Joan Jonas

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

Osman's writing reinvents poetry as an instrument for dissecting vision, language and power

This extensive collection of poet Jena Osman's acclaimed work spans more than 30 years, gathering poems from journals and books long out of print. Her poetry traces overlooked visual and linguistic incidents across centuries of American history, transforming "official" language—from Supreme Court opinions to the chatter of Predator drone pilots—into writing that is comic, chilling and relentlessly inventive.

Jena Osman's (born 1963) books include Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books, 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). She lives in Philadelphia.

American poet Norman H. Pritchard's second and final book, EECCHHOOEESS was originally published in 1971 by New York University Press. Pritchard's writing is visually and typographically unconventional. His methodical arrangements of letters and words disrupt optical flows and lexical cohesion, modulating the speeds of reading and looking by splitting, spacing and splicing linguistic objects. His manipulation of text and codex resembles that of concrete poetry and conceptual writing, traditions from which literary history has mostly excluded him. Pritchard also worked with sound, and his dynamic readings—documented, among few other places, on the album New Jazz Poets (Folkways Records, 1967)—make themselves heard on the page.

EECCHHOOEESS exemplifies Pritchard's formal and conceptual sensibilities, and provides an entryway into the work of a poet whose scant writings have only recently achieved wider recognition. DABA's publication of EECCHHOOEESS is unabridged and closely reproduces the design of the original 1971 volume.  

Norman H. Pritchard (1939-96) was affiliated with the Umbra group, a predecessor to the Black Arts Movement. He taught writing at the New School for Social Research and published two books: The Matrix: Poems 1960-1970 (Doubleday, 1970) and EECCHHOOEESS (New York University Press, 1971). His work was anthologized in publications including The New Black Poetry (1969), In a Time of Revolution: Poems from Our Third World (1969), Dices or Black Bones: Black Voices of the Seventies (1970), Ishmael Reed's 19 Necromancers from Now (1970), Text-Sound Texts (1980) and others.

Published in conjunction with the first major U.S. museum show of Joan Jonas’s art in nearly fifteen years, this monograph features new scholarship on her multimedia installations and performance practice from the early 1970s to the present. Inspired by the format of a reader, it breaks new ground by contextualizing and expanding understandings of Jonas’s body of work through three thematic approaches: the critical notions of gender, being and otherness; the politics of landscape and ecology; and new conceptions of medium specificity and un-specificity. Richly illustrated, with never-before-published sketches and drawings, the volume includes an interview with the late Douglas Crimp and Jonas’s personal reflection on their enduring friendship.

Edited by Barbara Clausen and Kristin Poor with Kelly Kivland, with an introduction by Clausen; essays by Clausen, Adrienne Edwards, André Lepecki, Poor, and Jeannine Tang; interview with Douglas Crimp; writings by Joan Jonas; conversation between Heather Davis, Joan Jonas, and Zoe Todd; and coda by Kivland

For British artist Delaine Le Bas, dress is divine. Clothes appear as both mask a nd memorial within an expansive body of work exploring mythologies of Le Bas’s Romani ancestry. Embroidered and hand-painted textile is central to the artist’s lyrically activist practice, alongside costume, writing and performance. In a new series of portraits by the British photographer Tara Darby, directed by Jane Howard, gold leaf dances across the planes of Le Bas’s face in repose, it wraps and jangles around her wrists, glimmers across her clothes. In a notebook she has inscribed: “In the forest of grief I grew into a shrub of gold.” The grief is alchemical.

As Stephen Ellcock writes:

‘The maxim ‘Know Thyself’ was inscribed in gold on a column on the threshold of Pythia’s temple, serving as a warning that wisdom, understanding, empathy and anything remotely resembling peace of mind are unachievable without selfawareness, reflection and ruthless self-criticism.’

The fragments of hope, anger, magic and curiosity redolent in Le Bas’s work form a call to action. A reminder of the racism, exclusion and subjugation that abound. Photographs of Le Bas, which Darby has been making for more than a decade, present the artist as truth sayer, inquisitive goddess and modern-day Sibyl.

Through the incorporation of texts—a conversation between gallerists John Marchant and Keiko Yamamoto with curator Claire Jackson—drawings from Le Bas’s journals, archival images taken at her home and the restyling—and reflection—of her own personal wardrobe, In the forest of grief I grew into a shrub of gold radiates psychological, social and political wisdom. Fashion is revealed as both tyrannical disguise and liberating regalia.

Publication accompanying the exhibition Gernot Wieland (08.02.-05.07.2020). 

One can summarize Gernot Wieland and his work as an intertwining of the man, the artist, and the artwork. With Gernot, we experience in his artwork and in his presence more of a quiet, constant fascination with what is around him and what has affected or influenced or indeed shaped him sinde his childhood. These impressions - whether quirky memories or indeed tragic experiences and the non-stop grappliing with what has happened - arise in his artwork or in his conversation, whether directly or not. Alongside self-analysis and presentation through his artwork is an analysis of societal norms and indeed repressed aspects of society as it expresses itself, even violently, in hegemonic structures - in the classroom and upon children, for example. From his sketches or film narratives we catch a powerful glimpse upon a concentration of trauma, repression, and guilt placed upon his generation, an Austrian condition manifesting itself in obscene and absurd ways.

The Trial is an extensive publication chronicling the decade-plus-long evolution of one of Rossella Biscotti's seminal works, focusing on the trials of members of the revolutionary left-wing movement Autonomia Operaia in the early 1980s, an emblematic judicial drama of Italy's Years of Lead.

The core of the book is the English transcription of a six-hour audio piece, originally composed from hundreds of hours of the trial's archival recordings broadcast by Radio Radicale. Edited like a theatrical script, The Trial becomes a polyphonic narrative that foregrounds the political voices of defendants in opposition to the structure and language of the legal machine: prosecutors, judges, lawyers. The transcript is accompanied by critical texts by Michael Hardt, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, and Giovanna Zapperi, as well as a conversation between the artist and philosopher Antonio Negri, one of the trial's key defendants. It investigates how political memory is carried, translated, and embodied across time.

Featuring visual documentation and multilingual excerpts from performances staged across various institutions and countries, this publication traces the work's ongoing reactivation through translation, collaboration, and context-specific interventions.

For the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine a group of people/ performers memorize a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. After years of learning by heart and reciting for readers, some of the books have now been written down from memory to create new editions, versions resulting from this process. This book is one of those books, chosen by one person, learned by heart and recited many times, and now written down again from memory. This edition is not a re-edition of the original text. It is a re-writing of the text after the process of reading, memorizing and reciting, with all the alterations that might have occured in the course of this process.