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Cover of TALKER issue #5 — Spalding Gray with Kathy Acker

Talker

TALKER issue #5 — Spalding Gray with Kathy Acker

Spalding Gray , Kathy Acker

€7.00

Talker is an interview zine about performance. 

This is Issue #5. It is a transcript of an event hosted by the writer Kathy Acker at the ICA, London in February 1987 in which the performer Spalding Gray discussed his work.

A founding member of the Wooster Group, Spalding Gray gained fame for his autobiographical monologue performances. At the time of this conversation, he had just completed filming Jonathan Demme’s movie adaptation of his work Swimming to Cambodia, a performance in which he describes experiences surrounding a trip to Southeast Asia to play a small role in the film The Killing Fields (1984). In this dialogue with Acker, Gray focuses on the process of developing work and compares his experience of writing with making live performance.

The event was part of the ICA’s IN CONVERSATION series which paired up writers to talk about their practices.

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Cover of TALKER issue #6 — Dora García

Talker

TALKER issue #6 — Dora García

Dora Garcia

Talker is an interview zine about performance. 

This is Issue #6. It features a conversation with Spanish artist Dora García.

For over 18 years García has worked with performance to deal critically with relationships between artworks, audiences, and places. Her projects are often developed in response to works by others and deploy performers as intermediaries in ambiguous roles as undercover agents, prophets, guides or spies.

In this conversation she traces the origins of her performance practice from a diverse creative community in Brussels in the early 2000s to the Happenings by Argentinian polymath Oscar Masotta happening again in her recent work Segunda Vez (2018). 

Cover of Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love

Far West Press

Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love

Jack Skelley

Fiction €13.00

Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love is a genre-defiant sex-trip to post-human dimensions. If C.G Jung, magic-mushroom shaman Terence McKenna and Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae) had a three-way while binging on George Bataille and undergoing Hormone Replacement Therapy, their baby might be the erotic cocktail of Myth Lab. Its extreme theme is nothing less than the fate of the species.

“Brilliant and wild, Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab is a manifesto of exuberance disguised as a sci-fi sex test-center for the invention of communal futures. Skelley’s a mad scientist, scholar and poet.” - Chris Kraus, author of After Kathy Acker
 
“In Myth Lab, Jack Skelley adroitly molds an “Einsteinian elasticity between objects and ether” to the “clitoverse.”  If this formulation seems too vast, just think about a) the last time you felt good about power and b) all the ways to say yes to pleasure as a source of liberation. In conducting a “cosmologic psychoanalysis,” Myth Lab thrillingly hot wires our neurons to an endless mirror stage reflective of our own instinctual nature.” - Kim Rosenfield, author of Phantom Captain
 
"An explosion of clit-cock-and-pop-culture worship. Skelley’s eroto-celestial universe fights back not only against the denial of desire – “also known as fuckheadocracy and market forces” – but against death itself."  - Francesca Lia Block, author of Weetzie Bat
 
"A hallucinatory book that straddles gender studies, science-fiction, and cultural criticism (to name but three of many genres). Ever eager to use a newfound Skelley-ism, I urge everyone to read Myth Lab and be “Kardashian'd” with love (i.e buy it now, it's great)." - Susan Finlay, author of The Jacques Lacan Foundation
 
"In Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab, something weird and beautiful is forged in the crucible of infinite horny grief. It’s an epic, delirious descent into the inferno, navigating the concentric circles of romance and desire as literary malady, TikTok psyop, benevolent cosmological principle, and more. Simultaneously a quest, a physics experiment and an elegy. I loved following its narrator - a tender, erotomanic, Blakean particle - seeking and finding visionary head." - Daisy Lafarge, author of Love Bug

Cover of Impossible Princess

City Lights Books

Impossible Princess

Kevin Killian

Fiction €16.00

Impossible Princess is the third collection of gay short fiction by PEN Award–winning San Francisco–based author Kevin Killian. A member of the “new narrative” circle including Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, Killian is a master short story writer, crafting campy and edgy tales that explore the humor and darkness of desire. A former director of Small Press Traffic and a co-editor of Mirage/Periodical, Killian co-wrote Jack Spicer’s biography, Poet Be Like God, and co-edited three Spicer books, including My Vocabulary Did This To Me: Collected Poems. His latest book, Action Kylie, is a collection of poems devoted to Kylie Minogue.

Cover of In Memoriam to Identity

Grove Press

In Memoriam to Identity

Kathy Acker

Fiction €16.00

In this characteristically sexy, daring, and hyperliterate novel, Kathy Acker interweaves the stories of three characters who share the same tragic flaw: a predilection for doomed, obsessive love. Rimbaud, the delinquent symbolist prodigy, is deserted by his lover Verlaine time and time again. Airplane takes a job dancing at Fun City, the seventh tier of the sex industry, in order to support her good-for-nothing boyfriend. And Capitol feels alive only when she's having sex with her brother, Quentin. In Memoriam to Identity is at once a revelatory addition to, and an irreverent critique of, the literature of decadence and self-destruction.

Cover of Adorno's Noise

Essay Press

Adorno's Noise

Carla Harryman

Philosophy €18.00

Adorno’s Noise is a collection of experimental, poetic, and conceptual essays. Adorno’s Noise takes a stunning plunge into a kaleidoscopic world of globalization, female sexuality, the place of art and artist, and the looming power of the state. Phrases from Theodor Adorno’s aphoristic philosophical text, Minima Moralia, serve as catalysts for an explosion of thought and language that quickly breaks Adorno’s orbit.

“This work by Carla Harryman, startlingly astute, once again proves how necessary an encounter with her writing has become for us today. Her grasp of theoretical and poetic exigencies is unbypassable, and she moves lightly, lifting the prose poem into the amplitude of a new articulation.” — AVITAL RONELL

“Adorno’s ‘noise’ may be nothing more than the consonance of late modern capital talking to itself, but Carla Harryman listens to Adorno listening, and what she hears is a very different sort of dissonance, something Adorno himself may have been deaf to. Listening for a noise that can’t be heard, Harryman attends to the disruption of signal the aesthetic artifact called a corpse at the limit of Adorno’s magisterial eloquence, where thought steps over the body. Atonally faithful to his negativity the afterglow of torment passing through figures of speech while refusing the authority of a masterful dialectic, Harryman makes our unthought horizon “normality is death” audible, presencing a body that can’t be redeemed by aesthetics the bosy wants tobe art and fails at it. From Gender the Status of Dogs to works by Sun Ra, Anais Nin, Robert Smithson, and Kenzaburo Oe, this radically asynthetic writing moves thru polyphonic configuration of word, image and concept. Synthesia? Emotional truth? The intersection between abstraction and narration? Practicing a militant ethic of non-mastery as every one of its sentences sounds like a sensory organ in the process of becoming its own theoretician. Adorno’s Noise reinvents the “essay as form,” but it doesn’t stop short of reinventing thinking.” — ROB HALPERN

Carla Harryman is the author of twenty-four books of poetry, prose, plays, and essays. Harryman is widely acknowledged as an innovator in poetry, prose, and inter-disciplinary performance. An active collaborator, she is one of ten co-authors of The Grand Piano, an Experiment in Collective Autobiography: San Francisco, 1975-1980 (2006-2010). Open Box, a CD of music and spoken text performance created with composer and musician Jon Raskin was released on the Tzadik label in 2012. Her Poets Theater plays and music/text collaborations have been performed nationally and internationally, including at dOCUMENTA 13, where she presented the closing keynote performance Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s “Music and New Music,” a music/text work that folds segments of Adorno’s Noise into her poetic adaptation of Adorno’s lecture. She is the editor of two critical volumes: Non/Narrative, a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory ( 2012) and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (with Avital Ronell and Amy Scholder, Verso, 2006).

Other books by Carla Harryman include the collection of poetry and performance writings published in French and English editions Sue in Berlin and Sue á Berlin (2017); A Voice to Perform (Split/Level 2020); the epistolary essay, Artifact of Hope (2017); the diptych W—/M— (2013), Gardener of Stars: A Novel (2001), and two volumes of selected writing: Animal Instincts: Prose, Plays, Essays (1989) and There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn (1995). Her grants and awards include The Foundation of Contemporary Art, New York, Opera America Next Stage (with Erling Wold), and The Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty in Creative Activity Award from Eastern Michigan University, where she serves on the faculty of an interdisciplinary creative writing program.

Cover of Postcommodity, Alex Waterman and Ociciwan: “in memoriam…”

uh books

Postcommodity, Alex Waterman and Ociciwan: “in memoriam…”

Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective

Performance €15.00

Eighty-page programme book score, and libretto, for performances by Indigenous musicians of in memoriam…Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau and Robert Ashley’s in memoriam... Curated and edited by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective.

[from back cover] …in memoriam Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau adds a new score and production by Postcommodity and Alex Waterman to a suite of four early scores by the American composer Robert Ashley. The fifth score honours the lives of Mary Cecil, Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau, three Indigenous women from territory at the turn of the Century as it became the province of Alberta. This significant addition continues Ashley’s project investigating the connections between musical forms and constructs of historicization, opening a conversation regarding whom and how we memorialize individuals and inscribe their legacies.

[from essay by Candice Hopkins] What histories are remembered and who is doing the remembering? What form do these rememberings take? It is not as simple as taking down one monument and replacing it with another. We need to ask more questions, take note of the voids that stand in for the past, and actively make way for other voices, particularly those are trapped under the ‘sea ice of English’. “Listen for sounds”, writes the Tlingit poet and anthropologist Nora Marks Dauenhauer, “They are as important as voices. Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen.”

Cover of ROT

a.pass

ROT

Sara Manente

ROT is a publication reflecting the research “Wicked technology/Wild fermentation,” by Sara Manente that focuses on forms and practice of fermentation as ways to rethink bodies and their making. This glossy magazine performs research, aiming to infect the reader, and questioning how to spread, publish, and help the work survive. 

Sara Manente is a performance artist, dance maker and researcher born in Italy and living in Brussels. She is interested in narrowing the distance between the performer, the audience, and the work. Her research starts from a dance practice that problematizes perception, translation, and ways of doing. Her work comes out in hybrid forms: book launch, 3Dfilm, written text, interview, choreographic piece, workshop, telepathic experience, collaboration, et al.