Artists' Writing

The meaning of the word ‘error’, in its origin, is neutral. In Latin ‘errare’ means both ‘to wander freely’ and ‘to wander from the right path’. After the seventeenth century, however, the word ‘error’ lost its ambiguity within English usage and became clearly understood as wrongdoing, as defect, as a way of missing a desired effect. The ninth issue of Pfeil Magazine focuses on the potential of erroneous processes to redefine the meaning of malfunction and takes a look at movements that are aimless or non-productive. Through this reflection, ‘error’ is introduced once again as the possibility of wandering freely. 

Contributions by: Mitchell Anderson, Christiane Blattmann, Adam Christensen, Tyler Coburn, Hans-Christian Dany, Michael Dean, Gina Fischli, Flaka Haliti, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Lina Hermsdorf, Judith Hopf, Karl Larsson, Clare Molloy, Susan Morgan and Thomas Lawson, Mense Reents, Stacy Skolnik, Paul Spengemann, Ramaya Tegegne 

Editors: Anja Dietmann, Nadine Droste

Within the format of a magazine, each page of Pfeil represents the floor, walls, or ceiling which together create an imagined room displaying a printed exhibition. Each issue is dedicated to a specific word, and artists are invited and given space to work on and with this term, and to construct or deconstruct the architecture around it. Combined, the contributions transform into an organic display surrounding the leitmotif. 

The tenth issue is dedicated to Mainstream, this volume questions exercised motions of majorities, practiced over long or short distances and timeframes, that can become patterns, sometimes taken for granted, sometimes followed unconsciously, automatically, or even mechanically. 

Contributions by: Alice Creischer, Annette Kelm, Charlotte Simon, Dodo Voelkel, Emily Pope, Hans-Christian Dany, Harry Gamboa Jr., Heike-Karin Föll, Holly White, Jan Matthé, Jannis Marwitz, Karl Holmqvist, Kevin Gallagher, Lars Bang Larsen, Magdalena Los, Marina Pinsky, Merle Radtke, Nicola Gördes, Pablo Schlumberger, Penny Goring and Stella Rossié.
Editor: Anja Dietmann

‘Masturbation in between the crimes against you will become a deciding matter in the kangaroo court. Philosophical questions will be answered without inquiry.’ 

If you have ever wondered how a cross between a funding application gone wrong and a tabloid column about the art world would read, this is it. Mellor presents a unique combination of novel and image, creating a polymorphous narrator who moves between personifications. Perhaps the most hazardous of these is Tippy Rampage, who is satisfyingly livid with the state of, well, everything. 

In a series of paintings, female police officers from British television shows such as Happy Valley and The Bill are positioned in an array of apocalyptic settings: freezing, burning, and backdropped by flooding. The accompanying text chronicles an acute feeling of being watched, what it feels like to watch whoever is watching you, or, as Mellor writes, how it feels to be kettled in your own flat, by your own paintings. 

Fragmented accounts map the protagonist’s shifting relationship to crime, gender, class and sexuality from multiple perspectives: as a child in Gamesley in the ‘70s, a lesbian performer in sex clubs in the mid ‘90s, an artist with and without gallery representation, and as a lecturer within an academic institution. These changes of position mix the language of a rally cry with an acerbic satire of the authorial voice and everyone they encounter. 

Published by Montez Press, Sirens is the first novel by Dawn Mellor and includes the complete set of the Sirens paintings. 

Dawn Mellor (b.1970) is an artist based in London, who has been exhibiting internationally since the 1990s. Solo exhibitions and special projects include Sixty Years at Tate Britain; London, Vile Affections at Studio Voltaire; London, Dawn Mellor at The Migros Museum; Zurich, Sirens at Team Gallery; New York, Madame X and The Party Tricks at Victoria Miro; London, Michael Jackson On The Wall at The National Portrait Gallery; London (touring), What Happened to Helen? Focal Point Gallery; Southend and Malerei, Böse at Kunstverein; Hamburg.

The eleventh issue of Pfeil Magazine looks into the multitude of meanings behind the word love: a positive affection and strong physical feeling which can be addressed to a friend, family, food, God, an object, or to an amorous partner or partners. Furthermore, it questions the expectations which go along with love, whether that love is returned or unanswered. Relationship patterns and role distributions are surveyed, vulnerabilities are assessed, but besides that the Love issue is also about a pregnant male seahorse, an infatuation with a smiling rock, sports and much more. 

Contributors: Adrian Williams, Anneli Schütz, CAConrad, Ceyenne Doroshow, Cyd Nova, Dan Kwon, Emily Pope, Eva Illouz, FORT, Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann, Gina Fischli, Hanna Fiegenbaum, Hans-Christian Dany, Keenan Jay, Maria Jakobsen, Mette Sterre, Monika Baer, Nick Oberthaler, Lindsay Lawson, Stine Sampers, Suné Woods, Theodore Barrow, Thomas Laprade, Vanessa Place and Vincent Ramos.

For the Interjection Calendar each month Montez Press invites an artist, a writer, a poet or a doer of some sorts to say things. All 12 pieces have introspection and reflection in common. They are a subjective overview of writing in the expanded field of contemporary art and writing in the year 2019. This is the Interjection Calendar 2019, the fifth collection in this series. 

With contributions by sabrina soyer, Lisa Robertson, Hatty Nestor, Adrianna Whittingham, Sondria, Claudia Pagès, Laetitia Paviani, Bella Milroy, Georgina Tyson, Son Kit, Alix Jean Vollum, Rene Matic and bleubaglife. 

Find the last 12 PDF's on montezpress.com.

Alex Farrar’s book Wimper (the Dutch term for eyelash, or a potential misspelling of the English for ‘whimper’) presently held by the reader is an extension of an exhibition, which may be experienced in its own right, after the space has been vacated. It operates on the limits of material evidence by reprising a series of earlier prints entitled Behavioural Residues (second sweep), featuring barely perceptible images of single eyelashes spread throughout the texts and pages. Apart from their significance as intimate materials discarded by the body over time, such as hair or skin, they submit to the almost nothing of an aesthetics of disappearance, while lingering in a dialectics of misunderstanding that commits to a lack of closure.

Texts by Nicolas de Oliveira and Nicola Oxley, and David Price. Graphic design by studio Hendriksen, risograph printed by Alex Farrar in studio Hendriksen, Amsterdam, with the cover offset printed by ZwaanLenoirSchuring and bound by AGIA (The Netherlands) in a print run of 300 copies.

In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making.

The experiment of the one hundred word constraint, each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long, amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground.

What's an encounter with anything once it's seen as an incitement to composition? What's a concept or a theory if they're no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? 

The Hundreds includes four indexes in which Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke each respond with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.

Even the Dead Rise Up, and the political becomes personal. In McKee’s first novel, observations of séances, scientific advances, group education outings, Kurdish protests for the ‘disappeared’, become mixed with his own Tarot influenced visions: a haunting spirit appears; the relation between political resistance and Spiritualism is cast as an insurrectionary force and a millenarian energy, celebrating the ecstatic moment. Histories of isolated early Christians and twentieth century mystics affect the psyche, all of this documented through journal entries that move from Scottish islands to Puerto Rico. Influenced by forms of 1960s new journalism, McKee pushes language to match the raw material of the stories, which become more erratic, signalling the looming fate of the text and its author.

Master Rock is a repertoire for a mountain. 

Rough land, open palm. Bodies are machines that shake. Big boned faces, big hands, big claws, ah Jesus, well-used. Bore. Blast. Smash. Force on loan. Must be hard and clever to survive in this technological age. Granite knows the biological. Gods inside the mountain, just plain men outside.

Working through the cavernous space in Ben Cruachan, the largest peak on the west coast of Scotland, Maria Fusco exhumes three fictional voices from fact: Tunnel tigers, the Irish explosives experts who emptied out the mountain to build a power station; Elizabeth Falconer, the artist who produced a mural inside that only the site’s workers ever see; and Granite, the 450 million year-old rock of Cruachan itself as a main character.

Queerdirect is an LGBTQI+ Artist support network, curatorial platform and arts programme. Initiated by Gaby Sahhar in 2017. Co-run With Lily Cheetah. Queerdirect hold regular events and curate exhibitions around London and provide queer artists with a platform and support. Queerdirect is the UK’s first contemporary arts platform and project space dedicated to queer arts.

This is the first edition, September 2019.
A5 perfect bound publication, 81 pp., published by Queerdirect & Camp Books and featuring 31 LGBTQIA+ artists working in and around London.

For '​A Studio in Hand-Reading: Charlotte Wolff'​ Valentina Desideri transformed Kunstverein’s space into a Studio – a place that generates knowledge through different modes of being together. Throughout the exhibition, Desideri invited participants as well as visitors to gather for readings and in study.

The Studio – and its bar – were open for readings during Kunstverein’s regular opening hours and punctuated by weekly contributions to the study by the invited guests and artists. 'Handreading Studies​' picks up where the project left off, bringing together a variety of materials and publications that were generated in or reverberated from the Studio.

A cautionary tale of academic privilege and misadventure in Diego Garcia via a Kreole translation, and parallel live chat. 

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.

The Happy Hypocrite – Silver Bandage gathers together new kinds of writing about ‘vibes’, those often unspoken energies of desire and aversion that move between people, palpable but traceless, hard to prove. The messages sent by your gut that you can’t always interpret, beyond an urge. What is intangible – vibes, feelings and reflexive responses like blushes, fidgets, slumps in posture, fluctuations in voice – is now targeted by invasive technologies of affective measurement. How can writing resist this regime of quantification? 

With an introduction by Maria Fusco, contributions and new work by CAConrad, Mel Y. Chen, Adam Gallagher, Alexandrina Hemsley, Rebecca Jagoe, Jessa Mockridge, Natasha Papadopoulou, Naomi Pearce, Parsa Sanjana Sajid, Patrick Staff, Daniella Valz Gen, and Hypatia Vourloumis. This issue’s archive is dedicated to Katerina Gogou. 

Erica Scourti is an artist and writer, born in Athens and now based mostly in London, whose work explores biographical writing and bodily inscription in the performance of subjectivity. Her writing has been published in Spells, Ignota (2018) and Fiction as Method, Sternberg (2017), among others.

Operating on the peripheries of a pathological discourse, Treatment penetrates the interstices of modern queer consciousness to medicate a multiheaded body of work. With no cure in sight, the text moves from violence, cowboys, iconography, illness and image to the death of Yves Klein and a fear of dentistry. Bridget’s reflections pose a dissection of novelistic cliché that attends to the repressed remnants of a queer romance. Played out in an interpersonal run of vignettes or “treatments,” rather than any death of the novel Treatmentpropositions a mischievous and travestying performance anchored in putrefaction. A serious play with the decay of forms, Treatment is a rendered reading of our ability to talk through the process of degradation and an ironized analysis of the desire to write it down. 

In Bridget’s “mouth-theatre” sit Allan and Allen—two precarious, spectral characters set against an eerie backdrop of clinical isolation. Framed by a nameless narrator, these mirrored figures undergo forty text-treatments across four artificially generated days that survey their feelings of angst, adulation and disorientation against the slow tick of a clock. A mash-up of love story, pornography, art criticism, literary appropriation, and essayistic meditation, Treatment pushes an anatomical body to its limits in a parodic portrayal of a mouth on the hunt for a tongue and its teeth. 

Filmmaker Chantal Akerman presents A Family in Brussels, a fictional stream-of-consciousness text encompassing multiple subjectivities and laced with autobiographical references. This is the first English-language publication of the work, which Akerman wrote and first performed as a monologue in Paris and Brussels. The accompanying recording documents the theatrical reading that took place at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York, in October 2001. The listener can hear Akerman's singular voice as she muses on familial relations, communication, closeness, and distance. 

Jolly Rogers is a collection of Peter Wächtler's latest short texts, written in preparation of his two solo exhibitions at Bergen Kunsthall and Kunsthalle Zürich (both 2019), and combined with a nearly complete collection of the artist's drawings and prints from recent years. 

The texts operate like vignettes to a larger story, and the images as unreliable illustrations to the narrative. However, the larger story never really is revealed. Each individual text, each single work, articulates itself by means of an intense focus. It is as if we were suspended in a continual zooming motion, as if the artist and author wanted to tell and show it all. But alas, such is life under the microscope: always larger-than-life, but at the wrong scale at a time driven by individual interests, self-optimization, and egos that stage themselves simultaneously as victims and disruptors. 

Peter Wächtler works in a variety of media: bronze, ceramics, drawings and video. But in many ways “stories” could be described as his main artistic material. His works often evoke a narration, with animals or human figures in animated states. They are made in ways that use and adapt elements of fiction and folklore, relating to specific traditions and common tales, and materialize the ways of telling a story as much as the story itself. 

Born 1979 in Hannover, Peter Wächtler lives and works in Brussels and Berlin.

A novel by Keren Cytter: an incomplete guide for life. 

Each person written about is represented by a letter, and when an object turns into a subject it is marked in bold. The form of life coaching described in this book won't lead the reader to social recognition or financial success. If one of the two occurs after reading this text, it is a coincidence. This book aims to expose the owners of an innocent heart to reality's true structures and to utilize them for spiritual growth so their soul and body evaporate into the abstract. This book was written from the middle. The contents of these pages have been modified numerous times. Notes were taken, ideas were rewritten—the ones that survived bare the most essential guidelines and wisdom for life. 

Published on the occasion of the exhibition “Keren Cytter – Selection”, Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, from June 11 to September 8, 2016.

A single black-and white photograph taken by Babette Mangolte has come to epitomize New York’s downtown art scene of the 1970s. The dancers performing Trisha Brown’s Roof Piece characterize perfectly the wild spirit of the time. Choreographed as an echo of movement unfolding across SoHo’s rooftops, the dancers mimed the chimneys, water towers, and fire escapes which surrounded them across that skyline. Influenced early on by Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and the work of Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, Mangolte began studies in 1964 at the renowned École nationale de la photographie et de la cinematographie in Paris, one of the school’s first female students. In 1970, having become disillusioned with the film scene in France, Mangolte moved to New York and became involved in the avant-garde film and dance milieus of the Kitchen and the Anthology Film Archives. 

Selected Writings, 1998–2015 is a collection of texts by Mangolte in which she reflects on her practice as a photographer and filmmaker and her collaborative work with filmmakers, artists, dancers, and choreographers. She provides insights into the techniques and methods she created as well as her relationships with notable collaborators such as Marina Abramović, Chantal Akerman, Trisha Brown, and Yvonne Rainer. 

Copublished with Kunsthalle Wien on the occasion of the exhibition “Babette Mangolte: I = Eye.”

An adventure novel based on a true story told in a televised interview by the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, describing seven hours in the life of Tibor Klaus Trier—Lars von Trier's father—from the moment that his wife goes into labor early in the morning until Lars is born.

The setting is Copenhagen, dominated by a hospital that recalls von Trier's television series “The Kingdom.” The plot is thick: Tibor arrives with his wife Margaret at the Maternity Ward of Mercy General Hospital, only to realize that he must return home to retrieve a forgotten mobile—his only link to a sister in distress. On the way, he stops to get gas and gets involved in a car robbery. A cancer takes root in his body. Back at home, he sneaks a peak at Margaret's e-mail and a great secret is revealed that makes him rush back to the hospital to kill her and her son. En route he crashes his new car and his body breaks into pieces and he loses his memory. Mercy General is haunted by a great ghost and the day is Armageddon when the ghost needs to challenge the living with an army of zombie children—all born within its walls. Who is this great ghost? What does Margaret hold in her body? Will Tibor survive his one day old cancer? All and more will be revealed…

Translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Roman.
Co-published with Witte de With. 

Keren Cytter (born 1977 in Tel Aviv, lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin) is an Israeli visual artist and filmaker.

A compilation of texts, poems and stories whose title is borrowed from the safe words used in BDSM practices.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition “Puberté 2”, Ravisius Textor, Nevers, from October 5 to November 16, 2019. Kevin Desbouis is a French artist and author.

Winter 2019. SLEEP.

Contributions by: NAVILD ACOSTA, CLAY AD, MANDISA APENA, KHAIRANI BAROKKA, LINDA BESNER, LEAH CLEMENTS, PENNY GORING, LEWIS HAMMOND, ELAINE KAHN, GARETH DAMIAN MARTIN, LIV MENDEZ, BELLA MILROY, EILEEN MYLES, PRECIOUS OKOYOMON, LAUREN O’NEILL, RUTH PILSTON, HANNAH QUINLAN & ROSIE HASTINGS, FANNIE SOSA, ROMILY ALICE WALDEN, IAN WOOLDRIDGE and ANNA ZETT

If Our Wealth Is Criminal Then Let's Live with the Criminal Joy of Pirates collects two short stories and an essay by Jacob Wren. In the first story, 'The Infiltrator, ' certain ongoing, rarely mentioned, difficulties for the activist Left are explored with unlikely candour. In 'Four Letters from an Ongoing Series, ' the postal service becomes an unwitting accomplice to the gatekeepers of potential culture. Finally, in the essay 'Like a Priest Who Has Lost Faith, ' questions of art and emptiness shift focus in relation to the agency that at all times surrounds us.

This book assembles the scripts of two solo performances levitations (2017) and New Skin (2018). Hannah De Meyer's work connects with the eco-feminist tradition and investigates the connections between femininity, ecology and decolonization. She merges text and movement into a quirky, hybrid theater language. Levitations is an enchanting trip along the peaks and valleys of De Meyers imagination. The recent new skin is an overwhelming feminist and ecological statement.

Real-Time Realist is a serial publication of J-LTF PRESS. This issue of Real-Time Realist explores Ecstasy, Joy, Serenity, and Love, The Yellow Wheel, with contributions from invited artists distilling the aforementioned emotions.