Dance as Moving Pictures

An analysis of Mike Kelley's work as a position in materialist philosophy, which appears as the feature that is most at stake in his artistic practice, focusing on the pieces he produced around the issue of memory––his leitmotiv from 1995 onward.

Mike Kelley is best known as one of the most influential visual artists of his generation. But he was also an insightful theorist who wrote profusely about his work as well as on aesthetics in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, an epoch marked, in his view, by victim culture and the pop psychology phenomenon known as repressed memory syndrome. Mike Kelley: Materialist Aesthetics and Memory Illusions presents the artist in a new light, almost as an empirical philosopher delivering his position through art as well as writing. In a meticulous and transdisciplinary approach, Laura López Paniagua presents Kelley's oeuvre as a stance in materialist aesthetics and weaves thoughtful relations between the artist's critique, statements, and comments and the theories of thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. López Paniagua focuses on Kelley's artistic production between 1995 and his death in 2012, analyzing these works vis-à-vis the concept of memory, one of the artist's obsessions and leitmotivs throughout his career.

Essay by Laura López Paniagua; introduction by John Miller.

Chris Korda (b.1962) is an American antinatalist activist, techno musician, software developer, multimedia artist and founder of the Church of Euthanasia. For the past 30 years, her work has spanned avant-garde performance, happenings, culture- jamming, photography, video, audio and so much more - though her work as an engineer, coder and software developer remains less known to the general public.

This book posits that her software and coding work are linked to her more well-known activist and music work, informing and reforming each other for over 30 years, inhabiting up until now parallel timelines that have been closening over the decades, honing in on a common creative goal: to reveal her as she should be revered, as an Inventor-Artist.

“Any outcome is inevitably shaped by the tools used to achieve it. In industrial civilization, most people use the same standardized tools and therefore achieve similarly standardized outcomes. But imagine discovering a tool for making tools. The outcomes are now limited only by toolmaking skills. This is how computer programming changed my life.”

She refers to her generative artworks, audio and visual, as kinetic sculptures. Working in collaboration with her algorithms, she does not use the machine as a ‘servant’ but rather:

“I invite them into the creative space as equals. They have abilities that I don’t have, and I also have abilities that they don’t have, so we complement each other. They supply speed and precision, I supply desire and intuition, and what emerges is greater than the sum of the parts.”

Thus, on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name, we dedicate this book to Korda’s generative audio-visual synesthetic work 'Adagio For Color Fields' (2023) - a piece that breaks the silence - using it as a lens to bring into focus Korda’s work as an innovative Inventor-Artist.

The first monograph on Christiane Blattmann takes its title from her solo show Un-Break My Walls at Kunsthalle Münster in 2019. Blattmann intricately interweaves, intermeshes, combines, compounds, merges, and processes in her work not only materials but also structures, things, stories, characters. The volume includes extensive illustrations of exhibitions, projects, and works, and a great number of black-and-white images capture the artist’s studio practice. The interactions of materials, along with theoretical and literary references, serve as important points of departure, and the emblematic outcomes involve text and texture as material structure and patterned surface; vivid condensation and entanglement; and invitations to exploration and reflection. The book compiles different elements designed on a series of shifting layers. Texts by Merle Radtke and Chloe Stead and a conversation between Christiane Blattmann and Than Hussein Clark provide insight into Blattmann’s art, complemented by a piece of fiction by Huw Lemmey.

Texts by Merle Radtke, Huw Lemmey, and Chloe Stead, and a conversation between Christiane Blattmann and Than Hussein Clark

The books included in the series ‘Choreography as Conditioning’ are rooted in a cycle of work sessions entitled CASC at KASK, in which students work together with invited guests. They explore the notions of choreography, understood as ways of organizing subjects in their surroundings, and conditioning in both art-making and society-making. Where, how, and by whom are things organized and what kind of landscapes of experience are made (im)possible by the practices we enact and encounter?

‘… Through Practices’ is written by artist researchers who have been involved in a three-day public symposium with the same title, explo­ring ecologies of attention, awareness, senses of participation, and agen­cies of practice. It presents resonances and sedimentations of indi­vidual, shared, and collective practices, mirroring different forms of participating and responding—diverse in/capacities, im/possi­bilities, and dis/interests as they appear in and through experience.

The motifs produced during time-intensive dyeing processes – which uses indigo, urine, and extracts of natural waste materials – are neither conventional fabric nor lace patterns, and they have only a distant relationship to batik painting. Yet, they are simulations and portraits of both.

Pattern Nor Painting starts in a batik Workshop in Bantul, Indonesia where an artist reconnects with her blank canvas and the batik techniques she learned from an artist in Serekunda, the Gambia many years ago. As documented in this publication Van Hoorebeke’s installations and performances deftly combine unique textiles and ceramics with production-chain goods, ranging from car parts to strawberry jam. Engaging with ages-old traditions of batik production for present-day communities and settings, her work embodies ancient craft, story-telling, time, female thinking, and above all, a connection to the natural world.