Artists' Writing

Diagrammatic Writing is a poetic demonstration of the capacity of format to produce meaning. The articulation of the codex, as a space of semantically generative relations, has rarely (if ever) been subject to so highly focused and detailed a study. The text and graphical presentation are fully integrated, co-dependent, and mutually self-reflexive.

This small book work should be of interest to writers, bibliographers, designers, conceptual artists, and anyone interested in the meta-language of diagrammatic thought in graphic form.

Special thanks to Iman Salehian for cover designs.
Thanks also to the Banff Art Centre, February 12-18, 2013.

Johanna Drucker is a writer and book artist known for her work in experimental typography. She has published and lectured widely on topics related to the history of the book, contemporary art, graphic design, and digital aesthetics. She is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Information Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Drucker wrote this text during residence at the Banff Art Centre, February 12-18, 2013.

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) 

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.

‘This lecture premiered at The Louvre auditorium as part of FIAC’s public programs in October, 2017. To give it, I loaded the talk into a teleprompter program on my laptop. The linebreaks in the piece are a result of the way the teleprompter program broke them up in order to facilitate the reading of the work. Although I have never written lineated verse, I love the idea that a computer lineated the verse for me. This lecture, then, reads an awful lot like the way I talk, but it is truly nothing like the way I talk.’ KG

Kenneth Goldsmith is the author and editor of over twenty books. In 1996, he founded UbuWeb. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania. In May 2011, he was invited to read at President Obama’s ‘A Celebration of American Poetry’ at The White House, where he also held a poetry workshop with First Lady Michelle Obama. In 2013, he was named as the inaugural Poet Laureate of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. His most recent book is ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’, a meditation on digital culture. 

Project developed in conversation with Mette Edvardsen.
Design by Maria Camila Alfonso.

Published 2020.

Meet Me In The Present: Documents and their Afterlives is an anthology of essays which examines the power of collective action. Spanning twenty-one acts of resistance — from letters exchanged between black power activists to the ethos of protest being brought into the Victoria and Albert Museum — and with an afterword by critic Orit Gat, these essays consider what it means to survive against all odds within a changing society. Drawing from the motives and experiences of those who have protected the right to access shared resources, Meet Me in the Present tells the stories of these diverse defenders. The book calls for public spaces, and for ideas to be made public in a time when ‘the commons’ is increasingly under attack.

Edited by Alex Quicho, Camilla Brown, Hatty Nestor, Laura Fava, Sarah Thacker, and Zachary Soudan
Design by Tom Finn and Jake Tollady

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

Confidences / Baseline plays with the vampire novel like a dollhouse. Charac­ters who variously believe in the power of theatre and performance become entangled with grief, desire, and the un­known. What does a rehearsal come to mean when a vampire lives forever?

Baseline is the first in a series of books that fetishise nightclubs for their inaccessibility. Deluded realities antici­pate the transformative sensuality of penetration. In his second novel, artist Ivan Cheng maintains his fixation on structures for audiences between public and private.

Designed by Sabo Day
Book cover by Özgür Kar
Back cover photography by Nikola Lamburov
TLTRPreß, Berlin 2021
ISBN: 978-3-9819640-5-9
176 pages, 117 x 164mm, edition of 40,2kg

About Ivan Cheng:
The performances of Ivan Cheng are incomplete, failing, desperate, and riddled with absence. They use his variously trained performing body, incanting texts that foreground subjectivity in monologues and dialogues. Identities of other interlocutors become embedded through rehearsal, dialogue, and entrustment. Without deluded presupposition of being for everyone, Cheng’s practice is invested in questions around publics and accessibility.

In 2020, he reconstituted past performance texts into a murder mystery about a street busker, and continues his foray into written genre with Confidences / Baseline. Past presentations of his texts have occurred at Volksbühne (Berlin), Oude Kerk (Amsterdam), Belvedere21 (Vienna), MuHKA (Antwerp), Nacionalinė dailės galerija (Vilnius), Unsound Festival (Krakow), Carriageworks (Sydney), Federation Square (Melbourne). He holds an MFA in Critical Studies (Sandberg Instituut), having previously studied at the Royal Academy of Music and Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

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

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.

“In this recent publication (to be printed January 2021) created as a part of my residency at Artist-in-Residence 2020 Petrohradska kolektiv in Prague, I wanted to share a few thoughts on how ‘matter matters’ within artistic practices, but at the same time, it was my attempt to experiment with the ways of presenting research and let the reader trace it as it was evolving – through various forms of notes, readings, writings, and conversations.”

Karolina Rybačiauskaitė (b. 1992) is a researcher currently living between Vilnius and Prague. She studies Ph.D. in Philosophy at Vilnius University, also graduated in History and Theory of Art at Vilnius Academy of Arts. Her research is motivated by the instability of knowledge-making and by searching for the ways to take care of the complex patterns it creates. This involves studying the speculative account of ‘ecology of practices’ proposed by Isabelle Stengers, but also adding to it through various practical engagements with artistic and curatorial reworkings of their matters. 

Wayne Koestenbaum's first book of short fiction: a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables. 

In his first book of short fiction—a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables—Wayne Koestenbaum takes the gloom and melancholy of our own terrifying political moment and finds subversive solace by overturning the customary protocols of tale-telling. Characters and narrators wander into strange locales; the difference between action and thinking, between reality and dream, grows moot in a heightened yet burlesque manner. The activities in The Cheerful Scapegoat are a cross between a comedy of manners and a Sadean orgy. Language has its own desires: figures of speech carry an erotic charge that straddles the line between slapstick and vertigo. Punishment hangs over every dialogue—but in the fable-world of The Cheerful Scapegoat, abjection comes with an undertaste of contentment. The tchotchkes of queer culture—codes and signifiers—get scrambled together in these stories and then blown up into an improbable soufflé.  

Koestenbaum's fables travel in circles, slipping away from their original point and leading the reader to a paradisiacal suspension of fixed categories. Intensified sentences and curlicue narratives scheme together mesmerically to convince the reader to abandon old ways of thinking and to take on a commitment to the polymorphous, the wandering, the tangential. Koestenbaum's fables—emergency bulletins uttered in a perverse vernacular of syntactic pirouettes—alert us to the necessity of pushing language into new contortions of exactitude and ecstatic excess.

A mystery murder artist's novel by Alex Cecchetti, in which the artist and narrator realises he is dead and decides to investigate the causes of his own death.

“I am dead. Homicide, assassination, accident, suicide, the detectives have come up with nothing. The labels in my clothes, my fingerprints, my shoe size, everything has been unstitched, erased, wiped away, blanched, bleached, and consigned to oblivion. As the only clue, in a secret pocket sewn into my trousers, the detectives found a flimsy slip of paper torn from the pages of a book. On that folded bit of paper just two words, Tamam Shud, “this is the end.” Experts, antiquarians, and opium smokers have been consulted, and all agree that these are the last two words in the Rubaiyat, an ancient collection of esoteric poems written by a Persian poet named Omar Khayyam. What the hell do I have to do with poetry, Persia, and hidden pockets? I can't even sew on a button. My identity is still unknown and not even I remember much. This is why I have decided to investigate my own death.”

The Tamam Shud narrative emerged through a series of episodic performances and an exhibition by Alex Cecchetti at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. For two years the writing process and the artistic process were interwoven, feeding each other as they evolved. The art project and the artist's novel are linked together as much as the life of the victim is connected to the piece of paper found in his pocket.

Artist, poet and choreographer, creator of performances and idiosyncratic objects, Alex Cecchetti (born 1977 in Terni, Italy, lives and works in Paris) has developed a unique practice, difficult to classify, that could be called art of avoidance: tactical and poetic, aesthetic and materialistic, its system leads to produce specific situations or objects that can exist both inside and outside the traditional exhibitions. It is in this double movement of representation and conceal that it's possible to inscribe his staging of invisible choreographies of hidden nudes and sleeping dancers. His work is focused in the construction of specific narratives that are experienced both mentally and physically by the audience.

A drama in three acts on the main theme of zombies: the most recent novel by the artists' collective.

Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte is a screenplay that cannot be a film; it is a film that can only be on paper. If the property of a film producer, Bernadette Corporation claims Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte would be left derelict, abandoned to vagabonds and squatters. It is intended as a narrative of messy revenge, ruined by the screenplay form. With Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte, Bernadette Corporation asks: How many amateur screenplay writers are there in existence compared to how many amateur novelists? What is the difference between a zombie and an insane cannibal?

Bernadette Corporation is an anonymous artists' group with changing members. From 1995 to 1997, it worked under the guise of an underground fashion label. In 1999 it self-published a magazine, Made in USA, and began producing videos, most notably Get Rid of Yourself (2003). In 2005 Bernadette Corporation authored the much-acclaimed collective novel Reena Spaulings, published by Semiotext(e) and hailed as "[a] sprawling work of crypto-impressionistic fiction that purposefully elides individual authorship for a sort of rarefied mechanical groupthink."

For over a century now, iconographer artists have fuelled their approach by tapping into the diversity of images produced by othersand spread through society by industrial means. From collage to the post-internet school, from archival installations to Appropriationist quotation and image constellations, the present book puts these art practices into perspective, focusing on the last forty years, an extraordinarily dynamic period that recently witnessed the invention and development of a new way of disseminating information and images, the internet. Through theoretical texts, artists’ interviews, and exhibition practices, the book maps the connections artists maintain with images and examines emotion as the driving force in our interactions with them.

Editors: Garance Chabert & Aurélien Mole
Texts: François Aubart, Garance Chabert & Aurélien Mole, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Jan Verwoert.

Interviews: Pierre-Olivier Arnaud, Barbara Breitenfellner, Céline Duval, Haris Epaminonda, Aurélien Froment, Wade Guyton, Camille Henrot, Thomas Hirschhorn, Pierre Leguillon, Jonathan Monk, Clément Rodzielski, Linder Sterling, John Stezaker, Oriol Vilanova, by Timothée Chaillou.

32 pages leaflet, Turmoil, Batia Suter, 2020, layered reproductions excerpt from a series in progress, various size. Courtesy of Batia Suter.

FUGUES is a study of objects. Elements repeat and imitate one another like a polyphonic canon of voices narrating stories of domestic confinement in looped time.

With images by photographer Nicole Maria Winkler & texts by artist Issy Wood, writer Ella Plevin, model Freja Beha Erichsen and curator Elaine Tam.

Real state is the first publication by artist Asta Meldal Lynge, a visual essay with text by Eleanor Ivory Weber, that takes a critical stance towards the subjects of housing, urban development and image production. Employing video-stills, photographs and found images, Lynge explores the social and political value of the image, in a specifically urban context, emphasising the fictions present in the (re)production of space.

In particular, Real state investigates the ramifications of architectural renderings within the public sphere, documenting building site hoardings, symbolic points at the threshold of construction, where a yet-to-exist everyday and a predicted image of the city meets the real one.

Processing this documentation through layering, editing and retouching, Lynge highlights (and challenges) both the intensifying tendency of ‘image-building’ or the production of buildings as icons and the subsequent transformation of public space into an infinite extension of image surfaces.

As the content is framed and re-framed, trackpad gestures are overlaid, ultimately bringing the stability of any image surface into question. This destabilising approach is mirrored in Weber’s text which combines excerpts from e-mail conversations, with differing registers of fiction, expanding on the disconnection between the idea of housing as a basic human need and its position within market logic and neoliberal ideology.

The book’s title alludes to these systems at play, both the power structures of governed entities and the business of real estate; whilst troubling the promise that there is something real or true to be revealed.

From interdisciplinary writer and performer Jacob Wren comes Polyamorous Love Song, a novel of intertwined narratives concerning the relationship between artists and the world. Shot through with unexpected moments of sex and violence, readers will become acquainted with a world that is at once the same and opposite from the one in which they live. With a diverse palette of vivid characters - from people who wear furry mascot costumes at all times, to a group of New Filmmakers that devises increasingly unexpected sexual scenarios with complete strangers, to a secret society that concocts a virus that only infects those on the political right - Wren's avant-garde Polyamorous Love Song (finalist for the 2013 Fence Modern Prize in Prose) is great.

Dissent Without Modification is a research book composed of interviews with radical and progressive artists and thinkers, who started their education and careers in the 1990s. Some are well-known, some are not. They are African, European, and American women working as painters, photographers, performers, hackers, activists and educators, among other roles such as Lisha Sterling, Monster Chetwynd and Kathrin Böhm.

What connects these brilliant women together, now in their late thirties, mid forties, early fifties and sixties; is that the decade of the 1990s had a culturally significant impact on their politics, career and personal life choices. The decade represented a creative coming of age for them all and their lives changed forever. The consequences of those changes are still reflected in their distinctive thoughts and practices today.

The long format interviews that comprise Dissent Without Modification are casual, meandering, philosophical conversations with a wide ranging appeal. Each person’s character is slowly revealed within a backdrop of humour, while touching on many serious universal and global subjects. Topics include pedagogy, race relations, neo-paganism, sexual violence, class warfare, interracial marriage, ecological feminism, contemporary slavery, activism, extreme tourism, African politics, terrorist practice in Western democratic states, and much more.

Published 2020

Reflecting on recent ecological shifts at both local and global scales, Energy Systems explores the systems that dominate global infrastructure and the consequences of connectivism under late capitalism; probing correlations between the worldwide drive for connectivity and the emergence of severe environmental rifts.

Energy Systems seeks to find ways of replacing ‘network’ orientated capital accumulation and socio environmental exploitation with ‘metabolisms’ which are orientated toward reciprocal models of coexistence. Through newly commissioned and existing text works by 19 artists and academics, Energy Systems explores a new architecture of values and begins to build stepping stones toward addressing the systemic alienation of the environment.

Energy Systems is released as part of Well Project’s 2020 exhibition programme of the same name. You can find documentation from each exhibition held as part of the programme at: www.wellprojects.xyz

Contributors:

Verity Birt, Dimitrios Bormpoudakis, Louise Beer, Milo Creese, Joachim Coucke, Kyriaki Costa, Hector Campbell, Jack Clarke, Sophie Dyer, Sasha Englemann, Billy Fraser, Nicolette Clara Illes, Melanie King, Ruth Pilston, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Tom Sewell, Sissel Marie Tonn & Rosie Grace Ward.

‘I’m in the bath on all fours, toward blue water (my nose is bleeding), I’m an ephemeral bubble of time waiting to be popped’ is an experimental archive of exhibition and performance documentation, seminar transcripts and (visual) essays from Well Projects 2019 programme of the same name.

Across three phases, IITBOAF,TBW(MNIB),IAEBOTWTBP invited pairs of artists and academics to collaborate and expand on notions of the sub-aqueous, engaging with the nature of water, embodied experiences and the deep dark in relation to community and commonality.

Contributors:

Flora Parrott, Lindiwe Matshikiza, Harriet Hawkins, Lucy Mercer, Amy Pettifer & Jennifer Boyd (SHELL LIKE) Madeleine Stack, Leyla Pillai, Alex Borkowski, Hannah Rowan, Rachel Squire, Rikke Berg Jensen, Korallia Stergides & Raphael Schulenburg.

I’m in the bath... programme was curated by Kris Lock & George Harding with support from Flora Parrott

An account of Spring Brakers, a project launched during the so-called First Wave. Spring Brakers was an online platform hosting video performances by a different artist each week alongside podcasts on various topics focusing on other labels or musical persuasions.

For this publication, all of the musicians who participated in the project are profiled, resulting in a grounded and oddly inspiring collection of testimonies of how artistic practices are shaped by an era that is still ongoing.

Artists include locals such as Bear Bones, Lay Low, Quanta Qualia, Vica Pacheco, KRAMP, Orphan Fairytale, and more, as well as far-out friends like Ka Baird, MSHR, Jung An Tagen, Eric Frye, and so on.

Each profile has a handy QR to redirect to each artist's video, and each copy includes a code to download a compilation made especially for the publication.

Black artists of the avant-garde have always defined the future.

Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture is the culmination of six years of multidisciplinary research by trans poet and curator Anaïs Duplan about the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility. Through a series of lyric essays, interviews with contemporary artists and writers of color, and ekphrastic poetry, Duplan deconstructs how creative people frame their relationships to the word, "liberation." With a focus on creatives who use digital media and language-as-technology, luminaries like Actress, Juliana Huxtable, Lawrence Andrews, Tony Cokes, Sondra Perry, and Nathaniel Mackey, Duplan offers three lenses for thinking about liberation: the personal, the social, and the existential. Arguing that true freedom is impossible without considering all three, the book culminates with a personal essay meditating on the author's own journey of gender transition while writing the book.  

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. He has worked as an adjunct poetry professor at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and St. Joseph's College. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Published Oct 2020