From Basement to Godzilla

This limited-edition print portfolio was produced by Godzilla: Asian American Art Network in 1999 and features 46 signed works by 48 artists. The portfolio was designed to complement the collective’s installation “From Basement to Godzilla,” as part of the Urban Encounters exhibition at the New Museum, in which Godzilla paid tribute to Basement Workshop, a grassroots artist-activist group founded in 1970 and one of the formative predecessors to Godzilla. The portfolio is modelled after Basement Workshop’s legendary Yellow Pearl, a boxed collection of graphics, poetry, song lyrics, and photographs published in 1972.

Housed in an archival box and hand stamped with the logos for Yellow Pearl and Godzilla, From Basement to Godzilla was originally printed in an edition of 250. However only half were assembled and distributed at the time. In 2022, Primary Information partnered with members of Godzilla to complete the assembly of the edition and provide 100 copies for sale.

The portfolio is comprised of members of Godzilla and Basement Workshop and includes works by Diyan Achjadi/Cheri Gandy, John Allen, Tomie Arai, Todd Ayoung, Keiko Bonk, Emily Cheng, Fay Chiang/Xian Chiang-Waren, Janice Chiang, Jean Chiang, Alex Chin, Ken Chu, Allan de Souza, Ming Fay, Great Leap, Skowmon Hastanan, Arlan Huang/Fay Chiang, Jason Kao Hwang, Michi Itami, William Jung, Byron Kim, Franky Kong/Jenni Kim, Nina Kuo, Bing Lee, Colin Lee, Corky Lee, Cynthia Lee, Lanie Lee, Robert Lee, Sally Leung, Franky Liu, Stefani Mar, Fay Chew Matsuda, Yong Soon Min, Philip Tajitsu Nash, Helen Oji, Athena Robles, Carol Sun, Kim Tran, Audrey E. Wong, Maureen Wong, Virgil Wong, Theodora Yoshikami, Mimi Young, Charles Yuen, Susan L. Yung, Zhang Hongtu.

The collective known as Godzilla: Asian American Art Network was formed in 1990 to support the production of critical discourse around Asian American art and increase the visibility of Asian American artists, curators, and writers, who were negotiating a historically exclusionary society and art world. Founded by Ken Chu, Bing Lee, and Margo Machida, Godzilla produced exhibitions, publications, and community collaborations that sought to stimulate social change through art and advocacy. For more than a decade, the diasporic group, having grown from a local organization into a nationwide network, confronted institutional racism, Western imperialism, anti-Asian violence, the AIDS crisis, and representations of Asian sexuality and gender, among other urgent issues.

The Basement Workshop was a grassroots and activist arts collective founded in downtown New York in 1970, and is considered one of the first pan-Asian political and arts organizations on the East Coast. Active from 1971 to 1986, Basement Workshop published art and creative writing in Bridge Magazine (1971–78), produced the Yellow Pearl visual arts portfolio, held workshops and youth programs, supported community-based healthcare, and compiled resources and information on API history and communities. Its members later went on to found many organizations, including the Asian American Arts Alliance, Asian American Arts Centre, the Museum of Chinese in America, Asian CineVision, Asian American Dance Theatre, and Godzilla: Asian American Art Network.

10.75 x 10.75 inches (Prints)
11 x 11 inches (Box)
Portfolio including 46 signed prints
B&W
Edition of 250
Published by Godzilla: Asian American Art Network in 1999
Distributed by Primary Information in 2022

Destroy All Monsters Painting

These mixed media paintings by Cary Loren were made for Destroy All Monsters Magazine, which we released in 2011. Each copy of the original book included a unique work, and Loren had 50 left over once the book was completed. These signed, 50 copies were made available to Primary Information as a fundraising edition.

8.5 x 11 inches
Painting
Edition of 50
October 2011

TOP

TOP is an artist book produced by Aram Saroyan in 1965. Unfolding across eight multi-color pages, the concrete poem represents a top that spins from slow to fast to slow as the reader moves through the book. The colors and letters (comprising an obliquely glimpsed word) change in accordance with each page to notate the speed of the spinning top. Produced as an accordion fold with taped seams, TOP can be read as a book or unfolded to stand on a shelf or table.

The original publication was printed on the off-set press at Academy Typing Service, owned and managed by the painter Virginia Admiral, the ex-wife of painter Robert De Niro, Sr. and mother of the actor. The press run, while projected to be 300 copies, was truncated at “around sixty” for reasons, says Saroyan, “no longer ascertainable.”

In 2021, Primary Information and the artist decided to finish the edition, producing a facsimile edition of 240 copies. All are signed and numbered (beginning with 61).

Aram Saroyan is a writer well known for his early minimalist, conceptual, and Concrete poetry of the 1960s. Over the course of the last six decades, Saroyan has written over 30 books in a variety of forms including several novels, memoirs, plays, long- and short-form journalism, and essays, garnering awards and esteemed grants along the way. Since the initial publication of Complete Minimal Poemsin 2008, Saroyan has begun producing new works in minimal and conceptual form, which have found new audiences in the art world. His work was included in the Made in L.A.exhibition at the Hammer Museum in 2016, for which he contributed the subtitle a, the, though, only.

10 Pages
8 x 5 inches
Paperback
Color
Edition of 240
September 2021

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Managing Editor: James Hoff
Managing Designer: Rick Myers

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 all been reproduced, and Alex Kitnick provides a new introduction.

Note(s) provides a rare look into Birnbaum’s early investigations of video art and its relationship to television. Her work of this period orchestrates a complex circuit of viewership and representation, in which her interest in psychoanalytic concepts—projective identification, regression, resistance, and intersubjectivity—are analyzed in tandem with the formal and interpersonal politics of image making. These investigations lay the groundwork for the artist’s breakthrough works, such as Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman and Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry, in which she appropriates popular television programs to critique the language and images of networked television.

Featured works include Back Piece (1975), Attack Piece (1975), Mirroring (1975), Liberty: A Dozen or So Views (1976), Relationship Perspectives: Perspective Relationships (1976–77), America: Land of Contrasts (A Day of Awakening) (A Shot in the Dark) (1976–77), Pivot: Turning Around Suppositions (1976), and Lesson Plans to Keep the Revolution Alive (1977).

Dara Birnbaum was born in New York City in 1946, and studied architecture at Carnegie Mellon University and painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. Recognized as one of the first artists to manipulate television footage to “talk back to the media,” Birnbaum enlists video technology and mass media images to deconstruct and redefine cultural, personal, and historical mythologies. Drawing from critical theory, literature, and feminist thought, Birnbaum matrixes film techniques such as dramatic wipes and layered images onto works that are deeply introspective and experiential. Her work has been widely exhibited, including at MoMA PS1, New York (2019); National Portrait Gallery, London (2018); the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio (2018); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); and the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2006).

434 pages
8.5 x 11 inches
Paperback
Edition of 2500
August 2021
ISBN: 9781734489774

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Managing Editor: James Hoff
Managing Designer: Rick Myers

Destroy All Monsters Painting

8.5 x 11 inches
Painting
Edition of 50
October 2011

Note(s): Work(ing) Process(es) Re: Concerns (That Take On / Deal With) (Signed Limited Edition)

This limited edition of Dara Birnbaum’s Note(s): Work(ing) Process(es) Re: Concerns (That Take On / Deal With) is published in an edition of 100 and includes a new dust jacket signed and numbered by the artist. The front and back covers of the dust jacket each feature a unique black-and-white photograph that extends onto the jacket’s inner flaps. Taken by the artist in 1975, these images are from her first installation, Back Piece, which is also featured in the publication.

434 pages
8.5 x 11 inches
Paperback
Edition of 100
August 2021
ISBN: 9781734489774

Destroy All Monsters Painting

8.5 x 11 inches
Painting
Edition of 50
October 2011

Destroy All Monsters Painting

8.5 x 11 inches
Painting
Edition of 50
October 2011

Destroy All Monsters Painting

8.5 x 11 inches
Painting
Edition of 50
October 2011

Destroy All Monsters Painting

8.5 x 11 inches
Painting
Edition of 50
October 2011

Destroy All Monsters Painting

8.5 x 11 inches
Painting
Edition of 50
October 2011

Destroy All Monsters Painting

8.5 x 11 inches
Painting
Edition of 50
October 2011

Liturgy

Liturgy is a journey into the uncanny realm of the senses that dives into histories of perception and intuition. The artist Flora Yin-Wong deploys a variety of images and texts to explore issues related to cosmic principles, conspiracies, and parallel universes. The result is a constellatory work filled with religion, dreams, and fragmented memories and knowledge that also gestures at the artist’s own history. The book’s chapters—Rituals & Fire; Omens; Hexagrams / Oracles; Curses; Gods & Creatures; Places Doors to Hell / Ghost Cities; Paradoxes; Sound Phenomena; Reality—function like a secret dossier inflected with flights of fantasy, speaking to systems of faith and language and its corruptions.

Divining inspiration from meditation, oracles, curses, hexagrams, Cantonese traditions, and superstitions, Liturgy interweaves textual and visual collage to create a multi-layered tonality. Reflected here is the multidisciplinary artist’s interest in the web between fiction, memory, rituals, and incantation, as well as her approach to sound.

Flora Yin-Wong is a London–born, Chinese-Malaysian writer, producer, and DJ who has released material on the labels Modern Love and PAN. Her sonic work uses traditional instruments, software processing, and text-based storytelling, and has been performed at venues including ISSUE Project Room (New York), the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Volksbühne Theater (Berlin), and Berghain (Berlin).

120 pages
4.31 x 7.12 inches
Paperback
Edition of 2200
June 2021
ISBN: 9781736534601

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Co-Published with PAN
Managing Editors: James Hoff and Bill Kouligas
Designers: NMR
Copy Editor: Allison Dubinsky

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 the performances utilizing quotidian, social acts that are amplified over time. For example, in Lax/Relax (1969), Graham’s subversion of West Coast new ageism, the artist chants “relax” in sync with a recording of a woman saying “lax” in a meditative manner, which implicates the audience into a group breathing exercise or hypnosis over the course of 30 minutes.

Throughout the ’70s, the artist engaged in a series of works that subverted the prescribed roles of the audience and performer by creating conditions in which each simultaneously functions as both (creating a type of feedback loop). Remarking on another work form this period, Graham once stated, “It begins with Minimal Art, but it’s about spectators observing themselves as they’re observed by other people.”* This paradigm is extended even further in Performer/Audience Sequence (1975) and Performer/Audience Mirror (1977), in which the artist performs by describing the audience as well as himself, creating conditions whereby the audience is performing for the artist as well as themselves.

Like (1971), Past Future Split Attention (1972), and Identification Projection (1977) are also featured in the publication.

Dan Graham is an artist based in New York. Since the 1960s, he has produced a wide range of work and writing that engages in a highly analytical discourse on the historical, social, and ideological functions of contemporary cultural systems. Architecture, popular music, video, and television are among the focuses of his investigations, which he articulates through essays, performances, installations, videotapes, and architectural/sculptural designs.

52 pages
5.8 x 8.2 inches
Paperback
Edition of 2500
May 2021
ISBN: 9781736534632

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Managing Editor: James Hoff
Managing Designer: Rick Myers

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* Dan Graham and Rodney Graham, “Dan Graham Interviewed by Rodney Graham,” in Dan Graham: Beyond, ed. by Bennet Simpson and Chrissie Iles, (MIT Press, 2009), 96.

Work 1961-73 (Limited Edition)

This publication is a limited edition of Work 1961-73. Each publication is signed by Yvonne Rainer and comes with two 5 x 7″ prints. The first photograph documents Steve Paxton performing in Parts of Some Sextets in 1965 at Judson Church in New York City and the second features Emily Coates, Timothy Ward, and Jon Kinzel performing in Parts of Some Sextets as part of the Performa 2019 Biennial at Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center in Brooklyn.

Originally published in 1974 by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Yvonne Rainer’s Work 1961-73 documents the artist’s landmark early works at the intersection of dance, performance, and art. The publication provides multifaceted insight into some of the artist’s most celebrated choreographic works, including Terrain (1962), Trio A (1966), Continuous Project-Altered Daily (1970), War (1970), Street Action (1970), and This is the story of a woman who … (1973), among many others.

Assembled ostensibly as a survey, Work 1961-73 features a multitude of documentary forms, including scripts, excerpts from the artist’s notebooks, press reviews, correspondence, photographic documentation, literary excerpts, contextualizing texts by the artist, diagrams, film stills, floor plans, scores, and more. As such, the publication resembles an artist book that generously gives the reader access to Rainer’s modes of working, as well as the social and political context around which the work was made. The publication is also a book of writing, with the artist’s frank, witty, and sometimes humorous prose intimately leading the reader through each work.

As the artist states in the book’s introduction:

I have a longstanding infatuation with language, a not-easily assailed conviction that it, above all else, offers a key to clarity. Not that it can replace experience, but rather holds a mirror to our experience, give us distance when we need it. So here I am, in a sense, trying to ‘replace’ my performances with a book, greedily pushing language to clarify what already was clear in other terms. But, alas, gone. This has seemed one good reason to compile a book ‘out of’ the remains of my performances, letting the language fall where it may. Let it be said simply “She usually makes performances and has also made a book.”

Work 1961-73 is an indispensable publication for anyone interested in the artist and the radical developments in dance and performance in the 1960s.

Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934) is a dancer, choreographer, writer, and filmmaker. She is a co-founding member of the Judson Dance Theater and worked primarily as a dancer and choreographer from the early 1960s through the early 1970s. Her choreographic work is widely recognized for blurring the lines between performers and non-performers, incorporating gestural and pedestrian movements, as well as classical dance steps and theatre. In 1972, Rainer began making films, producing seven experimental features, including Lives of Performers (1972), Privilege (1990), and MURDER and murder (1996). She returned to dance in 2000, producing new works commissioned by the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation, the Performa Biennial, and The Museum of Modern Art. She is the author of several books including Feelings Are Facts: A Life (2006), A Woman Who…: Essays, Interviews, Scripts (1999), and Poems (2012). She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Awards, The Foundation for Contemporary Art’s Merce Cunningham Award, and a USA Grant.

Work 1961-73 signed by Yvonne Rainer
346 pages
7.75 x 10 inches
Paperback
Edition of 50
November 2020

Parts of Some Sextets with Steve Paxton by Phil MacMullan (unsigned)
5 x 7 inches
Digital print
Edition of 50
November 2020

Parts of Some Sextets with Emily Coates, Timothy Ward, and Jon Kinzel (unsigned)
5 x 7 inches
Digital print
Edition of 50
November 2020

Sea Shanty

Sea Shanty is a letterpress print produced on the occasion of Primary Information’s publication of Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979. The print is produced in an edition of 50 and includes a hand-numbered certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

Sea Shanty was written in 1971 and appeared in the book Soundsword (London: Writers Forum, 1972). It appears in Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 along with other selections from Soundsword.

Paula Claire is a English-based writer that has been active in concrete and visual poetry since the late 60s.

8.5 x 12.5 inches
Letterpress print
Edition of 50 (+5 APs)
2020

Directed Cages

Directed Cages is a letterpress print produced on the occasion of Primary Information’s publication of Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979. The print is produced in an edition of 50 and includes a hand-numbered certificate of authenticity stamped by the artist.

Directed Cages was originally produced in 1983.

Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt is an artist based in Germany. She is well known for her typewriter and mail-art works, which she produced in the 1970s and 1980s.

8.5 x 12.5 inches
Letterpress print
Edition of 50 (+5 APs)
2020

Olaf Breuning

This postcard by Olaf Breuning is part of a series devoted to artists’ postcards initiated by Primary Information in the wake of the Trump Administration, as well as the social and political tumult that preceded it. Since the election, there has been a growing movement of citizens using postcards to voice their concern to their representatives. As such, the postcard is a media form that is vital to political and social engagement in the United States. It is also a form with a dedicated image space, and Primary Information feels strongly that images accompanying this civic engagement should be created by artists.