The Annotated Reader

Grace Crowley is a publication based on letters sent to the Australian artist and pioneer of modernist painting Grace Crowley (1890–1979) by friends, family and colleagues. Parts of those letters, which are now housed in the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the State Library of New South Wales archives in Sydney, were transcribed and categorised by Riet Wijnen in subsections such as ‘Marital Status’, ‘Teaching’, ‘Hosting’, ‘Eurasia’, ‘X’, ‘Being A Woman’, ‘War’, ‘$’ and ‘Making Work’. The result is an alternative biography constructed solely through a living set of relations.

The straplines of a number of advertisements drawn from magazines of the 1950s are turned into drawings, as though a particularly vain and narcissistic woman speaks (as of course she does), She is ‘en pleine forme’ of her beauty. (2016).

This Masturbatory Reader asks three main questions.
1. What power and pleasure can we access through attending to the erotics of knowledge production?
2. How are the sites, systems and tools of knowledge-making designed to reiterate violent norms (and in turn, erase deviant practices)?
3. What could the making (and unmaking) of these systems allow us to imagine?

To unpack these questions the edition gathers 16 contributors across 136 pages, conjuring the thinking (wondering, studying, lusting, sweating, ranting) of an expanding chorus of references that sit distances apart, folded here between facing pages. A chorus calling to action, calling to theory, calling to bed.

Featuring D Mortimer, Wes Knowler, Biogal, Tallulah Griffith, Brooke Palmieri, Carl Gent, Sophie Mak-Schram, Alice Butler, Jessa Mockridge, Nat Pyper, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Sammy Paloma, Donna Marcus Duke, and Ryan Boultbee, with a forward by Emily Pope.

“In this anthology, reading is cruising, and cruising is reading.” – Sam Moore, ‘The (Bad) Taste Test: Radical Acts of Queer (Self) Pleasure in The Masturbatory Reader’, Polyester Zine

Made in 1969 but never published, Terminal Boundaries is an artist book by Lawrence Weiner, a sculptor whose medium was language. The manuscript for the publication, which was recently brought to light, contains two related bodies of work represented as typewritten statements on paper that Weiner pasted to the pages of a small composition notebook. The book’s absence from Weiner’s oeuvre plagued him as it marked a terminus of his relationship to the physical construction of his artworks, and illustrated the principle of “specific” and “general” which he applied to his art.

Created from a standard notebook purchased in a stationery store, the manuscript is two books in one: Terminal Boundaries and A natural watercourse diverted reduced or displaced. A tête-bêche with two front covers, the book can begin from either cover by turning it upside down.

Weiner was a traveler by nature and the materials he refers to in these works are those that one can encounter on a road trip. The artist was traveling across Europe when this manuscript was composed. Struck by the tumultuous times and the critical illuminations about the climate from the Club of Rome discussions, the works in this book are in Weiner’s words, “concerned with the relationship of natural resources in relation to human beings.” Distinct from his contemporaries associated with the Land Art movement, in Terminal Boundaries and A natural water course diverted reduced or displaced, Weiner constructs his landscape interventions in language—the specific and/or general act and the location are stated—offering the reader/viewer the opportunity to consider each work’s existence, to build it in their mind’s eye. One can only wonder what Weiner did to divert, reduce, or displace a natural water course in Saltsrumen, Norway, the location of the world’s strongest maelstrom, or in nearby Bodø at the site of Svartisen glacier. A work in Terminal Boundaries titled The joining of France Germany and Switzerland by rope demonstrates the geopolitical perspective of Weiner’s land art. Requiring physical and mental borders to be transgressed in performing this work; how and where could this happen?

Terminal Boundaries finds Weiner just off the cusp of his decision to make art that lived centered in language, emphasizing the viewer’s responsibility to engage with it to make it whole. The book marks a crucial inflection point in the artist’s practice, defining his direction to make work that “attempts to present something to people that is not just about me,” but about materials and the world we find ourselves in here and now.

For nearly two years the author collected phrases from the exhibition press releases she received through email, posting certain of them on Facebook in a rather unsystematic way (that is to say, when she felt like it), with only one change, that of the personal pronoun, so each statement appeared vainglorious, absurd, even tragic. She supposes the measure was if they made her laugh or gasp or used words she deplores when thinking or writing about art. The posts gathered quite a following. Some people still mention them to her, and others have asked her to look at their own press releases before circulation.

These extracts have provoked laughter, disbelief (especially when performed as public readings, when she has  been obliged to swear to their veracity), self-recognition, and yes, shame.

She had only three rules: 1) She would not quote the press release of anyone she knows (certainly she could have done—she must admit that both a friend and someone she dislikes intensely have slipped in, and she fervently hopes neither ever reads this book); 2) She would not alter anything except the pronoun (this is largely true; however, for this book, she corrected some errors of punctuation and spelling, changed spellings to their English form, and employed her beloved Oxford comma); and 3) She would not use anything the artist had written (this, too, is true, save for one exception that was too wonderful not to include).

Finally, she  gathered a collection of endorsements, some along the way, others when she indicated this work was done. She is still alive and she continues to labour in obscurity. 

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet investigates how intelligence-human and artificial-manifests under conditions of secrecy, hostility, and concealment. 

Departing from Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin's dark forest theory, which frames the universe as a hostile terrain filled with predators where transparent communication is foolish and dangerous, the book portrays the internet as a cosmic war machine, teeming with existential tension, nascent AI cults, and deceptive superintelligences. It maps a digital world in which deception is safety, silence is strategy, and new forms of intelligence emerge through obfuscation. 

Against decades of writing that moralizes or diagnoses online life, this book suggests a colder thesis: that intelligence itself is mutating under pressure, learning to hide, mislead, and manipulate. Humans are both predator and prey in this digital ecosystem of information exchange whose purpose reverberates on a cosmic scale, weaving us into inescapable patterns of violence. When we break with the ideals of dialogue and open expression, what forms of intelligence and morality survive in their absence? Intelligence does not reward the loudest voice, but the most secretive presence. The future belongs to the quietest signal.

Precipitous philosophies. Synaptic-nerve narrations. Syntactic spirals. Hyper-coiled horizons. Will Alexander’s mental range has arrived. An anomalous scripting of the word “automatic,” Aunonomic Reasoning is a whirlwind of lingual torrents triggered by creative mishearing that at once exposes the occupations of orthodox surrealism, summons a voice for the scathed populace of imperial affliction, and forges new paths of phonetic potentiality to mend semantic injury. Pushing prosaic margins beyond their boundaries, these texts take on the etymological condition of the essay as “attempt” with iridescent siege, prepositional frenzy, paratactic provocation, noetic disreckoning, and a critical demand to dismantle: all of which signatures of Alexander’s unilateral poetic innovations.

In this wide-ranging and probing book Erin Manning extends her previous inquiries into the politics of movement to the concept of the minor gesture. The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. More than a chance variation, less than a volition, it requires rethinking common assumptions about human agency and political action. To embrace the minor gesture's power to fashion relations, its capacity to open new modes of experience and manners of expression, is to challenge the ways in which the neurotypical image of the human devalues alternative ways of being moved by and moving through the world—in particular what Manning terms "autistic perception." Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and Whitehead's speculative pragmatism, Manning's far-reaching analyses range from fashion to depression to the writings of autistics, in each case affirming the neurodiversity of the minor and the alternative politics it gestures toward.

I have been enthralled and held by this book! Erin Manning has given us a new theory of bearing, as well as a new elaboration of gesture, going beyond Balzac’s theory and Agamben’s interpretation of it. She doesn’t lament the loss of gesture but celebrates gesture's minoritization.
- Fred Moten

Wound Building is a volume of essays, with digressions, on one group of contemporary poets active in a self-organizing political poetry scene in the UK, most of whom have little to no audience outside of the little magazines that they publish and the reading series they put on. The book is a front-line report on the rapid development of this poetry in the period between 2015 and 2020, with a particular focus on the relationship of poetry to violence and its representation. The poets discussed here write violent love poems and violent elegies as well as violent fantasies composed in stabs of violent verse and violet prose. The poems themselves comprise fantasies of killing David Cameron, dreams of being split open along a seam, basement songs, hundreds of pages of notes on working life in a privatized care home in Hove, East Sussex, a four-line slogan about the Cologne groping scandal of New Year 2016, variations on the Refugees Medical Phrasebook, a life wasted in a factory in Guangzhou, an autobiographical sci-fi internet fever dream, an anarchist elegy, and a refusal to argue. Ultimately, Hayward argues that the lessons this poetry teaches is never to write a "worthy" narrative when a fucked up collage will do. Rather than a cohesive "account" of a "school" of poets, or a "contribution" to the boring tittle-tattle of aesthetic debates over British poetry as an institution, Wound Building is a front-line report on the local disasters of a contemporary UK poetry caught in the grip of the historical cataclysm of capitalist culture.

Wound Building is further concerned with aesthetic problems related to Marxism, anarchism, contemporary trans politics, and class, though its "theoretical" preoccupations are subordinated to its desire to provide a ground-level view on the writing itself, its production, its intellectual aporia, and the ways it finds itself outstripped by the ongoing "march of events." The book will be of interest not only for those concerned with contemporary British political and experimental poetry, but also more generally for anyone who wishes to think carefully about what it means to make art about present-day history and its many horrible enormities.

The book's title is derived from the idea of sublime woundedness that subtends the context of the poets discussed here: the impressions of wounds opening up like LED-lit shopfronts in the night, in a parallel universe in which injury is intoxicatingly impersonal and structural, and which forms the environment in which the poems fight to absolutize the value of every last breath, or face into the reality of extravagantly violent wish fulfillment, or dissolve themselves in a search for new ways of professing love, or transform into a kind of expressionism of vomiting up medical-diagnostic categories found in abstract social labor, or pump their verses full of the convulsive rhythms of surprise and sudden relief, without any guarantee that this is the right thing to do or that anyone will even fucking hear. Wound Building does not historicize this state of affairs as much as it attempts to live alongside the immediacy of this work, in order to see what is still possible for poetry, and criticism, to make and do.

New edition of this long out of-print classic of diasporic literature, featuring a forward by Eunsong Kim, an afterword by Emgee Dufresne, and new endnotes by Bhanu Kapil.

Incubation: a space for monsters is a formally innovative, hybrid-genre book that incorporates poetry and prose. Set in a shifting narrative environment, where human bodies, characters, and text are neither one thing nor another, this fragmentary-diaristic text journeys through the spaces in-between. Originally published in America in 2006 by Leon Works, and out of print for the last seven years, this is the first time this seminal text has been available in the UK.

Following protagonist Laloo – Cyborg, girl, mother, child, immigrant, settler – on a roadtrip through American landscapes, genre styles, and form, Incubation creates radical space for what is ‘monstrous’. Appropriating iconic American tropes, and the structure of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Incubation explores the challenges faced by immigrants in attaining such notions of freedom in so hostile an environment. In this fragmentary document there is a celebration in the cobbling together of lives; global in scope, with an intimate focus on interior voice, this landmark text evidences the early innovations and talents of this T.S. Eliot prizewinning author.