Artists' Books

A prescient document of art-industry and museum critique from Black artists and writers.

A collection of essays edited by artist and organizer Tom Lloyd and first published in 1971, Black Art Notes was a critical response to the Contemporary Black Artists in America exhibition at the Whitney Museum, but grew into a "concrete affirmation of Black Art philosophy as interpreted by eight Black artists," as Lloyd notes in the introduction.

This facsimile edition features writings by Lloyd, Amiri Baraka, Melvin Dixon, Jeff Donaldson, Ray Elkins, Babatunde Folayemi, and Francis & Val Gray Ward. These artists position the Black Arts Movement outside of white, Western frameworks and articulate the movement as one created by and existing for Black people. Their essays outline the racism of the art world, condemning the attempts of museums and other white cultural institutions to tokenize, whitewash and neutralize Black art, and offer solutions through self-determination and immediate political reform. While the publication was created to respond to a particular moment, the systemic problems that it addresses remain pervasive, making these critiques both timely and urgent.

It goes without saying that a dance is a dance and a book about dance is a book. Though they may meet at the intersection of Art and Good Intentions, I find myself greedy. I have a longstanding infatuation with language, a not-easily assailed conviction that it, above all else, offers a key to clarity. Not that it can replace experience, but rather holds a mirror to our experience, gives us distance when we need it. So here I am, in a sense, trying to 'replace' my performances with a book, greedily pushing language to clarify what already was clear in other terms. But, alas, gone. This has seemed one good reason to compile a book out of the remains of my performances, letting the language fall where it may. Let it be said 'She usually makes performances and has also made a book.' -Yvonne Rainer

Forty-five years after its publication, Primary Information brings Yvonne Rainer's classic book back into print in an exact facsimile.

In 1974, Yvonne Rainer published Work 1961-73, an illustrated catalog of her performance works up to that point. In these years, as the art world turned toward minimalism, Rainer and her Judson Dance Theater colleagues were engaged in a parallel, and equally radical, redefinition of dance. Stripping dance of its pomp and self-serious virtuosity, they created what dancer and choreographer Pat Catterson has called "the people's dance." Or, as Rainer put it, instead of the "overblown plot" of traditional dance, she explored the "obvious" alternative: "stand, walk, run, eat, carry bricks, show movies, or move and be moved by some thing other than oneself." 

Work 1961-73 chronicles the years when Rainer found herself and her work at the heart of a revolution in dance, performance and art. Written in Rainer's wonderful frank, funny and perceptive prose, and illustrated with photographs, handwritten scores, sketches, press articles and ephemera, Work 1961-73 is a period document and an instruction manual, an archive and a manifesto. 

A sought-after, rare classic, Work 1961-73 is brought back into print in a true facsimile edition by Primary Information; the only change is the small addition of new notes at the back of the book. 

One of the most influential artists of her generation, dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer (born 1934) was a founding member of Judson Dance Theater in New York City and a leading figure in the development of minimalist and postmodern dance.

A long-awaited facsimile of Michael Snow's legendary artist's book, a classic of conceptualism

For years an out-of-print rarity, Canadian artist, filmmaker and musician Michael Snow's (born 1928) classic 1975 artist's book Cover to Cover is available once again, in this facsimile edition. Unconstrained by discipline, Snow famously remarked that his sculptures were made by a musician, his films by a painter. Flipping through Cover to Cover, which is composed entirely of photographs in narrative sequence, one might describe it as a book made by a filmmaker. Each individual page features a distinct moment, seen from one perspective on the front, and from a diametrically opposed angle on the back, occasionally pivoting between interior and exterior spaces. Midway through the book, the images are inverted such that the volume must be turned upside-down to be looked at right-side up. The result is an elegant, disorienting study in simultaneity. With this work, wrote Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "Michael Snow has challenged the reader's/viewer's notion of a book, indeed one's very notion of perception."

Elizabeth in the Woolds is the product of two superimposed compositional strategies; a thematic aggregate based on notes dating back to 2008 and an epic prose narrative. Elizabeth is the device through which this simultaneous register moves. Screen writing provides a model for multiple voices. In a film script, the narrator can be the camera; there’s a machine at the centre of the story structure which figures a demand for resolution of plot; a contrario, the thematic approach (S, U, N, as electric light) obliterates chronology, and enumerates an atemporal topological figure, or the way the world is built.

(730pp., self-published first edition of 50, Kortrijk, 2021) 

‘Hotel Bellevue’ is a photo book and a vocabulary centered around border trees, Celtic historical facts and visual speculation. This book is a manifesto for love, anger, the non-human, a wish to connect, to suggest, and to study. Only things from the heart deliver.

Published 2021. 

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. 

It is less a lecture, more like a cartography.
Parts may or may not sync up, we will see.

Ce qui suit est “Une conférence sur la stagnation”
Il s’agit moins d’une conférence que d’une 
cartographie. Ses parties peuvent ou non 
se synchroniser, nous verrons bien.

Dit is “Een lezing over stagnatie.”
Het is minder een lezing, dan een cartografie.
De onderdelen hiervan kunnen wel of niet
synchroon lopen, we zullen zien.

Trilingual (!) edition. Loose sheets in an envelope. On the same model as Resistance.

Écrire comme être un chiton, c'est à dire de soi extraire la soie chitineuse. Les squames calcaires exsudés de son fragile : des miettes d'écailles et de spicules tapissent un devenir-mollusque. Au dedans mouolles mais affamé.es, brouteur.euses bestial.es à l'aube de grignotage ; il y a de quoi gratter !

avec les textes de Leo Go, moilesautresart, Marine Forestier, Suzette Haden Elgin, Ninoa André, Valentin Godard, Lucas Lazzarotto, GPT-3 soua la houlette de Guilluame Seyller; et les dessins de Patricia Lino Dias, Alix Penon.

Sitzen ist das neue rauchen is a publication released on the occasion of the exhibition 'Sitzen ist das neue rauchen' by Sophie Nys.

The publication contains unspectacular and sometimes very similar views of Haim Steinbach’s solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich in 2014. The pictures don’t look like regular exhibition views but are taken from the seated position of the guard who shows the exanimated spaces.

In the art practice of Ode de Kort (1992), the elements O and U are central. The forms meet in a dialogue, from script to body and back. Even more than the letters themselves, De Kort focuses on the linguistic, (typo)graphic and performative questions they generate. This process translates into photography, installation, video, performance, text and publications.

TYPP is the community journal of Sint Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp. TYPP is partly a generator for the shared research of our advanced master students, and partly a platform for carefully selected contributions by tutors, students, alumni, guest lecturers and friends of SLA. TYPP is a stage where art and research from this community is shared with you, to enjoy, read, look, learn and get inspired. 

Each edition is carefully and freely designed by Ward Heirwegh. 

Tracing a period in her life from the 1969 Woodstock Festival through the following years living on the land, this singular dance artist's direct and poetic writings bring a turbulent transitional era to life. Arriving in New York in the early 60's from California, she brought with her a series of pieces that proved to be a serious influence on the development of "postmodern" dance in years to come. Her "dance-constructions" were based on a concern with bodies in action, the movement not being stylized or presented for its visual line but rather as a physical fact. Combining drawings, "dance reports" (short descriptions of events whose movement made a deep impression on the author's memory), and documentary materials such as scores, descriptions, letters to colleagues, and photographic records of performances, Forti's eye toward creating idioms for exploring natural forms and behaviors is evident throughout.  

Simone Forti shifted from painting in 1955 to study dance with Anna Halprin and went on to study composition with Robert Dunn at the Merce Cunningham Studio leading to her association with Judson Dance Theater in the '60s. Her work spans from early minimalist dance-constructions, through animal movement studies, news animations, land portraits, and currently, Logomotion, an improvisational form based on the resonance between movement and the spoken word. She performs and teaches worldwide.

KILOBASE BUCHAREST A-Z is a publication which is describing Bucharest through a sort of experimental alphabet book: for each letter of the English alphabet, artists, writers, architects and researchers were invited to choose a key term and develop a contribution representing a sliver of the Romanian capital city, capturing a polyphonic set of perspectives on the infinite facets of a city whose identity is notoriously difficult to define.

Contributions by: Irina Bujor, Serioja Bocsok, studioBASAR, Iuliana Dumitru, Ștefan Ghenciulescu, Kilobase Bucharest, Apparatus 22, Mihnea Mihalache-Fiastru, Ștefan Constantinescu, Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Gruia Bădescu, Ioana Ulmeanu, Decebal Scriba, Sillyconductor, Prosper Center, Geir Haraldseth, Jimmy Robert, Karol Radziszewski, Lea Rasovszky, Ștefan Botez, Simina Neagu, Bogdan Iancu, Andrei Mihail, Mihai Lukács, Mihai Mihalcea, Cosima Opârtan, Juergen Teller, Hans Leonard Krupp.

The publication also includes a republished insert by late artist Ioana Nemeș, and three reprinted contributions previously published in Kilobase Bucharest A-H (Mousse Publishing, 2011) produced on the occasion of "Image to be projected until it vanishes" exhibition at Museion Bolzano.

From December 11, 2015, until April 10, 2016, the German Library in Guangzhou, China, became The German Library Pyongyang, a reimagining of an initiative of the Goethe-Institut that originally operated in North Korea between 2004 and 2009. This temporary intervention by Sara van der Heide is an imaginary transformation of the current geography of the German Library in Guangzhou. Van der Heide’s project is a contemporary version of the Goethe-Institut’s original library initiative in North Korea, devised as a vessel to discuss national cultural policy in a post-Cold War and postcolonial era that looks critically toward the parallel histories of Germany and the two Koreas. The German Library Pyongyang offers a space for critical questions, but it also functions as a context for transcending thinking that is prescribed by the lines of the nation-state, language, and geography. The several artistic, linguistic, and graphic interventions in the library merge with the continuing activities of the German learning center in Guangzhou, and all institutional printed matter in Chinese is replaced by Korean.

This publication brings together the four original exhibition booklets in German, Korean, English, and Chinese. An additional reader is included with critical reflections as well as documentation of the exhibition and the organized seminar.

Design by Dongyoung Lee
English/German/Korean/Chinese

With the series '24 European Ethnographic Museums' Van der Heide questions the construction and identity of the ethnographic museum today. Here, the project becomes a collection of artefacts in and upon itself and by recording the names of these institutions Van der Heide places the viewer in front of the dilemma: who is authorized to decide what is an artefact, and what should be collected and for what reason? In the 19th century, with the birth of the current European nations, museums openly referred to their colonial past. Today the museums bare more euphemistic names like: ‘Museum der Kulturen’ or ‘World Museum’ but still place the West as the self-acclaimed center of the world.  The existence of the ethnographic museum, which is intertwined with the complicated and loaded colonial past, has been subject to contemporary criticism. While some of the European ethnographic institutions have attempted to come to terms with the past of their collections and their heritage, Van der Heide focuses upon how language continues to reflect the political present of the institutions.

The Mill is the second of three projects to engage the resource industries of Vancouver Island (mining, forestry, and fisheries) through contemporary art and writing. This publication responds to forestry: a mobile industry of logging camps that follow the trees; prices that rise and fall; mills that open and close; communities that boom and bust. In The Mill, artworks are accompanied by a multiplicity of voices, including forestry workers, plant ecologists, and indigenous land stewards. Together, these perspectives chart the cultural and material shifts brought about when trees become commodities.

The Mill is a project that emerged on Vancouver Island to follow a thematic path from the microcosms of the forest floor to the quantifying and processing of lumber and the global distribution of forestry products. Expanded from two exhibitions at the Nanaimo Art Gallery, “Silva Part I: O Horizon” and “Silva Part II: Booming Grounds,” this book examines forgotten or under-acknowledged histories, while considering both local sites and forms of cultural expression that surround international forestry practices.

Contributions by Celestine Aleck, E. Richard Atleo (Umeek), Marian Penner Bancroft, Myrtle Bergren, Al Bersch & Leslie Grant, Peter Culley, Wilmer Gold, Bus Griffiths, Robert Guest, Jason de Haan & Miruna Dragan, Richard Hebda, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Duane Linklater, Liz Magor, George Sawchuk, Carol Sawyer, W. G. Sebald, Kathy Slade, Kate Stefiuk, Kika Thorne, Nancy Turner, Fred Wah, Elias Wakan, Merv Wilkinson, Anne Pask-Wilkinson, Ashes Withyman.

Graphic design: Will Holder.

Delta is a coming together for choreographic and performative work to be shared and exercised, a place for sharing work by doing the work. A container for participatory projects, dancing, exchange and choreographic inquiries. Delta is organised as evening dance classes, artist zines and thematic publications, like this one: On water histories, narratives and practices. 

Water both divides and merges, varies and manifests in different kinds of shapes and structures, acquiring different relations with its surroundings. As a transformative material, could one say that water has a different kind of logic, another kind of dance? In this publication, the contributors Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Paul Maheke, Axel Andersson, Sindri Runudde, Vibeke Hermanrud, Elly Vadseth, Daniela Bershan, Sabrina Seifried,  D.N.A. (Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, Neda Sanai and Anita Beikpour), Every Ocean Hughes, Adham Hafez, Pontus Pettersson, and Alice MacKenzie share their multi-layered practices, writings, memories and scores on water. Inviting you to submerge!

With contributions by: Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Paul Maheke, Axel Andersson, Sindri Runudde, Vibeke Hermanrud, Elly Vadseth, Daniela Bershan, Sabrina Seifried, D.N.A. (Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, Neda Sanai and Anita Beikpour), Every Ocean Hughes, Adham Hafez, Pontus Pettersson and Alice MacKenzie.

Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris: First Move, Original Rains: a Score for Sensing the Precipitational
Pontus Pettersson: Dripping from my fingertips
Adham Hafez: To dance about nature?
Daniela Bershan in collaboration with Sabrina Seifried: Mapping OCEAN
Sindri Runudde: Chosen by the barnacles
Vibeke Hermanrud in conversation with Elly Vadseth: Submerged
Axel Andersson: Confessions of a swimmer
D.N.A: Hydrocapsules.love
Paul Mahek:e As the Waters Recall
Alice MacKenzie: I know that smell
Every Ocean Hughes: Ocean
Pontus Pettersson: 100 ways of water

Graphic design by Sara Kaaman

ERRARE/WANDERING/WONDERING is a publication by Lucia Palladino that brings together exercises and notes for wild outdoor walking practices in Contemplative Activism. This publication can be used for improvisation and choreographic composition for dancers and actors, but can also be used by everyone as maps for disorientation and deep listening.

Contemplative Activism is an ongoing research in decolonizing, anti-capitalistic practices for the body in relations to the landscape they are immersed in. You find the manifesto of CA inserted in the publication.  

Concept and words by Lucia Palladino
Design by Marzia Dalfini
Proofreading by Sarah Cale
Bookbinding by La Rivière Sèche and Lucia Palladino

Co-produced by Nadine for the WAB 2021.

DEARS is a print magazine for transversal writing practices at the crossroads of art, poetry and experimental writing. It brings together authors and writers from different backgrounds and constitutes a dedicated platform for texts escaping the usual genres and disciplinary boundaries.

DEARS promotes the exploration of new forms of language as a way to foster new forms of living together, and emphasizes the growing relevance of trans- versal writing practices in this respect.

DEARS issue no. 2 / HOPE.FULLY / Spring 2021

With texts by Ann Cotten, Barbara Sirieix, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Heather Phillipson, Ines Marita Schärer, Kayije Kagame, Legion Seven, Leila Peacock, Louise Guerra Archive, Tarek Lakhrissi, and an epigraph by Rebecca Solnit

Editors are Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Nicole Bachmann and Robert Steinberger

Sasha Phyars-Burgess’ first monograph, Untitled. Spanning three bodies of work, this 200-plus page monograph includes poems by Ser Alida and Aurora Masum-Javed, a conversation between Sasha Phyars-Burgess, Juliana Huxtable and Carolyn Lazard, and essay by Bill Gaskins. Designed by Studio Lin.

As recipient of the second annual Capricious Photo Award, Sasha is a vital, emerging voice in contemporary photography, engaging the charged line between documentary and fine art. Her work ranges from affecting studies on diaspora, family and place to revolving social phenomenons in which energy, beauty and power meet.

The second annual jury panel was helmed by Capricious Founder and Publisher Sophie Mörner and Associate Publisher Anika Sabin alongside Lauren Cornell, Katherine Hubbard, JOFF, Matt Keegan, Guadalupe Rosales, Ka-Man Tse, and Lyndsy Welgos.

wild wild Wild West / Haunting of the Seahorse by Jonathan Lyndon Chase, part of a new book series of experimental narratives. This release of non-linear storytelling illustrates black queer bodies moving through fluid states of love, grief, and desire within the canons of science fiction, fantasy and horror. Like a love letter, Jonathan employs multi-sensory entanglements, a blending of the abstract and physical, to draw out complex histories of blackness, meditations on mental health, and queer futurity.

Jonathan Lyndon Chase is an interdisciplinary artist principally working in modes of painting, video and sculpture depicting queer black love and community amid the backdrop of urban and domestic spaces. This is their second book with Capricious Publishing—a debut book Quiet Storm was released in conjunction with Company Gallery in 2018. Chase was born in 1989 in Philadelphia, PA where they currently live and work.

RANDY is a 300-plus page full color anthology of RANDY zines spanning 2010-2013. Initiated by artist A.K. Burns and publisher Sophie Mörner, RANDY was a fearless celebration of queer/feminist arts.

Contains over 100 interviews, conversations and projects including work by:
niv Acosta, Jess Arndt, Meriem Bennani, Sadie Benning, Elizabeth Bethea, Ramdasha Bikceem, Cass Bird, Dana Bishop-Root, Pauline Boudry, boychild, Kathe Burkhart, Nao Bustamante, Jibz Cameron, Silvia Casalino, Christelle de Castro, Leidy Churchman, Jon Davies, Hayden Dunham, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Nicole Eisenman, Edie Fake, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Shannon Funchess, Mariah Garnett, Luke Gilford, Julia Gillard, Jules Gimbrone, Reina Gossett, Goodyn Green, Gordon Hall, Harmony Hammond, Onya Hogan-Finlay, Emily Hope, Katherine Hubbard, Amber Ibarreche, Mariana Juliano, Stanya Kahn, Sarah Forbes Keough, Pozsi B Kolor, Adam Krause, Lisa Lenarz, Katerina Llanes, Amos Mac, Lee Maida, India Salvor Menuez, Lessa Millet, MPA, Ulrike Müller, Sheila Pepe, Litia Perta, Cassie Peterson, Isaac Preiss, R.H Quaytman, Jen Rosenblit, Colin Self, Mel Shimkovitz, Amy Sillman, Tuesday Smillie, Jazmin Venus Soto, Matthew Stone, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Lanka Tattersall, Wu Tsang, Scott Valentine, Leilah Weinraub, Hanna Wilde, Martha Wilson, Io Tillett Wright, Geo Wyeth, Yes! Association/Föreningen Ja!

From theory-inspired poetry to technocratic desires concealed behind razorblades; from anarchy to mass-entertainment; from the collapse of binary distinctions of scale to post-human architecture; from the vibratory power of sound and vision to crowds, to the rejection of natural essentialism, materialist universality, and the haunted houses of the Anthropocene, all can be found in Deep Scroll. Edited by the artist Anne de Vries in collaboration with an AI text generator, this book offers an offline domain in which a network of artistic gestures and theoretical contributions are collected for your scrolling needs. 

Comprising a range of scrolling pathways that serve as hyperlinks and references to past art projects, sketches, research, and documentation, this book overflows with texts and collages that generate ambiguous algorithms that fleetingly capture the focus of our configurations. All content smoothly flows, driving an accelerated state of correlation to the point of its collapse. Deep Scroll is designed to be reactive; it may induce an epiphany, or to leave the reader at the nadir of a cognitive abyss.

DEEP SCROLL is an artist publication produced in collaboration with AISSystem and Onomatopee. This limited edition contains contributions by Ariella Azoulay, Alain Badiou, Iain Hamilton Grant, Amelia Groom, Nicholas Korody, AI text generators, and many others.

First launched in 2012, and published by mfc michèle didier (micheledidier.com), == is a small-run arts publication, edited by Matt Keegan. ==#2, 2015, is designed by Su Barber and published in an edition of 500 by Capricious Publishing. Barber and Keegan worked together on North Drive Press (northdrivepress.com) between 2005-2010, and this publication shares a variety of traits with NDP.

==#2 is a non-thematic arts publication contained in a box with a 96-page bound volume featuring artist-to-artist interviews, texts, and transcriptions. Six loose multiples are also included.

Contributors include: Sam Anderson, Uri Aran, Fia Backström, Darren Bader, Judith Barry, Stefania Bortolami, Daniel Bozhkov, Milano Chow, Anna Craycroft, Lucky DeBellevue, Cristina Delgado, Haytham El-Wardany, Jake Ewert, Vincent Fecteau, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Harrell Fletcher, Rachel Foullon, Aurélien Froment, Kenny Greenberg, Calla Henkel, Leslie Hewitt, Jaya Howey, Adelita Husni-Bey, Iman Issa, Ruba Katrib, Jill Magid, Jo Nigoghossian, Aaron Peck, Max Pitegoff, David Placek, Olivia Plender, Lisa Robertson, Andrew Russeth, Amy Sillman, Diane Simpson, Greg Parma Smith, Jessica Stockholder, Martine Syms, and Anicka Yi.