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Cover of Matt Mullican’s Pure Projection Landscapes

If I Can't Dance

Matt Mullican’s Pure Projection Landscapes

Vanessa Desclaux

€15.00

Since the late 1970s Matt Mullican has developed a practice of performing under hypnosis that extends from his investigations into representation and subjective projection, and from his efforts to “enter the image” and embody a fictional character, a body of work that offers an exceptional perspective on repetition and renewal in performance practice.

This book is the outcome of an extensive research project into Mullican’s hypnosis performances, undertaken within the frame of If I Can’t Dance’s Performance in Residence programme with invited researcher Vanessa Desclaux, and a two-day Class of Masters with Mullican on character construction. Desclaux takes up the question of personification in light of her analysis of Mullican’s hypnosis performances. A selection of Mullican’s photographs and works on paper are reproduced in this book.

Published in 2014 ┊ 64 pages ┊ Language: English

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Cover of Black Revelry: In Honor of ‘The Sugar Shack’

If I Can't Dance

Black Revelry: In Honor of ‘The Sugar Shack’

Derrais Carter

An experiment in book making, which takes up the form of the LP record as a starting point for re-configuring the haptics of the printed book. Presented as a collection of unbound pages inside a gatefold record sleeve, the publication includes a pressed record, as well as written, visual and sonic contributions from scholars, poets, artists, choreographers and DJs.

Through the logic of the detail, each contributor imaginatively (re)produces Ernie Barnes’s iconic painting The Sugar Shack as an archive of personal histories and a universe of intergenerational connections. Held together as an album, it is a performance to be made at home, which invites readers/listeners to feel art’s histories and to be in them with their bodies.

d.a. carter with contributions by Taylor Renée Aldridge; Samiya Bashir; La Marr Jurelle Bruce; DJ Lynnée Denise, Jennifer Harge, Duane Lee Holland, Jr., William H. Mosley, III, Zoé Samudzi, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Melanie Stevens and Phillip B. Williams.

Cover of Maquillage as Meditation: Carmelo Bene and the Undead

If I Can't Dance

Maquillage as Meditation: Carmelo Bene and the Undead

Sara Giannini

Performance €20.00

Partly a script, partly a personal voyage into the psyche of diseducation, this book happens, has happened and will happen on the 31st of October in a place called ‘The Palace of Melancholy’. In this temporal and spatial loop, the figure of Italian actor, author, director, philosopher, and public persona Carmelo Bene is summoned to hopefully be dismissed once and for all. Bene is looked at by the author reluctantly and yet resolutely through inner voices of dissent, shame and rebellion. He is imagined in gatherings that didn’t happen and read through an epistemology of contradiction. In Giannini’s company and support, Snejanka Mihaylova, Jacopo Miliani, and Arnisa Zeqo probe the walls of the Palace, looking for an exit.

Cover of Writing Out Loud

If I Can't Dance

Writing Out Loud

Jon Mikel Euba

Writing Out Loud is a publication that brings together the transcriptions of eight lectures by the artist Jon Mikel Euba that were live translated from Spanish to English during the course Action unites, words divide (On praxis, an unstated theory) at the DAI. The lectures were delivered across the academic year 2014 – 2015 at the invitation of If I Can’t Dance. They sit within a larger writing-centred project by the artist that he has pursued for almost a decade, through which he aims to define a form of praxis that could evolve into a technical theory.

Cover of Adrian Piper: Performing Objects I have Been

If I Can't Dance

Adrian Piper: Performing Objects I have Been

Rhea Anasta

Performance €15.00

Adrian Piper: Performing Objects I Have Been, 1972-2018, is a collection of documents from, or potentially relevant to Adrian Piper's performance Some Reflective Surfaces (1975-76) that has been edited by art historian and curator Rhea Anastas. This publication sits within If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution's Peformance in Residence Series, and its seventh artistic program, Social Movement (2017-18).

Adrian Piper, who lives in Berlin, at the age of seventy-two, is one of America's best-known artists. It so happens she is also one of America's best-known female artists. And yet, to use such a qualifier is to make the mistake of accepting limitations, coerced and containing, for artists and thier work— and, to quote Jacqueline Rose, "to dissolve the very possibility for women of any purchase on historical time." 

This publication focuses on an early performance called Some Reflective Surfaces (1975-76). In it, as Piper dances under spotlights, she stages multiple images and sounds. Over the work's duration, the audience follows the performer's images, physical performance, and sound. In "Artist's Statement" (1999), Piper descrvibes her 1960's work that led up to this one as "concered with duration, repetition, and meditative conciousness of the indexical present." Some Reflective Surfaces was produced in New York at the Fine Arts Building, New York University, in 1975, and then at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1976. The performance has not been staged since. A collection of the documents of Some Reflective Surfaces is reissued in this publication for the first time, along with other writings spanning Piper's work from 1972-2018.

Published 2021. 

Cover of Aftershow

Sternberg Press

Aftershow

Pauline Boudry/ Renate Lorenz

Performance €25.00

A monograph / artists' book that engages with the recent film installations of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Installation shots, research material, scripts, and film stills give an insight into the artists' investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound, and underground (drag) performances.

The book's title alludes to an interest in opaque events that are belated, left backstage or off-screen. A number of (fictitious) letters to friends and collaborators such as Sharon Hayes, Yvonne Rainer, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi, and Jack Smith place the work of Boudry & Lorenz in a context of debates around temporalities, activism, the archival, decolonizing practices, and queer histories. Published following the exhibition “Patriarchal Poetry” at the Badischer Kunstverein, September 27– November 24, 2013.

Cover of Maisa in Webland

Set Margins'

Maisa in Webland

Maisa Imamović

Design €25.00

What does ‘user-friendly’ website mean if, on it, online behaviors like stalking, teasing, and ghosting — once considered peripheral — are now central to survival, care, and belonging? How to thrive without becoming an “Interdisciplinary Unicorn”: the state’s most beloved user-citizen fluent in multiple registers of production, optimization, and self-branding? How in this beautiful world is one supposed to log off, when surveillance and privacy erosion have been normalized? And how, oh how, could users possibly think of building the alternatives, when cool and cringe online acts, all activate the platform’s reward system: the unleashing of emoji-filled praise? How to resist the platform’s toxic seduction? 

Haunted by screenshots of early cyberfeminist websites and in dialogue with digital sages, web scripts, and business interests, media artist, web developer, and author Maisa Imamović embarks on a philosophical and practice-based crusade through the internet’s surface and its shadows. To expose the various ways of thriving online without surrendering to optimization, the book explores imperfect uses of perfect software, preservation of precarious web infrastructures, tactical content strategies, and experiments with autonomous financial systems — all wrapped in educational efforts to sustain criticality amid automation. Through these traversals beneath the scroll, Maisa finds her Webland: speculative, broken, and oftentimes, poetic infrastructure where logic destabilizes, binaries dissolve, and meaning evades monetization. But can a non-extractive internet exist beyond metaphor? Can poetry rewire protocol? Or will her sanctuary be absorbed into the very architectures it resists?

"In Maisa in Webland, Maisa Imamovic evokes the multidimensional, spontaneous human elements of the early web, using interviews, case studies, critical theory and fiction as her organic materials. She peeks behind the screen and through time to trace the subtle erosion of the web’s early utopian ideals to its cold and extractive present. Imamovic bravely wades through the swampy digital muck that mediates our everyday reality, examining its invisible psychic scaffolding with academic rigor, and a big dose of humor and heart. Was it an inevitable entropy, or an aberration? How and when did we get so off-course? Can we return? Do we want to? In Maisa’s Webland, we might very well be doomed, and maybe that’s a good thing. When the center of this tangled web no longer holds, something new can take shape.” - Nada Alic, author of Bad Thoughts

Cover of Répondeur

Occasional Papers

Répondeur

Slow Reading Club

Performance €25.00

Slow Reading Club (SRC) is a semi-fictional reading group initiated and run by Bryana Fritz and Henry Andersen. Since 2016, in numerous contexts, they have rehearsed alternatives to the kinds of reading they were taught in school, actively suppressing semantic content through strobe lights, strange postures, sociality, and toxins. Operating at the contact zones between reader and text, text and text, reader and reader, they attempt to build a practice from within the unstable space of reading itself.

Répondeur is an extensive account of SRC’s practice in collective reading sessions, exhibitions, and textual bootlegging. Imagined as a scroll, with a rhyme structure and typesetting by Will Holder, the book brings together facsimiles of SRC readers, a wide-ranging interview by Alicja Melzacka, new texts by Joyelle McSweeney and Bill Dietz, and visual work and translations by SRC. These discrete elements are interwoven into a complex, shimmering whole, delighting in the ruptures and elisions of one text’s move into the next.

Cover of Tripwire 16 - Performance/Writing

Tripwire Journal

Tripwire 16 - Performance/Writing

David Buuck, Kevin Killian

Performance €18.00

A special issue focused on performance writing, with work by Tanya Lukin Linklater (with Michael Nardone), Jibade-Khalil Huffman & Simone White, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Claudina Domingo (trans. Ryan Greene), Kim Rosenfield, Nathan Walker, Liz Knox, Rona Lorimer, Léo Richard, & Hector Uniacke, Mohamed A. Gawad & Dalia Neis, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge & Teddy Yoshikami, interviewed by Michelle N. Huang, Kyoo Lee and Jocelyn Saidenberg, Adriana Garriga-López, Gabrielle Civil, plus a Kevin Killian Tribute, with Eileen Myles * Scott Hewicker * Cliff Hengst * Karla Milosevich * Craig Goodman * Michelle Rollman * Anne McGuire * Wayne Smith * Tanya Hollis * Steve Orth * Lindsey Boldt * Maxe Crandall * Arnold J. Kemp * Carla Harryman, Lee Ann Brown & Tony Torn * Susan Gevirtz * Laynie Browne * Patrick Durgin * Norma Cole * Jo Giardini. & reviews: Jessica Lopez Lyman & Jocelyn E. Marshall on Gabrielle Civil, alex cruse on Merce Cunningham, Rob Stanton on Anne Boyer, Jack Chelgren on Miyó Vestrini, David Grundy on Stephen Jonas, Virginia Konchan on Sarah Vap.