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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

Newspaper

Published by Steve Lawrence and edited with Peter Hujar and Andrew Ullrick, Newspaper was published in New York City between 1968 and 1971.

Newspaper was a wordless, picture-only periodical that ran for fourteen issues and featured the disparate practices of over forty artists. With an editorial focus on placing appropriated material alongside new works, the periodical sought to codify a visual language of high and low culture that represented contemporary society in the late 1960s. While largely overlooked in art-historical discourse, Newspaper showcased many of the most revered artists working in the United States at the time, as well as an emerging coterie of queer artists.

The mid to late sixties was a flourishing period for artists experimenting with new media formats such as books, records, and magazines to create or distribute their work. Newspaper was one of the first artist-published tabloids of its era, preceding Andy Warhol’s Interview and Les Levine’s Culture Hero, both of which debuted in 1969. However, in contrast to other tabloids, Newspaper focused strictly on images.

At a time when photography was not being exhibited regularly in galleries, Newspaper provided an alternative exhibition space for the medium and some of the era’s greatest photographers. The publication’s large size and unbound format encouraged readers to take it apart and hang its pages, which was how Newspaper was installed at the Museum of Modern Art’s influential Information show in 1970.

This is not to say that Newspaper only existed within the narrow confines of the art world, far from it. It lived within (and shared contributors with) a robust network of underground and queer periodicals like The New York Review of Sex, Rags, and Gay Power, among others. Yet, unlike many of these tabloids, Newspaper has largely disappeared from the discourse around underground magazines, queer publishing, and artists’ periodicals.

All fourteen issues of Newspaper are compiled in this volume for the first time.

Featured artists include: Diane Arbus, Art Workers Coalition, Richard Avedon, Clyde Baines, Sheyla Baykal, Peter Beard, Brigid Berlin, Richard Bernstein, Ann Douglas, Paul Fisher, Maurice Hogenboom, Peter Hujar, Scott Hyde, Christo and Jeanne-Claude Javacheff, Ray Johnson, Edwin Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Gerald Laing, Dorothea Lange, Steve Lawrence, Jeff Lew, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Mercado, Duane Michals, Jack Mitchell, Forrest “Frosty” Myers, Billy Name, Stephen Paley, Warner Pearson, Jurgen Warner Piepke, Charles Pratt, Joseph Raffael, Mel Ramos, Lilo Raymond, Ruspoli-Rodriguez, Lucas Samaras, Alan Saret, Bill Schwedler, Leni Sinclair, Norman Snyder, Elizabeth Staal, Stanley Stellar, Terry Stevenson, Paul Thek, Andrew Ullrick, Andy Warhol, William T. Wiley, and May Wilson.

416 pages
9.75 x 13.38 Inches
Paperback
March 2023
ISBN: 9781737797944

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Editor: Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez
Managing Editor: James Hoff
Designer: Rick Myers
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

Something Else Press Bundle

This special bundle includes all 9 of Primary Information’s Something Else Press titles currently in-stock:

– A Something Else Reader

– Our facsimile editions of the following Great Bear Pamphlets:

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

 

Reader (signed)

Reader is the first anthology to gather Constance DeJong’s diverse body of writing. Spanning from the 1980s to the present, the publication features eighteen works by DeJong, including out-of-print and previously unpublished fiction, as well as texts emanating from her new media sculptures, sound works, video works, and public art commissions.

An influential figure of the 1970s and ’80s downtown New York writing and performance scene, Constance DeJong has channeled time and language as mediums in her work for the last four decades, expanding the possibilities of narrative form and literary genre. From the earliest work collected here—a manuscript of DeJong’s 1982 prose text I.T.I.L.O.E.—to the digital project Nightwriters (2017-18), Reader assembles a range of experimental texts by the artist. The volume includes such works as the 2013 publication and performance, SpeakChamber and the script for Relatives (1988), a duet between a television and a performer made in collaboration with artist Tony Oursler. Never-before-published works including texts created for re-engineered vintage radios, aphorisms commissioned for a Times Square digital billboard, and transcripts for sound works originally installed along the Thames and Hudson rivers are also featured in the book.

Taken together, these works showcase how DeJong has helped define and push the boundaries of language in the visual and performing arts. The artist’s sustained exploration of language blurs the lines between many fields, and DeJong’s work has also had a long life in the literary world. In the late 1970s, she self-published the critically acclaimed novel Modern Love on her short-lived Standard Editions imprint. On the 40th anniversary of the novel’s original publication, the book was published in facsimile form by Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse, and has gone on to sell over 10,000 copies since its release in 2017.

Constance DeJong is a New York-based artist who has exhibited and performed internationally. Her work has been presented at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in New York at the Dia Art Foundation; The Kitchen, Thread Waxing Space, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1983 she composed the libretto for Satyagraha, the Philip Glass opera, which has been staged at opera houses worldwide, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York; the Netherlands National Opera, Rotterdam; and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. She has permanent audio-text installations in Beacon, New York; London; and Seattle. DeJong has published several books of fiction, including her celebrated Modern Love (Standard Editions, 1977; Primary Information/Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), I.T.I.L.O.E. (Top Stories, 1983), and SpeakChamber (Bureau, 2013), and her work is included in the anthologies Up is Up, But So is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Science, 1974-1991 (NYU Press, 2006); Blasted Allegories (New Museum/MIT, 1987), and Wild History (Tanam Press, 1985).

216 pages
6 x 9 inches
Paperback
July 2022
ISBN: 9781736534694

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Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Designer: Freer Studio
Copy Editor: Allison Dubinsky

The All Night Movie

Created by Mary Heilmann in 1999, The All Night Movie beautifully wraps a memoir inside of a monograph, creating an artist book in which each page is designed as though it were a painting. The artist delicately utilizes color, text, candid photographs, reproductions of paintings, and song lyrics that unfold seamlessly to create an immersive visual experience. Heilmann has described the book as “the story of my life, told in words, painted images and photographs.”

Across eight chapters, Heilmann recounts her life, from childhood in California through New York in the 1990s, providing intimate insight into the development of her work, friendships, and formative life experiences. Snapshots by the artist and others provide a portrait of Heilmann’s evolving artistic community, which included Gordon Matta-Clark, Pat Hearn, Dicky Landry, Jack Pierson, Keith Sonnier, Pat Steir, William Wegman, and Jackie Winsor, among others. And this is just the first half of the book. Included with the artist’s memoir is an essay by Jutta Koether and a survey of paintings from 1972-1999. This highly revered and extremely scarce publication was co-designed with Mark Magill and is reproduced here as a facsimile edition. The All Night Movie was originally published by Hauser & Wirth and Offizin Verlag.

Mary Heilmann was born in San Francisco in 1940. She studied at the University of California at Santa Barbara, San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley before moving to New York in 1968. Heilmann began her career creating sculpture before quickly pivoting into abstract painting once on the East Coast, experimenting with bright colors and unusual geometries that bridge two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements. She has been the recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award as well as a Guggenheim Foundation award.

148 Pages
9.5 x 12.25 inches
Paperback
June 2022
ISBN: 9781736534656

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Managing Editor: James Hoff
Managing Designer: Rick Myers
Copy Editor: Madeleine Compagnon