Books

The Unfollowing is a sequence of elegies, mourning public as well as personal loss. The grief is not coherent. Though the poems are each fourteen lines long, they are not sonnets but anti-sonnets. They are composed entirely of non-sequiturs, with the intention of demonstrating, if not achieving, a refusal to follow aesthetic proprieties, and a rejection of the logic of mortality and of capitalism. As the author sees it, outrage, hilarity, anxiety, and ribaldry are not easily separated in the play of human emotions. And they are all, and sometimes equally, the proper, anarchic medium for staying alive.

Amateur is the first comprehensive publication about Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s moving-image work and accompanying installations. Developed over the past ten years, these works explore communication and interaction between individuals, often set against the backdrop of a unique public location in order to cast attention towards repressed, incomplete, and unresolved histories. Through the staging of these encounters in film, Van Oldenborgh enables multiple perspectives and voices to coexist, and brings to light political, social, and cultural relationships and how they are manifested through social interactions. The publication is generously illustrated and brings together a wealth of texts by artists, curators, and writers who have been key interlocutors with Van Oldenborgh, and offer in-depth observations and reflections on a work from her oeuvre.

Contributors: Nana Adusei-Poku, Ricardo Basbaum, Frédérique Bergholtz, Eric de Bruyn, Binna Choi, David Dibosa, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Avery F. Gordon, Tom Holert, Nataša Ilić, Charl Landvreugd, Sven Lütticken, Anna Manubens, Ruth Noack, Grant Watson.

Design: Julia Born

Publishers: If I Can’t Dance; The Showroom, London; and Sternberg Press, Berlin

A reflection about the status of the image as a balance of forces in tension and a paradoxical act of cancellation of the body through its own representation.

In Ion Grigorescu’s work, as in the book, the body is continually shown in different ways - from photography to film, from performance to drawing - and yet it remains absent, obscuring its own identity in an attempt to question the collective one. As it is impossible to show his art during the regime, it ends up hiding, disappearing inside the image. Instead of showing, the image conceals, because it is non-documentary and non-transmittable; it is an act of birth, a prove of the artist’s resistance, especially as a human being inside (or against) any geographical or historical background. In the rituals of his gestures and in the symbolism of his performances, Grigorescu finds a way to stay alive, preserving his own intellectual status while also defending the dignity of everyday life.

The book traces the progression, both expansive and inclusive, of his work, which inscribes itself into the space of the body and of the world. Grigorescu absorbs elements of the surrounding reality, showing us a continuity between art and life: his act of dissidence is not an outcry of provocation, nor is it extreme; it is an anti-aesthetic operation which uses experimentation and rough techniques to uncover the fiction of art, to denounce the artifice of representation and to affirm images as an instrument of subversive power.

Ion Grigorescu (Bucharest, 1945) is one of the most significant Romanian contemporary artists of the Post-War period and an iconic figure of the conceptual and performative art since the early 70s. He represented Romania at Venice Biennial in 1997 and 2011; his works are in the main public collections, such as MoMA, New York; mumok and Erste Foundation, Vienna; Tate Modern and Deutsche Bank AG, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris.

A collection of misprinted sheets originating from books designed by graphic designer Manuel Raeder: a “behind the scene” project, which documents the early stage of book production and its conventions.

Makulatur, a German word that derives from lat. maculatura “something stained”, refers to misprinted paper that is discarded at the beginning of the printing process as use- and worthless. In 2010, the graphic designer Manuel Raeder started to collect and preserve misprinted sheets of all the publications he designed not only for his own publishing house Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite but also for fellow artists and institutions.

This waste paper that shows all difficulties arising in the early stage of production—trails, testy or stains—he combined to a new volume as a compilation of maculae “stains”. Thus, he dissolved the spoiled material from the realm of invisibility and displays it to the public whereby he reveals and reflects on the conventions of a book.

Graphic designer Manuel Raeder lives and works in Berlin.

In this premiere essay, meditations on writing form a mini-antologica. The work of Piera Aulagnier is linked to that of Sade. A focus is cast on the artist Filippo de Pisis. Designed in collaboration with Sara De Bondt. Edited by Megan Francis Sullivan.

Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative publishes unexpected, genre-bending works by important 20th century writers. Unearthed from personal and institutional archives in the United States and abroad, these materials are edited by doctoral students at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

LOST & FOUND SERIES VI presents work by Gregory Corso, Judy Grahn, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, and Ted Joans. While the styles and experiences of these writers are radically different, each project presented here enacts a commitment to the exploration of knowledge unbound by disciplinary constraints.

Gregory Corso: Naropa Lectures 1981, introduced by Anne Waldman, includes two transcribed and annotated lectures that illustrate Corso's vast storehouse of cultural knowledge, animating his poetics both on the page and in the classroom.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins: The Sounding Word presents two very different lectures from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and a new interview with the author. Whether looking at iconic French novelist Colette or examining the poetics of prose, The Sounding Word describes an unflinching empirical approach to knowledge and its transmission through direct experience.

Judy Grahn: Selections from Blood, Bread, and Roses explores mythic, societal, and personal relationships to menstruation throughout time, and is accompanied by a recent interview with the legendary poet, teacher, scholar, and activist.

Ted Joans: Poet Painter / Former Villager Now / World Traveller, introduced by Diane di Prima, presents an array of previously unpublished texts on jazz, surrealism, travel guides to Africa and Paris, his inimitable Negative Cowboy, and photographs from his life and times. As writers, each considers and refigures the malleable conditions of historical truth and the pursuit of knowledge as part of their creative process. And as readers, we are encouraged to do the same.

SERIES VI includes:

Gregory Corso: Naropa Lectures 1981 (Part I & II) (ed. William Camponovo, Mary Catherine Kinniburgh, Öykü Tekten)

Bobbie Louise Hawkins: The Sounding Word (ed. Iris Cushing)

Judy Grahn: Selections from Blood, Bread, and Roses (ed. Iemanjá Brown & Iris Cushing)

Ted Joans: Poet Painter / Former Villager Now / World Traveller (Part I & II) (ed. Wendy Tronrud & Ammiel Alcalay)

COOP documents Swedish artist Fia Backström's (born 1970) performances of two recent scripts, continuing her exploration of language, marketing, disorders and performance. The first script operates according to two distinct logics: a four-part linear base structure and text material that was chosen and read during the performance through chance movement of the performer's body across a grid.

This publication was especially designed to reflect this type of unpredictable and spontaneous movement. Mathematical symbols have been embedded into the text and these symbols link to ones on the upper corner of pages with nonlinear material. These indicate where the text could be inserted during a performance, thus incorporating the form of performance into the book. The second script serves as an epilogue to the first and was performed by four voices, reading from beginning to end without assigned lines, sometimes simultaneously.

Eliza travels to Sydney to deal with the estate of her Aunt Dodge, and finds Maxine, a hitherto unknown cousin, occupying Dodge's apartment. When legal complications derail plans to live it up on their inheritance, the women's lives become consumed by absurd attempts to deal with Australian tax law, as well their own mounting boredom and squalor. The most astonishing debut novel of the decade, Dodge Rose calls to mind Henry Green in its skewed use of colloquial speech, James Joyce in its love of inventories, and William Gaddis in its virtuoso lampooning of law, high finance, and national myth.

Jack Cox was born in Sydney, Australia, and holds a Master's degree from the University of Sydney. In 2012, he studied in Paris as the recipient of a Marten Bequest scholarship. Dodge Rose is his first novel.

No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It’s even bemoaned by poets: ‘I, too, dislike it,’ wrote Marianne Moore. ‘Many more people agree they hate poetry,’ Ben Lerner writes, ‘than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore.’

In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defence of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato’s famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.

Written according to its own dictum, "language is the universal inebriant," these epistolary essays, personal narratives, meditations on avant-garde writers, and unorthodox forays into the "narco-imaginary"—the habits and conventions surrounding literary and cultural representations of drug use—attend to the residue of transient impressions that remain, long after the delirium of creative activity subsides.

Ramsey Scott teaches at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His essays, poems, and fiction have appeared in various print and online publications, including the Southwest Review, the Seneca Review, The Massachusetts Review, Shampoo, Tarpaulin Sky, Confrontation, and Mirage #4/Period(ical). The Narco-Imaginary is his first book.

Bill Berkson's Invisible Oligarchs is like a book jotted on the back of a poet's hand—a hand that picks up everything that sings to it, from gold-leaf proverb to chopstick sheath, on its quick trip through a few places in urban Russia, 2006. Across faintly ruled Japanese paper, many pages reproduced here in facsimile, snapshots change hands, new poems blink, and poetry politics meet political gossip over lunch in St. Petersburg. Berkson's educated guesswork about that elusive quality once known the Great Russian Soul, is framed here by letters from his friend Kate Sutton and encompassing encounters with poets and cab drivers, Moscow conceptualists and a White Night at the Mariinsky Ballet. As a sharply observant poet and the most soulful art critic alive, Berkson knows how to get us behind the set, and reading this book is as nice as taking a high dive with him into a perfectly mixed White Russian.

Bill Berkson was born in New York in 1939. He moved to Northern California in 1970 and now divides his time between San Francisco and New York. He is a poet, critic, sometime curator, and professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught art history and literature for many years. A corresponding editor for Art in America, he has contributed to such other journals as Artforum, Aperture, Modern Painters, and artcritical.com. His recent books include PORTRAIT AND DREAM: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Coffee House Press, 2009); BILL, a words-and-images collaboration with Colter Jacobsen; Lady Air; Not an Exit with drawings by Léonie Guyer; REPEAT AFTER ME (Gallery Paule Anglim, 2011), with watercolors by John Zurier; and a collection of his art writings, FOR THE ORDINARY ARTIST (BlazeVOX books, 2010), as well as a new collection of his poems, Expect Delays, from Coffee House Press in 2014 and INVISIBLE ORLIGARCHS out from Ugly Duckloing Presse in 2016.

The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories gathers together Lynne Tillman's groundbreaking fiction/essays on culture and places, monuments, artworks, iconic TV shows, and received ideas, written in the third person to record the subtle, ironic, and wry observations of the playful but stern "Madame Realism." This new collection also includes the complete stories of Tillman's other persona, the quixotic author Paige Turner (whose investigation of the language of love overshoots any actual experience of it), and additional stories and essays that address figures such as the "Translation Artist" and Cindy Sherman.

Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016 is a collection of essays by Peter Gidal that includes “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film” and other texts on metaphor, narrative, and against sexual representation.

Also discussed in their specificity are works by Samuel Beckett, Thérèse Oulton, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol. Throughout, Gidal’s writing attempts a political aesthetics, polemical as well as theoretical. One of the foremost experimental film-makers in Britain since the late 1960s, Peter Gidal was a central figure at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, and taught advanced film theory at the Royal College of Art. His previous books include Andy Warhol: Films and Paintings (1971), Understanding Beckett (1986) and Materialist Film (1989).

The 1960s and 1970s were a defining period for artists’ film and video, and the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC) was one of the major international centres. Shoot Shoot Shoot documents the first decade of an artist-led organisation that pioneered the moving image as an art form in the UK, tracing its development from within London’s counterculture towards establishing its own identity within premises that uniquely incorporated a distribution office, cinema space and film workshop.

Contributions from: Antony Balch, Ian Breakwell, Bob Cobbing, John Collins, David Crosswaite, David Curtis, Fred Drummond, John Du Cane, Mike Dunford, Ray Durgnat, Deke Dusinberre, Stephen Dwoskin, Gill Eatherley, Steve Farrer, Simon Field, Chris Garratt, Peter Gidal, Marilyn Halford, David Hall, Roger Hammond, Simon Hartog, Ron Haselden, Jim Haynes, Roger Hewins, Tony Hill, Jeff Keen, Ian Kerr, Jonathan Langran, David Larcher, John Latham, Malcolm Le Grice, Mike Leggett, Carla Liss, John Mathews, Harvey Matusow, Anthony McCall, Barry Miles, Jack Henry Moore, Annabel Nicolson, Jenny Okun, David Parsons, Sally Potter, Stuart Pound, William Raban, Anne Rees-Mogg, Lis Rhodes, Carolee Schneemann, Anthony Scott, Guy Sherwin, John Smith, Chris Welsby. Illustrated throughout in full colour, this book brings together a wide variety of texts, images and archival documents, and includes newly commissioned essays by Mark Webber, Kathryn Siegel and Federico Windhausen.

LUX, London / 2016

Paperback, 288 pages incl 193 full colour illustrations

Nel Aerts (b. 1987) moves in a freely, intuitive way between different media as painting, drawing, collage, performance and sculpture. Since a few years she focuses more often on the portrait-genre, which she visualises on paper or on wooden panels, with careful attention to the different qualities of each material. As such, she is creating a large collection (family almost) of posing subjects caught between abstract patterns and hard-edged figuration. The figures she portraits refer to both popular culture and her direct, everyday surroundings.

The self-portraits are tragicomic in the sense of the contrasts they evoke. Alternately they are desperate or funny, extra- or introverted, thought- or playful carved from wood or originated as a collage, but they are always introspective and self-relativistic.

In Hundred Zundert, “Nel Aerts evokes a visual rendezvous with Vincent van Gogh and sets the tone for the near one hundred drawings that would be made during her three-month residency at the Van Gogh House in Zundert. Rather than ‘following in the footsteps of Van Gogh’, Aerts is interested in examining the mud and earth around them by (literally) placing herself in the environment of Van Gogh’s youth. The resulting work is characterised by a deceptive interplay between formal simplicity and playfulness which belies a substantial complexity. (…) Nel Aerts’s working process is uncomplicated and free of any pretension: black ball pen (dozens), sheets of white A4 paper (hundreds) and spontaneous, almost naive line work (in seemingly infinite supply) are the building blocks of a story that is nevertheless rich in visual and intimate detail, a story that teeters between seriousness and playfulness, at once both comical and deeply emotive.” From: ‘Portrait of the Artist’, Grete Simkuté, in: Hundred Zundert.

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.

Let a thousand verses bloom. Anthems of Resistance is about the iconoclastic tradition of poetry nurtured by Ali Sardar Jafri, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Javed Akhtar, Fehmida Riyaz and all those who have been part of the progressive writers' movement in the Indian subcontinent. It documents the rise of the Progressive Writers' Association, its period of ascendancy, its crucial role in the struggle for independence, and its unflagging spirit of resistance against injustice. In the process, the book highlights various aspects of the PWA's aesthetics and politics such as its internationalist ethos, its romance with modernity, its engagement with feminism, its relationship to Hindi cinema and film lyrics, and the vision of a radically new world which its members articulated with passion.

Part history, part literary analysis, part poetic translation, and part unabashed celebration of the PWA era, this book is truly a unique resource. This is a lucidly written account of a glorious chapter in the history of Indian literature. The powerful verses of the PWA poets are wonderfully translated and, along with the highly accessible transliteration, offer the general reader a rare opportunity to appreciate the writings that helped shape a nation. Anthems of Resistance is truly an inspiring and pleasurable read.