An experimental novella about the bounds of the self and the many forms of embodied expression.

Where does your body end and the world begin? How do you locate the limit between your self and others? A Rock, A River, A Street follows a young, Black woman who lives at the hazy border between Brooklyn and Queens in the not so distant present. As she rides the subway, walks around her neighborhood, visits the doctor, watches movies, attends dance class and tries to heal her body, we are brought into her conflicted relationship with language, as she recalls formative experiences from her childhood and absorbs the world around her. Acutely conscious of the soft, responsive nature of her physical self, and pushed and pulled by forces she cannot control, the narrator is vulnerable, terrifyingly open. Everything and everyone leaves an impression. Brooklyn-based artist Steffani Jemison (born 1981) moves deftly across narrative genres and styles in this novella, as she interrogates the boundedness of the self, the possibilities of plurality and the limits of performance.

¶#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. 

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

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.

A previously unpublished anthology of classic texts from Something Else Press, assembled in the 1970s by Dick Higgins, with works by John Cage, Al Hansen, Claes Oldenburg and many more.

Conceived by poet, publisher, artist, composer and writer Dick Higgins (1938-98) in the early 1970s to celebrate Something Else Press--the legendary publishing company he founded in 1963 to showcase Fluxus and other experimental artists--this volume, which was never realized in Higgins' lifetime, collects an amazing array of 1960s avant-garde creativity. Something Else Press published some of the most radical art and literature of its time and provided a foundation and template for the artist's book medium, which has flourished internationally since the 1960s.

The Reader features selections from rare and out-of-print Something Else classics such as Claes Oldenburg's Store Days; John Cage's Notations; Emmett Williams' An Anthology of Concrete Poetry; Richard Kostelanetz's Breakthrough Fictioneersanthology; Jackson Mac Low's pioneering poetry collection, Stanzas for Iris Lezak; Gertrude Stein's Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein; Bern Porter's I've Left; Wolf Vostell's Dé-coll/age Happenings; Al Hansen's A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art; and other pamphlets and artist projects for the page by Robert Filliou, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alison Knowles, Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, Daniel Spoerri, André Thomkins and Richard Meltzer, among others. A critical checklist/bibliography assembled by Hugh Fox and Higgins' introduction from 1973 completes the original manuscript.

This new edition of Faux Pas, the acclaimed collection of writings by Amy Sillman, comes as an expanded edition, with the addition of new essays, including recent texts on Paul Cézanne, Carolee Schneemann, Elizabeth Murray and Louise Fishman. The previously unpublished text from a lecture on drawing complements Sillman's views on color and shape. New drawings from 2020-22 include a selection of works on paper that were part of the artist's installation at the 59th International Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, in 2022.

Since the 1970s, Sillman, a beloved and key figure of the New York art scene, has developed a singular body of work that includes large-scale gestural paintings blending abstraction with representation, as well as zines and iPad animations.

Over the past decade, Sillman has also produced stimulating essays on the practice of art or the work of other artists: for example, reevaluating the work of the abstract expressionists with a queer eye; elaborating on the role of awkwardness and the body in the artistic process; and discussing in depth the role and meanings of color and shape. Featuring a foreword by Lynne Tillman, Faux Pas gathers a significant selection of Sillman's essays, reviews and lectures, accompanied by drawings, most of them made specially for the book.

Faux Pas aims at revealing the coherence and originality of Sillman's reflection, as she addresses the possibilities of art today, favoring excess over good taste, wrestling over dandyism, forms over symbols, with as much critical sense as humor.

Based in New York City, Amy Sillman (born 1955) is an artist whose work consistently combines the visceral with the intellectual. She began to study painting in the 1970s at the School of Visual Arts and she received her MFA from Bard College in 1995. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial in 2014 and the Venice Biennale in 2022; her writing has appeared in Bookforum and Artforum, among other publications. She is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York.

Telling Invents Told is the first collection of writings by artist and filmmaker Lis Rhodes.

It includes the influential essay Whose History? alongside texts from works such as Light Reading, Pictures on Pink Paper and A Cold Draft, together with new and previously unpublished materials. Since the 1970s, Rhodes has been making radical and experimental work that challenges hegemonic narratives and the power structures of language. Her writing addresses urgent political issues – from the refugee crisis to workers’ rights, police brutality, racial discrimination and homelessness – as well as film history and theory, from a feminist perspective.

An important figure at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, Rhodes was also a founding member of Circles, the first British distributor of film, video and performance by women artists.

Fanzine de poésie à tendance médiévo-queer et son assortiment de goodies: encart BD et planche de stickers.

Avec : 
@trobairitz_lactans @guillaumeseyller @matricule.mouche @ricardoakajohan
@sarahkorzec @constanceburgerleenhardt #HaroldBarme @touche_moulin #GraceGrenadine @estelle.coppolani @ninoa.andre @annesarah_huet @selibkide

Gossiping is Not (Just) Bitching is a zine transcribing a performance revolving around the clichés attributed to gossip, addressing the oppression exerted on women and queer voices. Informal discussions, defined as futile, are discredited as marginal, practised by people who don’t always have access to public speech. The performance deconstructs different uses of gossip, exploring its political significance through the interpretation of sources from sociology, literature, chick-flicks and reality TV. 

More images at
https://aurianepreudhomme.com/gossiping-is-not-just-bitching-artist-book-2022/

A collaborative artist's book of musical scores based on Norwegian knitting patterns.

For Identity Pitches, artists Cory Arcangel (born 1978) and Stine Janvin (born 1985) have composed conceptual music scores based on the knitting patterns for traditional Norwegian sweaters known as Lusekofte. Utilizing three of the most popular designs (Setesdal, Fana and the eight-petal rose of Selbu) of this ubiquitous garment, Janvin creates scores for both solo and ensemble performers by mapping the knitting patterns onto the harmonic and subharmonic series and integrating the tuning principles of traditional Norwegian instruments. These scores are further manipulated by Arcangel using a custom "deep-fried" coding script to create a series of image glitches.
A foreword and an interview between the two artists, both based in Stavanger, Norway, provide context for the work, delving into the history of Norwegian folk music tunings and the Lusekofte sweater and their intersection with the cultural identity of the country over the last millennium.

The artist book Amanda is greatly inspired by “Tradeswomen” quarterly magazine for women in blue-collar work, published in the 1980’s and 1990’s in the United States. Amanda is similarly thought as a periodical dealing with the subjects of technology and industry from a feminist (not solely female) angle. The first issue contains fiction stories of an emancipatory character, citing trade associations, oil industry in Iran and ghosts of the printer feeders.

The publication is made in the framework of The Building Institute, an experimental organisation aiming to strengthen the position of femmes builders in the domain of technical construction work. Amanda brings together literary texts by Maria Toumazou, Samantha McCulloch, Sepideh Karami and Madeleine Morley, combining fiction stories with visual artwork. 

Olga Micińska is a visual artist currently living in Amsterdam. Graduated from the MA Art Praxis program at the Dutch Art Institute and holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Also trained as a woodworker, collaborates with craft studios of various domains. Recently she has initiated The Building Institute.

The Building Institute (TBI) is an experimental platform aiming to emancipate the undermined knowledges dwelling in the craft domains, and to unpack diverse questions related to technology and the means of production. TBI combines art’s speculative competences with the grounded practice of manual labor, manifesting its objectives through educational activities, exhibitions, and publications.

Afternoon Editions no. 3: Language is a map of failures. Messy thoughts on reading, writing and dressing up by Runa Borch Skolseg.

In May 2019, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine relocated its base to the Oslo Biennale headquarters in Myntgata, with a room of its own and ongoing activities. Runa Borch Skolseg visited the space at several occasions before its final closure, in 2021. Her invitation to write for the Afternoon Editions bridges the move from one room to another, and is a reflection on how fashion can be a world of fantasy, and drama, a language we all communicate through. With a personal narrative she makes readings of clothes, literature and writing, and how they merge and enrich each other.

‘Human beings embody whatever they meet, and it’s all there when you work whether you want it there or not.’ Practice is like the dust that accumulates, and revisiting fragments of essays and talks on choreography Jonathan Burrows ended up embracing the haphazard and the mess, moments of unfocus and focus, harnessing them in pithy formulations and scores, adding room and punctuation and line breaks in the process so readers can hear the rhythm as he writes his dance on writing dance.

Jonathan Burrows is a choreographer, who has worked for many years in collaboration with the composer Matteo Fargion, with whom he continues to create and perform work. He is the author of A Choreographer’s Handbook (Routledge, 2010) and is currently an Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

A day can be a composition not unlike an essay. Full of possibilities, full of limitations, bound by universal structures and marked by idiosyncratic desires. You go on walks. You read. You do your chores. All the while memory and other forms of imagination keep time with you. Books are strange companions; writing is a lonely thing rich with consolations.

Certain Things is a text by Claudia La Rocco, created with and through ideas such as these.

Published September 2022.

The volume is an epistolary narrative produced via text message with a community of anonymous correspondents. Following on from a performative work, conceived by Simon Asencio, this book stages a relation between two protagonists, U and I. Through identitarian slips and glyphs, the book explores the narrative ambiguities of experimental writing, to generate a space for fluidity and uncertainty, at the intersection of the artistic and the literary.

Edited by Lilou Vidal

Dear reader,
These words are the premises of a correspondence between you and I. It will carry on for some a few days or a few months, it's up to you-just tell me if you want ti bring this to an end. One part of this story has ended on April 19th, 2020. Another part continues within these bound pages.

U and I don't jnow each other: two letters standing in for two characters in a story yet to be narreted.

You will remain forever the riddle, an address to the unknown: I will be writing to U, unknowing of who stands behind this U (after all you could be so many), unknowing of where you stand when reading these words, unknowing of how these words might coalesce with the life that forges your sense of self daily.

In my case this I might not necessarily stand for one self either, yet I will account for all of these selves.

I hope this masquerade will allow us to get closer. To long for and attend to each other without assuming our otherness.

I do not expect any answers. Yet if you do, I promise it will remain between U and I.

I look forward x

+32 485 837 930

Simon Asencio (Toulouse, 1988) uses imposture and the expression of doubt to create performances that question the notions of liveness, stage and audience. The publication of this book results from the exhibition This Is My Body, My Body Is Your Body, My Body Is the Body of the Word, curated by Lilou Vidal, at Le Delta, Namur (BE); in partnership with Le Delta, Namur, with the support of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles.

‘Kamer I - Oesters’ is een kort verhaal geschreven in het kader van het kunstproject Beste Anna,. Hierin fungeert de figuur van de openlijk lesbische Rotterdamse schrijfster Anna Blaman als motor voor vragen, gesprekken en correspondenties rondom feminisme, schrijvende vrouwen en de canon, anders zijn, eenzaamheid en vriendschap.

Ook verkent Katinka met dit onderzoek Anna Blaman als personage voor een toekomstige roman. In ‘Kamer I - Oesters’ betreedt de hoofdpersoon Anna’s met een rolkoffer vol boeken van andere schrijvers, fluistert ze hun woorden in de kieren in Anna’s muren en verleidt ze Anna met een pauwendans.

Anna Blaman (1905-1960) was openlijk lesbisch, in die tijd een groot taboe, maar zag zichzelf niet als voorvechter van een beweging. Een belangrijk thema in haar werk is de vraag of we een ander werkelijk kunnen kennen. De personages in haar romans zijn vaak alleen en verlangen naar een ander, die altijd onbereikbaar blijft. In 1948 publiceerde Blaman de roman Eenzaam Avontuur, die erg veel stof op deed waaien vanwege enkele (homo-)erotische personages die in het boek voorkomen. 

Child’s Replay is a hallucinatory homecoming. As we follow THE CHILD in a series of private re-enactments, the present self is revealed as the past’s fragile construction. Pursuing the banality of trauma, a first-person character juxtaposes childhood events with internal misrepresentations, reflections on the emotional toll of migration, psychoanalytic theory, Brazilian history, and literary criticism. An exploration of the impact that language and fiction have on real bodies, Child’s Replay assembles a hybrid portrait of memory and anti-memory. 

This publication is limited to 100 copies, which are signed and numbered by the author. 

Reader is the first anthology to gather Constance DeJong’s diverse body of writing. Spanning from the 1980s to the present, the publication features eighteen works by DeJong, including out-of-print and previously unpublished fiction, as well as texts emanating from her new media sculptures, sound works, video works, and public art commissions.

An influential figure of the 1970s and ’80s downtown New York writing and performance scene, Constance DeJong has channeled time and language as mediums in her work for the last four decades, expanding the possibilities of narrative form and literary genre. From the earliest work collected here—a manuscript of DeJong’s 1982 prose text I.T.I.L.O.E.—to the digital project Nightwriters (2017-18), Reader assembles a range of experimental texts by the artist. The volume includes such works as the 2013 publication and performance, SpeakChamber and the script for Relatives (1988), a duet between a television and a performer made in collaboration with artist Tony Oursler. Never-before-published works including texts created for re-engineered vintage radios, aphorisms commissioned for a Times Square digital billboard, and transcripts for sound works originally installed along the Thames and Hudson rivers are also featured in the book.

Taken together, these works showcase how DeJong has helped define and push the boundaries of language in the visual and performing arts. The artist’s sustained exploration of language blurs the lines between many fields, and DeJong’s work has also had a long life in the literary world. In the late 1970s, she self-published the critically acclaimed novel Modern Love on her short-lived Standard Editions imprint. On the 40th anniversary of the novel’s original publication, the book was published in facsimile form by Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse, and has gone on to sell over 10,000 copies since its release in 2017.

Constance DeJong is a New York-based artist who has exhibited and performed internationally. Her work has been presented at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in New York at the Dia Art Foundation; The Kitchen, Thread Waxing Space, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1983 she composed the libretto for Satyagraha, the Philip Glass opera, which has been staged at opera houses worldwide, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York; the Netherlands National Opera, Rotterdam; and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. She has permanent audio-text installations in Beacon, New York; London; and Seattle. DeJong has published several books of fiction, including her celebrated Modern Love (Standard Editions, 1977; Primary Information/Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), I.T.I.L.O.E. (Top Stories, 1983), and SpeakChamber (Bureau, 2013), and her work is included in the anthologies Up is Up, But So is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Science, 1974-1991 (NYU Press, 2006); Blasted Allegories (New Museum/MIT, 1987), and Wild History (Tanam Press, 1985).

—
Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Designer: Freer Studio
Copy editor: Allison Dubinsky

During a residency on Fire Island, artist and writer Hannah Black decided to tackle a highly daunting project: the 2020 novel.

The result of her efforts, Tuesday of September or the End, is a slim, playful work of speculative fiction. Written in the aftermath of the early months of the pandemic and the uprisings of summer 2020, the novel explores the ruptures of the year with a satirical sci-fi bent. Black chronicles the lives of two characters, Bird and Dog, as they contend with rapidly changing political possibilities during the pandemic while the run of Moley Salamanders (i.e. Bernie Sanders) concludes and aliens finally invade earth. Through a galvanic vision of how the riots of 2020 might have turned revolutionary, Black offers a meditation on collective life. This crucial novel invites readers to consider who we are—and, by extension, what we are here for—when our normal referents are muted, deleted and upended.

Hannah Black (born 1981) is a New York-based visual artist, critic and writer from Manchester, England. Her work spans video, text and performance and draws from communist, feminist and Afro-pessimist theory. She is the author of Life (2017, with Juliana Huxtable) and Dark Pool Party (2016). Black is represented by the gallery Arcadia Missa in London and Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin.

FROM THE PROP TO THE INSIDE gathers texts on the concept of the prop—as object, requisite and support—on stage and in the exhibition space. The starting points of this book are objects and installations of the artist Michaela Schweighofer, which deal with the stage as a platform and the sculpture as a prop.

The authors are friends: artists, critics and curators whom she has invited to write a text at the interface of their and her practice. The contributions within take on multiple forms; letters, essays and interviews—they are intended to create a theoretical-subjective anthology that makes visible the phenomena of the private as symptoms of the structural, as well as to provide a direct insight into contemporary artistic creation.

Text: Juliane Bischoff, Veronika Eberhart, Cornelia Lein, Cathrin Mayer, Gianna Virgina Prein, Agnieszka Roguski, Juliane Saupe, Michaela Schweighofer & Chloe Stead

German/English

A collection of writings by Alina Popa and Florin Flueras written over a seven-year period.

Unsorcery composes and explores ways of sorcery that can eventually surpass or undo some of the contemporary realities and subjectivities. It is an Artworld involved in a productive alienation from concepts through experience and from experience through thought. Unsorcery is an environment in which Alina Popa and Florin Flueras were working together, each following their own path, doing their own practices, texts and performances around the concepts: Life Programming, Artworlds, Black Hyperbox, Second Body, Dead Thinking, End Dream.

New expanded edition of the book first published in 2019.

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

Florin Flueras (born 1978 in Târgu Mureș, Romania) oscillates between contemporary performance, visual arts and theory as contexts in which he activates.

Tense is a never-realised publication, written and composed by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns in 1984, that only now has been released in a very limited run on our imprint. The book accompanied the exhibition Top Stories, which took a closer look at the 29 issues of the prose periodical with the same title, founded in the late 1970s by Anne Turyn.

Top Stories was dedicated to fiction by emerging women artists and writers from that time. Tense was originally intended to become part of the series as well, but never made it to print. It was only recently – during the making of the exhibition at Amsterdam’s Kunstverein – that the original mock-up was retrieved from the editor’s archives and finally sent off to the printer.