Beyond Conceptual Art

The artist’s book ‘#GIVEPOETRYATRYCOLLECTEDPOETRY1990-2020…’ features thirty years of Karl Holmqvist’s artist’s writing in the form of spoken word and concrete poetry, together with signature “cover versions” of lyrics from singer-songwriters such as Robyn and Taylor Swift. The book’s tightly written A4 format pages and cardboard-box-brown no-nonsense cover has been designed in a collaborative effort between the artist and designer Dan Solbach.

‘#GIVEPOETRYATRYCOLLECTEDPOETRY1990-2020…’ Karl Holmqvist’s artist’s book of collected poetry is published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König on the occasion of projects at the Fridericianum, Kassel and gta exhibitions, ETH Zurich.

Jack Smith presented his performance Irrational Landlordism of Bagdad as part of the Cologne Art Fair fringe in the summer of 1977. Many other events were documented photographically and can now be found in the Cologne Art Fair archives - not so Smith's performance.

This book shows him in his fair stall and during his performance for the first time. The pictures are perfect documents of a completely eccentric transaction by this pioneering director and performance artist.

Past Words is three books in one: a collection of previously published texts and two exhibition-like experiments: A Year with Prem Krishnamurthy at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and Endless Exhibition at the Kunsthal Gent. These parts are iinterconnected but distinct, not least because each is designed by a different designer—Ann Richter, David Knowles, Mark Foss & Valentijn Goethals. Together, they chart the past—and future—of a peripatetic performance of a practice, taking stock of a fifteen-year period through writing, a medium that 1s both primary and secondary. This writing is about design, about curating, about exhibition-making, and about how all three are themselves forms of storytelling. They allow us to draft narratives that stand just to the side of accepted realities, to sneak wild ideas into the world with the hope they may—with time—turn into facts. 

Based in Berlin and New York, designer and curator Prem Krishnamurthy (born 1977) is head of the artist group Department of Transformation and of the design consultancy Wkshps. In 2015 he was the recipient of the Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Award for Communication essDesign. As both creator and curator, Krishnamurthy aims to discover “how art & design can be agents of transformation for individuals, communities and institutions.” 

With an introduction by Krist Gruijthuijsen.

A collection of interrelated short stories by Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael. First published in private limited edition, it was intended as a cheap holiday read to titillate and entertain summer visitors to the Mediterranean island of Stromboli, and as a piece of site-specific work; the location of the action and the place in which it is read being the same.

The visual art subsequently generated by Unlawful Assembly includes work by Josephine Pryde, with whom the artists collaborated to produce this second edition’s cover image.

Artistes typographes (Artists as typographers) is a visual corpus that brings together one hundred and thirty-two artists' books collected and reproduced as part of an artistic residency conducted at the Centre des livres d'artistes (Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche). This compilation of images demonstrate the interest of some figures of the art field for the substances of the book object. They show singular compositions and other typographic details: handwritten letters, character designs, stamps, logotypes.

Featuring Jean-Michel Alberola, John Baldessari, Christian Boltanski, Jean-François Bory, Broutin, Pol Bury, Philippe Cazal, Ulises Carrión, Henri Chopin, Claude Closky, Joëlle de la Casinière, herman de vries, Hamish Fulton, Jochen Gerz, Raoul Hausmann, Simone Forti, Paul-Armand Gette, Dick Higgins, Isidore Isou, Joseph Kosuth, Edmund Kuppel, La Monte Young, Pascal Le Coq, Jean Le Gac, Lefevre Jean Claude, Claude Lévêque, Mario Merz, Annette Messager, Jean-Claude Moineau, Matt Mullican, Maurizio Nannucci, Clemente Padín, Dieter Roth, Claude Rutault, Seth Siegelaub, Roman Signer, Harald Szeemann, Ernest T., Ben Vautier, Bernard Villers, Wolf Vostell, Martha Wilson...

Can critical thinking spring from both a fortune cookie and Jacques Lacan’s most obscure seminar footnote? Estelle Hoy says yes. In saké blue, overpriced cheesecakes are the starting point for an essay on art writing; shoplifting in Berlin opens to a reflection on the economies of activist practices; fiction allows us to discuss the legacy of institutional critique, queer mélanges, or quiet melancholy. To her, the story of art becomes more nuanced in light of lyrics by Arthur Russell, the posthumous sorrow of Sylvia Plath, or a poem by Yvonne Rainer.

saké blue gathers critical essays, art reviews, and poetic fiction. Written in dialogue with the work of Martine Syms, Marlene Dumas, Hervé Guibert, or Camille Henrot, these texts combine the subjective and analytic, addressing power relations and the force of affect. Hoy spares nothing—and no one, exposing cultural clichés and urgent political issues through fast-paced acerbity. She advocates the work of women artists, mocks stereotypes, questions myths, and champions desire, sadness, and boredom. Simultaneously beautiful, lyrical, and cutthroat, her writing echoes to the reader like l’esprit d’escalier—we think of the perfect reply just a little too late.

“Estelle Hoy practises philosophy as an unsettled but deeply committed query into existing together. She reads, she looks, she writes, to find out something essential about the future and living for it.”
—Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal

“Estelle Hoy's prose slap and bite, saké blue is a sharp pleasure to read.”
—Calla Henkel, author of Scrap

“Hoy’s renditions of all-too familiar scenes are made more visceral than life with sparkling prose and a sly attention to life’s many shifting values that feels more than appropriate for anyone truly interested in art.”
—Natasha Stagg, author of Artless

Edited by Antonia Carrara
With an introduction by Lisa Robertson

Great is the Power of the Name considers the works of authors Elena Ferrante, Pauline Reáge, Karl Ove Knausgård, Colette and artist Lee Lozano. 

In 2016, when Anne-Mette had invited Signe to take on the role as editor of her text The Institute of Applied Speech, they both began reading Elena Ferrante's The Neapolitan Novels. They were specifically fascinated by the author’s use of pseudonym. Anne-Mette's Institute of Applied Speech was a tale of a fictive place, a pseudo-topos, and Elena Ferrante’s ideas about the pseudonym as a space for the writing itself was useful in thinking about fictive authorship. In a number of written interviews, Elena Ferrante unfolds the feminist perspective of her use of pseudonym. They were attracted by the idea that the author could avoid the biographical question; that she could disappear behind her own writing. 

To them, the artist Lee Lozano is the ghostly presence of hard-core moralist and humorous fuck-off art from another decade. During the course of her life, Lozano continuously reconfigured and gradually dissolved her own name, starting from Leonore Knaster ending up with E. Her work Boycott Women, in which she decides not to have any contact with women, expands the notion of feminist critique. 

Great is the Power of the Name publishes a readership interested in the position of the artist, and how it conditions the way we make art.

This collection of essays celebrates the work of international feminist filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Featuring contributions from leading scholars, filmmakers, essayists and activists, On Feminist Films is the second volume in the South London Cultural Review series. Contributors include: Stuart Bell, Catherine Grant, So Mayer, Louisa Wei, Emma Wilson.