Dreaming Water

The “catalogue dé-raisonné” of all the printed matter produced by the independent publishing house Beau Geste Press, that federated visual poets, neo-Dadaists and international artists affiliated with the Fluxus movement from 1971 to 1976.

The independent publishing house Beau Geste Press (BGP) was founded in 1971 by the Mexican artists' couple Martha Hellion and Felipe Ehrenberg. Together with their two children, they moved into a farmhouse in Devon, in the English countryside, where, joined by a group of friends including the artist and art historian David Mayor, the graphic designer Chris Welch and his partner Madeleine Gallard, they formed 'a community of duplicators, printers, and artisans'.

Beau Geste Press was active until 1976, printing publications by visual poets, neo-Dadaists and international artists affiliated with the Fluxus movement. Specialising in limited-edition artists' books, it published the work of its own members, but also that of many of their colleagues worldwide. In the spirit of cottage industry, Beau Geste Press adapted its methods and scale of production to its needs, keeping all stages, from design and printing to distribution, under the same—bucolic—roof.

Although it operated from the periphery of the main artistic centres of its time, Beau Geste Press was undoubtedly one of the most productive and influential publishing ventures of its generation.

Published by the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux in collaboration with Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite, this reference book surveys the history of the independent publishing house Beau Geste Press (BGP) through the publications of its founding members Felipe Ehrenberg, Martha Hellion, David Mayor and Chris Welch, and of the numerous visitors to its rural outpost from 1971 to 1976. A “catalogue dé-raisonné” of all the printed matter produced by BGP, it is complemented by critical essays and first-hand texts that explore the working methods (economy and autonomy of production, distribution of books via post) and document the international influence of this short-lived “community of duplicators, printers, and artisans”.

Essays by Karen Di Franco, Zanna Gilbert, Polly Gregson, Carmen Juliá, Alice Motard, Mila Waldeck ; original texts by Allen Fisher, Mike Leggett, Clive Phillpot, Cecilia Vicuña.

Editions by Claudio Bertoni, Ulises Carrión, Helen Chadwick, GJ de Rook, Felipe Ehrenberg, Matthias Ehrenberg, Yaël Ehrenberg, Allen Fisher, Ken Friedman, Mick Gibbs, Klaus Groh, Kristján Guðmundsson, Mary Harding, Woody Haut, Jan Hendrix, Jarosław Kozłowski, Myra Landau, Michael Leggett, Rafael López, Raúl Marroquin, Pepe Maya, David Mayor, Anthony McCall, Victor Musgrave, Opal L. Nations, Colin Naylor, Michael Nyman, Ryo & Hiroko Koike, Takako Saito, Carolee Schneemann, Sitting Dog & Co, Endre Tót, Yukio Tsuchiya, Ben Vautier, Cecilia Vicuña, Chris Welch, Hideki Yoshida...

Each book is accompanied by five unprecedented bookmarks.

Poetry as both a form and genre has many possibilities to exist within; however, poetry too often is burdened by the imperative to have an argument and a set of imagery and meanings that are preconceived and placed within the poem. In this way, poetry gets conflated with writing a thesis or project, and the poet simply the presenter of perfectly argued language. When poets attempt to bridge the gap between genres and write within the contemporary essay form, they are tasked to construct perfect arguments there as well and avoid the associative and aesthetic logic that makes poems important. The term essay itself was coined by Michel de Montaigne in the 1500s — it comes from the French word essai, which means to test or experiment with what one knows as a learning tool, and is in partial opposition to the terms we use to discuss the essay now

ESSAYS calls on thinkers and writers to move beyond this linear thinking into the realm of what an essay by someone like Montaigne might do. His essays do as they say they will—they test out ideas, they are unafraid to get messy in their execution, they are brave enough to go forward into the uncharted waters. In them, it’s completely beside the point to get back to where they started, let alone where they’d say they would go. They are simply beside the point. It’s true.

ESSAYS, edited by Dorothea Lasky, is a book of essays on the essay, which enact and query these directives. The volume collects essays by poets Ariel Goldberg, Ken Chen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Brandon Shimoda, Cecilia Vicuña, Fred Moten, and Mónica de la Torre.

First published in 1973, two months after the military coup in Chile, Cecilia Vicuña's SABORAMI is a document of the times and the way in which history can change art. It is filled with the urgent hope that art, too, can change history. Put together when Vicuña was just twenty-five years old, the poems, paintings, and objects of SABORAMI enact a complex and multidimensional conversation. The meanings of the works (which were created over a seven year period) shifted radically after the events of September 11, 1973. Their meanings continue to shift and resonate in light of political events today. This recreation of the original SABORAMI is published with a new afterword Vicuña wrote especially for this edition.

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, visual artist, and filmmaker born in Santiago de Chile. The author of twenty books of poetry, she exhibits and performs widely in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Her multidimensional works begin as a poem, an image or a line that morphs into a film, a song, a sculpture or a collective performance.

This book on the films of Anton Vidokle features essays and conversations by theorists, curators, and artists exploring the themes of technological immortality and resurrection informed by Cosmist philosophy.

Citizens of the Cosmos examines the artist Anton Vidokle's films and the Cosmist philosophy underpinning them. It features essays and conversations with Vidokle by seminal contemporary theorists, curators, and artists: Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Raqs Media Collective. This is the first book to survey Vidokle's Cosmism-related filmic output, begun in 2014, and includes full scripts from the films.

The book's contributors speculate on Vidokle's Cosmist conceptions of technological immortality, utopian resurrection, museology, and space travel, grappling with how these ideas embroil or crystallize contemporary theories, practices, and technologies: atmospheric manipulation, cryonics, biopolitics, extraplanetary prospecting, geo-engineering, transhumanism, genetics.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi disagrees with the Cosmist conjecture of death as a flaw in the conception of the human being. Elizabeth Povinelli digests the life-nonlife mattering of dust through relationships to and from the human and more-than-human ancestors to come.

Boris Groys contemplates the gravitational forces between Cosmism and communism according to cosmic and social orders, grounded as they are in the laws of both physics and socialist politics. Keti Chukhrov considers the formation of thinking through madness, dying, and reasoning according to Cosmist philosophical and religious debates and beliefs.

Raqs Media Collective and Anton Vidokle discuss different cultures of death, finitude, and rituals. Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins examine the in-betweeness of the categories of life and death through the designs of terraforming vehicles navigating interplanetary space travel.

Daniel Muzyczuk investigates Vidokle's interests in the context of the history of the collection at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, while Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle converse about filmmaking references and methods, from voiceover narrative to editing processes.

Edited by Miguel Amado. Contributions by Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Raqs Media Collective, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth A. Povinelli.

Inspired initially by Jerome Rothenberg’s translation Flower World Variations, which Cecilia Vicuña first encountered in 1985, Deer Book brings together nearly forty years of the artist’s poetry, “poethical” translations, and drawings related to cosmologies and mythologies surrounding the deer, and sacrificial dance in cultures around the world.

Woven like one of her quipu installations, Vicuña’s texts—which include original compositions in Spanish as well as English translations by Daniel Borzutzky—become meditations on translation, not just of the sacred nature of this animal but on how our understandings of ceremony and ritual are transformed, by this ongoing process. Taken as inspiration rather than conundrum, the impossibility of translation opens up poetic possibilities for Vicuña as she continues her lifelong exploration into the nature of communication across eras and distant lands, languages and shared symbols within Indigenous spiritualities.

This publication shows the content of the folder ‘Narcissus. Gazing into an (artificial) well of fountain’. This folder is one of the 18.000 subject folders that are kept in the photographic collection at the Warburg Institute in London. This iconographically organized archive contains reproductions of sculptures, paintings, drawings, prints, tapestries, and other forms of imagery, ranging in date from classical antiquity to circa 1800. All the photographs in this publication were taken on July 2th 2023. 

Many thanks to Paul Taylor, Curator of the Photographic Collection, Warburg Institute, London.

Second edition

"Cet ouvrage est un magazine participatif regroupant les oeuvres de 48 artistes autour d'un thème commun, l'artefact. Vertige du passé ou projection contemporaine, l'artefact nous parle. Il raconte les cultures, en façonne le souvenir et promet ainsi un voyage à travers les créations humaines. Ce sont ces témoignages tangibles de l'existence que nous souhaitons vous offrir grâce aux interprétations captivantes de l'artefact. Chaque page de ce nouveau numéro est une invitation à plonger dans les méandres de l'histoire ou de la fiction, à explorer les différentes strates de l'humanité à travers le primes de ses réalisations matérielles."

Alexandre Daram, Alice Royer, Audrey Poujoula, Audrey Ramos, Basile, Bordel j’ai glissé, Cel, Charlie Udave, Collectif IPN, Elliott Sanchez, Emilia Pesty, Marie Derrien, Fils Kurylak, Flora Rushiti, Hélène Berlemon, Inès Day, Julie Plantefeve, Kaspar kaspar.wtf, Kawani DS, Kiara Patry, Laura Zanti, Lauriane Rolo, Le Bayou Club Graphique, Lea Canovas, Lili Archer, Lily Terrible, Lisa Dehove, Lola Marty, Louis Kervel, Lutine Cabarrou, Maeva Iorio, Maké, Martin Régnier, Maxoy, Meuneurol, Nathanael Brelin, Nurzen & Jack Montaly, Oscar, Pierre Touron, Ptit Lylou, Rachel Roland, Rose Meybeck, Sarah Josserand, Theo Grandchamp. 

Le titre du livre « Index of operational and code names » reprend l'intitulé d'un document trouvé sur Internet constitué d'une liste de 437 mots anglais classés par ordre alphabétique et accompagnés de brèves indications concernant les opérations militaires pour lesquelles ces mots ont servi de noms de code.

Ce document a inspiré à Diane Guyot la série « Index War » réalisée selon un protocole simple consistant à produire un dessin pour chaque mot de la liste.

Composé de 86 dessins issus de cette série, certains reproduits pour le support du livre, d'autres présentés au sein d'un cahier photographique tels qu'ils sont aujourd'hui accrochés dans les intérieurs de leurs propriétaires, et d'une partie textuelle placée en fin de volume qui restitue l'intégralité du document source, le livre, comme le suggère la mention volume 1 qui accompagne son titre, ne marque pas le point d'achèvement de l'œuvre mais témoigne au contraire d'un processus en cours.

L'articulation des composantes de l'œuvre dans l'espace du livre en constitue en mème temps une nouvelle version, à la fois spécifique et autonome. L'activation du dispositif codex/index invite le lecteur à une méditation sur la notion de code, où s'entrecroisent sémiotique de l'image, technique de propagande et technologie de l'information.