Artists' Books

Diaries of an avatar: a Bible-style artist's book of writings by Martine Syms

A new artist's book by California-based artist Martine Syms (born 1988), Shame Space explores the possibilities of narrative and identity, collecting journal writings by the artist from 2015 to 2017 in which she attempts to capture her shadow self, alongside image stills from the video project Ugly Plymouths. The text entries form the voiceover of Mythiccbeing (pronounced "my thick being'), a "black, upwardly mobile, violent, solipsistic, sociopathic, gender-neutral femme" digital avatar who has iterated across several of Syms' recent exhibitions. In Syms' installations, Mythiccbeing manifests variously in video, audio and as an interactive chatbot that responds to the viewer's communications with messages and animations.

In Shame Space, the character's autofictional, diaristic commentary is gathered into 15 chapters. Its design updates the Bible format with its A5 size, embossed leather-textured cover and silver edge painting. The Ugly Plymouths still-image selection was coded using a programming script, such that the design, like the chatbot's SMS responses, is an exercise in machine automation.

Published Dec 2020

A lost gem of permutational conceptualism from a key figure in artist's book culture, available again

Known internationally as one of Mexico's most important conceptual artists, Ulises Carrión (1941-89) played a decisive role in defining and conceptualizing the genre of the artists' book through his manifesto, The New Art of Making Books (1975), which he wrote soon after the 1972 publication of SONNET(S) and his move from Mexico City to Amsterdam, where he opened the legendary bookshop gallery, Other Books and So, the first space dedicated exclusively to artists' publications and an important precursor to such artists' book hubs as Printed Matter.

One of Carrión's earliest bookworks, SONNET(S) represents a landmark shift in the artist's output from poetry to artists' books. Here, Carrión takes a single poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti through 50 typographic and procedural permutations. This republication is supplemented by new essays on Carrión's bookworks by contemporary artists, writers, and scholars from Mexico, Europe and the US. 

Published March 2021

Every Monday in 2017 and 2019, comedic performance artist Morgan Bassichis created a to-do list. THE ODD YEARS is a collection of those lists, which served both as a way to generate material for live performances and as a place to archive the logistical, emotional, and political business that just kept piling up throughout this two-year project. A record of routine and impossible tasks—some completed and others left unfinished—THE ODD YEARS is one response to the oddness of times in which intensified crisis becomes ordinary.  

THE ODD YEARS is the fourth title in the Document Series, an interdisciplinary publishing initiative that highlights work by time-based artists in printed form.

Morgan Bassichis is a comedian and musician living in New York City. Morgan's performances include Nibbling the Hand that Feeds Me (Whitney Museum, New York 2019), Klezmer for Beginners (Abrons Arts Center, New York, 2019), More Protest Songs (Danspace Project, New York, 2018), and The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions: The Musical (New Museum, New York, 2017).

Heike-Karin Föll’s foundational collection of works on paper refuses, in its totality, to be pinned down. SPEED exists in a sequence of autonomy, embracing simultaneity and resisting typical chronology or logic. A resource library for Foll’s more well known painted works, each page also stands on its own. The “writing” and “rewriting” of these pages is a rejection by the artist to rest on what has already been accomplished, and insists on constantly renewing modes of expression amidst the routine and expected.

SPEED takes the form of visual index, a micro structure of narrative, through the space of the page. Blank spaces (components of in-betweens and not-yets), textual elements, found images, and abstract icons are assembled from a daily stream of computational information and graphics to bring us into the temporal now. The pages slip from medium to medium, relying on short forms and small units as the bases for recontextualisation and variation. Montez Press is honoured to be able to offer an opening for these vast and untamable works by Heike-Karin Föll.

Heike-Karin Föll is painter who is currently based in Berlin. She works with the materiality and mechanics of painting and language, treating textuality as equally a vehicle of content, a visual motif and a material form.

plot twist ii is a collection of 11 essays and short stories from the hosts of plot twist’s 2019 - 2020 programme of reading groups and workshops. It includes meditations on privacy, work, and failure; a sci-fi tale in four acts; a story on dizziness and giddiness; two essays on the cultural politics of disgust; and a musing on the peculiar ways language and words stay with us, lodged for a lifetime in our memories. also included are the full reading lists from the year’s programme, and a limited edition riso printed poster (A3) by Lucie de Bréchard (@journal2bor). plot twist is a literary collective, reading group, and experiment in self-organised learning, founded in 2018 by Jo Kali and Georgie Sinclair. plot twist ii is their second publishing project.

Contributions from Andreea Breazu, Angelica Sgouros, Elisa Grasso, Georgie Sinclair, Jo Kali, Juliette Lizotte, Loren Ewart, Lucia Dove, Naomi Credé, Rosie Haward and Sarah Eskens. Designed by Juliette Lizotte and Lucie de Bréchard.

Le titre du livre « Index of operational and code names » reprend l'intitulé d'un document trouvé sur Internet constitué d'une liste de 437 mots anglais classés par ordre alphabétique et accompagnés de brèves indications concernant les opérations militaires pour lesquelles ces mots ont servi de noms de code.

Ce document a inspiré à Diane Guyot la série « Index War » réalisée selon un protocole simple consistant à produire un dessin pour chaque mot de la liste.

Composé de 86 dessins issus de cette série, certains reproduits pour le support du livre, d'autres présentés au sein d'un cahier photographique tels qu'ils sont aujourd'hui accrochés dans les intérieurs de leurs propriétaires, et d'une partie textuelle placée en fin de volume qui restitue l'intégralité du document source, le livre, comme le suggère la mention volume 1 qui accompagne son titre, ne marque pas le point d'achèvement de l'œuvre mais témoigne au contraire d'un processus en cours.

L'articulation des composantes de l'œuvre dans l'espace du livre en constitue en mème temps une nouvelle version, à la fois spécifique et autonome. L'activation du dispositif codex/index invite le lecteur à une méditation sur la notion de code, où s'entrecroisent sémiotique de l'image, technique de propagande et technologie de l'information.

Mon premier coloriage conceptuel is the first ever conceptual coloring book in the history of the world, until we find evidente to the contrary. For Immixtion Books, publishing this book is both an honor and a form of tribute to a little interactive drawing book titled "Toi par Lui et moi" [You by Him and Me] conceived by Robert Filiou in 1975. Mon premier coloriage conceptuel is the result of a joyful collaboration between Diane Guyot de Saint Michel and Marthe Pradeau.

Bad Advisors compiles recent texts with pictures of flowers from the street and public gardens taken in Paris during spring 2017. Mourning is an empty box with an excessive syntax. A rose does not allude to anything except its own existence. But you feel, brushing within its range, a bit more complete, which means the sensation is an apparition from nothing. The rose is an empty box with an excessive syntax. English Landscapes contains a series of white-on-black i-phone touch drawings of hay bales; a circular form that replicates across UK agricultural zones in late summer. The books are a pair.

This book is part of the www.anywhereoutofthebook.com series

This first publication brings together texts, documentation, scripts and reference material relating to the body of work Jones started in 2013. Marking a new cycle in his work the book makes a claim about the status of performance in the context of his wider practice and the function of documentation and image regimes in our current times.

The book is claimed to be a form of ‘paraperformance’, meaning a collection of materials that have circulated alongside or chosen to represent the live moments created in his work over a five year period. It represents seven distinct works of installation, sculpture, and performance by Jones including a new work that is made specifically for the pages of this book.

This collection of materials touches on diverse sources and references including the Radical Faerie movement, the Spanish magazine ‘Party’, Liberace’s libel trials, images of uncontacted Amazonian tribes, the political writing of Jean Genet and an early performance work of Vito Acconci to name but a few.

The thread amongst all of the works included in this book is the subtle interweaving of discourses around theatre, performance, the law, representation and politics and the oscillation between urban space, the public sphere and a queer wilderness. More widely the book uses the specificities within Jones’ research to consider the role that performance could play within the art field and, by extension, how documentation and representation of our everyday lives impacts on how we understand our world at large.

This book is part of the series www.anywhereoutofthebook.com series

Concurrently: ode, elegy, satyre, Boeing Nº 737-800 in F♯m awakes and takes off, lands and falls asleep, in between cold sweats and time zones. Triangulating the distance from ground to body, moving though still, to sun, blinding though eyeless, amidst a text searching for sense in an economy of simulations, value suspended 38000 feet above the ground. 

The anatomy of the world’s most popular commercial airplane serves as test tube to rehearse, under the common denominator of a possible fall, a motley set of anxieties, crossing borders, with and without passport. Mirror-play, annotated between the internal voice of a passenger, by the window, their dialogue with the Sun and a chorus of various interjections, from cockpit to exhaust pipe.

“May we want to reckon the time of the position ‘student’ not from the progressive aspect of amateur towards pro. Besides the fact that every step of life is an ongoing learning, there’s a clear physical(virtual) circumstance of school and an educational boundary for student, which makes student’s moment independent from any other vocations. Extra time of working on one subject with mistakenly expended deadlines, being experimental and anti-aesthetic by testing its performance, the growth on having own tone of (visual) voice while mumbling and simultaneously thinking the mumbling can be also a kind of voice. There are untamed beauties in this position.”

The inaugural issue of Rush Print focuses on the topic ‘BAD TYPE.’ A loose synonym of bad here is amatuer or ugly which is what contributors deliver as a student. The content ranges from interviews, workshops and anecdotes with 2020 participants of Grafisch Arnhem. The entire publication is typeset in student-made typefaces so the book also functions as a type specimen.

Rush Print is new magazine annually releasing out from the contributors of Grafisch Arnhem. Throughout spreads, it contains graphic design related subjects such as Types, Time, Talks, etc.

the monumental misrememberings is a meditation on death. It’s a curious insight on the creative and violent ways in which Black girls, women, trans women and femmes often become displaced, experience death, and subjugation as a result of patriarchal systems in America. This debut collection of poems by Mimi Tempestt operates through this specific lens, not to romanticize the pain of Black femme bodies, but to bring light to this sadistic truth. When we turn on the television, when we log into social media, when we look in the mirror, the normalcy of how often and creatively Black women are murdered weighs on our conscience. the monumental misrememberings addresses our unwillingness to grapple with these violences, and places front and center the realities faced by Black femmes.

Size: 5" x 7.5", 88 pages

Self published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Women's Center for Creative Work. Designed by MJ Balvanera, Riso-printed by Neko Natalia.

An interactive guide for black women of all ages, to not only create the creative life they want, but to monetize every aspect of it. Visit creativeblackwomansplaybook.com for a Spanish version of the book.

Size: 5" x 7.5", 60 pages

Self published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Women's Center for Creative Work. Designed by MJ Balvanera, Edited by Sarah Williams and Hana Ward, Riso-printed by Neko Natalia, Illustrations by Hana Ward.

Two clock-faces are staring at each other.
They are two sides of one thing, as different as they are the same.
They move as two bodies revolving around each other, into a tender embrace.
A kiss, made of time, in time.
Mirrored shape shifters, their hour-numbers climbing on each other's shoulders.
Running up against the limits of their own usefulness, clocklikeness.

A book by Katja Mater, with a text by Amelia Groom designed by Elisabeth Klement
79 clocks, 192 pages, open spine, 17 × 21 cm
Printed by Wilco Art Books on Arena White Rough by Fedrigoni 

Special issue of this US magazine dedicated in its entirety to the late Australian artist/compositional linguist/raconteur Chris Mann, who died in 2018. The magazine contains tributes from Mann associates and admirers, including Warren Burt, Amanda Stewart, Pi-0, Ronald Robboy, Linda Kouvaras, Alvin Lucier, Ruark Lewis, Annea Lockwood, as well as Mann’s own writing and an interview with him by Philip Blackburn.

88 pages bound in soft-cover glossy colour cover by Brigid Burke.

Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain collects a decade of work from artist, musician, and author of On Hell, Johanna Hedva. In plays, performances, an encyclopedia, essays, autohagiography, hypnagogic, and hypnapompic poems—in texts whose bodies drift and delight in form—Minerva tunnels into mysticism, madness, motherhood, and magic. Minerva gets dirty with the mess of gender and genius. She does the labor of sleep and dreams. She odysseys through Los Angeles, shapeshifting in stygian night and waking up to wail in the light.

Toutes les filles rêvent d’un prisonnier est un fanzine issu d’une correspondance avec un ami incarcéré dans une prison française. Un petit ouvrage de 16 pages qui donne à voir une réalité de la prison depuis l’intérieur. Entre potes, gâteaux et barreaux.

J’ai quitté Paris juxtapose des écritures de natures différentes, les unes imageant les autres, parfois lune, regard, tête en l’air, parfois paysage défilant, envolée filante. L’ouvrage s’articule autour de trois textes. Des extraits des Indes Galantes de Jean-Philippe Rameau (1735) ouvrent chaque cahier de texte. Des poèmes de Julien Creuzet composent le corps de texte principal. Ce dernier est accompagné de notes, montages de descriptions paysagères extraites de la collection Toutes nos colonies (1931). Ces extraits ont tous été placés à leur pagination initiale, forçant la rencontre des géographies décrites dans ces ouvrages. Ces ensembles de texte sont séparés par des cahiers d’images, où les photographies de Julien Creuzet se superposent à des détails de l’iconographie de Toutes nos colonies.

J’ai quitté Paris a été conçu lors de l’année de résidence de Julien Creuzet au centre d’art La Galerie à Noisy-le-Sec en 2014. Résidence pensée comme un opéra, qu’il appellera Opéra-Archipel.

Publié avec le soutien de La Galerie, Noisy le Sec, du FRAC Normandie Caen et de la Galerie Dohyang Lee, Paris, France

À lire :
Amadou Elimane Kane à propos de J'ai quitté Paris

Défense d’Afficher est un recueil de graffitis politiques relevés en France tout au long de l’année l’année 2019, une période riche en contestations sociales. Une sélection restreinte, à fortiori non exhaustive, mais recouvrant un large panorama des luttes contemporaines qui nous concernent : contre le capitalisme, contre le racisme, contre le pillage du tiers-monde et pour l'accueil des réfugiés, contre le sexisme et les violences faites aux femmes, contre la destruction de la planète, contre cette société néo-libérale, contre la police et ses violences, contre les inégalités sociales, pour l’auto-défense et l’auto-organisation.

Sans oublier d’y faire apparaitre des sujets plus légers ou drôles. Le corps de l’ouvrage qui recueille les graffitis est imprimé sur six affiches jaunes fluo 50 × 70 cm pliées encartées, soutenu par une couverture muette au motif abstrait de peinture à la bombe. L’ensemble est recouvert d’une jaquette imprimée sur des affiches dos bleu accueillant le titre Défense d’Afficher, lui aussi relevé dans l’espace public. Ce fanzine à été produit suite à l’invitation « Impressions libres » d’Étapes et Exaprint.

Ce fanzine étant vendu à prix libre, il n’est pas possible de l’acheter en ligne. N’hésitez pas à nous contacter pour les modalitées de vente.

FAQ is an accordion-fold art publication edited by Maurizio Cattelan and Myriam Ben Salah and commissioned by Le Dictateur. Coinciding with the 10th anniversary edition of Le Dictateur, the first volume will expand into a yearly series.

FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions, referencing an attempt to synthesize a recurrent flow, a tenor, an ideal visual representation of a given and very subjective “now”. 
Born out of an accute image eating disorder, FAQ reflects the mental assimilation of a relentless roving within physical and virtual art spaces: from galleries to tumblr accounts, museums, or artists studios; it can be seen as a portable exhibition, a show on paper, a project of restitution, a hybrid object that you can leaf and scroll through. Far from being a rational enterprise because of its lack of rules, hierarchy, order—or concept for that matter—it is expressly and brazenly as personal and biased as possible and reflects the obsessive mannerism of its authors.

Works by Korakrit Arunanondchai, Thomas Bayrle, Neil Beloufa, Judith Bernstein, David Douard, Carroll Dunham, Dan Finsel, Llyn Foulkes, Kathy Grannan, Camille Henrot, Charles Irvin, Elad Lassry, Jon Rafman, Steven Shaerer, Emily Mae Smith, Peter Sutherland, Slavs and Tatars, Andra Ursuta, Aleksandra Waliszewska, Charlie White, Jakub Julian Ziolkowski...

In 2019, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania presented the experimental exhibition Colored People Time. Divided into three chapters—Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents—it used the Black vernacular phrase Colored People's Time (CPT) to explore the ways that dominant notions of time have been used to control and condemn Black people. CPT names a political performance by Black people to evade and ridicule the enforcement of punctuality and productivity.

Alongside reproductions of historical objects from the Black Panther Party, Sutton E. Griggs, the National Institutes of Health/Getty Images, and the African Collection at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Colored People Time includes reprints of seminal essays, newly commissioned writing and poetry from Huey Copeland, Eve Ewing, Michael Hanchard, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Amber Rose Johnson, Carolyn Lazard, Jessica Lynne, Tausif Noor, Meg Onli, Gregory Pardlo, M. NourbeSe Philip, Monique Scott, Martine Syms and Michelle M. Wright. Artists include: Aria Dean, Kevin Jerome Everson, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Carolyn Lazard, Dave McKenzie, Cameron Rowland, Sable Elyse Smith and Martine Syms.

Over the past 40 years, Canadian artist Moyra Davey (born 1958) has perfected a unique synthesis of photography, film and text to critically engage with the past, present and future of the world around her. Based on Davey's eponymous 2019 film, I Confess unites three main sources in a chronicle of late 20th-century Quebec, shaped by themes of race, poverty, language and nationalism. Using American writer James Baldwin's 1962 novel Another Country as its point of departure, Davey's film also focuses on the life and work of Québécois revolutionary Pierre Vallières and Ottawa-based political philosopher Dalie Giroux.

Published to accompany the exhibition Moyra Davey: The Faithful at the National Gallery of Canada, this deeply personal and highly political book seeks to examine an unresolved chapter of Québécois history from a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective that draws attention to contemporary issues of separatism, while reflecting the artist's understanding of photography and text as unique corollaries. This publication features writings by the artist, Dalie Giroux and National Gallery of Canada's Associate Curator Andrea Kunard, and a poster insert.

Published September 2020. 

Drink Deeply and Dream by Elspeth Walker is an ethereal, offbeat short story about wannabe vampires with a Marxist bent and their search for salvation from capitalism via eternal bloodlust.

Paperback, Staple Bound and Offset Printed