Large

This limited-edition is a facsimile reproduction of a Godzilla t-shirt created and designed in 1993 by Stefani Mar, Helen Oji, Tony Wong, and Charles Yuen. It’s being produced by Primary Information to celebrate the recent publication of Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990-2001, which was edited by Howie Chen.

Shirts are only available on a made-to-order basis with a limited window for pre-orders. If you’d like to purchase this edition, please order before 6:00 pm on Friday, December 10. After this date, all orders will be closed and the edition will no longer be available. All orders will ship on or before January 3.

Click here to view all available t-shirt sizes.

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.

T-shirt
Open Edition
December 2021


Designers: Stefani Mar, Helen Oji, Tony Wong, and Charles Yuen
Managing Designer (2021): William Bahan
Printer: Flying Saucer Press

 

X-Large

This limited-edition is a facsimile reproduction of a Godzilla t-shirt created and designed in 1993 by Stefani Mar, Helen Oji, Tony Wong, and Charles Yuen. It’s being produced by Primary Information to celebrate the recent publication of Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990-2001, which was edited by Howie Chen.

Shirts are only available on a made-to-order basis with a limited window for pre-orders. If you’d like to purchase this edition, please order before 6:00 pm on Friday, December 10. After this date, all orders will be closed and the edition will no longer be available. All orders will ship on or before January 3.

Click here to view all available t-shirt sizes.

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.

T-shirt
Open Edition
December 2021


Designers: Stefani Mar, Helen Oji, Tony Wong, and Charles Yuen
Managing Designer (2021): William Bahan
Printer: Flying Saucer Press

 

Writings 1973–1983 on Works 1969–1979

Writings 1973–1983 on Works 1969–1979 is an essential document of a decade of formative work by Michael Asher. Originally published in 1983, the book presents 34 works through the artist’s writings, photographic documentation, architectural floor plans, exhibition announcements, and other ephemera.

Asher did not create traditional art objects; instead, he chose to alter the existing institutional apparatus through which art is presented, creating work dependent on the architectural, social, or economic systems that undergird how art is produced and experienced. For example, in 1974, he removed the partition wall dividing the office and gallery space of the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles. In another work from 1978, Asher had a bronze replica of a nineteenth-century sculpture of George Washington moved from the exterior of the Art Institute of Chicago to a room in the museum that housed eighteenth-century art, changing its location, but also its function from a public monument to an indoor sculpture, as it was originally intended.

Due to its site specificity and immateriality, Asher’s work ceased to exist after an exhibition, which makes this highly sought-after book the definitive mode through which one can gain insight into the work he made during this period. As the artist states in the introduction: “This book as a finished product will have a material permanence that contradicts the actual impermanence of the art-work, yet paradoxically functions as a testimony to that impermanence of my production.”

Initiated by Kasper König, Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 was originally co-published by the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and was largely shaped by Asher’s close collaboration with art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, who succeeded König as editor of the press.

240 pages
8.5 x 12 inches
Paperback
October 2021
ISBN: 9781732098640

Managing Editor: James Hoff
Managing Designer: Rick Myers

 

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

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
August 2021
ISBN: 9781734489774

Managing Editor: James Hoff
Managing Designer: Rick Myers

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

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.

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 100
August 2021
ISBN: 9781734489774

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

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

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