Books

Living Translation offers a powerful perspective on the work of distinguished thinker and writer Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, revealing how, throughout her long career, she has made translation a central concern of the comparative humanities.

Starting with her landmark "Translator's Preface" to Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology in 1976, and continuing with her foreword to Mahasweta Devi's Draupadi and afterword to Devi's Chotti Munda and His Arrow, Spivak has tackled questions of translatability. She has been interested in interrogating the act of translation from the ground up and at the political limit. She sees at play at border checkpoints, at sites of colonial pedagogy, in acts of resistance to monolingual regimes of national language, at the borders of minor literature and schizo-analysis, in the deficits of cultural debt and linguistic expropriation, and, more generally, at theory's edge, which is to say, where practical criticism yields to theorizing in untranslatables.

This volume also addresses how Spivak's institution-building as director of comparative literature at the University of Iowa—and in her subsequent places of employment—began at the same time. From this perspective, Spivak takes her place within a distinguished line-up of translator-theorists who have been particularly attuned to the processes of cognizing in languages, all of them alive to the coproductivity of thinking, translating, writing.

In this anthology of contemporary eco-literature, the editors have gathered an ensemble of a hundred emerging, mid-career, and established Indigenous writers from Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and the global Pacific diaspora. This book itself is an ecological form with rhizomatic roots and blossoming branches. Within these pages, the reader will encounter a wild garden of genres, including poetry, chant, short fiction, novel excerpts, creative nonfiction, visual texts, and even a dramatic play—all written in multilingual offerings of English, Pacific languages, pidgin, and translation.

Seven main themes emerge: "Creation Stories and Genealogies," "Ocean and Waterscapes," "Land and Islands," "Flowers, Plants, and Trees," "Animals and More-than-Human Species," "Climate Change," and "Environmental Justice." This aesthetic diversity embodies the beautiful bio-diversity of the Pacific itself.

This volume surveys Paul Chan's publications and works made between 2010 and 2022 following his return to artmaking. The exhibition takes as its organizing principle the notion of the "breather," a word that can signify a moment of rest or pause but can also reference a purposeful redirection toward other activities.

Chan's turn to publishing through the founding of his independent press Badlands Unlimited represented a type of "breather." Badlands for Chan embodied a radical break that seeded new ideas and ways of working. The term is also what Chan titles a recent major body of work. Breathers is an ongoing series of pneumatic sculptures and installations that he considers a new genre of moving-image works. Tacitly and overtly, the metaphor of the "breather" underscores each of the works in the Walker Art Center exhibition, which, with the artist's input, is conceived in four sections. The exhibition catalog includes scholarly contributions by Chan; Pavel Pys, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center; and Vic Brooks, Senior Curator of Time-based Visual Art at Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (EMPAC).

Paul Chan (born 1973) is an artist, writer and publisher who lives in New York. Chan is the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize in 2014, a biennial award honoring artists who have made visionary contributions to contemporary art. Chan founded the independent press Badlands Unlimited in 2010. Badlands has published over 50 books, including the works of Yvonne Rainer, Calvin Tomkins, Lynne Tillman, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carroll Dunham, Claudia La Rocco, Dread Scott, Martine Syms, Craig Owens, Petra Cortright, Cauleen Smith, Ian Cheng, Rachel Rose, Aruna D'Souza and many others.

A privileged look into the life and artistic practice of the experimental filmmaker, music anthologist, and enigmatic polymath Harry Smith.

Best known during his lifetime as an experimental filmmaker and Folkways Records music anthologist, Harry Smith (1923-1991) was a spiritual outsider and one of the most original, influential artists of the mid-century American avant-garde. An avid, inspired collector of old blues and hillbilly recordings during his youth, he became a fan of such bebop jazz as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and began making avant-garde film animations featuring patterns painted directly onto the negatives as visual accompaniments to jazz performances. Smith crossed paths with nearly everyone central to the cultural avant-garde; he lived for art and gnosis with little thought for practical consequences. In 1991, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in New York.

Five years after Smith's death, the poet Paola Igliori began conducting intimate interviews with the filmmakers, musicians, poets, and artists who knew him best. The result, American Magus Harry Smith, offers a privileged look not only into Smith's life and artistic practice, but also into his era and the informal economy of influence that operated during that time. It provides invaluable insight into the mind of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic polymaths. This expanded edition includes photos of Smith and many other color images.

An artist's book by New York-based author and artist Sam Pulitzer (born 1984), The Premise of a Better Life combines photographs with ethical and existential questions addressed to the viewer, in an allegory of the contemporary condition. These photographs of everyday things, ambiguous details, nondescript landscapes and cityscapes were mostly taken in New York, although the city appears as the pale reflection of a model city.

Each picture is accompanied by a question: "Can you afford yourself?" "Are you waiting for a moment that just won't come?" "If you knew then what you know now, would it make a difference?" "Do you trust happiness?" The montages offer a complex, personal, at times satirical image of the present age.

An original essay by Pulitzer unfolds the project's philosophical and political issues, notably discussing a key reference for the project, Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope.

This new edition of Faux Pas, the acclaimed collection of writings by Amy Sillman, comes as an expanded edition, with the addition of new essays, including recent texts on Paul Cézanne, Carolee Schneemann, Elizabeth Murray and Louise Fishman. The previously unpublished text from a lecture on drawing complements Sillman's views on color and shape. New drawings from 2020-22 include a selection of works on paper that were part of the artist's installation at the 59th International Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, in 2022.

Since the 1970s, Sillman, a beloved and key figure of the New York art scene, has developed a singular body of work that includes large-scale gestural paintings blending abstraction with representation, as well as zines and iPad animations.

Over the past decade, Sillman has also produced stimulating essays on the practice of art or the work of other artists: for example, reevaluating the work of the abstract expressionists with a queer eye; elaborating on the role of awkwardness and the body in the artistic process; and discussing in depth the role and meanings of color and shape. Featuring a foreword by Lynne Tillman, Faux Pas gathers a significant selection of Sillman's essays, reviews and lectures, accompanied by drawings, most of them made specially for the book.

Faux Pas aims at revealing the coherence and originality of Sillman's reflection, as she addresses the possibilities of art today, favoring excess over good taste, wrestling over dandyism, forms over symbols, with as much critical sense as humor.

Based in New York City, Amy Sillman (born 1955) is an artist whose work consistently combines the visceral with the intellectual. She began to study painting in the 1970s at the School of Visual Arts and she received her MFA from Bard College in 1995. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial in 2014 and the Venice Biennale in 2022; her writing has appeared in Bookforum and Artforum, among other publications. She is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York.

Beginning with the simultaneous rise of civil rights and computer revolutions in the 1960s, McIlwain, for the first time, chronicles the long relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the Internet. In turn, he argues that the forgotten figures who worked to make black politics central to the Internet's birth and evolution paved the way for today's explosion of racial justice activism.

From the 1960s to present, the book examines how computing technology has been used to neutralize the threat that black people pose to the existing racial order, but also how black people seized these new computing tools to build community, wealth, and wage a war for racial justice.Through archival sources and the voices of many of those who lived and made this history, Black Software centralizes African Americans' role in the Internet's creation and evolution, illuminating both the limits and possibilities for using digital technology to push for racial justice in the United States and across the globe. 

A compendium of creative texts examining our complex and slippery relationships with new technologies.

What will the internet of the future make possible? Untethering the Web explores the technologies, strategies and anxieties that are coalescing in 2022 to shape a new digital paradigm. As naturalized citizens of today's always-online world and as survivors of a multiyear pandemic, the need to reform our digital tools and approaches is more pressing than ever before.

Evolved models for virtual convening, collective organizing and digital ownership are making this possible, and a reckoning for the platformed web and its monolithic tech giants is beginning to feel imminent—but how will it all unfold, and what new pitfalls will emerge? In conjunction with Pioneer Works' seventh Software for Artists Day, in October 2022, creators, technologists and members of our community share their visions for a flourishing digital multiverse, and how they imagine it manifesting over time.

Translated from the Spanish by Cecilia Rossi. THE LAST INNOCENCE and THE LOST ADVENTURES are Alejandra Pizarnik's second and third collections of poetry. Published in Buenos Aires shortly after The Most Foreign Country, her first book of poetry (which she would later disavow), these early poems blend the real and the imaginary, demonstrating the inner torment, deep solitude and acute vulnerability that would plague Pizarnik throughout her short life. This edition includes new English-language translations of both books along with an introduction by poet, translator, and Pizarnik scholar Ana Becciu.

Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) was a leading voice in twentieth-century Latin American poetry. Born in the port city of Avellaneda, in the province of Buenos Aires, to Russian- Jewish immigrants, Pizarnik studied literature and painting at the University of Buenos Aires and spent most of her life in Argentina. From 1960-1964 she lived in Paris, where she was influenced by the work of the Surrealists (many of whom she translated into Spanish) and participated in a vibrant community of writers including Simone de Beauvoir and fellow expatriates Julio Cortázar and Octavio Paz. Known primarily for her poetry, Pizarnik also wrote works of criticism and journalism, experimental fiction, plays, and a literary diary. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968 and a Fulbright Scholarship in 1971. Her complete works in Spanish have been published by Editorial Lumen. A book of her critical writings, A TRADITION OF RUPTURE (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), was translated into English by Cole Heinowitz. Five books of her poetry have been translated into English: THE LAST INNOCENCE / THE LOST ADVENTURES (Ugly Duckling Presse 2019), THE MOST FOREIGN COUNTRY (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), DIANA'S TREE (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014), A Musical Hell and Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 (New Directions, 2016) and The Galloping Hour: French Poems (New Directions, 2018). She died in Buenos Aires, of an apparent drug overdose, at the age of 36.

A New Program for Graphic Design is the first communication-design textbook expressly of and for the 21st century. Three courses—Typography, Gestalt and Interface—provide the foundation of this book.

Through a series of in-depth historical case studies (from Benjamin Franklin to the Macintosh computer) and assignments that progressively build in complexity, A New Program for Graphic Design serves as a practical guide both for designers and for undergraduate students coming from a range of other disciplines.

Synthesizing the pragmatic with the experimental, and drawing on the work of Max Bill, Beatrice Warde, Muriel Cooper and Stewart Brand (among many others), it builds upon mid-to-late 20th-century pedagogical models to convey contemporary design principles in an understandable form for students of all levels—treating graphic design as a liberal art that informs the dissemination of knowledge across all disciplines. For those seeking to understand and shape our increasingly networked world of information, this guide to visual literacy is an indispensable tool.

David Reinfurt (born 1971), a graphic designer, writer and educator, reestablished the Typography Studio at Princeton University and introduced the study of graphic design. Previously, he held positions at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University School of Art. As a cofounder of O-R-G inc. (2000), Dexter Sinister (2006) and the Serving Library (2012), Reinfurt has been involved in several studios that have reimagined graphic design, publishing and archiving in the 21st century. He was the lead designer for the New York City MTA Metrocard vending machine interface, still in use today. His work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. He is the co-author of Muriel Cooper (MIT Press, 2017), a book about the pioneering designer.

Initiated in 1997 and now in its tenth and final installment, John Zorn's acclaimed Arcana series is a major source of new music theory and practice in the 21st century. Illuminating directly via the personal vision and experience of the practitioners themselves, who experience music not from a cool, safe distance, but from the white-hot center of the creative crucible itself, Arcana elucidates through essays, manifestos, scores, interviews, notebooks and critical papers.

Over 25 years the ten volumes of Arcana have presented the writings of over 300 of the most extraordinary musical thinkers of our time, who address composing, performing, improvising, touring, collaborating, living and thinking about music from diverse, refreshing and often surprising perspectives. Technical, philosophical, political, artistic and mystical in nature, these writings provide direct connections to the creative processes and hidden stratagems of musicians from the worlds of classical, rock, jazz, film soundtrack, improvised music and more.

Contributors include: Susan Alcorn, Oren Ambarchi, Ran Blake, Peter Blegvad, Tyondai Braxton, Patricia Brennan, John Butcher, Ben Coniguliaro, Amir Elsaffar, Kenny Grohowski, Tom Guralnick, Mark Helias, David Hertzberg, Stefan Jackiw, Dan Kaufman, Derek Keller, Richard Kessler, Pauline Kim, Ulrich Krieger, Hannah Lash, Dan Lippel, Annea Lockwood, Dave Lombardo, Charlie Looker, Thomas Morgan, Stephen O'Malley, Laura Ortman, Alex Paxton, Alexandria Smith, Conrad Tao, Pat Thomas, Henry Threadgill, Anna Webber, Fay Victor, Christian Wolff and Miguel Zenon.

In the 1890s and for years thereafter, America reverberated with the name of the notorious Anarchist, feminist, revolutionist, and agitator, Emma Goldberg. A Russian Jewish immigrant at the age of 17, she moved by her own efforts from seamstress in a clothing factory to internationally known radical lecturer, writer, editor, and friend of the oppressed. This book is a collection of her remarkably penetrating essays, far in advance of their time, originally published by the Mother Earth press which she founded.

In the first of these essays, Anarchism: What It Really Stands For, she says, Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. In Minorities Versus Majorities she holds that social and economic well-being will result only through the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass. Other pieces deal with The Hypocrisy of Puritanism; Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure; The Psychology of Political Violence; The Drama: A Powerful Disseminator of Radical Thought; Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty; and The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation. A biographical sketch by Hippolyte Havel precedes the essays.

Anarchism and Other Essays provides a fascinating look into revolutionary issues at the turn of the century, a prophetic view of the social and economic future, much of which we have seen take place, and above all, a glimpse into the mind of an extraordinary woman: brilliant, provocative, dedicated, passionate, and what used to be called high-minded.

American author Kathy Acker was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Working through an experimental and avant-garde tradition, she wrote numerous novels, essays, poems, and novellas from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. As a postmodernist, plagiarist, and post-punk feminist, she continues to inspire generations of writers, philosophers, and artists. Get Rid of Meaning is the first comprehensive publication on Acker’s work from an artistic and literary perspective. It includes previously unpublished material from Acker’s personal archive and other collections. The publication is the compilation of a multipart research project including an exhibition and a symposium at Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe.

With contributions from: Kathy Acker, Eleanor Antin, Dodie Bellamy, Hanjo Berressem, Ruth Buchanan, William S. Burroughs, Anja Casser, Georgina Colby, Leslie Dick, Claire Finch, Johnny Golding, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Anja Kirschner, Chris Kraus, Sylvère Lotringer, Douglas A. Martin, Jason McBride, Karolin Meunier & Kerstin Stakemeier, Avital Ronell, Carolee Schneemann, Daniel Schulz, Matias Viegener & McKenzie Wark.

Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel réalise au printemps 2020 la série de dessins Hack’n’slash.

Ces collages sont faits à partir d’aplats de couleur autocollants Letrafilm Color/Tint Overlay, que l’on pourrait traduire par Couleur/Teinte Superposition, permettant ainsi de nommer l’importance des jeux de profondeur qui s’y trouvent. 

L’artiste se calque là-dessus et joue alors avec la confrontation entre le hack: détournement et réemploi d’outils techniques (trames numériques, encres d’imprimante, dessin manuel) – et le slash: le fait de trancher/juxtaposer les formes venant de différentes dimensions pour composer ses dessins.

Chaque édition a une couverture unique sérigraphiée sur du papier Pantone Letraset par l’Atelier PPP et un texte critique-fiction de Mia Brion.

La Redoutable compile les archives lesbiennes de trois provenances distinctes mais complémentaires. Aux abords de l’ARCL (Archives Recherches Culture Lesbiennes) se rencontre Caroline Drieu, Roxanne Maillet et Suzette Robichon. Elles se racontent des mots imprimés sur des t-shirts et des gapettes. Ces slogans, fruits de détournements, plagiats et jeux de mots sont en plus d’être revendicateurs, des signes distinctifs pour un réseau de lesbiennes absolument occupées à incarner les attitudes qui les définissent. Ces viragos peuvent se connaître ou non, mais un jour, ielles se retrouveront certainement dans des jardins partagés, à des groupes de lecture, des barbecues ou des karaokés.

A significantly expanded edition of Carrington's acclaimed Tarot series, featuring new archival images and research.

The British-born Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) spent a lifetime exploring the esoteric traditions of diverse cultures, and incorporated their ideas and symbols into her artistic and literary oeuvre. Tibetan Buddhism, the Kabbalah, ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian magic, Celtic mythology, witchcraft, astrology and the Tarot were filtered through her feminist lens to create a visionary, woman-centered worldview.

Carrington created a spectacular Major Arcana Tarot deck sometime during the 1950s, laying gold and silver leaf over brilliant color. Exhibited for the first time during her centennial exhibition Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales in 2018, this extraordinary work was a revelation for the public and inspired the publication of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington.

What would it be like to imagine a communism not just of wealth but also of care, love and belonging? Where the full range of human needs are met without depending on the fragile bubble of the nuclear family? That institution we are all supposed to believe will be there for us—even though so many books and films detail all the ways in which it fails. This is the difficult yet important terrain where Sophie Lewis ventures. Abolish the Family is a short, sharp shock to our assumptions about the good life and how to achieve it.

Sophie Lewis is a freelance writer living in Philadelphia, teaching courses for the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her first book was Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, Boston Review, n+1, the London Review of Books and Salvage. Sophie studied English, Politics, Environment and Geography at Oxford, the New School, and Manchester University, and is now an unpaid visiting scholar at the Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Acclaimed critic Sianne Ngai theorizes the gimmick as an aesthetic category reflecting the fundamental laws of capitalism. Gimmicks make promises of saving labor and increasing value that we distrust but also find attractive. Exploring the use of this form, Ngai shows how its aesthetic dissatisfactions reflect deeper anxieties about capitalism.

Sianne Ngai is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ugly Feelings and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, winner of the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize. Her work has been translated into multiple languages.

Seventeen short stories reveal the author's sustained concern with human relationships and values in past and future worlds of fantasy, speculation, and unearthly provision.

Silence: Lectures and Writings is a book by American experimental composer John Cage (1912–1992), first published in 1961 by Wesleyan University Press. Silence is a collection of essays and lectures Cage wrote during the period from 1939 to 1961.

Most of the works are preceded by a short commentary on their origins, some have an afterword provided. Several works feature unorthodox methods of presentation and/or composition. "The Future of Music: Credo" juxtaposes paragraphs of two different texts. The text of the first part of "Composition as Process" is presented in four columns, the text of "Erik Satie" in two. "45' for a Speaker" is similar to Cage's "time length" compositions: it provides detailed instructions for the speaker as to exactly when a particular sentence or a phrase should be said. "Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing?" is presented in several types of typeface to better reflect the concept of the lecture, which was originally presented as four tapes running simultaneously. "Indeterminacy" is a collection of various anecdotes and short stories taken from life or books Cage read: the concept is to tell one story per minute, and to achieve the speaker has to either speed up or slow down, depending on the length of the story.

Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist "spirituality" based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us. 

In the near future, Berlin's real estate is being flipped in the name of "sustainability," only to make the city even more unaffordable; artists are employed by corporations as consultants; and the weather is acting strange. In search of affordable housing, young couple Anja and Louis move into a community on an artificial mountain, The Berg—yet another "eco-friendly" initiative run by a corporation called Finster. They're offered a home rent-free in exchange for keeping quiet about the seriously malfunctioning infrastructure of the experimental house. But when Louis returns home from his mother's funeral in America, Anja is convinced he has changed. He seems to be in denial of his grief and newly idealistic, consumed by a secret project at the NGO where he works as an artist-consultant. Anja is horrified when she discovers what Louis has invented: a pill called Oval that temporarily rewires the user's brain to be more generous. Louis is convinced that if he can introduce the drug into the Berlin club scene, he can finally remedy the income disparity that has made Berlin so unlivable.

Oval is a fascinating portrait of the unbalanced relationships that shape our world, as well as a prescient warning of what the future may hold.

Elvia Wilk is a writer and editor living in New York and Berlin. She writes about art, architecture, and technology for several publications, including frieze, Artforum, e-flux, Metropolis, Mousse, Flash Art, Art in America, and Zeit Online.

Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.

Foreword by Da’Shaun L. Harrison.
Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal.

"Joy James’s Revolutionary Love is umph-degree love; or love beyond measure. It is anything love. It is love without reckoning. It is love that dares all things, beyond which others may find the spirit-force to survive; to live to fight another day. Such love is also fighting itself, for the sake of ensuring that others may live." — Mumia Abu-Jamal

As a stretch of land cultivated for crops to grow, a field evokes sensuous associations of smells, turned soil, exposure to weather. In a sense, fields ground our entire sedentary civilization and the cultures it gave rise to. At the same time, the field is where bodies fall in battle, the site that hosts the perishing of things.

Interweaving strands of autobiography with mythological and cultural tropes, Julien Bruneau explores the field as a metaphor rich with meaning and possibility. How do we inhabit fields and their furrows? How in turn do their history and imagination traverse us? As if it were a dance on the page, Fields invites the reader to encounter, think and feel our entanglement with space and places.

Julien Bruneau is an artist working with dance, presence, drawing and writing. His interest lies in the dynamic interplay between interiority and the collective.