Books

This first issue of Real-Time Realist explores amazement, distraction, surprise and awe (the blue sector of Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions) with contributions from invited artists distilling the aforementioned emotions. [publisher’s note.]

Real-Time Realist gathers contributions by graphic designers, writers, and artists, most of them living in the NL and former students of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie or the Werkplaats Typografie.

Contributors: Jungmyung Lee, Josse Pyl, Carson Lee, Charlie Clemoes, Laura Pappa, Lieven Lahaye, Will Pollard, Mathew Kneebone, Max Gershfield, Rudy Guedj. 

Originally published in 1973, The New Woman's Survival Catalog is a seminal survey of the second-wave feminist effort across the US. Edited by Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie in just five months, The New Woman's Survival Catalog makes a nod to Stewart Brand's influential Whole Earth Catalog, mapping a vast network of feminist alternative cultural activity in the 1970s.

A Cookbook of Invisible Writing, by Dutch artist, designer and teacher Amy Wu, is an introduction to analog steganography—a type of secret writing that is hidden in plain sight. This book serves as a starter pack to run workshops with groups who are interested in alternative forms of communication. It contains invisible ink recipes and other invisible communication techniques that may be used to subvert surveillance and bypass censorship, but also inspire your community to develop poetic and playful forms of communication to nurture social bonds. In the tradition of esoteric manuals published on secret writing, this cookbook also channels the spirit of everyday access and the easy distribution and sharing of practical knowledge.

Following Giambattista della Porta's 1558 popular science book Natural Magic—one of the first major publications that detailed simple but diverse recipes of invisible inks for public consumption—this cookbook aims to bring this obscure field to a wider audience. The publication includes a critical essay about the history of surveillance through a feminist and postcolonial lens. The last chapter presents Wu's own body of work that aims to revive analog techniques as a counter to today's digitally surveilled mediascape.

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.

At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.

Livret de 56 pages; format 13x21; illustré; couverture souple; cousu. Traduction originale du portugais ("Teoria do indiscernível" texte figurant dans le vol. "Abissologia - Teoria do Indiscernível", Lisboa - 2012). Édition bilingue portugais-français.

Quelques textes de Kathy Acker, écrits avant ses trente ans, traduits par Elodie Petit et Claire Finch.

A book from A Nos Amours gathering up all the research and writing that went into making the London Chantal Akerman retrospective possible.

Between 2013 and 2015,  A Nos Amours presented in London a complete retrospective of the films of the celebrated film-maker Chantal Akerman. This was a complex and demanding project as rights and screening copies turned out to be widely scattered and difficult to access. The research needed to present this retrospective is offered in this book so that others may easily follow suit.

Also included are the texts, journalism and blogging that was offered to the audience as a means to engage with film-works that are at once radical, heterodox and, in many cases, little known. The book aims to be accurate and a reliable source of detailed information about the films.

Texts are included that provide invaluable insight, including by:

Raymond Bellour, Richard Brody, Ivone Margulies, Marion Schmid and Ginette Vincendeau.

Laura Mulvey has written an expansive foreword, surveying Akerman's achievement, making use of the book as an aide-mémoire for what stands as one of the astonishing bodies of work in all cinema:

"As a collage of writing of many different kinds, the Handbook crucially bears witness to the effect that Akerman has had on the film community, from her earliest movies until her last... The high quality of the texts included in the book are all a reminder of the way that her ‘cinematic’ qualities have advanced our understanding of film." (Laura Mulvey preface)

Unafraid of exploring the potentials of technology, both its tyrannical and emancipatory possibilities, the manifesto seeks to uproot forces of repression that have come to seem inevitable—from the family, to the body, to the idea of gender itself.

The Dream of a Common Language explores the contours of a woman s heart and mind in language for everybody language whose plainness, laughter, questions and nobility everyone can respond to.

In a bathtub in a rooming house in Montreal in 1980, a woman tries to imagine a new life for herself: a life after a passionate affair with a man while falling for a woman, a life that makes sense after her deep involvement in far left politics during the turbulent seventies of Quebec, a life whose form she knows can only be grasped as she speaks it. A new, revised edition of a seminal work of edgy, experimental feminism. With a foreword by Eileen Myles.

Four young cats with wings leave the city slums in search of a safe place to live, finally meeting two children with kind hands.

First critical edition of Kathy Acker’s unpublished early writings from (1969-1976). Comprises almost all the typescripts from that period present in the Kathy Acker’s archives. Features also the transcription and presentation of Acker’s two 1974 experimental videos.

Editor: Justin Gajoux. Critical notes: Justin Gajoux & Claire Finch. Also with texts of: Alan Sondheim, Emily Cheng, Jill Kroesen, Peter Gordon, Claire Finch, Anna Maria Pinaka, Matias Viegener, Justin Gajoux.

Adriana Gheorghe works with performance and writing and a gravely irreverent sense of indeterminacy, while in relation to contexts (conceptual, physical, political, human), and for the reformulation of the same ongoing artistic and living practice – the performative imagining of the humans in relation to language and representation, hijacking subjectivity and identity with the crack of endless potentiality.

A collection of texts, notes and drawings from Alina Popa (1982-2019), edited as a tribute publication by her longtime accomplice, the artist Florin Flueras. A political and theoretical work that questioned both the intimate and social mechanisms of the contemporary.

Square of Will in Square of Love gathers a selection of texts, notes and drawings by Alina Popa, edited by Florin Flueras. Most texts are more poetic and more personal than Alina’s previously published writing, “...a mixture of styles, subjects and mediums—theory, poetry, drawings, diary notes, it's unclassifiable, as she liked it.” (Florin Flueras).

Alina Popa (1982-2019) was a Romanian artist who moved between choreography, theory, and contemporary art.

CORNER football+society VOL.1 comprises all contributions from the first six issues of the eponymous artist-run magazine, published in Romanian between 20015-2017. 

With texts and conversations by: Mihnea Anţilă, Octav Avramescu, Violeta Beclea-Szekely, Matei Bejenaru, Declan Clarke, Irina Costache, Ion Dumitrescu, Florin Flueras, Bogdan Ghiu, Christopher Johnson, Cosima Opârtan, Florin Oprea, V. Leac, Andrei Mihail, Vasile Mihalache, Anca Verona Mihuleţ, Petrica Mogoş, James Montague, Cat Năstăsoiu, Pompiliu Nicolae-Constantin, Alexandra Pirici, Florin Poenaru, Ovidiu Pop, Powerpuff, Corneliu Porumboiu, Anamaria Pravicencu, Claudiu Revnic, Matei Sâmihaian, Ben Shave, Ştefan Tiron, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu and artworks by: Enric Fort Ballester, Alex Bodea, Irina Botea + Jon Dean, Ion Grigorescu, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Cătălin Mihalache, Monotremu, Dan Perjovschi, Alexandra Pirici & Jonas Lund, Raluca Popa, Gabriele de Santis, Sergiu Sas.

CORNER fotbal + societate is a periodical publication that proposes a crossdisciplinary approach, taking football and its complex contemporary and historical context as a starting point. This material foregrounds less (re)presented subjects and follows its evolution and social determinations. Aiming to intersect the culture of sport with various fields of knowledge such as anthropology, art, contemporary dance, architecture and economics, it follows less discussed aspects such as horizontal organisation, representation of minorities, gender power relations, subcultures and the relationship between the individual, group and society - amongst other topics. Under the current conditions, where both sport and art are being confiscated by the media and transformed into commodities, CORNER reclaims the democratic and emancipatory aspects of football, alongside a critical analysis of its functioning and reception modes.

Various artists and authors use two writers' correspondence as a primary source to develop an artistic and literary falsification. In this collaborative volume, the writer and artist Paul Buck works with the late 29 Kathy Acker. Using as source the raw materials of their correspondence from the early Eighties, a period when Acker was writing Great Expectations and trying to leave America for London, Buck confronts issues of appropriation, sampling, and plagiarism, relevant then and now.

Further encounters are triggered by writer Rebecca Stephens, artist John Cussans... and playwright Richard Foreman, artist Susan Hiller, musician David Coulter. Kathy Acker (1947-1997) was at the forefront of transgressive writing from the Seventies until her death. Her provocative intertextual narratives—halfway between autobiography and pornography—were developed in lectures, performances and films (Variety, Bette Gordon).

Her published work includes Blood and Guts in High School (1984), Don Quixote (1986), and Empire of the Senseless (1988). Rebecca Stephens escaped the chains of theology teaching to write on Saints and Courtesans, subjects on which books are in the pipeline.

John Cussans is a writer, artist and researcher who has exhibited regularly in London, Berlin, Slovenia, Vienna, Vancouver. In 2001 he founded The Bughouse, an art-event generator inspired by the work of Philip K. Dick. Paul Buck (born 1942, United Kingdom) is a British poet, performer and author of more than fifty crime novels. He has been challenging notions of writing, narrative, and the limits of the feasible since the late Sixties in books like The Honeymoon Killers, Violations and Lust, Walking into Myself... Chief editor of Curtains magazine, he introduced many French authors to the English audience.

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.

I Want reviews the eponymous duo's double-projection film installation examining issues of gender, sexuality and performativity—and inspired by the words of punk poetess Kathy Acker and convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. This publication documents the major film installation I Want (2015) by collaborative artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, which was presented at their 2015 solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary.

The double-projection film installation is based on a script that borrows texts from American punk-poet Kathy Acker (1947-1997), as well as chats and materials by convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning that speak of her reasons for revealing nearly one million secret military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks, at the same time exposing her transgender identity to her superiors.

Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity, and the nature of collaboration. Alongside generous color documentation, written contributions by Gregg Bordowitz, Laura Guy, Dean Spade, and Craig Willse unpack and reflect upon both the historical context and contemporary significance of this multivalent work.

Blue has run is an intervened facsimile of A Catalog of Textiles and Folkart of Chiapas by the anthropologist Walter F. Morris, published in 1979. The original publication was printed in 100 copies, most of which have been lost or dispersed through various specialized libraries.

This catalog listed the items belonging to three collections of fabrics and weaving patterns in South Mexico which Walter F. Morris, called Chip, helped to constitute during mid seventies: the Pellizzi, the Pomar and the Morris Collection. Its DIY quality gives the images an almost abstract twist. This and the painstakingly precise descriptions of the items take the content of the catalog towards territories closer to poetry, drifting it away from its original purpose.

Eighty-page programme book score, and libretto, for performances by Indigenous musicians of in memoriam…Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau and Robert Ashley’s in memoriam... Curated and edited by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective.

[from back cover] …in memoriam Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau adds a new score and production by Postcommodity and Alex Waterman to a suite of four early scores by the American composer Robert Ashley. The fifth score honours the lives of Mary Cecil, Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau, three Indigenous women from territory at the turn of the Century as it became the province of Alberta. This significant addition continues Ashley’s project investigating the connections between musical forms and constructs of historicization, opening a conversation regarding whom and how we memorialize individuals and inscribe their legacies.

[from essay by Candice Hopkins] What histories are remembered and who is doing the remembering? What form do these rememberings take? It is not as simple as taking down one monument and replacing it with another. We need to ask more questions, take note of the voids that stand in for the past, and actively make way for other voices, particularly those are trapped under the ‘sea ice of English’. “Listen for sounds”, writes the Tlingit poet and anthropologist Nora Marks Dauenhauer, “They are as important as voices. Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen.”

“The ritual of the job interview can be considered as a courtship that’s conditioned by protocols that ask for a quite particular display: with social relations as material, a dance of conformity, the attempted imagining and echoing of expectations.”

This anthology of commissioned writing includes contributions by Nadim Abbas, Howie Chen, Heman Chong, Matthew Dickman, Jason Dodge, Angie Keefer, Holly Pester, Natasha Soobramanien, Marina Vishmidt, and Jonas Žakaitis.

Edited and illustrated by Chris Evans, and co-published with Para Site, Hong Kong.

Lyn Hejinian’s unpublished prose poem which (in her better-known essay The Rejection of Closure) the author reads closely as model for various, open, equitable relations between language and things (such as human bodies, as emphasised in a commentary exploring the destituent potential of Hejinian’s faltering poetic corpus, in “A Draft of Resistance” by Andrea di Serego Alighieri), in an envelope.

1. Lyn Hejinian’s unpublished prose poem which (in her better-known essay The Rejection of Closure) the author reads closely as model for various, open, equitable relations between language and things (such as human bodies, as emphasised in

2. A commentary exploring the destituent potential of Hejinian’s faltering poetic corpus, in “A Draft of Resistance” by Andrea di Serego Alighieri), in

3. An envelope.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. The 18th issue, “Recto Verso” is edited by Will Holder, and had its beginnings in prosody, the measure of language, geometry, and a notion of imagist transcription, even. A two-dimensional exercise, it turns out, on paper. Words were tuned out, in favour of the volume of values our bodies exchanged: “the historical and bodily movement of language amongst subjects.” Attentions turned—taking (the measure of) classes in body language: the non-verbal: the insinuated: the reverse-side of image: the backside, and, oddly: Oh no: we don’t speak about that—to the next page…

“Black Sun” the 17th issue, edited by Will Holder in conversation with Krist Gruijthuijsen, to accompany the exhibitions David Wojnarowicz Photography & Film 1978–1992, Reza Abdoh, and TIES, TALES AND TRACES. Dedicated to Frank Wagner, Independent Curator (1958–2016), at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. The issue departs from Wojnarowicz’s grief at the loss of loved ones during the 1980s AIDS crisis, and anger at the US government for their willful neglect of this loss.

The issue assembles a chorus of various gendered and sexual positions, all seeking support, love and intimacy in linguistic, architectural and bodily structures, all the while under threat of collapse. These voices are threaded together with excerpts from Julia Kristeva’s white, feminist, psychoanalytical, semiotic Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia (1992).