★Primary Information
Primetime Contemporary Art: Art by the GALA Committee as Seen on Melrose Place (Book)
Primetime Contemporary Art is a publication documenting a radical, two-year intervention by the GALA Committee on the primetime television show Melrose Place. Originally published in a limited run in 1998, this extremely rare artist book is reproduced here for the first time as a facsimile edition.
Mel Chin initiated the loose collective of artists known as the GALA Committee in 1995 in response to an invitation to participate in an upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Ange…
Untitled Essay and Other Works (Book)
** 2024 Stock ** This pamphlet presents scenarios for three narratively elaborate Happenings—“Mushroom” (1962), “Paper” (1964), and “Interruption” (1967)—and a key early statement, which originally accompanied the first published Happening in 1958. The essay forcefully propounds Allan Kaprow’s ideas on the practice of art as a radical form of life that perpetually reinvents itself.
Originally published by Something Else Press between 1965 and 1967, the Great Bear Pamphlet series was envisioned b…
A Filliou Sampler (Book)
** 2024 Stock ** The centerpiece of this collection of short works by Robert Filliou is “Yes (An Action Poem),” a performance work involving an extended anatomical analysis of the “adult male poet” (originally performed in collaboration with Alison Knowles and Philip Corner). Also included are several short “plays,” a poem for Emmett Williams and Daniel Spoerri, and a performance work entitled “Five Ways to Prepare for a Space Trip,” all dated 1958-1964.
Originally published by Something Else Pr…
A Look Into The Blue Tide: Part 2 (Book)
** 2024 Stock ** The Blue Tide is a vast, multi-part work that developed out of a diary Diter Roth kept while teaching in the United States between 1964 and 1966 (which Edition Hansjörg Mayer had published in a full-color edition earlier in 1967). This publication consists of excerpts from the continuation of that work—all translated by Roth himself “from color + german into blackandwhite + english”—as well as sketches, diagrams, poetry, and assorted writing.
Originally published by Something El…
Sketchbook, September 1977 (Book)
Sketchbook, September 1977 is an early journal by Greer Lankton written during her time as an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It offers key insights into the artist’s mind before her move to New York in 1978, where she would go on to have a prolific career making lifelike dolls, theatrical sets, photographs, drawings, and paintings.
Containing drawings, behavioral diagrams, and occasionally confessional writing, the journal is a record of imagining the body and mind re…
Dear Jean Pierre (Book)
Filled with artworks, photos, and memorabilia, this epistolary portrait depicts Wojnarowicz's development as a writer and artist via his heartfelt letters to his Parisian lover.
COOP a-script (Book)
COOP a-script is an artist book based on two performance scripts by Fia Backström, extending her exploration of visual and spoken language, global community, bureaucratic jargon, and mood and communication disorders. The first section of the book, “Aphasia as a visual way of speaking, on A-production and other language syndromes,” consists of a text written in four parts. When this work was performed at The Poetry Project in New York City, the artist organized the script across the venue’s floor…
Writings
** 2023 Repress ** Writings is the first collection to widely survey the singular Tony Conrad polymath’s prolific activity as a writer. Edited by artists Constance DeJong and Andrew Lampert, the book spans the years 1961 – 2012 and includes fifty-seven pieces: essays originally published in small press magazines, exhibition catalogs, anthologies, and album liner notes, along with other previously unpublished texts. Conrad writes about his own work, with substantial contributions on The Flicker, …
A Something Else Reader (Book)
368 pages. A Something Else Reader is a previously-unpublished anthology edited by Dick Higgins in 1972 to celebrate Something Else Press, the publishing house he founded in 1963 to showcase Fluxus and other experimental artistic and literary forms. The publication features selections from Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days, John Cage’s Notations, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, Breakthrough Fictioneers, Jackson Mac Low’s Stanzas for Iris Lezak, Gertrude Stein’s Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein, B…
Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network (Book)
A revelatory compendium of writings, art and ephemera on the ’90s New York collective that fostered a social space for diasporic Asian artists
Writings 1973–1983 on Works 1969–1979 (Book)
An essential and long out-of-print document of formative works by institutional critique progenitor Michael Asher
Note(s): Work(ing) Process(es) Re: Concerns (That Take On / Deal With)
Originally created in 1977 as a single handmade copy, Dara Birnbaum’s Note(s): Work(ing) Process(es) Re: Concerns (That Take On / Deal With) gathers writings, working drawings, photographic documentation, and ephemera from the artist’s earliest video and installation works. The publication was originally produced by Birnbaum and exhibited in Notebooks, Workbooks, Scripts, and Scores at Franklin Furnace in 1977. The book’s vinyl cover and section dividers, hand-folded pages, and color images have…
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…
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…
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 …