Better Living Catalog

Pippa Garner’s Better Living Catalog, originally published in 1982, takes the form of a mail order catalog featuring clever and whimsical inventions that parody consumer goods while simultaneously critiquing America’s obsession with ingenuity, efficiency, leisure, and comfort. These works, which were made as prototypes and photographed for the publication, take the form of improbable accessories, clothing, footwear, home appliances, and office gadgets.

For example, the “Reactiononometer,” a portable wristband, instantly measures social success, while the “Digital Diet Loafers” display the wearer’s weight with every step. If the “Munch-o-Matic” reduces deskwork interruptions by flinging a snack right into the user’s mouth, other items promise financial solvency (the controlled cash flow “Autowallet”), sustainable waste management, or mess-free companionship (the “Pet-a-Vision” TV console). The artist asserts that all of the products in the book are “absolute necessities for contemporary survival.”

The Better Living Catalog was a pop hit when it was published, earning Garner spots on nighttime TV talk shows and attention from magazines like Vogue and Rolling Stone. In a meme-filled culture, the works still resonate today, finding their analog in widely-circulating consumer products, and—in the case of the “High Heel Skates”—even appearing unattributed in the runway collection of a major luxury fashion brand.

A few years after the Better Living Catalog was published, Garner began her gender transition, which she has characterized as an artistic project that draws conceptual parallels to the altered consumer goods she has continued to create since the 1970s. The artist’s practice has always been about hacking—gender hacking, she stated, was “an excellent premise for maverick conceptual art and diametrically opposed to anything I’d ever done.”

Many of the prototypes Garner created for the publication were repurposed or recycled, making this previously rare gem of an artist book one of the artist’s few works to now be widely available.

Born in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, Pippa Garner (formerly known as Philip Garner) began her practice in the late sixties as a member of the highly regarded Transportation Design department at ArtCenter, California, with plans to become a car stylist, and was drafted to Vietnam to serve as a combat illustrator. In the mid-80s, Garner began her gender transition, which she considers a conceptual artwork, marking an extension of her practice from twenty years of altering cars, garments, and consumer products to using her own body as raw material. Garner appeared on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and other talk shows, showcasing her satirical consumer product inventions, and her artwork has been featured in Car & Driver, Rolling Stone, Arts & Architecture, and Vogue, among other publications. In the 1980s, her performance, design, and video work was exhibited in institutions including the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; since 2015, she has had exhibitions at STARS, O-Town House, Redling Fine Art, and Parker gallery in Los Angeles; Jeffrey Stark in New York; JOAN, Los Angeles; Kunstverein München; 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, Metz; Kunsthalle Zurich; and Art Omi, Ghent, New York. She is the author of three other books: Utopia… or Bust! Products for the Perfect World (1984), Garner’s Gizmos & Gadgets (1987), and the zine Beauty 2000 (1992/2021).

100 pages
5.25 x 8.09 inches
Paperback
June 2023
ISBN: 9798987624944

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Managing Editor (2023): Rachel Valinsky
Managing Designer (2023): Siiri Tännler

The Kill

The Kill is a silkscreen print by Pippa Garner, produced on the occasion of Primary Information’s publication of the artist’s Better Living Catalog. The work is signed by the artist and produced in an edition of 50.

Born in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, Pippa Garner (formerly known as Philip Garner) began her practice in the late sixties as a member of the highly regarded Transportation Design department at ArtCenter, California, with plans to become a car stylist, and was drafted to Vietnam to serve as a combat illustrator. In the mid-80s, Garner began her gender transition, which she considers a conceptual artwork, marking an extension of her practice from twenty years of altering cars, garments, and consumer products to using her own body as raw material. Garner appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and other talk shows, showcasing her satirical consumer product inventions, and her artwork has been featured in Car & Driver, Rolling Stone, Arts & Architecture, and Vogue, among other publications. In the 1980s, her performance, design, and video work was exhibited in institutions including the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; since 2015, she has had exhibitions at STARS, O-Town House, Redling Fine Art, and Parker gallery in Los Angeles; Jeffrey Stark in New York; JOAN, Los Angeles; Kunstverein München; 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, Metz; Kunsthalle Zurich; and Art Omi, Ghent, New York. She is the author of three other books: Utopia… or Bust! Products for the Perfect World (1984), Garner’s Gizmos & Gadgets (1987), and the zine Beauty 2000 (1992/2021).

8.5 x 11 inches
Silkscreen print
Edition of 50 + 5 APs
Signed
2023

Live Audio Essays

Live Audio Essays presents transcripts from performances and films by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, an artist known for his political and cultural reflections on sound and listening.

Abu Hamdan’s intricately crafted and heavily researched monologues are at times intimate, humorous, and entertaining, yet politically disquieting in their revelations. Using personal narratives, anecdotes, popular media, and transcripts rooted in historical and contemporary moments, the artist leads the reader through his investigations into crimes that are heard but not seen. These live audio essays turn our focus to acoustic memories, voices leaking through walls and borders, the drone of warfare, cinematic sound effects, atmospheric noise, the resonant frequencies of buildings, the echoes of reincarnated lives, and the sound of hunger.

Live Audio Essays collects seven iconic works, which were originally presented as performances, films, or video installations from 2014 through 2022. Featured pieces include Contra Diction (Speech Against Itself), Walled Unwalled, After SFX, Natq, A Thousand White Plastic Chairs, Air Pressure, and the newly-completed The 45th Parallel.

All the texts were transcribed and edited with the artist and are available here in a single volume for the first time.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a Private Ear, listening to, with and on behalf of people affected by corporate, state, and environmental violence. Taking the form of forensic reports, lectures and live performances, films, and publications, his work reflects on the political and cultural context of sound and listening and has been presented at the 22nd Biennale of Sydney; the 58th Venice Biennale; the 11th Gwangju Biennale; the 13th and 14th Sharjah Biennial; Witte De With, Rotterdam; Tate Modern Tanks; Chisenhale Gallery; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Portikus Frankfurt. He received his PhD in 2017 and has held fellowships and professorships at the University of Chicago; the New School, New York; and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. He is the recipient of the Toronto Biennial Audience Award, the Edvard Munch Art Award, and the Nam June Paik Award, and was the co-winner of the Turner Prize in 2019. His audio investigations have been used as evidence at the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and been a key part of advocacy campaigns for organizations such as Amnesty International, Defence for Children International, and Forensic Architecture.

144 pages
5 x 7.5 Inches
Paperback
May 2023
ISBN: 9798987624951

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Editor: James Hoff
Designer: David Bennewith / Colophon
Copy editor: Allison Dubinsky

The Twofold Commitment

The Twofold Commitment is an artist book by filmmaker, writer, and theorist, Trinh T. Minh-ha. While contextualizing the wider scope of her filmmaking practice, this publication centers on Trinh’s feature film Forgetting Vietnam (2015), which takes up one of the myths surrounding the creation of Vietnam: a fight between two dragons whose intertwined bodies fell into the South China Sea and formed Vietnam’s curving, S-shaped coastline. Commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the film draws inspiration from ancient legend to stage an ongoing, contemporary conversation between land and water, creating a third space for historical and cultural re-memory.

The book features the film’s lyrical script, along with rhythmically distributed cinematic stills. Expanding on this central focus is a series of conversations between Trinh and film and sound scholars Patricia Alvarez Astacio and Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa; Erika Balsom; Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier; Domitilla Olivieri; Stefan Östersjö; Irit Rogoff; and Xiaolu Guo. These conversations date from 2016 to 2022 and are accompanied by an index of key concepts in the artist’s work.

Born in Vietnam, Trinh T. Minh-ha is a filmmaker, writer, and music composer. She is the author of twelve books, including, most recently, Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared (2016) and D-Passage: The Digital Way (2013), as well as the foundational Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989). Her films and large-scale multimedia installations have been presented at Documenta 11, Kassel; La Triennale at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and the Whitney Biennial, New York; as well as the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Kyoto Biennale; the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris; the Okinawa Prefectural Museum; the Guangzhou Triennial; and Manifesta 13, Marseille. Her films have been exhibited as part of numerous international film festivals and honored in over sixty-five retrospectives worldwide. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, and is a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School in the departments of Gender & Women’s Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.

204 pages
6.6 x 8.9 inches
Paperback
May 2023
IBSN: 9781737797968

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Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Designer: Dorothy Lin
Copy Editor: Allison Dubinsky

Untitled (Arthur Rimbaud in Paris)

Untitled (Arthur Rimbaud in Paris) is an editioned photograph by David Wojnarowicz produced on the occasion of Primary Information’s publication of Wojnarowicz’s Dear Jean Pierre. This edition is produced from the artist’s Arthur Rimbaud series and is the only one that is not set in New York City. Originally produced in 1980, the work depicts Wojnarowicz’s Parisian lover Jean Pierre Delage standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, wearing a life-size mask of Arthur Rimbaud and holding a burning newspaper.

Untitled (Arthur Rimbaud in Paris) is printed by Gary Schneider, the acclaimed photographer and printer who worked with David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar in the 1980s. The print is produced in an edition of 100 and is stamped and numbered by the Estate of David Wojnarowicz. It comes enclosed in the inside cover of the Dear Jean Pierre book.

The first 50 prints in this edition are priced at $600, with the following 30 priced at $800, and the final 20 priced at $1,000.

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. Wojnarowicz channeled a vast accumulation of raw images, sounds, memories and lived experiences into a powerful voice that was an undeniable presence in the New York City art scene of the 1970s, 80s and early 90s. Through his several volumes of fiction, poetry, memoirs, painting, photography, installation, sculpture, film and performance, Wojnarowicz left a legacy, affirming art’s vivifying power in a society he viewed as alienating and corrosive. His use of blunt semiotics and graphic illustrations exposed what he felt the mainstream repressed: poverty, abuse of power, blind nationalism, greed, homophobia and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related complications on July 22, 1992 at the age of 37.

8 x 10 inches (paper size)
4.125 x 6.16 inches (image size)
Pigmented ink print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Matt
Edition of 100 + 10 APs
Numbered and stamped by the Estate of David Wojnarowicz on verso
1980/2023

Primetime Contemporary Art: Art by the GALA Committee as Seen on Melrose Place

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 Angeles. The artist arranged with the producers of Melrose Place for the collective to create objects for the soap opera, resulting in an extensive series of political works used as plot devices and props across two seasons of the show. The GALA Committee’s intervention provided surreptitious commentary on reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS, the Gulf War, domestic terrorism, corporate malfeasance, and substance abuse, among other issues. Despite some of these topics having been banned by the FCC at the time, the group’s political critiques went unnoticed by censors, subverting corporate and government controls of primetime television with a progressive agenda.

These works were exhibited in Uncommon Sense at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1997 and then sold at an auction at Sotheby’s to support several charities. Primetime Contemporary Art, created by Chin and Helen Nagge, was used as the auction catalog for the evening, documented the artwork produced for the exhibition, and articulated the conceptual framework of the GALA Committee.

Mel Chin was born in Houston, Texas, and is known for the broad range of approaches in his art, including works that require multi-disciplinary, collaborative teamwork, and works that enlist science as an aesthetic component to developing complex ideas. He pioneered “green remediation” in his 1990 project, Revival Field; presented his proposal for a New World Trade Center as part of the American representation at the 2002 Venice Biennale of Architecture; won a Pedro Sienna Award for Animation in Chile for his 2017 film, 9-11/9-11; and founded S.O.U.R.C.E. Studio in 2017 to realize sustained engagements with community and environment. In 2018, he presented Unmoored and Wake in Times Square, New York City, creating a visual portal into a future of rising waters, and had a forty-year-survey exhibition at the Queens Museum. He is the recipient of many awards, grants, and honorary degrees, including the MacArthur Fellowship in 2019, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021.

Helen Nagge has collaborated with Mel Chin on major public art projects for over two decades. She has worked with commercial galleries and non-profit art spaces in Houston, Texas, and New York City, and developed in-house archival systems for clients and seminal American artists’ estates. She also worked in publishing for several years, notably for Simon & Schuster, Harvey Klinger Literary Agency, and others, and continues to edit texts for Mel Chin Studio.

The GALA Committee (1995-1997) was a collective of artists, faculty, and students from the University of Georgia, Athens; CalArts, Los Angeles; and Grand Arts, Kansas City formed by Mel Chin in response to the 1995 invitation to participate in the group show Uncommon Sense at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The GALA Committee included: David Adams, Elizabeth Adams, Eric Andersen, Emily Arthur, Katie Bauman, Cameron Bernie, David Blanchard, John Borthwick, Barron Brown, Alan Bush, Heather Champ, Heeyeon Chang, Mel Chin, Lance Clarke, Roymont Clements, Kathleen Hillseth Clinesmith, Karina Combs, Melissa Conroy, John Crowe, John Cupit, Lesley Dill, Heather M. Eastman, Diane Edison, Brian Ellison, Evan Firestone, Mark Flood, Joe Girandola, Terry Glispin, Nuala Glynn, Jason Grier, Garrison Gunter, Elizabeth Huber, Chip Hayes, Frank Irving, Kim Jensen, Bryan Jernigan, Karin Johansson, M. Dana Jones, Cheryl Kaplan, Kendal Kerr, Kat Kinsman, Koichi Kimura, Jeff Knowlton, Leo Knox, Bernie Koersen, H. Lan Thao Lam, Ed Lambert, Elizabeth Langford, Jon Lapointe, Tom Lawson, Kristi Leonard, Donna Marcantonio, Diana McIntosh, Mara Lonner, Wendy Lundin, Steve Maleski, Thomas Mann, Stephen McRedmond, Carol Mendelsohn, Georgia Metz, Tamara Mewis, James Millar, Steve Miller, Tam Miller, Tess Miller, Dallas Moore, Margaret Morgan, Jerry Murphy, Helen K. Nagge, Yana Nirvana, Gail Patterson, Kim Patterson, Constance Penley, Joseph Pizzorusso, Chuck Pratt, Elizabeth S. Puckett, Dan Pugh, Martha Rees, Carl Robertson, Guadalupe Rodriguez, Sandra Rodriguez, Jeff Roe, Kathleen Rogan, Huan Saussy, Sanjit Sethi, Maura Sheehan, Jocelyn Shipley, Eric Shriner, Deborah Siegel, Rachel Slowinski, Frank South, Rachael Splinter, Eric Swangstu, Troy Swangstu, Janice Tanaka, Valerie Tevere, Joseph Tucker, Kathy Vargas, Tony Velasco, Jim Wade, John Watts, David Wilson.

40 pages
8.5 x 11 inches
Paperback
April 2023
ISBN: 9781737797975

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Managing Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Managing Designer: Siiri Tännler

Untitled (Arthur Rimbaud in Paris)

The first 50 prints in this edition are priced at $600, with the following 30 priced at $800, and the final 20 priced at $1,000.

A Something Else Reader

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, Bern Porter’s I’ve Left, Wolf Vostell’s Dé-coll/age Happenings, Al Hansen’s A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art, and other projects for the page by Robert Filliou, Alison Knowles, Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, Daniel Spoerri, André Thomkins, and Richard Meltzer, among others. An annotated checklist assembled by Hugh Fox and Higgins’s unpublished introduction are also included.

Perhaps no other publisher in the 60s influenced artists’ books more than Something Else Press. Higgins had a firm vision that radical art could be housed in book form and distributed throughout the world and he worked endlessly to cultivate new works that challenged conventional notions of both contemporary art and books. While other presses created extraordinary publications, none were able to achieve the breadth of titles and artists like Higgins, who successfully ran Something Else Press until 1974 in a manner that resembled a more traditional paperback publisher.

Oddly, Higgins hadn’t intended to publish A Something Else Reader himself. Instead, in 1972, he assembled the table of contents and an introduction into a proposal that he then pitched to Random House. They eventually rejected the title and encouraged Higgins to publish it, but before he could do that, Something Else Press went out of business, and the dreams of the anthology evaporated. From there, the proposal went into Higgins’s archive, where it was found by scholar and curator Alice Centamore, who compiled the works and assembled A Something Else Reader.

Eleanor Antin, George Brecht, Pol Bury, Augusto de Campos, Clark Coolidge, Philip Corner, William Brisbane Dick, Robert Filliou, Albert M. Fine, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh Fox, Buckminster Fuller, Eugen Gomringer, Brion Gysin, Richard Hamilton, Al Hansen, Jan J. Herman, Dick Higgins, Åke Hodell, Ray Johnson, Allan Kaprow, Kitasono Katue, Bengt af Klintberg, Alison Knowles, Richard Kostelanetz, Ruth Krauss, Jackson Mac Low, Robert K. Macadam, Toby MacLennan, Hansjörg Mayer, Charles McIlvaine, Richard Meltzer, Manfred Mohr, Claes Oldenburg, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Charles Platt, Bern Porter, Dieter Roth, Aram Saroyan, Tomas Schmit, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Ellen Solt, Daniel Spoerri, Gertrude Stein, André Thomkins, Wolf Vostell, and Emmett Williams are all included in A Something Else Reader.

Dick Higgins was an American artist, composer, theorist, poet, and publisher, as well as a co-founder of Fluxus. After attending Yale and Columbia Universities and receiving a BA in English, he graduated from the Manhattan School of Printing. He studied music composition with Henry Cowell, attended John Cage’s course in experimental music at The New School, and participated in the inaugural Fluxus activities in Europe from Fall 1962 to Summer 1963. He founded Something Else Press in 1963 and in 1972, he founded Unpublished Editions (later renamed Published Editions). Over the course of his life, Higgins wrote and edited forty-seven books.

368 pages
6 x 9.25 inches
Paperback
October 2022
ISBN: 9781737797920

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Editor (1972): Dick Higgins

Editor (2022): Alice Centamore

Managing Editor: James Hoff

Designer: Scott Ponik

Copy editor: Allison Dubinsky

A Rock, A River, A Street

In her experimental debut novella, A Rock, A River, A Street, artist Steffani Jemison moves deftly across narrative genres and styles as she interrogates the boundedness of the self, the possibilities of plurality, and the limits of performance. Titled after Maya Angelou’s poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” the book is punctuated by gestural drawings that point to questions of repetition and difference.

Where does your body end and the world begin? How do you locate the limit between yourself and others? A Rock, A River, A Street follows a young Black woman who lives at the hazy border between Brooklyn and Queens in the not-so-distant present. As she rides the subway, walks around her neighborhood, visits the doctor, watches movies, attends dance class, and tries to heal her body, she recalls formative experiences from her childhood and absorbs the world around her; in the process, we are brought into her conflicted relationship with language. Acutely conscious of the soft, responsive nature of her physical self, and pushed and pulled by forces she cannot control, the narrator is vulnerable, terrifyingly open. Everything and everyone leaves an impression.

Steffani Jemison was born in Berkeley, California and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and special projects at JOAN, Los Angeles; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Nottingham Contemporary; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC Bordeaux; Museum of Modern Art, New York; RISD Museum, Providence; and LAXART, Los Angeles, among others. Collaborative and group presentations have taken place at the Guggenheim Museum; MoMA PS1’s 2021 Greater New York; the 2019 Whitney Biennial, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Brooklyn Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the New Museum, and elsewhere. Jemison is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and an Associate Professor at Rutgers University – Mason Gross School of the Arts.

154 pages
5 x 7.25 inches
Paperback
October 2022
ISBN: 9781736534663

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Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Designer: Pacific
Copy Editor: Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro

Dicere #2

Dicere #2 by Mary Kelly is a silk screen print that draws from the artist’s Dicere series (2014-2018), which is comprised of unique lint works compressed through thousands of dryer cycles. The series combines images of satellite transmissions of drone targets with textual narratives based on witness accounts. Since the 1990s, Kelly’s compressed lint works have asked how to visualize, or give voice to, the unrepresentable domain of human grief and vulnerability that remains in the aftermath of war and social violence.

Dicere #2 centers on witness recounts of the US Hellfire missile attack on a wedding convoy in the Rada’a District of central Yemen, on December 12, 2015. As Kelly notes, “For me, it was the distance from the scene, the absence of faces, that underscored the violence.”

Mary Kelly is known for project-based work that addresses questions of sexuality, identity, and memory in the form of large-scale narrative installations. Recent exhibitions include retrospectives at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Whitworth, Manchester; and Ujadzdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. Her work was represented in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, as well as documenta 12. Her publications include Post-Partum Document (1983) and Imaging Desire (1996). She is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Currently, she is Judge Widney Professor, Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California.

16.5 x 12.75 inches (paper size)
12.625 x 8.75 inches (image size)
Three color silkscreen print
Edition of 50 + 5 APs
Signed
2022

Identity Pitches

In Identity Pitches, artists Stine Janvin and Cory Arcangel have composed conceptual music scores based on the knitting patterns for traditional Norwegian sweaters known as Lusekofte. Utilizing three of the most popular designs (Setesdal, Fana, and the eight-petal rose of Selbu) of this ubiquitous garment, Janvin creates scores for both solo and ensemble performers by mapping the knitting patterns onto the harmonic and subharmonic series and integrating the tuning principles of traditional Norwegian instruments. These scores are further manipulated by Arcangel using a custom, “deep-fried” coding script to create a series of image glitches.

A foreword and an interview between the two artists provides context for the work, delving into the history of Norwegian folk music tunings and the Lusekofte sweater and their intersection with the cultural identity of the country over the last millennium.

Stine Janvin is a vocalist, performer, and sound artist based in Stavanger, Norway. Janvin works with the extensive flexibility of her voice, and the ways in which it can be used to channel physicality of sound. Often drawing from electronic music, folk music, and contemporary media, she creates audio visual works for variable spaces from theaters, to clubs and galleries, and more recently websites and digital platforms. Recent presentations include Performa Telethon, New York; Munch Live and CADS, Munchmuseet, Oslo; Deutschlandradio Kultur, Daadgalerie, and CTM Festival, Berlin; Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger; Rokolective, Bucharest; Wiener Festwochen, Vienna; Issue Project Room, New York; and INA GRM, Paris.

Cory Arcangel is an artist based in Stavanger, Norway. Arcangel explores, encodes, and hacks the structural language of video games, software, and machine learning. In 2014, he established the merchandise and publishing imprint Arcangel Surfware, which opened its flagship store in Stavanger, Norway in 2018. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Barbican Art Centre, London; Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami.

84 Pages
6 x 9.5 inches
Paperback
September 2022
ISBN: 9781737797913

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Designer: Benjamin Hickethier
Managing Editor: Hiji Nam
Copy Editor: Allison Dubinsky⁠

Assembling a Black Counter Culture

DeForrest Brown, Jr.’s Assembling a Black Counter Culture presents a comprehensive account of techno with a focus on the history of Black experiences in industrialized labor systems—repositioning the genre as a unique form of Black musical and cultural production.

Brown traces the genealogy and current developments in techno, locating its origins in the 1980s in the historically emblematic city of Detroit and the broader landscape of Black musical forms. Reaching back from the transatlantic slave trade to Emancipation, the Industrial Revolution, and the Great Migration from the rural South to the industrialized North, Brown details an extended history of techno rooted in the transformation of urban centers and the new forms of industrial capitalism that gave rise to the African American working class. Following the groundbreaking work of key early players like The Belleville Three, the multimedia output of Underground Resistance and the mythscience of Drexciya, Brown illuminates the networks of collaboration, production, and circulation of techno from Detroit to other cities around the world.

Assembling a Black Counter Culture reframes techno from a Black theoretical perspective distinct from its cultural assimilation within predominantly white, European electronic music contexts and discourse. With references to Theodore Roszak’s Making of a Counter Culture, writings by African American autoworker and political activist James Boggs, and the “techno rebels” of Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave, among others, Brown draws parallels between movements in Black electronic music and Afrofuturist, speculative, and Afrodiasporic practices to imagine a world-building sonic fiction and futurity embodied in techno.

DeForrest Brown, Jr. is an Alabama-raised rhythmanalyst, writer, and representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. As Speaker Music, he channels the African American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of generational trauma. On Juneteenth of 2020, he released the album Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry on Planet Mu. His written work explores the links between the Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music, and has appeared in Artforum, Triple Canopy, NPR, CTM Festival, Mixmag, among many others. He has performed or presented work at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Camden Arts Centre, UK; Unsound Festival, Krakow; Sónar, Barcelona; Issue Project Room, New York; and elsewhere. Assembling a Black Counter Culture is Brown’s debut book.

432 pages
5.5 x 8.25 inches
Paperback
August 2022
ISBN: 9781734489736

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Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Editorial Consultant: Ting Ding and Camille Crain Drummond
Designer: Scott Ponik
Copy Editor: Madeleine Compagnon

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