New or neglected titles, soon to appear

After two weeks of Chess sets there's both a backlog of things to post, and a need for a little break. Posts will resume shortly, with the above works and a focus on Siglio Press, who just announced their new Christian Marlcay title [top] yesterday. 

Top Stories Exhibition

Top Stories was a prose periodical featuring experimental writing by women authors and artists. The series included staple-bound booklets by Jenny Holzer, Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Pati Hill, Mary Kelly, Cookie Mueller, and others. The series also included visual contributions by artists such as David Armstrong, Joe Gibbons, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Gary Indiana, Richard Prince and Leslie Thornton. 

The series was published by Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, New York, an artist-run centre founded by Charles Clough, Robert Longo, Diane Bertolo, Nancy Dwyer, Larry Lundy, Cindy Sherman and Michael Zwack in 1974. 

The 29 publications produced between 1978 and 1991 are now the subject of the an exhibition at The Netherlands Kunstverein. Complete sets of the series are somewhat rare, but not too prohibitively expensive that they needed to be displayed as rare objects under glass. This allows the museum to avoid the typical trappings of archival shows, and instead display the works on a magazine rack. The press release invites visitors to "browse, smell, read and touch the material for yourself."

In addition to the publications, the show features a newly commissioned two-channel film by Peggy Ahwesh, unpacking the Top Stories archives. Parallel to the exhibition, is the publication of Tense,  a never-realized publication by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns from 1984. It will be launched during Amsterdam Art Weekend, towards the end of the exhibition.

"As I listen to Turyn speaking to Ahwesh about Top Stories #9: Kathy Acker (1981), I pick up the issue in question and flip through it. In the film, Turyn describes how she took care of the imagery for this issue herself, after Acker wrote her a letter saying that she wanted ‘the photographs to undermine the text’. In response, Turyn walked through Manhattan, from 57th Street to Chelsea, with Acker’s text, New York City in 1979, in mind, taking photos that – while showing no direct connection to the text – similarly evoke the unique social landscape of Times Square. The chapbook is bookended by two photographs of a clothed woman sitting on a chair, with only her lower half visible. On the first page, her legs are closed and, in the last, they are wide open. Turyn initially thought the chapbook should finish with the image of the woman’s legs closed to signify the end of the book, but Acker wanted it the other way around, arguing: ‘Literature should be open-ended.’ It’s something that could also be said of this exhibition, which, through its pared back yet insightful presentation, shows the importance of letting writers speak for themselves, offering an experience that is as open-ended as Acker intended her work to be."

- Julia Mullié, Frieze

Linda Neaman | Foot Facts

Linda Neaman

Foot Facts

Buffalo, USA: Hallwells, 1983

[18] pp., 22 x 14 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

Top Stories was a prose periodical featuring experimental writing by women authors and artists. The series included staple-bound booklets by Jenny Holzer, Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Pati Hill, Mary Kelly, Cookie Mueller, and others. 

The series is published by Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, New York, an artist-run centre founded by Charles Clough, Robert Longo, Diane Bertolo, Nancy Dwyer, Larry Lundy, Cindy Sherman and Michael Zwack in 1974. 

The fifth issue (of a total of 29 publications) presents an analysis of how women’s feet have been objectified and tortured over the years. Neaman's writings are illustrated with images of high heels, self-defence instructions, and reflexology charts.

Foot Facts is Neaman's second publication, after Sex & Monsters (also published by Hallwells, in 1980). Her third book, Dead Stuff, was published almost thirty years later, in 2012.

Foot Facts is available from Printed Matter, for $30 US, here. 

Judith Doyle | Transcript

Judith Doyle

Transcript

Buffalo, USA: Hallwells, 1981

[9] pp., 22 x 14 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

Top Stories was a prose periodical featuring experimental writing by women authors and artists. The series included staple-bound booklets by Jenny Holzer, Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Pati Hill, Mary Kelly and others. 

The eighth issue (of a total of 29 publications) features a transcript from a performance based on personal accounts exploring the subject of physical pain as it relates to emotional numbness, in particular the feeling of being in a strange new place.

Available for $25 US, here. 

Laurie Anderson | Words in Reverse

Laurie Anderson
Words in Reverse
Buffalo, USA: Hallwells, 1979
16 pp., staplebound

The second in the series of Top Stories (which also included Jenny Holzer, Kathy Acker and others) and, I believe, the only to be reprinted. The booklet is entirely text-based, featuring extracts from Anderson's performances 'Like A stream' and 'Americans on The Move' from 1978 & 1979. Some of the texts were later reworked into songs or incorporated into other performances.

Some examples below.


I saw a photograph of Tesla, who invented the Tesla coil. He also invented a pair of shoes with soles four inches thick to ground him while he worked in the laboratory. In this picture, Tesla is sitting in his lab, wearing the shoes, and reading a book by the light of the long, streamer-like sparks shooting out of his transformers.



There are Eskimos who live above the timberline. There’s no wood for the runners on their sleds. So instead, they use long frozen fish which they attach to the bottoms of their sleds to slip across the snow.



I can draw you so that you have no ears. I can draw you so that you have no ears at all. So that where your ears would be, there is only blank paper.



The detective novel is the only novel truly invented in the twentieth century. In the detective novel, the hero is dead at the very beginning. So you don’t have to deal with human nature at all. Only the slow accumulation of facts ... of data ...In science fiction, the hero just flies in at the very beginning. He can bend steel with his bare hands. He can walk in zero gravity. He can see right through lead doors. But no one asks how he is able to do these things. They just say, “Look! He’s walking in zero gravity.” So you don’t have to deal with human nature at all.