★Primary Information
Theatre
Theatre is an artist book that documents seven early performances by Dan Graham taking place from 1969 to 1977 with notes, transcripts, or photographs for each work. Originally published in 1978, and produced here in facsimile form, the publication focuses on several key works that interrogate or undermine the psychological and social space created by, or between, individuals inside the performance venue. Like most of Graham’s work, they also serve as a critique of cultural norms, with many of t…
Camino Road
First published in 1994, Camino Road is artist Renée Green’s debut novel—a short, ruminative work infused with semantic ambiguity and the dreamy poetry of the quotidian. Republished here in a facsimile edition, the book ostensibly traces its protagonist Lyn’s journeys to Mexico and her return to attend art school in 1980s New York, but what emerges is more an intertextual assemblage of the moments between drives, dreams, and consciousness. Lyn does her Spanish homework and makes note to read Ann…
In the Shadow of Forward Motion
David Wojnarowicz’s In the Shadow of Forward Motion was originally published in 1989 as a limited-run zine/catalog to accompany an exhibition by the artist at P.P.O.W gallery. Despite its meager print run of just 50 copies, the publication has garnered a legendary status, and for good reason. In it we find Wojnarowicz’s writing and visual art—two mediums for which the artist is renowned—sitting side by side for the first time, playing off each other in equal measure. We glimpse the artist’s now…
The Last French-Fried Potato and Other Poems (Book)
A short but potent collection of poems by Emmett Williams, a central player in Fluxus and the Concrete poetry movement and one of the editors of the Great Bear series. The titular work—subtitled “the ultimate poem”and improvised around the eating of french fries—was originally performed with Robert Filliou in 1964. The six poems herein are characterized on the whole by compulsive flows of language, with short, piston-like lines carrying out obsessive serial modulations to create a perpetually un…
The Cursive Scandinavian Salve (Book)
Poet and anthropologist Klintberg was one of the earliest Scandinavian participants in Happenings and Fluxus. The Cursive Scandinavian Salve collects a number of event scores and scenarios that maintain a lyrical dialogue with Sweden’s oral traditions and picturesque landscape’s subtle evocations are counterbalanced by a continual, prankish flirtation with danger and volatility. This book includes several collaborations with and dedications to Åke Hodell, Sten Hanson, and Henning Christiansen, a…
The Twin Plays: Port-au-Prince & Adams County Illinois (Book)
** 2021 Stock ** This pamphlet is comprised of a pair of structurally identical plays, each composed by means of chance operations around the time of the editing and publication of An Anthology of Chance Operations by Mac Low with La Monte Young. Each play is made up of five partially improvised conversations in which the dialogue is derived from a highly restricted lexicon: the first uses words made from the letters that spell out the word “Port-au-Prince” to construct nonsensical “pseudo-sente…
Berlin and Phenomena (Book)
** 2021 Stock ** This pamphlet records Vostell’s two titular large-scale performance pieces “Berlin” and “Phenomena,” both carried out in mid-60s Berlin alongside a host of accomplices. “Berlin” consisted of 100 timed events—performed in both public and private—over a seven hour period, with equal weight given to utterly mundane actions like “looking for a parking place,” and more spectacular actions like “following the second hand of a watch with a welding torch.” “Phenomena” was a Happening se…
Ritual: A Book of Primitive Rites and Events (Book)
** 2021 Stock ** This collection of event scores and descriptions adapted from a range of ethnographic sources also implicitly functions as an examination of the Happenings movement in an expanded historical and anthropological context. Rothenberg’s translations, along with the restriction of information on his sources in the table of contents, leave ample room for cultural and historical ambiguity, giving each event a strong foothold in the here and now. Ritual stands as a direct predecessor to…
Incomplete Requiem for W. C. Fields (Book)
** 2021 Stock ** Though the title indicates an “incomplete” piece, this pamphlet presents the complete poem originally performed by Al Hansen in New York in 1958, at the intersection of the “backwash from the San Francisco Poetry Revolution” and the dawn of Happenings. Hansen read the poem aloud while a hand-spliced assemblage of W.C. Fields’ films was projected onto his chest. The pamphlet’s introduction, written by Hansen in 1966, consists of recollections of the New York art and poetry scenes…
Injun & Other Histories -1960 (Book)
** 2021 Stock ** This breezy and acerbic collection of early writings and illustrations by Oldenburg presents gnomic visions of an earlier America. Claes Oldenburg’s hand shines through in the loose, vivid prose and in the overall presentation. The pamphlet includes “Two Scenarios from an Incomplete Pageant of America,” a pair of excerpts from the longer, unfinished narrative “Faustina,” and a postscript.
Originally published by Something Else Press between 1965 and 1967, the Great Bear Pamphlet…
A Book About Love & War & Death: Canto One (Book)
** 2021 Stock ** This first section of Higgins’ major work, A Book About Love & War & Death, a sprawling prose poem meant to be read aloud. The text evolves modally, cycling through language games and experiments, oblique autobiography, and vocabulary drawn from an Indonesian dictionary, with a use of a chance method that is both elaborate and informal. The guiding principle of the work is, above all, what Higgins saw as a density of conceptual imagery—a density to be unraveled somewhat in what …
By Alison Knowles
** 2021 Stock ** This collection of scores presents a comprehensive overview of Knowles’ seminal early performance/event pieces from 1961 to 1965. These scores range from well-known directives (“Make a salad” and “Tie up the audience”) to more elaborate orchestrations, including pieces conceived for Nam June Paik and George Brecht and several relating to Knowles’ work as a printer.
Originally published by Something Else Press between 1965 and 1967, the Great Bear Pamphlet series was envisioned b…
The Context
The Context reimagines the superhero comic book as a queer parable of belonging. The story follows six powerful beings from different worlds who find themselves inexplicably adrift together in an otherwise lifeless void: Biopower, Cathexis, Barelife, Objector, Drives, and Form. The characters, each named for a concept drawn from critical theory, engage one another in skintight fight scenes that often look like sex scenes, and philosophical debates masked as exposition.
As a lifelong fan and a mo…
Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979
Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 is expansive anthology focused on concrete poetry written by women in the groundbreaking movement’s early history. It features 50 writers and artists from Europe, Japan, Latin America, and the United States selected by editors Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre. Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 takes as its point of departure Materializzazione del linguaggio—the groundbreaking exhibition of visual and concrete poetry by women curated by Italian feminist art…
Cover to Cover
For years an out-of-print rarity, Michael Snow’s classic artist book Cover to Cover is available once again, in a facsimile edition from Light Industry and Primary Information. Never bound by discipline, Snow has remarked that his sculptures were made by a musician, his films by a painter. Flipping through Cover to Cover, which is composed entirely of photographs in narrative sequence, one might describe it as a book made by a filmmaker. Snow himself has called the piece “a quasi-movie,” structu…
Shame Space
Shame Space is an artist book that explores the possibilities of narrative and identity. The book collects a selection of journal writings by Syms from 2015-2017 in which she attempts to capture her shadow self alongside a selection of image stills from the recent video project Ugly Plymouths (2020). The diaristic commentary in Shame Space is gathered into fifteen chapters that stage narrative as a process of being in the making.
Text entries in Shame Space have formed the voiceover of Mythiccbe…
A Documentary HerStory of Women Artists in Revolution
First published in 1971, A Documentary HerStory of Women Artists in Revolution documents the efforts of a group of women artists, filmmakers, writers, critics, and cultural workers organized around advancing women in the art world.
Women Artists in Revolution (W.A.R.) was founded as the women’s caucus of the Art Workers’ Coalition and was active from 1969 to 1971. This publication gathers manifestos, statements, and declarations by W.A.R. members; articles and reports about gendered and racializ…
Black Art Notes
Published on the 50th anniversary of the original printing, Black Art Notes features writings by Tom Lloyd, Amiri Baraka, Bing Davis, Melvin Dixon, Jeff Donaldson, Ray Elkins, Babatunde Folayemi, and Francis and Val Gray Ward. “If there is one lesson the post–civil rights period has taught us, it is that those most likely to shape the destiny of Black Americans in the next decade are activists and artists, who may possess additional skills as organizers,” writes Ward in “The Black Artist—His Rol…
The Matrix Poems: 1960-1970
The Matrix by Norman H. Pritchard (1939–1996) gathers a selection of the Concrete and Black Arts poet’s work from 1960 to 1970. The seventy-one poems collected here might be regarded, as Charles Bernstein has written, as “sound” poems, being tethered not only to the literature of the Black Arts Movement but also to jazz culture and urban life in New York. Drawing as much from the visual arts and concrete poetry as from sound-based experimentation and music, Pritchard utilized the simple tools of…
Four Basic Kinds of Lines & Colour
This publication is a facsimile edition of Sol LeWitt’s iconic Four Basic Kinds of Lines & Colour. Originally published in 1977, the publication stands as an enduring example of LeWitt’s rigorous process-driven practice, which utilized simple conceptual parameters to generate complex and formally-diverse visual works. Four Basic Kinds of Lines & Colour is a composite of two earlier publications—Four Basic Kinds of Straight Lines (1969) and Four Basic Colours and Their Combinations (1971). Each …