Artists' Writing

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. “what I mean is—” the 16th issue, edited by Will Holder.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. “Flurry” is the 15th issue (a best-of, of sorts) edited by Will Holder. “I realized very slowly over a period of time that the activity of framing a performance and the intentions that accumulate around that activity produce a certain anxious kind of mode, and I became bothered by the flurry of activity and how it tends to mask so many things.”

“Recognition” is concerned with bodies, ecology, empathy, gazing at the world, and reading (environments) from non-anthropocentric POVs—nonetheless described and written by humans. Animals, birds, and trees feature heavily.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, edited by Will Holder, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. This 13th issue of F.R.DAVID is edited with Riet Wijnen, and has its origins in her Registry of Pseudonyms, an online database which accounts for who is who and why who is who. ‘Inverted Commas’ follows ‘pseudonym’ through names, naming, bodies, brains, self, author, other, reader, labour.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises.
This issue, “All distinctions are mind, by mind, of mind”, has a split personality, allowing comparative readings between left/ right, good/ bad, manic/ depressive.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises.

“With Love,” takes correspondence and calligraphy—or letter-writing—as model for information theory, and adaptive, cybernetic relations.

Rodney Graham's The System of Landor's Cottage: A Pendant to Poe's Last Story is the most ambitious of the textual interventions that contributed to Graham's emergence onto the international art scene in the 1980s.

Part 'pataphysical investigation, part Roussellian exercise, the text begins with Edgar Allan Poe's short story "Landor's Cottage: A Pendant to 'The Domain of Arnheim,'" which describes a waylaid traveller's encounter with an uncannily pristine landscape and cabin in the Hudson River Valley. Into this short tale, which numbers less than twenty pages in most editions, Graham inserts an entire novel centered around an annex to Poe's original structure that houses a fantastical machine.

Through a complex set of nested tales, the origins of the machine become clearer but no less magical, and readers will be held rapt by accounts of architectural wonders, a mysterious cipher, and the romance of impossible science.

0(rphan)d(rift>)'s Cyberpositive is an experimental sci fi theory-fiction that streams a group of asked and unasked contributors writing, sampled and edited by 0D's Maggie Roberts. It was published in 1995 with support from Nick Land and Cabinet Editions, serving as a manifesto and as the catalogue for the debut exhibition of the same name. It came together in the spirit of much of 0D's visual work, bringing together processes of sampling and looping as well as the Burroughs text cut up technique, referring to a breakdown and reordering of language from a post human POV.

This issue is dedicated to 'Materializzazione del Linguaggio', a 1978 Venice Biennale exhibition curated by Mirella Bentivoglio. The exhibition comprised of work by over eighty women artists working in a huge range of media, but united in their interrogation of text, voice and language. After the smashing hit of their Hervé Guibert No.1 issue, Tinted Window continues its focus on a single subject with issue No.2: Verbivocovisual. In No.2, Tinted Window brings much of this work back to the fore where many artists have slipped into the footnotes of an exciting period in art history. But much beyond our focus on this iconic exhibition, the issue features new essays and art projects by some of the best artists working with text, voice and poetry today.

No.2 features new commissions, translations and reprints from: Holly Antrum, Jeremy Atherton Lin, Mirella Bentivoglio, Angela Bianchini, Daniela Cascella, Anne Carson, Paula Claire, Paul Clinton, William Cobbing, Constance DeJong, Karen Di Franco, Sholto Dobie, Gustavo Grandal Montero, Katalin Ladik, Daisy Lafarge, Rosanna Mclaughlin, Silvia Mejía, Hannah Regal, Giovanna Sandri and Sue Tompkins.

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

Translated by Daniella Shreir with an introduction by Eileen Myles and afterword by Frances Morgan.

If winning can only occur in a competition between equal opponents, someone who isn’t equal will need to adopt a different strategy and let go of the promise, or the curse, of victory. Anna Zett takes up the challenge in this collection of personal science fiction, registering the traces systems of power leave in the body, in its locomotory, nervous and digestive systems. Zett’s voice appears in several textual guises, addressing authority, resistance, trauma and the physicality of language. Dedicated to the feminist revolution, the post-socialist subject of Artificial Gut Feeling questions logocentric and capitalist beliefs about the economy of meaning. This book gathers together fists, guts and brains to gain a deeper understanding of the non-verbal roots of dialogue.

"This being is able to transform movement into speech. It winds itself about inside me like a thick snake and I have to use all my strength to let it spin and do what it does. When I wilfully try to stop it, it begins to whisper words to me and that is even more unpleasant. If I were to associate this gut feeling with an emotion, I would say disgust. But this disgust is not directly linked to your name."—Anna Zett

A selection of 22 texts that were written between 1989-2019 that problematize Creischer's constant struggle for a vocabulary to analyze and criticize, to comment and intervene in the social fabric she finds herself surrounded by. Rather than neatly discriminating between form and content, between emancipation and information, Creischer's lessons suggest various ways of inscribing one into the other of juxtaposing opposing poles.

Alice Creischer is a German artist, writer and theorist. Her artistic practice and theoretical work focuses on issues of economic and institutional critique, globalization and the history of capitalism.

Retrospective is a comedy-science-fiction novelette about “faggotry” and the art world; depicting a retour-au-passé in contemporary painting and waving to some of the most beautiful homosexuals on Earth. Flaunting otherness, the alert reader can follow a clerk of The Land of Sculptures whilst he encounters the pretty faces of The Painter, The Foreign Painter, The Tyrolese Painter and other people doing art and drugs.

Retrospective includes “Thumbs-Up”, a superficial analysis of the normalisation of gayness; “Why Homos Are Better”, a masterpiece of investigative journalism in two parts, that originally appeared in Agony 2 (circa 1988–93), a zine edited by B. Boofy and William Bonifay; a drawing by Jurgen Ots; a photograph by César Segarra; and a poem by Lars Laumann.

Alberto García del Castillo writes genre fiction and nonfiction about communities and queer, performs his own and other people's writings, and collaborates in multiple configurations. He has published his writing in Girls Like Us, co-edited Midpoint (Théophile's Papers, 2016) and his two novels Merman (2017) and Retrospective (2014) were published by Shelter Press. Alongside Marnie Slater, is co-curator of Buenos Tiempos, Int.

This light, pocketbook format publication by After 8 Books gathers works by French artist Julie Beaufils, and three short stories commissioned for the occasion, dealing altogether with social tensions and emotional explosions.

The ink drawings by Julie Beaufils that form the core of the book, follow a logic of editing, accumulation and narrative incompleteness: the figures come from memories of films or TV series, as sediments of mass culture, or sometimes from personal observations and experiences crystallized in images. Shapes and figures develop as an ambivalent collection, informed by the weight and the vibration of lines and strokes.

This book aims at triggering the interpretation of these works, and at making their “reading” more complex, more playful too. Graphic designer Scott Ponik composed a visual story close to a manga, part abstraction, part emotion. The narrative and affective potential of the drawings is further activated by their free association with three short stories by Michael Van den Abeele, Buck Ellison, and Reba Maybury. Van den Abeele tells about the inner thoughts of a donor at the sperm bank; Buck Ellison’s story follows a few hours in the life of some girls in the San Francisco area, dealing with the cruelty and the naïvety of their relationships; while Reba Maybury proposes an erotic analysis of the connection between desire and capitalism.

Texts By: Kristen Alvanson, Stuart Bailey, Stephen Barber, Mark & Steve Beasley, Karla Black, Marianna Botey, Jesse Bransford & Casey Mckinney, Charles Bronson, Paul Buck, David Burrows & Simon O'sullivan, Bonnie Camplin, Lisa Castagner, Ccru/Orphan Drift, Dennis Cooper, Michael Corris, Esther Planas, Karen Cunningham, Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth, Michael Cross/ M Satai, John Cussans, Enrico David, Anthony Davies, Lorenzo De Los Angeles Iii, Madeline Djerjian, Peter Donaldson, Ross Downes, Electric Six, Patricia Ellis, John Espinosa, Dick Evans, Keith Farquhar, Dan Fox, Luca Frei, Barnaby Furnas & Ivette Zieghelboim, Tony Garifalakis, Babak Ghazi, Ilana Halperin, Mark Harris, Iain Hetherington, Damien Hirst, Klara Hobza, Stewart Home, Rachel Howe, Mark Hulson, Andy Hunt, Andrew Hughes, Gareth Jones, Kevin Killian, Kool Keith, Steve Klee, The Knockouts, Pete Lewis, Cedar Lewisohn, Fiona Lumbers, Patricia Macormack, Andrea Mason, Natt Mellors, Anna Mitchell, N.R.K Mohammad/ Sos Newsrod/ Dan Thurwen, Gean Moreno, Hv Morton, Donal Mosher, Neil Mulholland, Patrick Mullins, Yuki Muruyama, Reza Negarestani, No Bra, Paul Noble, Bernard Noel, David Osbaldeston/Joe Devlin, Arthur Ou, Mike Pare, Chloe Piene, Esther Planas, Elizabeth Price, Adam Putnam, Harry Pye, Hillary Raphael, The Rebel, Steve Rushton/Hubert Czerepok, Amelia Saul/Jo-Ey Tang, Kenji Siratori, Craig Slee, Alison Smith, Emma Stark, John Strutton, Francis Summers, Rebecca Taylor, Simon Thompson, Mark Tichner, Ian Titus, Dan Torop, Jeffrey Vallance, Harlan D Wilson, Benny Zadik.

Texts By: Kathy Acker, Mireille Andrès, Antonin Artaud, Dominique Auch, Ned Baldwin, Stephen Barber, Georges Bataille, Baudelaire, John Beagles, Mark Beasley, Dodie Bellamy, Alissa Bennett, Simon Bill, Jesse Bransford, R.A.Bransford Jr Esq, Paul Buck, Bonnie Camplin, Aline Bouvy/John Gillis, Dennis Cooper, John Cussans, Trinie Dalton, Sue De Beer, Brock Enright, Felix Ensslin, Dan Fox, Robert Garnett, Paul Green, Matthew Greene, Fernando Guerreiro, Pierre Guyotat, Ilana Halperin, Glen Helfand, Jacques Henric, Rachel Howe, Ben Kaleb Brantley, Seth Kelly, Kevin Killian, Christopher Knowles, Jennifer Krasinski, Cedar Lewisohn, Lorenzo De Los Angeles Iii, Rachel Lowther, Dave Martin, Karl Marx, Casey Mckinney, Gean Moreno, J.P. Munro, Paulina Olowska, Simon O¹Sullivan, Arthur Ou, Damon Packard, Mike Paré, Graham Parker, Wotjek Puslowski, Adam Putnam, Ian Rafael Titus, Eugène Savitzkaya, Eric Schnell, Amy Sillman, Allison Smith, Joanne Tatham/ Tom O'sullivan, Daniel Torop, Genya Turovsky, Banks Violette, Benjamin Weissman, Ivan Witenstein, Thom Wolf

Texts By: Art & Language, Fabienne Audéoud, Dave Beech, David Burrows, Ccru, Jake Chapman, John Cussans, Johnny Golding, Inventory, Martin Mcgeown, Lucy Mckenzie, Esther Planas, Graham Ramsay, John Russell, Clara Ursitti, Andrew Williamson.

Mo-Leeza Robert's novel Head describes the desperate future that clusters around Head Gallery like cockroaches swarming over a pig's head. It is at once critical and complicit, deluded and envious. Jerry-rigging saccharine sci-fi, with a leavened mush of curatorial artspeak, artists, collectors, hanger-ons and other art world actors explode in ecstasy, pain, or self-induced eradication – all, according to the whims of the Head Gallery, which remains an anonymous and inviolate force, the overseer of events and a selfless accumulator of prestige and wealth. Familiar contemporary artists are reanimated for the future, giving the events described an unsettling familiarity. Any reader familiar with the art world should feel both seduced, and infected. It is like Dickens but with laughs induced by our approaching extinction, and like Salò, written, directed and starred in by Barbara Gladstone.

“After all we all want to be fucked by Bruce Willis. Baby-penis, Man-Father, penis-stool, envelope-sheath. The Fantasy is available to us all in a spectacle of scale. There is no false consciousness.”

SALT.’s tenth issue is themed ‘Glossolalia’. Glossolalia means to speak in tongues, to speak in a language misunderstood, perhaps dead, perhaps not yet existent: a latent language waiting to be translated. It is in this almost-silence that we have found our submissions to reside, often emerging from a feeling of isolation or alienation where a will to speak reverberates but has not yet come to the fore.

Contributors: Sabeen Chaudhry, Gabriella Hirst, Anna Ilsley, Yessica Klein, Carlos Kong, Jessie Makinson, Harriet Middleton Baker, Jessa Mockridge, Penny Newell, Hannah Regel, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Thea Smith, Jala Wahid, Evie Ward, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Charlott Weise, Nicola Woodham.

QUICKSAND was written to be an opera libretto. But it was written in the form of a novel....I am devoted to "mystery" stories. I read them one after another, mostly two or three times. Some of the best writers today are writing in this form. So, I thought that I would try to make an opera libretto from a mystery story, told verbatim. That is, the libretto and the novel would be the same: no scenes moved around or actions adapted to the proportions of a libretto, just tell the story the way it's told in the novel. But first I needed a novel....So that meant I had to write a mystery novel. Where do you start? The answer is: I always need a 'location' to be inspired to tell a story. Everything in the novel is true, except for a lot of the facts.

Unsorcery composes and explores ways of sorcery that can eventually surpass or undo some of the contemporary realities and subjectivities. It is an Artworld involved in a productive alienation from concepts through experience and from experience through thought. Unsorcery is an environment in which Alina Popa and Florin Flueras were working together, each following their own path, doing their own practices, texts and performances around the concepts: Life Programing, Artworlds, Black Hyperbox, Second Body, Dead Thinking, End Dream.