Liturgy

Facsimile compilation of the late-'70s journal on diasporic and colonial histories that paved the way for the British Black Arts Movement.

Published in three issues between 1978 and 1979, Black Phoenix: Journal of Contemporary Art & Culture in the Third World (the subtitle was changed to Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture for its second and third issues) stands as a key document of its time. More than a decade after '60s liberation movements and the historic Bandung and Tricontinental Conferences that called for social and political alignment and solidarity to dismantle Western imperialism and (neo)colonialism, Black Phoenix issued a rallying call for the formation of a Third World, liberatory arts and culture movement on the eve of Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979.

Based in the UK, and both international and national in scope, Black Phoenix positioned diasporic and colonial histories at the center of an evolving anti-racist and anti-imperialist consciousness in late 1970s Britain—one that would yield complex and nuanced discourses on race, class and postcolonial theory in England in the decade that followed.

A precursor to the British Black Arts Movement that formed in 1982 (which encompassed such cultural practitioners as the Black Audio Film Collective and cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall), Black Phoenix proposed a horizon for Blackness beyond racial binaries, across the Third World and the colonized of the interior in the West.

This single-volume facsimile reprint gathers all three issues of the journal, which include contributions by art critics, scholars, artists, poets and writers, including editors Rasheed Araaen and Mahmood Jamal, Guy Brett, Kenneth Coutts-Smith, Ariel Dorfman, Eduardo Galeano, N. Kilele, Babatunde Lawal, David Medalla, Ayyub Malik, Susil Sirivardana and Chris Wanjala.

Self-published in 1968, Footprints, Poems, and Leaves collects dozens of poems written by Martin Wong between 1966 and 1968. Hand-written in a signature calligraphic style that he was just beginning to develop, the poems ebb and flow visually across the page, much like the fluctuating characters, scenes, and moods that inhabit them. This was Wong’s first book of poetry and it contains a double cover showcasing intricate drawings of skeletal angels and other tableaux, as well as a folded, looseleaf broadsheet containing two poems and a drawing of a boney leaf.

The poems were written during a relatively free period for the artist, shortly after he dropped out of Berkeley and began exploring San Francisco at the height of the hippy movement. The poems range from surrealist and pastoral descriptions of the urban subculture that surrounded him to downtrodden, travel-weary biographical entries that are both lonely and tender. Footprints, Poems, and Leaves functions like a journal capturing Wong’s tumultuous life in this period, which included being arrested at a queer, drug-fueled house party (along with Rudolf Nureyev and Dame Margot Fonteyn) and a stay in a mental institution in late 1967 and early 1968. Around the time of the book’s publication, Wong enrolled in Humboldt State University to finish his degree, beginning a new chapter for the artist.

Despite the dark backdrops of many of the works, the writing displays a playfulness with form and language and a sense of humor that can be seen throughout Wong’s later work as well. Altogether, Footprints, Poems, and Leaves creates a rich tapestry of visual poetry that is both a product of its time and the budding artistic mind of a young Martin Wong.

A facsimile of Graham's ultra-rare artist's book documenting early performance works.

Originally published in 1978 and produced here in facsimile form, Theatre is an artist's book documenting seven early performance works by Dan Graham (born 1942) taking place from 1969 to 1977, with notes, transcripts and photo documentation for each performance. These performances catch the artist at a unique moment, as he shifts away from his early media works and towards his hallmark video and written work around underground music and youth culture.
The works in Theatre focus primarily on the psychological and social space between individuals and the roles they serve inside the arena of performance, subverting them by creating conditions by which a performer or audience simultaneously functions as both (creating a type of feedback loop through social transgression). Like most of Graham's work, these performances also serve as a critique of cultural norms, with many of the performances utilizing quotidian, social acts that are amplified over time.

This publication is a compilation of Lee Lozano’s notebooks from 1967 to 1970. The three notebooks included here contain her seminal “Language Pieces” and drawings for her paintings, including 12 studies for her 11-panel masterpiece, “Wave Series.”

Lee Lozano (1930-1999) was an enigmatic artist making a diverse body of drawings, paintings, and conceptual works. While prolific, her production was limited to her time in New York from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. She was very actively engaged with other artists in New York until she decided to leave the art world in 1972. Until recently, much of her work has been difficult for the public to access. From the time of her boycott of the art world until her death, Lozano was an artist working conceptually even though she did not participate actively in the commercial art world for the last three decades of her life.

The pages of the notebooks contain notes and sketches related to her abstract paintings and also contain her texts, which were known as “Language Pieces.” The artist’s work in the books reveal her desire to live and create art within a structured system. Lozano considered the individual pages of her notebooks to be drawings, and they were sometimes separated and exhibited. Twenty-five years ago, the notebooks were photocopied and it is that record which serves as the basis for this book.

Notebooks 1967-70 was first published by Primary Information in 2010. This is the second printing.

A fascinating account of Lankton's inquisitive, sociological and emotional ruminations in advance of her gender-affirming surgery.

This is one of the earliest of Greer Lankton's (1958-96) journals, sketchbooks and daybooks to appear in the artist's archives, and the first to be published in facsimile form. Written during her time as an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the journal offers key insights into Lankton's mind at work before her career-defining move to New York in 1978, where she would become an important figure of the East Village art scene in the 1980s and early '90s with her lifelike dolls and theatrical sets.

Containing drawings, behavioral diagrams and aspirational, occasionally confessional writing, the journal is a record of imagining the body and mind reconciled through transformation. In these pages, the 19-year-old turns an inquisitive, sociological eye toward the emotional landscape and somatic effects of the days recorded here; days leading up to her decision to undergo hormone treatment and gender-affirming surgery in 1979. Lankton reflects with raw vulnerability and keen self-awareness on critical questions of self-image, social perception, gender normativity and human behavior.

Oracles don’t require belief—they now theatrically suspend disbelief. No longer advisors of world policy, they run Locus Solus, a town that has come to ramble around an eponymous theatre and chocolate factories. Theo, a centuries-old vampire intent on remaining contemporary through performance, visits Locus Solus, which is hosting Praise Estate, an international theatre festival. He uses the festival as an opportunity to stay with Gean, his oracle boyfriend, who is there visiting family. Theo has a fetish for the future, fixated on the one thing he is in no shortage of.

Confidences / Oracle is a lover’s trip to a weeklong theatre festival. A vehicle for recontextualising recent performance scripts and texts, Oracle is the third instalment in Ivan Cheng’s Confidences series, which intertwines vampires and performance as sites for circulation and recognition.

Canonically Speaking is the second title to appear on the First Drafts imprint, a zigzag in Kunstverein Publishing’s output that’s dedicated to publishing completed manuscripts that would otherwise, for an array of reasons, not see the light of day in this rough early form.

Central to Canonically Speaking is the idea that (female) life is an inherently surrealist experience. In this spirit, the ‘absurd’ is embraced as a means to speak out on themes such as self-image, spirituality, mental health and work. While slipping between poetry, comprehensive list-making, knock knock jokes and intertextual references, forms of recital and misinterpretation often take place, whereby characters quote and repeat sentences and words from a large variety of sources, jumping from the health benefits of whale blubber to court transcripts of Bill Clinton's impeachment to the plasma that is released when microwaving two grapes side by side.

Auditing Intimacy is a collection of postal correspondence, photographs and declassified documents produced by Chris Dreier and Gary Farrelly between 2015 and 2020 under the banner of their shared practice The Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence. In a spirit of transparency and full disclosure, the publication contains a certified, independent and critical audit of the practice by Alicja Melzacka. The project was undertaken to commemorate the fifth anniversary of O.J.A.I.

Edited by Chris Dreier and Gary Farrelly
Artworks by Chris Dreier and Gary Farrelly
Essay by Alicja Melzacka
Design by Zero Desk
Documentation by Pauline Miko
Published by Fantôme Verlag
174 pages

Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence is the collaborative practice of artists Chris Dreier (DE) and Gary Farrelly (IRE/BE). The work is fuelled by a recurring obsession with architecture, infrastructure, finance,  institutional power and DIY ritualism. O.J.A.I. pursues a strategy of self-institutionalisation where tools and codified rules of engagement are appropriated from economic and political infrastructures for the purposes of structuring intimacy and conjuring autonomy.