Artists' Writing

TRAVERSALS is based on a series of conceptual interviews with Dora Garcia, Chris Kraus, Mark von Schlegell, Charles Stankievech, and Jacob Wren originally produced for an installation in an art gallery. As a re-issue of these texts, the publication continues K.'s interest in the book-as-exhibition. Each invited contributor has found a unique way to explore the hybrid spaces between genres and art forms, and the discussions focus especially on the role and relationship between visual art and writing.

While the interview process was rather formalized—with one set of five identical questions posed to each person in the first round, and then five individual questions asked in a second round in response to the first five answers—the texts themselves delight through a personal tone and a great openness for both idiosyncratic trajectories and unexpected traversals between the five different chapters.

Contributors: Dora Garcia, Chris Kraus, Charles Stankievech, Mark von Schlegell, Anna-Sophie Springer, Jacob Wren

Angoisse: Première Partie departs from the original script written for and used during its performance. The publication was then adapted listening to the sound recording and expanded with transcriptions of interactions, gestures and actions. Special edition w silk-printed handkerchiefs to weep on and wipe off those cold sweats. Graphic design, Roxanne Maillet.

Violence is in language and violence is language. The violence of language stratifies voices into those that matter and those that do not, using ideas of appropriate form and structure as its weaponry. It claims propriety and politeness are the correct mode of address, when urgency and anger are what is needed. Where languages intersect, hierarchies of language become means for domination and colonization, for othering, suppression, negation, and obliteration. The demand for a correctness of grammar, the refusal to see what is seen as incorrect, the dismissal of vernacular in favour of the homogenised tongue: all are violent. The narrative of history is a narrative of violence. The contributions herein refuse this narrative. They explore how violence permeates and performs in language, how language may be seized, taken back to be used against the overwhelming force of structural and institutional violence that passes as acceptable or normal. Violence may be a force for rupture, for refusal, for dissent, for the herstories that refuse to cohere into a dominant narrative.

Contributors: Travis Alabanza, Katherine Angel, Skye Arundhati-Thomas, Mieke Bal, Janani Balasubramanian, Elena Bajo, Jordan Baseman, Emma Bolland, Pavel Büchler, Paul Buck,Kirsten Cooke, Jih-Fie Cheng, John Cunningham, Andy Fisher, Caspar Heinemann, Jakob Kolding, Candice Lin, Rudy Loewe, Nick Mwaluko, Vanessa Place, Katharina Poos, Tai Shani, Linda Stupart, Benjamin Swaim, Jonathan Trayner, Jala Wahid, Isobel Wohl, Sarah Wood

In this post-truth era, how does one navigate the endless information available and choose a viable narrative of reality? In How to Know What’s Really Happening Glasgow-based writer and curator Francis McKee looks at various techniques for determining verity, from those of spy agencies and whistle-blowers to mystics and scientists.

Francis McKee is an Irish writer, medical historian, and curator working in Glasgow where since 2006 he has been the director of the Centre for Contemporary Arts, and is a lecturer and research fellow at Glasgow School of Art. McKee has worked on the development of open-source ideologies and their practical application to art spaces.

Afternoon Editions no. 1: an essay by Jeroen Peeters titled Reseeding the library, gleaning readership. In May 2017, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine settled during three weeks in the Ravenstein Gallery in Brussels as part of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Invited as a writer in residence, Jeroen Peeters visited the library of living books on a daily basis and recorded his observations by hand in a notebook, which formed the basis for Afternoon Edition #1. Reseeding the library, gleaning readership is an essay on the seed library, on the dispersion of literature through wind, water and animals, on biodiversity and commoning at the heart of readership. On the cover a drawing by Wouter Krokaert of a Philodendron Xanadu. Published May 2018.

In dictionary entries, after its first appearance the discussed word is represented by its initial: class, class struggle, class contradiction as well as crisis, catastrophe, or colonialism become C. Our C (K in German) stands for Class Languages, and thus for the question of the verbalization, translation, and inscription of those political and social conflicts that determine our contemporary moment. Instead of passing off art as a model for a better politics, we wish to test it for the signatures, the markers and forms of these deeply antagonistic relations of which art itself is a material part: we are concerned with art as a class language, as well as with class languages in art; with art’s room for maneuver as well as with its limits and restrictions, curatorially, in writing and debate.

Caught up in the vortex of this bellicose age, adrift on the sea of digital information and misinformation, without perspective enough to glimpse the future that is actually forming, I am finding it hard to think. Here is a book about thought right now and about how to think in a world that asks us at every level not to. Discontent? Malcontent? Sarah Wood looks at the world through Freud and fraud.

PERSONA is the second magazine in a series in response to a series of meetings of female artists entitled "A conversation to know if there is a conversation to be had" held in New York, Amsterdam, Berlin and London in 2010-11. The first journal LABOUR, addressed the question of women's work, and used the lens of the feminist critique of unpaid labour to look at the contemporary condition of the artist. PERSONA as a jumping off point looks at the condition of self-presentation for the contemporary artist, but in an expansive manner encompasses discussions on embarrassment, refusal, interiority and identification.

Contributors: Rita McBride, Celine Condorelli, Avery Gordon, Isla Leaver-Yap, Eva Kenny, Melissa Gordon, Marina Vishmidt, Josephine Pryde, Sabeth Buchmann, Chris Kraus, Audrey Reynolds, Elisabeth Subrin, Alison Carr, Karolin Meunier, Sue Tate, Nadia Hebson, Jen Liu, Da

Sad Sack is a book of collected writing by Sophia Al-Maria, taking feminist inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’; opposing ‘the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic.’ Encompassing more than a decade of work, Sad Sack tracks Al-Maria’s speculative journey as a writer, from the first seed of her ‘premature’ memoir, through the coining and subsequent critique of ‘Gulf Futurism’, towards experiments in gathering, containing, welling up and sucking dry.

For me this book is a bag... Like any single-use carrier bag – I disapprove. It shouldn’t exist, it contributes to pollution, it should be banned... And yet, in spite of the fact I know this book may be a waste product... I’m still writing, redacting, expanding... I’m still waiting, wasting, wanting. According to Ursula, ‘It is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag.' – Sophia Al-Maria

A set of generative texts following the genetic sequencing of DNA as the underlying structure or score for its characters.

Graphic design by Gerard Herman

Recipes for you: A vegan and gluten free recipe and story book with additional life skills is a new cookbook and survival guide by artist Holly White. Rather than selling an aspiration, the book looks honestly at our conflicted relationship with consumption. White intersperses recipes and self-sufficiency notes with prose, as the contributions collected on her food blog (http://holly-white-food.tumblr.com/) spark imagined and remembered references and memories.

Mistress Rebecca is approached by a 34-year-old Tory who works in a corporate field of creativity with a feeding fetish. Such mundanity is outrageous – until he declares himself as a female supremacist. Over the period of two evenings and one afternoon in three different chain restaurants in central London, Mistress Rebecca explores Humpty Dumpty’s beliefs then pushed his adoration of humiliation and his facade of female empowerment to its limits.

Skinned and Detouched, a pair of artists books, are a portal to a single performative stage in the industrial production of two large scale sculptures, one of which is on show at Large Glass. The books, including writing by Jennifer Boyd, photography by Thierry Bal and design by Europa, imaginatively document the multiple embodiments and disembodiments involved in one moment in the production of the two works.

Tom Buckle is an ambitious young moderate Labour apparatchik, rising happily through the party bureaucracy on a diet of bottomless brunches, legitimate concerns and drug-fueled Blairite sex parties. That is until he meets Otto, a charismatic young radical whose urge for cocks, communism, and a mysterious plot for the victory of the holetariat opens his eyes to a changing world. Finding himself thrown into a chaotic new political landscape of pigfucking PMs, frog-frenzied neonazis and falafel-throwing communists, Tom has to pick a side. Will he manage to nd a third way to a safe seat, or will Corbyn’s terrifying red horde make his moderate mission impossible? And can Tom resist the most seductive of all highs — pure, high-grade socialism, main-lined straight into London’s clogged and throbbing veins? So much for a kinder, gentler form of politics!

Published April 2019.

Spectacles is a research by Sara Manente starting from the distance between language and experience, specifically the experience of dance and performance.
Contains Spectacle #1 #2 #3 + the script of spectacle #4.

Writing Out Loud is a publication that brings together the transcriptions of eight lectures by the artist Jon Mikel Euba that were live translated from Spanish to English during the course Action unites, words divide (On praxis, an unstated theory) at the DAI. The lectures were delivered across the academic year 2014 – 2015 at the invitation of If I Can’t Dance. They sit within a larger writing-centred project by the artist that he has pursued for almost a decade, through which he aims to define a form of praxis that could evolve into a technical theory.

Black Hyperbox comes forth as a place that holds incompatible conceptual zones and spatiotemporalities together: Old World and New World, theater and jungle, jaguars and AI, prehistory and futurism, the earthly home and the alien space, Mecca and the North Pole, spaceships lost in cosmos and the politics of Isis, Malevich’s black square and the moon travel, thought and hallucination.

How to Sleep Faster is published as part of the collaborative discussion that form the critical direction of the gallery. and sits alongside the first two exhibitions – Sleep Faster (February), and How to Carve Totem Poles (March). It has been put together as an open ended continuation of this dialogue through which we seek to understand the contradictions / complexities that define and form our experience, existence and participation in a contemporary digital-analogue creative environment.

Arcadia Missa Publications; Rozsa Farkas, Tom Clark, Jammie Nicholas, Laura Farley (eds).

How to Sleep Faster 2 is the second of our biannually published journals that form the backbone of Arcadia Missa’ critical collaborative discourse on participation, post-digital visual-production and institutional subjectivity.This issue explores moments of collapse, shift and potential in a cultural moment framed by economic, political and societal disturbance.

Arcadia Missa Publication; eds Rozsa Farkas, Tom Clark et al.