Piero Heliczer. Poems & Documents / Poèmes & Documents

What is an artists’ life made of? From the home to the studio, from the studio to the gallery, from one exhibition to the next, from one place to another – a suite of moves and a list of addresses. Tobias Kaspar’s work sheds light on the ambivalent position of the artist, taken in a web of social and economic relations: in the second volume of New Address, he uses the tone of the diary, combined with the code of the moodboard, to document the side aspects of the life of a “stereotypical artist.”

The book gathers black & white photographs taken between 2018 and 2024, during the installation or the opening of exhibitions; at performances, dinners, parties; in different homes and rooms Kaspar has been living in; and in the course of daily activities. Contrary to an exhibition catalogue, projects by the artist such as his line of jeans, or his series of bronze sculptures made from disposable packaging, are thus shown “in the middle of affairs.”

An additional booklet opens with a short essay by artist Mikael Brkic, reflecting on the “behind the scenes” logics, followed by a letter penned by writer Leif Randt, and a text in which curator Kari Rittenbach discusses Tobias Kaspar’s work in relation to the economics and aesthetics of display and fashion. It concludes with a list of artworks in the order as they appear in the main book.

Published with the support of Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung, Pro Helvetia, Kultur Stadt Zürich.

An artist's book by New York-based author and artist Sam Pulitzer (born 1984), The Premise of a Better Life combines photographs with ethical and existential questions addressed to the viewer, in an allegory of the contemporary condition. These photographs of everyday things, ambiguous details, nondescript landscapes and cityscapes were mostly taken in New York, although the city appears as the pale reflection of a model city.

Each picture is accompanied by a question: "Can you afford yourself?" "Are you waiting for a moment that just won't come?" "If you knew then what you know now, would it make a difference?" "Do you trust happiness?" The montages offer a complex, personal, at times satirical image of the present age.

An original essay by Pulitzer unfolds the project's philosophical and political issues, notably discussing a key reference for the project, Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope.

In Claire Star Finch’s first novel, love and the void question each other in action. 

Judith, an academic celebrity, and Wendy, a slightly less famous academic celebrity, fall in love. They break up. In her ensuing grief, Wendy finds herself in a pornographic, epistolary haze that slumps toward the narrative. Fueled by the only things that cut through the pain—sex and democratic theory—Wendy takes us along on her wild ride toward self-actualization. 

Claire Star Finch is a Paris-based experimental writer & performer. Their literary performances and hybrid ficto-theories are regularly presented in art spaces, both as part of their solo work and with the collective RER Q. Their research centers on themes like dildos and vomit, defining these objects as forms of emancipatory literary technologies.

They published in French the experimental fiction Crache dans ma bouche puis crache dans mon autre bouche (Les Petits Matins, 2024).

Design by Victoire Le Bars

Les Voies du Paradis rassemble ce qui subsiste d’une œuvre perdue : les seules notes de bas de page d’un texte manquant, laissées par un chercheur après son décès et éditées par Peter Cornell. Ces notes et leurs illustrations forment un ensemble incomplet, qui se donne ici à lire à travers ses manques. Un fil – d’Ariane ? – se tisse entre les diagrammes, les figures de spirales et de labyrinthes – de Cesare Ripa à Ernst Josephson et Robert Smithson, des Templiers aux spirites et aux surréalistes – qui parcourent le texte et se font écho, comme les éléments d’une énigme ou des figures ésotériques. Le « Paradis » dont il est question ici, c’est le rêve de la connaissance absolue, la saisie de l’ordre caché des choses, à laquelle aspirent autant poètes et artistes que mystiques et scientifiques…

Paru en Suède en 1987, Les Voies du Paradis y a acquis la réputation d’un livre culte. Peter Cornell y propose une perspective inédite sur les liens entre art, littérature, spiritualité et occultisme, dans un texte à mi-chemin de l’essai et de la fiction, de l’érudition et de la mystification. La volonté de savoir y est mise en scène comme une quête prise au piège de l’irrationnel ; les notes s’assemblent par logique associative, programme éclectique qui tente encore de retrouver un centre perdu – comme les algorithmes auxquels est confiée aujourd’hui la tâche fantasmée de mettre en ordre les connaissances humaines.

Acting like an academic endpoint, cuneiform everything.

Conlan Eliseu is a vampire and an out-of-vogue fashion stylist who takes a job as an advisor at the Gatlin Finishing School, a three-year vocational program for talented teens in a theatre town. Human teen Doeke Schreyer wants to be a star and isn’t afraid of hard work. He just can’t seem to get it. Will his corporeal charms help him exceed the curse on his name, inherited from his adoptive parents?

Confidences / Production deals with the process of keeping the past alive, whether as image or restaging. It is the fourth instalment in Ivan Cheng’s Confidences series, which uses the figure of the vampire as shorthand for cultural movement. Following Confidences / Baseline, Confidences / Majority, and Confidences / Oracle, this new episode contains excerpts or elements from scripts by the artist, as well as documents and reflections on the tradition and transmission of theatre. 

Ivan Cheng (b. 1991, Sydney) produces films, objects, paintings and publications as anchors for the staging of complex and precarious spectacles. His background as a performer and musician form the basis for his using performance as a critical medium and questioning publics and accessibility. He holds an MFA in Critical Studies from Sandberg Instituut. His performances, works and writings have been recently presented at Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; galerie Édouard Montassut, Paris; Villa Imperiale, Pesaro; OCTO, Marseille; Volksbühne Roter Salon, Berlin; gta Exhibitions, Zurich; and Mind Eater Festival, Oslo. In 2017 he initiated the project space bologna.cc in Amsterdam.

Confidences / Production is published in collaboration with Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Naarm/Melbourne, in conjunction with the presentation of the project, Ivan Cheng: NP in September 2024.

She Follows No Progression reflects on the plurality of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982)’s work and legacy, collecting essays, personal narratives, poems, conversations, letters, and the extratextual in a reader that attests to Cha’s genre-bending vision and political imagination. The writers, artists, scholars, organizers, and educators collected here, each unique in their voice and method, multiply approaches to language, colonial history, migration, and time in dialogue with Cha’s unequivocally interdisciplinary practice. Their contributions traverse subjects from Asian American studies to literary history, translation, film theory, and experimental poetics, while attending to the gaps between these fields and the intractable entanglements of race, class, and gender that underlie them. She Follows No Progression echoes Cha’s appeal for a liberatory horizon emergent from all that we are affixed to in the present.

She Follows No Progression is published on the occasion of the 2022 program, The Quick and the Dead: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Edition. The Quick and the Dead is a yearlong, multiphase project that highlights the life, work, and legacy of a deceased writer by bridging their work to that of contemporary practitioners. In its third year, the program focused on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Contributors:

Sam Cha, Marian Chudnovsky, Jesse Chun, Una Chung, Anton Haugen, Irene Hsu, Valentina Jager, Juwon Jun, Youbin Kang, Eunsong Kim, Youna Kwak, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Jennifer Gayoung Lee, Sujin Lee, Florence Li, Serubiri Moses, Jed Munson, Yves Tong Nguyen, Wirunwan Victoria Pitaktong, Brandon Shimoda, Caterina Stamou, Megan Sungyoon, Teline Trần, and Soyoung Yoon.

The first book devoted to the late African American writer and actress, Dorothy Dean, one of the few prominent African American women of New York City's bohemian heyday, close to Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe.

This second release from Éditions 1989 features Dorothy Dean's unpublished writing and selected correspondence with Edie Sedgwick, Rene Ricard, and Taylor Mead, among other friends and artists. This volume also includes Dean's transcendent script of an unrealized film starring Factory actor, Ondine.

Lyrical, humorous, political, and brutally honest, Who Are You Dorothy Dean? is a tribute to one of the few prominent African American women of New York City's bohemian heyday.

Dorothy Dean (1932-1987) was an African American writer and actress. She entered the 1960s New York underground scene and quickly became one of its key, if overlooked, figures, starring in six of Andy Warhol's films and inspiring the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Robert Creeley. Presumably the first woman ever hired as fact-checker at The New Yorker, Dean held brief editorial and proofreading positions at publications such as Vogue before launching her very own bulletin of film reviews, the All-Lavender Cinema Courier, in 1976.

Edited by Anaïs Ngbanzo.
Texts by Dorothy Dean, Edie Sedgwick, Robert Creeley, Gerard Malanga, Rene Ricard, Taylor Mead, et al.
Translated from the English (American) by Rachel Valinsky.

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.