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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

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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

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

Portrait of Kathy Acker

“Portrait of Kathy Acker” (1978) is a limited edition print by Jimmy DeSana. Printed posthumously and signed by the artist’s estate, this work was selected from a series of portraits the artist took of famed writer and friend Kathy Acker. “Portrait of Kathy Acker”  is part of a larger series of commercial photographs of Downtown celebrities that DeSana carried out in the late 1970s alongside his work for artists’ magazines and periodicals like FILE, X Magazine, and SoHo Weekly News, as well as for musicians such as the Talking Heads and James Chance. This body of work also appeared in the artist’s first exhibition at Steffanoti Gallery (1979) and in P.S.1’s legendary New York/New Wave (1981).

Printed in an edition of 75, this 5 x 7” pigment print comes with a copy of Salvation, DeSana’s posthumous artist book, which was published by Primary Information in spring 2024.

Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) grew up in Atlanta, GA, and earned his bachelor’s degree from the Georgia State University in 1972 before relocating to New York’s East Village in the early 1970s. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Jimmy DeSana & Paul P.—Ruins of Rooms, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany, 2024 and The Sodomite Invasion: Experimentation, Politics and Sexuality in the work of Jimmy DeSana and Marlon T. Riggs, Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada, 2020. DeSana’s work can be found in numerous public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. A major retrospective of DeSana’s work was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2022, accompanied by a catalogue co-published by the Brooklyn Museum and DelMonico Books.

5 x 7 inches
Pigment print
Edition of 75 + 5 APs
Stamped by the Artist’s Estate
August 2024

Each edition comes with a copy of Jimmy DeSana’s Salvation.

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
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.

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