovere features all the letters from the Dear Friend publishing project, which they initiated at the Graphic Design Department of the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2018. The book includes contributions by Singapore-based design writer Justin Zhuang, designer and writer Else Lagerspetz, and artist Lieven Lahaye. The book is designed by Ott Kagovere and published by Lugemik and Estonian Academy of Arts.

Texts by Justin Zhuang, Lieven Lahaye, Else Lagerspetz

Letters written by Alicia Ajayi, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, Claudia Doms, Nell Donkers, Maarin Ektermann, Rosen Eveleigh, Maryam Fanni, Saara Hannus, Eik Hermann, Paul John, Maria Juur, Ott Kagovere, Maarja Kangro, Arja Karhumaa, Kristina Ketola Bore, Nicole Killian, Rachel Kinbar, Tuomas Kortteinen, Keiu Krikmann, Kadri Laas, Else Lagerspetz, Lieven Lahaye, James Langdon, Jungmyung Lee, Kai Lobjakas, Michelle Millar Fisher, Maria Muuk, Sheere Ng, Sandra Nuut, Laura Pappa, Jack Self, Indrek Sirkel, Paul Soulellis, Triin Tamm, Laura Toots, Alice Twemlow, Loore Viires, Sean Yendrys, Justin Zhuang

Catalog is a serial publication about cataloging, written by Lieven Lahaye and designed by Ott Metusala. This is Catalog #14, printed by Colorama on the occasion of ‘Books on Books’ — a week-long event on the topic of publishing and collecting, hosted by Anna Bergquist, Johanna Maierski and Kathrin Schömer. Berlin, August 2017.

Catalog is a serial publication about cataloging, written by Lieven Lahaye and designed by Ott Metusala. This is Catalog issue 20, ‘Hard Sun’, it’s part of a sub-series on near invisibility. Images in this Catalog were produced by exposure: to the sunlight of Athens, Brussels and Tallinn, and to the heat inside a Berlin apartment, between September 2021 and May 2022. Published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Penny in the Fountain’ at VBKÖ, Vienna in July 2022.

Catalog is a serial publication about cataloging written by Lieven Lahaye and designed by Ott Metusala. This is Catalog issue 21, ‘Impressed’, it’s part of a sub-series on near invisibility. Published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Dear Friend’ at EKA Gallery, Tallinn in September 2022. This issue of Catalog was produced during a residency period at Air Berlin Alexanderplatz, May-August 2022.

Long awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman’s Bad Education proposes a queerness without positive identity—a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order takes shape.

Like Blackness, woman, incest, and sex, queerness, as Edelman explains it, designates the antagonism, the structuring negativity, preventing that order from achieving coherence. But when certain types of persons get read as literalizing queerness, the negation of their negativity can seem to resolve the social antagonism and totalize community.

By translating the nothing of queerness into the something of “the queer,” the order of meaning defends against the senselessness that undoes it, thus mirroring, Edelman argues, education’s response to queerness: its sublimation of irony into the meaningfulness of a world. Putting queerness in relation to Lacan’s “ab-sens” and in dialogue with feminist and Afropessimist thought, Edelman reads works by Shakespeare, Jacobs, Almodóvar, Lemmons, and Haneke, among others, to show why queer theory’s engagement with queerness necessarily results in a bad education that is destined to teach us nothing.

The 9th HOOT pops up for the winter 2022-23, but the conception of this issue started well over a year ago at our beloved Plage Avant (Traduttore, traditore’s studio, Marseille). 

We met Sophie T. Lvoff at many openings and art related events in Marseille these last few years, having a practice that appears mainly as photography, Gufo got curious about all the processes that she uses which involve sound, installation, writing… and more. She welcomed us in her studio of the city of Marseille where she recently settled.

We found out about the “trompe-l’œil” of this iconic checkered table, witnessed the installations of translucid and colored objects evolving on the sunny wall, and looked through her photographic chamber it’s called a large-format camera, but this is funny… For this issue, Sophie suggested to interview another artist, Moyra Davey, who also works in photography and writing, and appeared to have shared experiences too.

The topics of everyday life, intimacy that images embody in both their works, take another dimension as soon as their thoughts, voices and writing expand and express the entirety of their gestures.

This issue is the first interview between two native English-speaking artists, who have ties to the French language from childhood.

The penpals are the main characters of that encounter where we are very welcome to join in their very generous conversations. This is only an excerpt of a long and well referenced correspondence.

« La société n’existe pas » : la formule de l’ancienne Première ministre britannique Margaret Thatcher est restée célèbre. On connaît moins ses ramifications en images, de la guerre civile anglaise du XVIIe siècle jusqu’à l’art contemporain en passant par la culture populaire en Grande-Bretagne. De photographies en affiches, de manuscrits en frontispices, ce livre traverse l’histoire pour cerner les échos visuels du thatchérisme. Son point de départ est une pièce de l’artiste Jeremy Deller : la reconstitution d’une bataille ouvrière entre mineurs grévistes et policiers survenue en 1984. Maxime Boidy en extrait une série de scènes qui sont autant d’infléchissements de l’idée de « corps politique ». Ce faisant, il dessine la discrète et brûlante actualité de ces formes symboliques, à l’heure de la guerre civile qu’a imposé le thatchérisme globalisé.

Maxime Boidy est enseignant-chercheur en études visuelles. Il s’intéresse principalement à l’histoire des savoirs de l’image et à l’iconographie politique sous toutes ses formes.

Dans son atelier, qui est aussi son salon, Frances Stark se demande si elle ne serait pas devenue une Femme au foyer. Elle observe avec amusement et lassitude les artistes hommes qu’elle associe à la figure des Architectes parce qu’ils séparent production artistique et activité ménagère, art et décoration et qu’ils ont la chance de pouvoir quitter l’espace domestique pour aller créer ailleurs.

Frances Stark réfléchit à son expérience quotidienne, la mêlant à des réflexions sur des habitations construites par R.M. Schindler et Jorge Pardo, l’essai Critique comme artiste d’Oscar Wilde, le livre Une chambre à soi de Virginia Woolf ainsi que des déclarations de Daniel Buren, d’Adolf Loos, d’Otto Weininger, ou encore de Ludwig Wittgenstein. Elle livre ainsi ses pensées, vives et sagaces, sur les espaces d’exposition, les maisons, les chambres à coucher, les coussins décoratifs, en prenant aussi en compte les couples hommes-femmes qui les utilisent, s’y rencontrent, s’y unissent et s’y séparent.

Une récente enquête menée dans les écoles d’art et de design francophones aboutit à un constat étonnant : beaucoup d’étudiante·s affirment que l’artisanat est l’avenir de l’art et que les sorcières détruiront le patriarcat. Iels s’approprient un imaginaire composite mêlant fantasy et moines copistes, herboristerie médiévale et communalisme. Dans le même temps, des slogans en latin sont tagués sur les murs par de jeunes révolutionnaires. Des remèdes au capitalisme pourraient-ils se trouver dans le monde qui précéda son avènement ? Pour sonder cet imaginaire politique et artistique construit sur un passé lointain, Clovis Maillet et Thomas Golsenne analysent des œuvres contemporaines, des sources médiévales et la pensée de Silvia Federici et William Morris qui, chacun·e à leur endroit, proposent une vision du Moyen Âge émancipatrice.

Maître de conférences en histoire de l’art et études visuelles à l’Université de Lille, ancien directeur de l’unité de recherche Bricologie à la Villa Arson à Nice, Thomas Golsenne a publié Carlo Crivelli et le matérialisme mystique du Quattrocento (2017).

Professeur·e d’histoire et théorie des arts dans les écoles d’art d’Angers et de Genève, Clovis Maillet est aussi artiste performeur·euse en duo avec Louise Hervé et médiéviste. Iel est l’auteur·ice du livre Les Genres fluides : de Jeanne d'Arc aux saintes trans (2020).

Lorsqu’Allen Ginsberg s’enregistre sur un magnétophone et capte fortuitement des émissions de radio, le souffle du vent et des conversations, des agents du FBI et de la CIA l’écoutent, à la recherche d’aveux involontaires. En considérant ces agents comme de sérieux théoriciens de la poésie, Lytle Shaw montre qu’ils s’inspirent des expérimentations d’avant-garde et transforment une technique libératrice en un outil répressif.

Lytle Shaw enseigne la littérature à l’Université de New York. Il a publié Frank O’Hara : The Poetics of Coterie en 2006 (University of Iowa Press) et Fieldworks : From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics en 2013 (University of Alabama). En 2021, est paru New Grounds for Dutch Landscape (OEI).

Un hôpital où un corps est connecté à un dispositif médical. Un pré faussement idyllique sous lequel grouillent des câbles. Des rivages où des formes oscillent entre ensevelissement et immersion. Dans Désolation, Verity Spott propose une poésie fantasmagorique entre narration, prose et dialogues. L’expression des sentiments bouleverse les attributions des pronoms personnels et les structures syntaxiques. Des identités changeantes prennent à partie les politiques d’austérité et les voix d’extrême droite. Livre de deuil et d’amour qui frôle la satire, Désolation travaille une écriture hybride où s’entrelacent la poésie lyrique, des images tirées de blockbusters et le langage des démagogues pour contrer les moules qui tenteraient de dicter la forme de nos chagrins.

Verity Spott vit à Brighton, écrit de la poésie et fait des performances. Ses derniers livres comprennent Click Away Close Door Say (Contraband Books, 2017) et le recueil de ses Coronelles (Veer Books, 2021).

Craig Owens (1950-1990) a bouleversé la théorie de l’art en une décennie d’intense travail. À la fin des années 1970, aux États-Unis, il s’engage dans l’aventure intellectuelle postmoderne, en quête d’alternatives à un discours moderniste cramponné aux problèmes formels. Owens se penche sur des pratiques artistiques conçues à la croisée des médiums, comme celles de Robert Smithson ou de Trisha Brown. Lecteur des philosophes poststructuralistes, il soutient que les oeuvres se composent de signes ouverts à l’interprétation. Owens place ainsi les spectateur·ices au premier plan, tout en apportant une inscription théorique inédite aux performances de Laurie Anderson et aux oeuvres postconceptuelles de Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine ou Martha Rosler. Attentif au genre des artistes et inspiré par des réflexions sur le pouvoir du regard masculin, Owens écrit ensuite sur le féminisme et la domination. Ses essais prennent une tonalité sociale et politique. Ils touchent aussi à des questions ouvertes par les études postcoloniales. Autant de recherches interrompues par le sida, dont Owens meurt en 1990. 

Ce recueil, établi, introduit et traduit par Gaëtan Thomas, permet de suivre les expérimentations d’une oeuvre portée par une réflexivité exceptionnelle.

Gaëtan Thomas est historien (médialab Sciences Po, Paris). Il a établi le recueil Pictures: S’approprier la photographie, New York 1979-2014 (Le Point du Jour, 2016) qui rassemble des textes de Douglas Crimp.

Lesson on Gravity is a slice of Anne Juren’s ongoing artistic research into ‘fantasmical anatomies’. ‘What happens when our sense of ground, orientation and support is lost? What are the risk and the promise of detaching ourselves from the pull of gravity?’ As this apocryphal Feldenkrais lesson embraces moments of intrusion and fragmentation, poetry and flights of fancy, it shows how language is alive, embodied and liquid. It also invites the reader to treat the book itself as a body, an unruly tongue sticking somewhere in its folds and creases

Anne Juren is a choreographer, dancer and Feldenkrais practitioner. In 2021 she finished her PhD at Stockholm University of the Arts with the project Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
First edition, March 2023
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

A provocative, highly accessible journey to the heart of Sophocles' Antigone elucidating why it keeps resurfacing as a central text of Western thought and Western culture.

"Zupančič writes with rare lucidity and patience for exposition, helped along by a talent for turning peculiar phrases or seemingly senseless jokes into full-blown insights. Her ideas are fresh, as if they hailed from some open air beyond the clutter of current theoretical quarrels. This brilliant account of Antigone breaks new ground for philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political and feminist theory."—Joan Copjec, Brown University

There is probably no classical text that has inspired more interpretation, critical attention, and creative response than Sophocles' A ntigone. What is it about the figure of Antigone that keeps haunting us? To what kind of always contemporary contradiction does the need, the urge to reread and reimagine Antigone—in all kinds of contexts and languages—correspond?  

The violence in Antigone is the opposite of "graphic" as we have come to know it in movies and in the media; rather, it is sharp and piercing, it goes straight to the bone. It is the violence of language, the violence of principles, the violence of desire, the violence of subjectivity. From this question of violence, the author turns to questions of funerary rites and of the relation of Antigone's singularizing claims to her universal appeal. What, Zupančič asks, does this particular (Oedipal) family's misfortune, of which Antigone chooses to be the guardian, share with the general condition of humanity? This forces us to confront the seemingly self-evident question: "What is incest?"  

Let Them Rot is Alenka Zupančič's absorbing guided tour of the philosophical and psychoanalytic issues arising from the Theban trilogy. Her original and surprising account illuminates the play's ongoing relevance and invites a wide readership to become captivated by its themes.  

Alenka Zupančič is Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School and a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her books include What IS Sex?, The Odd One In: On Comedy, and Ethics of the Real.

A young filmmaker’s life is disrupted by a fated encounter with a Peruvian healer. Called to twin paths of artistic creation and mystic truth-seeking, they set out on a transcontinental journey. In the Pacific Northwest they meet K, a double agent working between art and technology, who invites them to test a secret program called Shaman.AI. This human-machine experiment, rooted in magic, produces a key to rewriting reality – a manifesto describing how entangled human and non-human intelligence will remake our technologies, identities and deepest beliefs.

Allado-McDowell (along with their AI writing partner GPT-3) weave fiction, memoir, theory and travelogue into an animist cybernetics – an air age blueprint. 

Cover art by Somnath Bhatt

When we practice becoming with another’s experience, we practice empathy. When we embody collectiveness, we understand ourselves as a whole and therefore feel no separation. What would it be like to inhabit a body without limits or definition? Which words and meanings make us feel like “non-animals”? The literary genre of xeno fiction proposes an exercise of ethological research and imagination, placing our body inside another’s perspective. This publication convenes writers and non-writers that have experimented with animal embodiment to create literary works and visual interpretations that explore different ways to experience “otherness.” In this volume of the Making Kin series, we focus on non-human animals and hybrid bodies.

Authors: Zoë De Luca Legge, Esther Merinero, Eva Piay, John Kazior, Jorge de la Cruz, Marianne Hoffmeister Castro , Luca E. Lum, Anonymous, Paula Proaño Mesías, Laura Dominguez Valdivieso, Adèle Grégorie, Morgan Wood

The second volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against, acting for better work conditions in the visual arts and against all forms of discrimination.

We Know What Remains Unsaid presents research on the mechanisms of invisibilisation of precarious realities and activist knowledges. It investigates what our silences and the unsaid reveal. By giving a voice to several researchers, activists and collectives, this volume records silent words, forgotten stories, invisible struggles and thus makes possible the construction of alternative common narratives.

Wages For Wages Against (WFWA, wfwa.ch) is a a militant collective and a campaign for the fair remuneration of artists in Switzerland, better work conditions, and an alternative economy of the arts.

Edited by Tiphanie Blanc and Ramaya Tegegne.

Contributions by Gufo, Tiphanie Blanc, Johana Blanc, L'eau à la Butch, Tiziri Kandi, Noémi Michel, Olga Rozenblum.

Graphic Design: Roxane Maillet.

This artist's book is the achievement of the Ka Kualmaku project conducted in 2018 during a residency of Marc Buchy in Colombia, in Lugar A Dudas, during which the artist began to learn Namtrik, said to be a disappearing language. The book restores this learning as a Namtrik-French language guide.

Elegant in exposition, vast in implication, this groundbreaking work of ecological philosophy compellingly argues the necessity for restoring humanity's lost connections with the sensuous world. Drawing on disciplines as diverse as phenomenology and sleight-of-hand magic, Abram explains how the processes readers think of as "mental" actually derive from a deeply physical interaction with the rest of nature.