V.Vale on RE/Search publications

From noon to 1:30 today at Edition Toronto, V.Vale from RE/Search publications will be speaking in conversation with Lauren Wetmore.

"RE/Search Publications was founded by V. Vale in 1977 out of San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore with a $200 loan from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Over the subsequent four decades RE/Search became the essential source for pre-internet, punk, and counter-culture independent publishing. Based out of San Francisco, DIY strategies informed the voice and design of the publications, which take the form of tabloids, handbooks, textbooks, and zines, and feature interviews, ephemera, commissioned artwork, and literature. RE/Search was a vital early platform for many artists, writers, and performers who have gone on to exemplify experimental and punk practices including The Yes Men, Annie Sprinkle, Lydia Lunch, and George Kuchar. It was also an essential republication source for banned or out-of-print material by J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Octave Mirbeau. RE/Search publication’s catalogue provides on-the-ground portraits of underground cultural movements such as Noise music (The Industrial Culture Handbook, 1983), body art and ethnographic practices (Modern Primitives, 1989), feminist performance art (Angry Women, 1991), and independent publishing, (Zines Vol.1 and 2, 1996).Curator and writer Lauren Wetmore presents Incredibly Strange Resistance: 40 years of RE/Search Publications, a history of RE/Search Publications featuring ephemera and footage from V. Vale’s archive. The lecture, followed by a Q&A with Momus publisher Sky Goodden, illuminates RE/Search Publication’s uncompromising practice of political and cultural resistance through DIY publishing – a unique position in North American art-house publishing and a vital perspective for the contemporary context."