Books

Ghost Image is made up of sixty-three short essays—meditations, memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poems—and not a single image. Hervé Guibert's brief, literary rumination on photography was written in response to Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, but its deeply personal contents go far beyond that canonical text. Some essays talk of Guibert's parents and friends, some describe old family photographs and films, and spinning through them all are reflections on remembrance, narcissism, seduction, deception, death, and the phantom images that have been missed.

Both a memoir and an exploration of the artistic process, Ghost Image not only reveals Guibert's particular experience as a gay artist captivated by the transience and physicality of his media and his life, but also his thoughts on the more technical aspects of his vocation. In one essay, Guibert searches through a cardboard box of family portraits for clues—answers, or even questions—about the lives of his parents and more distant relatives. Rifling through vacation snapshots and the autographed images of long-forgotten film stars, Guibert muses, "I don't even recognize the faces, except occasionally that of an aunt or great-aunt, or the thin, fair face of my mother as a young girl." In other essays, he explains how he composes his photographs, and how—in writing—he seeks to escape and correct the inherent limits of his technique, to preserve those images lost to his technical failings as a photographer.
With strains of Jean Genet and recurring themes that speak to the work of contemporary artists across a range of media, Guibert's Ghost Image is a beautifully written, melancholic ode to existence and art forms both fleeting and powerful—a unique memoir at the nexus of family, memory, desire, and photography.

Hervé Guibert (1955-91) was born and worked in Paris. A noted photographer, he also contributed articles on culture to the French newspaper Le Monde and wrote works of fiction and books on photography.

FAQ is an accordion-fold art publication edited by Maurizio Cattelan and Myriam Ben Salah and commissioned by Le Dictateur. Coinciding with the 10th anniversary edition of Le Dictateur, the first volume will expand into a yearly series.

FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions, referencing an attempt to synthesize a recurrent flow, a tenor, an ideal visual representation of a given and very subjective “now”. 
Born out of an accute image eating disorder, FAQ reflects the mental assimilation of a relentless roving within physical and virtual art spaces: from galleries to tumblr accounts, museums, or artists studios; it can be seen as a portable exhibition, a show on paper, a project of restitution, a hybrid object that you can leaf and scroll through. Far from being a rational enterprise because of its lack of rules, hierarchy, order—or concept for that matter—it is expressly and brazenly as personal and biased as possible and reflects the obsessive mannerism of its authors.

Works by Korakrit Arunanondchai, Thomas Bayrle, Neil Beloufa, Judith Bernstein, David Douard, Carroll Dunham, Dan Finsel, Llyn Foulkes, Kathy Grannan, Camille Henrot, Charles Irvin, Elad Lassry, Jon Rafman, Steven Shaerer, Emily Mae Smith, Peter Sutherland, Slavs and Tatars, Andra Ursuta, Aleksandra Waliszewska, Charlie White, Jakub Julian Ziolkowski...

In 2019, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania presented the experimental exhibition Colored People Time. Divided into three chapters—Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents—it used the Black vernacular phrase Colored People's Time (CPT) to explore the ways that dominant notions of time have been used to control and condemn Black people. CPT names a political performance by Black people to evade and ridicule the enforcement of punctuality and productivity.

Alongside reproductions of historical objects from the Black Panther Party, Sutton E. Griggs, the National Institutes of Health/Getty Images, and the African Collection at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Colored People Time includes reprints of seminal essays, newly commissioned writing and poetry from Huey Copeland, Eve Ewing, Michael Hanchard, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Amber Rose Johnson, Carolyn Lazard, Jessica Lynne, Tausif Noor, Meg Onli, Gregory Pardlo, M. NourbeSe Philip, Monique Scott, Martine Syms and Michelle M. Wright. Artists include: Aria Dean, Kevin Jerome Everson, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Carolyn Lazard, Dave McKenzie, Cameron Rowland, Sable Elyse Smith and Martine Syms.

Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader is a landmark collection representing the visionary life's work of beloved Bay Area luminary Steve Abbott. It brings together a broad cross-section of literary and artistic work spanning three decades of poetry, fiction, collage, comics, essays, and autobiography, including underground classics like, Lives of the Poets and Holy Terror, rare pieces of treasured ephemera, and previously unpublished material, representing a survey of Abbott's multivalent practice, as well as reinforcing his essential role within the contemporary canon of queer arts.

"Holy Terror is good reading, well written and extremely knowledgeable about the subject of magic black and white. In fact, all magic is both."—William Burroughs

"All of us who knew the late Steve Abbott will now be happy that the stone has rolled back, to reveal the amazing accomplishment of Beautiful Aliens, poet Jamie Townsend's masterful take on Steve's multigenre work. Prose, poetry, journalism, the essay, the comic book, the novel: Steve was driven to try his hand at all these categories, excelling more often then you'd think possible. It's time that people knew a genius (of sorts) once lived at the corner of Haight and Ashbury." —Kevin Killian

Steve Abbott (1943-1992) was a poet, critic, editor, novelist and artist. Abbott was raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, graduated from the University of Nebraska, and attended Emory University where he was an organizer for Atlanta's Gay Liberation Front and the gay lib editor at the underground paper The Great Speckled Bird. Abbott moved to San Francisco in 1974 where he became was a frequent contributor to local publications, including The Advocate, The Sentinel, and the Bay Area Reporter. He was also one of the founding editors of the literary arts newsletter Poetry Flash and the publisher/editor of the literary journal Soup. Steve wrote a number of books of poetry and prose during the 1980s and early 90s including: "Wrecked Hearts", "Stretching the Agape Bra", "Lives of the Poets", "Holy Terror", "Skinny Trip to a Far Place", and "View Askew: Postmodern Investigations", a book that collects Steve's essays from The San Francisco Sentinel, The Advocate, and the arts journal Mirage. He was active in various reading series and discussion groups in the Bay Area, including Cloud House and Small Press Traffic, and, in 1981, he co-organized the historic Left/Write conference. Steve was also a respected critic and the first to use the term "New Narrative" to describe the work of contemporaries including Bruce Boone and Robert Glück. Abbott died of complications due to AIDS on December 2, 1992. His novel The Lizard Club was published posthumously. Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet, publisher, and editor living in Oakland, California. They are half-responsible for Elderly, a publishing experiment and persistent hub of ebullience and disgust. They are the author of several chapbooks including, most recently, Pyramid Song (2018) as well as the full-length collection SHADE (2015). An essay on the history of the New Narrative magazine Soup was published in The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (2017).

Published December 2019.

Over the past 40 years, Canadian artist Moyra Davey (born 1958) has perfected a unique synthesis of photography, film and text to critically engage with the past, present and future of the world around her. Based on Davey's eponymous 2019 film, I Confess unites three main sources in a chronicle of late 20th-century Quebec, shaped by themes of race, poverty, language and nationalism. Using American writer James Baldwin's 1962 novel Another Country as its point of departure, Davey's film also focuses on the life and work of Québécois revolutionary Pierre Vallières and Ottawa-based political philosopher Dalie Giroux.

Published to accompany the exhibition Moyra Davey: The Faithful at the National Gallery of Canada, this deeply personal and highly political book seeks to examine an unresolved chapter of Québécois history from a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective that draws attention to contemporary issues of separatism, while reflecting the artist's understanding of photography and text as unique corollaries. This publication features writings by the artist, Dalie Giroux and National Gallery of Canada's Associate Curator Andrea Kunard, and a poster insert.

Published September 2020. 

Drink Deeply and Dream by Elspeth Walker is an ethereal, offbeat short story about wannabe vampires with a Marxist bent and their search for salvation from capitalism via eternal bloodlust.

Paperback, Staple Bound and Offset Printed

In My Paris, a Canadian woman keeps an extraordinary journal of her time in a Parisian studio. Not a typical tourist, she prefers indoor spaces, seeing Paris go by on TV or watching from her window the ever-changing displays of men's designer clothing across the boulevard. Or she roams the streets, caught between nostalgia and a competing sense of the present day, between Paris's rich cultural traditions and the realities of Western imperialism. Disillusioned by her inability to reconcile these contradictions and by her own part in perpetuating them, she assembles in her journal pieces of the present, past, of art, philosophy, of herself, and of the world outside her.

Gail Scott is a writer and translator. She has been short-listed twice for the QSPELL (Québec English-language fiction) award. A former journalist who has worked for Canada's leading newspapers, she is also a founding editor of the Montreal French-language cultural journal Spirale, and the bilingual journal of women's writing, Tessera. Her translations include France Thoret's Laurence, and The Sailor's Disquiet, and Helen with a Secret, both by Michael Delisle.

In Spill, self-described queer Black troublemaker and Black feminist love evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs presents a commanding collection of scenes depicting fugitive Black women and girls seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism. In this poetic work inspired by Hortense Spillers, Gumbs offers an alternative approach to Black feminist literary criticism, historiography, and the interactive practice of relating to the words of Black feminist thinkers. Gumbs not only speaks to the spiritual, bodily, and otherworldly experience of Black women but also allows readers to imagine new possibilities for poetry as a portal for understanding and deepening feminist theory.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines and the Founder and Director of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, an educational program based in Durham, North Carolina.

With texts and contributions by Nicholas Vargelis, Kerstin Stakemeier, Steve Beck, Lis Rhodes, Leslie Bauer, Érik Bullot, C.Vanaik, VUE Committee, Shirley Clarke, Hilary Harris, Giuliana Bruno, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Peter Larsen, Elissa Suh, Straub-Huillet, Storm de Hirsch, Mark Fisher, Bruce Baillie, Rachel Haidu, Kai Althoff, Jennifer Reeves, Karl Holmqvist, Eros in Le Wind, Marie Menken and Jonas Raam.

Facsimile of the seminal magazine created by Ulises Carrión and Cres, originally published in 1978. In this photographic book—one of very few of Carrion's entire practice—the author is very critical about his own affiliation with the mail art movement. The book presents a series a photographs of his calling card filing box, which the author juxtaposes with witty and poignant captions.

“This book of mine is partly real facts and partly fantasy. The real fact is that I love lists of names, card indexes, information retrieval systems, that sort of thing. No wonder I have an archive at home, the Other Books and So Archive, which includes a collection of artist's books.”

Ulises Carrión (1941-1989) is one of the most important figures of Mexican conceptual art. His 1975 manifesto The New Art of Making Books help defined artist's books as an autonomous artistic genre. His work includes numerous artist's books—which was then designated as bookworks—but also video art, sound arts, performance and mail art.

Riot is an intellectual biography of artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien (born 1960), looking at key moments in his career and discussing the influences that shaped them. Julien's trail-blazing career has moved across film and art, documentary, biography, narrative film and multi-screen installation, and has drawn on influences as disparate as silent cinema, cultural studies, Chinese myth and pirate radio culture. Riot is the first career-long overview on Julien, situating his work in the context of his personal and intellectual development: the friendships, mentors, night clubs, films, politics, records and the artworks that informed his practice. The backdrop to Julien's own story is a collage of some of the most important political and cultural events of the past 30 years: Thatcherism and the rise of neo-liberalism, the AIDS epidemic, punk rock, social riots, the globalization of the art market and the movement of filmmakers into the gallery.

With Texts by: Giuliana Bruno, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Bell Hooks, Kobena Mercer, Laura Mulvey and Mark Nash.

Published 2014

Monograph bringing together some fifty works by Judy Chicago and unpublished documents, accompanied by three critical texts by Géraldine Gourbe.

Judy Chicago says she wants to live as long as possible; not to transcend her mortal condition, but to be  around as her works successively find recognition. A woman holding out against all odds: such is the image of an artist more a visionary than the pioneer she has so often been described as. Unlike the pioneers, Chicago has never joined the “greats” of the white, modernist, Eurocentric canon. Rather she has avoided this historical snare, urging instead the alternatives of to sustain the vision.

Géraldine Gourbe is a philosopher, author, art critic, and curator.

Published May 2020

In this trailblazing anthology, more than fifty self-identified sex workers from all walks of the industry (survival and trade, past and present) explore their lived experience through the expressive nuance and beauty of poetry. In a variety of forms ranging from lyrics to list poems to found poetry to hybrid works, these authors express themselves with the complexity, agency, and honesty that sex workers are rarely afforded. Contributors from Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia include Gregory Scofield, Tracy Quan, Summer Wright, and Akira the Hustler. As an antidote to the invasive and often biased media depictions of sex workers, Hustling Verse is a fiercely groundbreaking exploration of intimacy, transactional sex, identity, healing, and resilience.

"With so much scathing insight into human behavior, Hustling Verse is not just about sex work, but about sexual possibility and self-determination for everyone." —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Sketchtasy

"The span of these poems - authored by surviving and commerical sex workers, younger and elder sex workers, racialized and Indigenous sex workers, queer and trans and cisgender sex workers - covers enormous ground while remaining united by an unwavering commitment to speaking the truth in all its painful and healing beauty." —Kai Cheng Thom, author of I Hope We Choose Love

Amber Dawn is a white queer femme survivor living in unceded Coast Salish Territories, Vancouver. She is the author of four books (the most recent of which is the novel Sodom Road Exit) and the editor of two anthologies. Her memoir How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir (2013) won the Vancouver Book Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia and guest mentors at drop-in, sex work-driven community spaces.

Published October 2019.

The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse—by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals—propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.

Like Roberto Bolano's 2666 or Faulkner's novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world saturated with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it's a world that becomes more and more terrifying the deeper you explore it.

Translated by Sophie Hughes.

As we face the compounded crises of late capitalism, environmental catastrophe and technological transformation, who are the thinkers and the ideas who will allow us to understand the world we live in? McKenzie Wark surveys three areas at the cutting edge of current critical thinking: design, environment, technology and introduces us to the thinking of nineteen major writers. Each chapter is a concise account of an individual thinker, providing useful context and connections to the work of the others.

The authors include: Sianne Ngai, Kodwo Eshun, Lisa Nakamura, Hito Steyerl, Yves Citton, Randy Martin, Jackie Wang, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Achille Mbembe, Deborah Danowich and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Eyal Weizman, Cory Doctorow, Benjamin Bratton, Tiziana Terranova, Keller Easterling, Jussi Parikka.

Wark argues that we are too often told that expertise is obtained by specialisation. Sensoria connects the themes and arguments across intellectual silos. They explore the edges of disciplines to show how we might know the world: through the study of culture, the different notions of how we create such things, and the impact that the machines that we devise have had upon us. The book is a vital and timely introduction to the future both as a warning but also as a road map on how we might find our way out of the current crisis.

McKenzie Wark is the author of Capital is Dead, General Intellects and Molecular Red among other books. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City.

Caliban and The Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation is a history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the battle against the rebel body and the conflict between body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social organization.

"In the neoliberal era of postmodernism, the proletariat is whited-out from the pages of history. Federici recovers its historical substance by telling its story starting at the beginning, with the throes of its birth. This is a book of remembrance, of a trauma burned into the body of women, which left a scar on humanity's memory as deep and painful as those caused by famine, slaughter, and enslavement." — Peter Linebaugh

Silvia Federici is a longtime feminist activist and teacher. In 1972 she was among the founders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the Campaign for Wages For Housework in the US and abroad. She has also been active in the anti-globalization movement and the anti-death penalty movement. Silvia Federici was a founding member of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, which for more than ten years documented the struggle of African students against the austerity programs imposed by the IMF and the World Bank on African countries. She has taught in the US and in Nigeria and is Emerita Professor of Political Philosophy and International Studies at Hofstra University (Hempstead, New York). Federici is the author of many book and essays on political philosophy, feminist theory, political philosophy, cultural studies, and education.

Published 2004.

A new edition of Sarah Schulman's acclaimed 1988 novel, a noirish tale about a no-nonsense coffee-shop waitress in New York who is nursing a broken heart after her girlfriend Dolores leaves her; her attempts to find love again are funny, sexy, and ultimately even violent. After Delores is a fast-paced, electrifying chronicle of the Lower East Side's lesbian subculture in the 1980s.

Sarah Schulman is the author of sixteen books, including the novels The Mere Future, The Child, Rat Bohemia, and Empathy (all from Arsenal Pulp Press) and the recent nonfiction works The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination and Israel/Palestine and the Queer International. She was also co-producer with Jim Hubbard of the feature documentary United in Anger: A History of ACT UP and is co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project. She lives in New York, where she is Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York (College of Staten Island) and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.

The first of a two-volume publication dedicated to the artist's novel, this theoretical essay aims to elucidate the pressing questions posed by the emergence of this new artistic medium with a number of key case studies and interviews.

Why do artists write novels? What impact does the artist's novel have on the visual arts? How should such a novel be experienced? In recent years, there has been a proliferation of visual artists who create novels as part of their broader art practice. They do so in order to address artistic issues by means of novelistic devices, favoring a sort of art predicated on process and subjectivity, introducing notions such as fiction, narrative, and imagination. In this sense, it is possible to see the novel as a new medium in the visual arts; yet very little is known about it. This two-volume publication is the first to explore in depth the subject of the artist's novel.

Part 1, A New Medium, is a theoretical examination that looks critically at the different ways contemporary artists employ the artist's novel, focusing mainly on four key case studies: Benjamin Seror's Mime Radio, Cally Spooner's Collapsing in Parts, Mai-Thu Perret's The Crystal Frontier, and Goldin+Senneby's Headless. It seeks to situate the artist's novel within the broader context of the visual arts in the hopes of sparking a much-needed discussion about a practice that has long been ignored by critical strands in art discourse. It includes valuable resources, such as the only existing bibliography of artists' novels.

Interviews with Benjamin Seror, Cally Spooner, Mai-Thu Perret, Goldin+Senneby, Francis McKee, Vivian Ziherl, Natasha Soobramanien, Clive Phillpot, Alex Cecchetti, Łukasz Gorczyca, Jan Jasiński.

This edition is published on the occasion of the YES sessions by Slow Reading Club (Bryanna Fritz & Henry Andersen with the participation of Maud Jacquin) organized by Lafayette Anticipations as part of EXTRA! Le festival de la littérature vivante (4th edition, from September 11 to 27, 2020 at the Centre Pompidou).

Taking inspiration from the history and identity of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall, this series of books seeks dialogue with the culture and folklore of magical practice. A range of artists were asked to create new work and collaborate on four publications that take their shape through this fascinating alternative history.

‘Empty Aphrodite’ is a radical imagining of the gods of antiquity as archetypal powers and forces that people often encounter in their lives. Organised as an alphabetic poetic sourcebook, it combines magic and inspiration in a series of surrealist portraits. The encyclopaedia comes with five random stickers with which you can choose your fate.

Taking inspiration from the history and identity of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall, this series of books seeks dialogue with the culture and folklore of magical practice. A range of artists were asked to create new work and collaborate on four publications that take their shape through this fascinating alternative history.

‘Satan is Real’ comprises two short stories by Wendy Erskine, who lives in Belfast, and illustrations by London-based artist and illustrator Stephanie von Reiswitz. A missing boyfriend in Amsterdam leads to new, uncontrollable powers being unleashed. A young member of a country gospel act has a penchant for black metal. What could go wrong?

Taking inspiration from the history and identity of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall, this series of books seeks dialogue with the culture and folklore of magical practice. A range of artists were asked to create new work and collaborate on four publications that take their shape through this fascinating alternative history.

‘The Cult of Water’ began as an experimental radio programme conceived by singer-songwriter and author David Bramwell. Aided by a witch and the magician Alan Moore, he takes an occult journey back in time, in search of the supernatural secrets of our waterways – and to solve the haunting mystery of a drowned village. But can he face his demons?

This catalogue accompanies a major group show at CCA Wattis in San Francisco, curated by Anthony Huberman. It reflects on ways the “machine” determines how we live and what we believe in.

A machine is also a mechanism, not just a physical object but also an abstract ideology. The artworks point to the forms and instruments that make up our technological infrastructure, as well as to the values they are designed to enforce. Contesting a world that rewards efficiency, speed, and productivity, the participating artists test existing systems with inefficient machines, impossible tools, wasted time, and elaborate protocols that misalign outputs and inputs.