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Cover of Remembering a Dance – Part of Some Sextets 1965/2019

Lenz Press

Remembering a Dance – Part of Some Sextets 1965/2019

Yvonne Rainer

€30.00

A re-examination of Yvonne Rainer's Parts of Some Sextets, a radical performance and pivotal piece in the American choreographer's career, which led her to theorize her conception of dance in the 1960s, before being revived in 2019.

Parts of Some Sextets, Yvonne Rainer's 1965 performance for ten people and twelve mattresses, represents a turning point in the American choreographer's oeuvre. "My mattress monster," as Rainer calls it, was built in her formative years with the experimental downtown New York group Judson Dance Theater. In this work, she asserted her exploration of "ordinary" actions as well as her disregard for narrative constructions to create an intricate choreography that unfolded with a new scene every thirty seconds.

More than half a century after its premiere, Rainer, in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Emily Coates, directed the 2019 revival of the piece for the Performa 19 Biennial in New York, grappling with the changing contexts of a new presentation of her radical performance. Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 delves into every aspect of this dance, from its original manifestation to its reconstitution.

This book, designed by visual artist Nick Mauss, includes previously unpublished archival images and documents from the 1965 stagings at the Judson Memorial Church in New York and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Texts by Emily Coates, RoseLee Goldberg, Jill Johnston, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson, Lynne Tillman, and Soyoung Yoon, as well as a new interview with Rainer, pose questions about the trajectories of artworks, performers, and audiences, all while tracing the life—and afterlife—of a dance.

Edited by Emily Coates. 
Texts and contributions by Emily Coates, RoseLee Goldberg, Jill Johnston, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson, Lynne Tillman and Soyoung Yoon; conversation between Yvonne Rainer, Emily Coates and Nick Mauss.

recommendations

Cover of Euforia

Lenz Press

Euforia

Tomaso Binga

Performance €45.00

This monograph explores the work and the artistic activities of Italian radical performer, poet, visual artist and feminist Tomaso Binga through a specific lexicon (Agora, Biographies, the Corporeal Nature of the Word, Correspondences, Geographies, Vaginal Value), and also features a selection of poems by the artist.

The volume explores the key passages of Tomaso Binga's artistic practice, and as such is divided into three macro areas. The first, purely textual, following institutional introduction by the President of the Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee Angela Tecce, features texts by Eva Fabbris, Daria Khan, Quinn Latimer, Lilou Vidal, and Stefania Zuliani, as well as a conversation between the artist herself and Luca Lo Pinto. The second part brings together a series of short critical texts that offer an in-depth analysis of single works and small bodies of work by Tomaso Binga. These contents are further subdivided into six categories (Agora, Biographies, The Body of the Word, Correspondences, Geographies, Vaginal Value) with the aim of delving into the key areas of interest in Tomaso Binga's practice in chronological order. Critical contributions are thus provided by Marc Bembekoff, Barbara Casavecchia, Martina Cavalli, Chiara Costa, Anna Cuomo, Valérie Da Costa, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Daria Khan, Émilie Notéris, Raffaella Perna, Antonello Tolve, and Andrea Viliani. The third and final part is dedicated to the artist's visual poems. Each poem is accompanied by an English translation, in several cases published here for the first time.

Embedded in the language of visual and sound poetry, the practice of Tomaso Binga (Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, born 1931 in Salerno) is based on an ironic, insightful questioning of the idea of gender. In her work, this theme is not only a generator of identity, but also a way of looking afresh at the social roles, rights and opportunities traditionally available to women. Her decision to work under a male pseudonym from 1971 onwards was intended to parody male privilege and to provoke a barbed reflection on the political dimension of what it is to be a woman. Her attitude has served as a key marker within the gender equality issues at the center of the debate raging amongst the younger generations.

Edited by Eva Fabbris, Lilou Vidal, Stefania Zuliani with Anna Cuomo.

Texts by Tomaso Binga, Eva Fabbris, Daria Khan, Quinn Latimer, Luca Lo Pinto, Lilou Vidal, Stefania Zuliani.

Cover of William Scott

Lenz Press

William Scott

William Scott

Monograph €28.00

Covering the past thirty years of William Scott's practice, this monograph offers the largest comprehensive selection of paintings, drawings, masks and architectural models, as well as an unique insight on his creative and transformative approach.

Published on the occasion of Malmö Konsthall William Scott's exhibition at Mälmo Konsthall en 2022.

William Scott (born 1962 in San Francisco) has developed his own artistic practice while working at Creative Growth, an art center in Oakland where people with development disabilities are given the opportunity to work and advance creatively as artists. Combining image and text, his colourful paintings tie in stylistically with current popular culture. Scott's vividly graphic and highly detailed paintings, drawings, and sculptures explore the intersections of community, cultural memory, faith, and science fiction. "Rebirth" is a constant subject for the artist, who reimagines the social topography of his native San Francisco as well as new, interstellar organizations. His portraits depict family members and neighbors, and celebrate Black actors, musicians, and civil rights leaders. For Scott, painting is a transformative as well as a documentary tool; a way to re-craft his personal narrative and even undertake extraordinary acts.

Edited by Nicola Wright
Texts by Carson Cole Arthur, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Helen Delaney, Tom di Maria, Simona Dumitriu, Nathan Hamelberg, Kathleen Henderson, Matthew Higgs, William Scott, Nicola Wright

Cover of Feet of Clay

Lenz Press

Feet of Clay

Filipa Ramos, Chus Martínez

Sculpture €17.00

Curator, art historian, writer Chus Martínez and writer and curator Filipa Ramos bring together a group of artists who have been using clay, pottery and ceramics to imagine, project and shape the world they live in.

Some may associate clay, pottery and ceramics to tradition, and tradition to the past. Some may associate technology, digital communication and data with the new, and the new with the future. What if the future is only a technology as old and unusual as clay? What if clay is a matter that renews itself constantly and gives time its unpredictable configurations?

What if clay is the future and the future is clay? And if the feet of clay only reveal a vulnerability because the rest of the body is made of a different material? And if the feet of clay are actually rooting people to the earth, connecting them through the same matter? And if feet of clay are a way to establish a post-technological communication that requires no webs, no networks, no cables; only our many, one, two, eight, twenty feet and some clay?

These are some of the questions and enigmas addressed by curators Chus Martínez and Filipa Ramos, who brought together a group of artists who have been using clay, pottery and ceramics in an exhibition entitled Feet of Clay, presented at Galeria Municipal do Porto in 2021. Like clay, the project has now been moulded into book format, bringing together exclusive texts and interviews with the participating artists: Neïl Beloufa, Isabel Carvalho, Gabriel Chaile, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Formabesta (Salvador and Juan Cidrás), Tamara Henderson, Ana Jotta and Eduardo Navarro.

Texts by Neïl Beloufa, Isabel Carvalho, Gabriel Chaile, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Formabesta (Salvador e Juan Cidrás), Tamara Henderson, Ana Jotta, Chus Martínez, Eduardo Navarro, Filipa Ramos.

Cover of Dreaming Alcestis

Lenz Press

Dreaming Alcestis

Beatrice Gibson

Dreaming Alcestis is an artist's book by artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson, conceived as an accompaniment to her holographic film installation of the same name. Dreaming Alcestis was co-directed and co-scripted by Gibson, her partner Nicholas Gordon and critic Maria Nadotti. The publication features a specially commissioned essay by poet and translator Allison Grimaldi Donahue, as well as a reprint of the American poet Alice Notley's 1991 essay What Can Be Learned From Dreams?

Drawing on the protagonist of Euripides's ancient myth as its ancestral guide, Dreaming Alcestis offers a poetic reflection on living and dying at a time of acute social, political and economic turmoil, documenting—via dream life—Gibson and Gordon's relocation from Northern to Southern Europe. In the film, two characters, dreaming of a long-dead queen, are filmed in long takes, refracted holographically and interrupted only by the sounds of the city and the sea. In Gibson's words, "2,500 years after her birth, Alcestis—in the film, a mysterious, Lynchian figure—returns from the underworld, dreaming of, or possibly dreamed by, a man and woman who have traversed Europe in search of her, from North to South, with family in tow. Meanwhile, the ice caps melt, 43 wars rage around the globe and another city burns on TV." In a feminist key, Gibson, Gordon and Nadotti reclaim a minor heroine from Greek mythology, using her as a therapeutic device to reflect on what it is to be human in the contemporary context.

Premiering at the British Art show in 2022, Dreaming Alcestis was exhibited on the occasion of the artist's first solo show in Italy, Dream Gossip, at Ordet in Milan, and was subsequently taken on tour, first to the Museo Civico di Castelbuono and then to Macro, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. The book and the film Dreaming Alcestis are part of Alkestis, a project orchestrated by the Museo Civico di Castelbuono in partnership with the British Art Show 9 (Hayward Gallery Touring, Southbank Centre, London).

Edited by Laura Barreca, Edoardo Bonaspetti, Beatrice Gibson.
Texts by Laura Barreca, Edoardo Bonaspetti, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Alice Notley.

Cover of Hardscapes / Here

Lenz Press

Hardscapes / Here

Maria Hassabi, Nina Canell

Hardscapes / Here documents and brings together two exhibition projects by artists Nina Canell and Maria Hassabi. Produced on the occasion of the exhibitions of the same name curated by Samuele Piazza at the OGR Torino, the publication consists of two graphically specular books that merge into a single volume. Essays, unpublished materials and a rich set of photographic materials form the driving force behind two visual narratives that offer new keys to understanding the research of the two artists.

Hassabi's live installation Here calls on visitors to share space and spend time with six performers portrayed in a decelerated rhythmic choreography within a sculptural environment. In constant motion, the dancers contribute to a situation of shifting presence, demonstrating the contestable nature of the "here and now." Immobility and slowing down are thus used both as techniques and as subjects of representation: the performing bodies oscillate between dance and sculpture, subject and object, living body and static image.

Canell's Hardscapes combines two works that focus on the concepts of circulation and transformation as well as on unexpected forms of coexistence. Energy Budget (2017–18), a video that alternates between two subjects: a basement in which a leopard snail crawls over an electrical panel, and the gradual shifting of the frame away from "dragon gates"—portal-like openings in huge buildings on the Hong Kong waterfront. Muscle Memory (16 Tonnes) (2020–21) is a floor sculpture, decomposed and transformed by the density of moving bodies, which literally crumbles under the soles of passing visitors.

In addition to texts by the curator, the publication includes essays by Felicia Leu and Laura Preston, along with a conversation by Maria Hassabi and Nina Canell with Lorenzo Giusti.

Published on the occasion of the epoymous exhibitions at OGR Torino in 2022.

Edited by Samuele Piazza.
Texts by Lorenzo Giusti, Felicia F. Leu, Samuele Piazza, Laura Preston.

Cover of Paradis catalogue

Claude Balls Int.

Paradis catalogue

Marie Angeletti

Contributions by: Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, Georgia Sagri, John Kelsey, Matthew Pang, Cathy Wilkes, Sarah Rapson, Nick Irvin, Gene Beery, Anne Dressen, Anne Pontégnie, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Sara Deraedt, Anne Rorimer, Kari Rittenbach, Olga Balema, Maria Nordman, Louise Lawler, Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Adrian Morris, Matt Browning, John Miller, Envers Hadzijaj, Enzo Shalom, Bedros Yeretzian, Morag Keil, Helmut Draxler, Gianna Surangkanjanajai, Steve Cannon, Rae Armentrout, Zoe Hitzig, Pierre Guyotat, Lola Sinreich, Fanny Howe, Hélène Fauquet, Marie Angeletti, Richard Hawkins, Andy Robert, Alexander García Düttmann, Daniel Horn, El Hadji Sy, Henrik Olesen, Aurélien Potier, Richard John Jones, Stéphane Barbier Bouvet, Nora Schultz, Peter Fend, Megan Francis Sullivan, Jill Johnston, Sturtevant, Tonio Kröner, Bernard Bazile, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Jérome Pantalacci, Gérard Traquandi, Gladys Clover, Maria Wutz, Jimmie Durham, Richard Sides, Camilla Wills, Michael Callies, Steven Warwick, Matthew Langan-Peck, Dan Graham, Nina Könnemann, Hans Christian Dany, Valérie Knoll, Win McCarthy, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Anna Rubin, Heji Shin, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Inka Meißner, Simone Forti, Morgan O’Hara, Angharad Williams, Ye Xe, Lily Van Der Stokker, Yuki Kimura, Peter Wächtler, Eva Steinmetz, Michael Van den Abeele, Marc Kokopeli, Bradley Kronz, Robert Grosvenor, Samuel Jeffery, Charlotte Houette, Adam Martin, Wade Guyton, Chloe Truong-Jones.

Edited by Marie Angeletti with Gianmaria Andreetta and Camilla Wills.

Printed in December 2022.
416 pages, Edition of 840.
© 2022 Claude Balls Int. / the author(s).

Cover of Aftershow

Sternberg Press

Aftershow

Pauline Boudry/ Renate Lorenz

Performance €25.00

A monograph / artists' book that engages with the recent film installations of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Installation shots, research material, scripts, and film stills give an insight into the artists' investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound, and underground (drag) performances.

The book's title alludes to an interest in opaque events that are belated, left backstage or off-screen. A number of (fictitious) letters to friends and collaborators such as Sharon Hayes, Yvonne Rainer, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi, and Jack Smith place the work of Boudry & Lorenz in a context of debates around temporalities, activism, the archival, decolonizing practices, and queer histories. Published following the exhibition “Patriarchal Poetry” at the Badischer Kunstverein, September 27– November 24, 2013.

Cover of The Essential Jill Johnston Reader

Duke University Press

The Essential Jill Johnston Reader

Jill Johnston, Clare Croft

Performance €28.00

Jill Johnston began the 1960s as an influential dance columnist for the Village Voice and by the start of the next decade she was known as a keen observer of postmodern art and lesbian feminist life who challenged how dance, art, and women can and should be seen. The Essential Jill Johnston Reader collects dozens of pieces of her writing from across her career. These writings—many of which appeared in the Village Voice and the New York Times—survey the breadth of her work, braiding together her thinking, writing, and activism.

From personal essays, travel writing, and artist profiles to dance and visual art reviews as well as her infamous series of columns for the Voice in which she came out as a lesbian, these pieces demonstrate the evolution of her philosophies and writing style. Illustrating how Johnston drew on lessons from dance to reconsider what it means to be a woman, this collection brings a fascinating and brilliant voice of American arts criticism, radical feminism, and gay liberation back to contemporary audiences.