John Cage | A Year From Monday

John Cage

A Year From Monday

Middletown, USA: Wesleyan University Press, 1967

23 x 20.3 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Subtitled New Lectures and Writings, A Year from Monday is John Cage’s second book, following the 1961 release Silence (also published by the Wesleyan University Press). The volume is a collection of essays, lectures and journal entries from 1961 to 1967. It includes an early version of "Diary: How to Improve the World (you will only make matters worse)”, which was later republished by The Something Else Press and, posthumously, expanded into a full book by Siglio Press. 

The book also features texts about several of Cage’s contemporaries, including "26 Statements Re Duchamp" (1963),  "Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas" (1964), "Miró in Third Person: 8 Statements" (1967), and "Nam June Paik: A Diary" (1965). 

"Daniel Charles: Well, where did the title of your second book, A Year from Monday, come from?

John Cage: From a plan a group of friends and I made to meet each other again in Mexico 'a year from next Monday’. We were together on a Saturday. And we were never able to fulfil that plan. It’s a form of silence ...

Daniel Charles: Is your second book very different from the first one?

John Cage: It deals in particular with change. Consequently, it touches on plans. Or at least, it englobes something in the future - keeping the future in sight. Frankly, when I thought of the title, I wasn’t being pessimistic, contrary to what you might be led to think from what I’m saying. The very fact that our plan failed, the fact that we were unable to meet does not mean that anything failed. The plan wasn’t a failure.”

- For The Birds

A physical book which compiles conceptual books by various artists

[Various artists]

A physical book which compiles conceptual books by various artists

Madison, USA: Partial Press, 2022

180 pp., 5.83 x 8.27”, softcover

Edition size unknown

A compendium that collects a series of ‘conceptual’ or ‘unrealized’ books and moves them one step closer to realization by bounding them together and getting them into bookstores. 

Edited and published (as Partial Press) by Carley Gomez and Levi Sherman, the book’s full title is 

A Physical Book Which Compiles Conceptual Books by Various Artists: Possibly Undermining Their Conceptual Commitment to Dematerialization, but Also Sparking Unforeseen Juxtapositions and Insinuating the Works into New Situations.

Featuring over ninety contributors from around the world, the volume presents books that previously only existed as "verbal statements, descriptions, or provocations”. Beyond conceptual works, the book features rhetorical, impossible and implausible books.

The title can be purchased from Fungus Books, in Pittsburgh, a small but well-curated store dedicated to "Rare, new, & used books, records, printed matter.” Fungus was founded by writer Ed Steck, alongside partners Seth Glick (Concept Art Gallery) and Michael Seamans (Mind Cure Records). Seamans stocks a small display of vinyl records in the store, where one might find Sun Ra, Sonic Youth, Brian Eno, Moondog, Jandek, and Terry Riley disks. 

The bookstore carries some of my favourite contemporary publishers of artists’ books: Primary Information, Siglio Press, and New Documents. Our visit was brief, but I spotted several gems, such as 

Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine Plans, a rare Ben Vautier pamphlet, Steve McCaffery’s double volume Seven Pages Missing and Marcel Duchamp’s The Blind Man reprint. Other author/artists in stock included Harry Smith, Susan Howe, Luis Bunuel, Bernadette Mayer, William Burroughs, Yvonne Rainer, James Baldwin, Valie Export, Dieter Roth, Destroy All Monsters, and many others. 

The store is located at 700 & 1/2 South Trenton Avenue, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Visit their site here. 

A physical book which compiles conceptual books by various artists is also available as an ebook, for $2.00, here.  

"When Levi first envisioned the anthology, he pictured conceptual books in the vein of 1960s and ‘70s Conceptual art, and we did receive such books. Like many Fluxus publications, these conceptual books build a frame through which to view everyday experiences in a new light. An Index of Beginnings and Endings by Ellen Bruex makes this explicit: “Instructions: Move through your days with awareness of new beginnings and final endings.” Some instruction pieces lend themselves to execution, relying on chance to produce novel outcomes. Random Color Generated Instant Book by Esther K Smith & Susan Happersett exemplifies this approach with detailed, plainspoken instructions and everyday materials. Other instructions are more poignant as mental exercises. In this category, we would place Who Has Seen the Wind by Cathryn Miller of Byopia Press. One could feasibly print her ninety-nine sonograms of the wind, but it is Miller’s Duchampian declaration that these imagined prints are art, specifically asemic poems, that is so striking. Despite their variety, these works all share Conceptual art’s emphasis on the viewer/reader rather than the artist. They remind us that reading is a creative, constitutive act.”

 - Carley Gomez

Dorothy Iannone | You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends

Dorothy Iannone

You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends

New York City, USA: Siglio Press, 2014

320 pp., 7.25 × 9", softcover

Edition size unknown

Edited by Lisa Pearson, this volume reproduces both familiar and rarely seen work, including works from long out-of-print artist's books as well as unpublished writings and drawings. Many are reprinted in their entirety, including the 80-page Danger in Düsseldorf, which was originally published by Hansjörg Mayer in 1973. 

You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends is available from the publisher, here, for $45.00 US. 

Iannone died in Berlin two days ago, on December 26th, at the age of eighty-nine. 

Printed Matter NYC Art Book Fair Signings

 

A few of the many book signings taking place this weekend at the Printed Matter Art Book Fair:

1:30 pm Nicole Rudick at Siglio Press

2:30 pm Lucy Ives at Siglio Press

3:00 pm: Jack Pierson at Bywater Brothers, C52

4:00 pm: AA Bronson  at booth F16

Printed Matter Art Book Fair

 

Some pics taken from Instagram of the Printed Matter Art Book Fair, which runs from 1 - 7pm today and then 11am to 7pm on Saturday, and 11am to 5pm on Sunday, at 548 West 22nd Street in Chelsea.

Entry is five dollars and Sunday is free. Visit nyabf2022.printedmatterartbookfairs.org for details. 

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. 

N.E. Thing Co.: Companies Act (Volume 1), Part 2

N.E. Thing Company

N.E. Thing Co.: Companies Act (Volume 1)

Vancouver, Canada: Brick Press, 2020

362 pp, 21.3 x 27.5 cm., softcover

Edition of 500

Between the proliferation of Artist Book Fairs (pre-pandemic) and the ease of online distribution, the market for artists' publications continues to grow, and once unsaleable books that languished in storage for years are now only available on the secondary market, often prohibitively priced. 

To counter the scarcity of the originals, many publishers have undertaken the difficult work of producing reprints of these rare titles, in order to make them available again at affordable prices. 

Five years ago four Marcel Broodthaers titles were reprinted in the span of a few months, by Siglio Press, Granary Books and the Museum of Modern Art. Siglio has also produced reprints of long-unavailable titles by Sophie Calle, Ray Johnson, John Cage, Bernadette Mayer and others, alongside their schedule of new publications. Similarly, Primary Information produces both new artists’ books and facsimile reprints (Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer, Dan Graham, Constance DeJong, Tony Conrad, etc.). Other publishers who take this approach include The Everyday Press (Yves Klein), Zédélé Editions (Jan Dibbets, Peter Downsbrough, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Long, Herman de Vries), Dancing Foxes Press (Fred Sandback), JRP Ringer (Dorothy Ianonne, FILE Megazine) and Boabooks (a series of great Ulises Carrión titles).  

I have no compunction about this practice. If there is renewed interest in a band, their recordings are re-issued, without concern for the collector who owned the "first editions". The authors of novels and non-fiction often see their books returned to print when the market suggests there may be a demand. These titles might feature a new cover design, an added preface or other extras that would be complicated with an artist’s book. Unlike an author’s book1, an artists’ book is typically designed as a cohesive work. Short of re-engaging the artist to reimagine the original title, a facsimile seems the most practical route. Most are pretty faithful to the original, with occasional concessions to available paper stocks, and sometimes scale. 

The Brick Press version of N.E. Thing Co.: Companies Act (Volume 1) is perhaps the first instance I am aware of that constitutes a reinterpreted facsimile. 

Inspired by the ambiguous copyright of the original (“The Material in the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. Book Can Be Used By Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere. Please Let Us Know When You Do This.”), Ryan Smith  set out to produce a version of the book that is both loyal to the original and also acknowledges the time that has passed in the forty-plus years since publication.  

This includes the physical properties of the book, but also the shifting political and social mores. 

Rather than work from the original files, or clean up the scans in Photoshop, Smith maintains the scuffs, cracks and creases of the copy he found in a second hand store a few years prior. Most surviving copies of the book are pretty beat up (see previous post).2

This choice helps distinguish the reprint from the original but also serves as a reminder that cultural artifacts accrue meaning over the years, particularly if they are in circulation.3 

The original book looked like a series of photocopies, a stylistic choice that was revisited in the exhibition catalogue for Art Metropole's 1992 retrospective Media Works, on the works of Iain Baxter and NETCO. This lends itself well to the Brick Press approach of not tidying up the scans. The price Smith paid for the original book, seventy-five dollars, is also included as if written in pencil on the upper right hand corner of the title page. This is bound to cause some confusion, as the reprint retails for around fifty dollars.

The reinterpreted facsimile also seeks to correct offensive language used in the press at the time. Several of the clippings have a distinct tone of misogyny when discussing Ingrid. She is referred to as "Iain's pretty blonde wife", for example. Rather than let these instances go unchecked, Smith runs a thumbtack scratch through these lines. There's a bit of a righteous FTFY4 feel to the intervention, but it does serve to highlight the passage of time and draw further attention to Ingrid Baxter's erasure. 

The history of Canadian collectives is littered with founding members reduced to footnotes after parting ways, particularly if they no longer pursue a career in the arts. But it's especially egregious in the case of the N.E. Thing Company. Both Baxters were listed as Co-Presidents of the Corporation - and it's only employees - yet the duo's works are often misattributed to Iain Baxter as solo creations, even in the Vancouver Art Gallery, the city in which they worked. 

Baxter is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and he has been awarded the Order of Ontario, the the Order of British Columbia and the Order of Canada. His solo career has far-outlasted his time in the N.E.Thing. Co., but it is also clear that the international success of the couple's collaborative work are the primary impetus for these awards. 

After their divorce - the year of the original publication - Ingrid Baxter stopped producing art.  

"I went back to school for my master’s degree," she told Art in America in 2014, "I bought the canoe and boat rental business in 1981, and it has since grown way beyond whatever I imagined it could be." This business - the Deep Cove Canoe and Kayak Centre, in North Vancouver - now employs more than sixty people.

Approaching an art practice as a corporation was a wildly influential venture (see the work of Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc., Xavier Veilhan, Fabrice Hyber la, Dana Wyse, etc., etc.), as was opening a restaurant or store as an artwork (Michael Rakowitz' Enemy Kitchen, Damian Hirst's Pharmacy, Jonathan Berger's The Store, Keith Haring's Pop Shop, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin's The Shop, and so on).5 Ingrid Baxter's role in the legacy of posing prescient questions about the relationship between art and commerce deserves more than being referred to as "Iain Baxters then-wife". 

And this is gradually happening, as the art world continues its reckoning with the marginalization of women that it has perpetuated for years. Ingrid Baxter's contributions are slowly being reinstated into the canon, including at the VAG, who recently adjusted the attributions in their collection. 

For me, this Brick Press publication is still first and foremost a facsimile reprint of an important book that I wasn't able to own previously, but these discreet gestures introduce compelling ideas about what future collaborative publishing might begin to look like. 

The title is available from the publisher, here, for $50.00 CDN. 

1. The very fact that we do not call them "author's books" makes the term "artists' book" suspicious, but until a good alternative is agreed upon...

2. There is only one copy listed on ABE, by Gordon Simpson's ANARTIST store. It is being offered for $750 US and the condition is listed as "very good, except covers are good with lots of creases": https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&cm_sp=SearchF-_-home-_-Results&an=n.e.thing&tn=companies+act&kn=

3. See Derek Sullivan's recent artist book, here: https://artistsbooksandmultiples.blogspot.com/2021/08/derek-sullivan-evidence-of-avant-garde.html

4. FTFY is urban slang for "Fixed that for you", which originated in Reddit memes. The acronym encompasses both copy-editing (corrected spelling or grammar in a post) and also sarcasm (a Democrat editing a Trump tweet to subvert it’s meaning, for example). 

5. Restaurants by artists that predate Eye Scream include FOOD by Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden and Gordon Matta-Clark in 1971, Allen Ruppersberg's Al's Cafe in 1969, projects by Les Levine and others.

John Cage | Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)

John Cage

Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)

Los Angeles, USA: Siglio Press, 2019

200 pp., 5.75 x 8.25", softcover

Edition size unknown

An expanded paperback edition of the now out-of-print Siglio Diary collection. This version reproduces parts one through eight of Cage's Diary (see previous post) along with previously unpublished material from Cage’s incomplete ninth entry (of a planned ten parts).

It is available from the publisher, here, for $24.00 US. 

John Cage | Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)

John Cage

Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)

Los Angeles, USA: Siglio Press, 2015

176 pp., 6 x 8.5", hardcover

Edition size unknown

Poets Clark Coolidge and Michael Palmer met at the legendary Vancouver Poetry Conference in 1963, a three week summer session course at the University of British Columbia, organized by Warren Tallman and Robert Creeley, that featured Allen Ginsberg, Margaret Avison, Charles Olson and numerous others. "We took to each other instantly," remembers Palmer, "and started immediately talking about jazz, John Cage, and composing aleatory works on the typewriter. The musical connection--both jazz and new music--was an immediate opening for both of us because we were both very much involved in that world.” 



Their shared interests led to the forming of the short-lived periodical Joglars (1964 - 1966). Primarily a poetry magazine, the publication also included works by contributors who crossed over into other fields, such as filmmaker Stan Brakhage, concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay and Fluxus artist Jackson Mac Low. 



Coolidge solicited a contribution from Cage for the third (and final) issue, who responded with the first instalment of what would become one of his most celebrated lectures, Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse).



"Since Coolidge's magazine was printed by photoset from typescripts," Cage wrote in the forward to A Year From Monday, which reprinted the work, "I used an IBM electric typewriter to print my text. I used twelve different type faces, letting chance operations determine which face would be used for which statement. So, too, the left marginations were determined, the right marginations being the result of not hyphenating words and at the same time keeping the number of characters per line forty-three or less."

Siglio Press, the LA-based independent publisher founded by Lisa Pearson in 2008 with a mandate to produce “uncommon books at the intersection of art & literature” released a new version of Diary in 2015. The hardcover book collects - for the first time - all eight completed parts of the Diary, which was written and published over a sixteen-year period. Co-editors Joe Biel and Richard Kraft stay true to the spirit of Cage's chance-determined layouts with a lovingly produced volume, with coloured texts and a letter-pressed cover.



Cage described these writings "a mosaic of ideas, statements, words and stories. It is also a diary." In addition to the typeface and layout (and later colour), the length of the texts were also the result of Cage’s oft-used chance determinacy procedures, including tossed coins and consulting the I Ching:



"For each day, I determined by chance operations how many parts of the mosaic I would write and how many words there would be in each. The number of words per day was to equal, or by the last statement written, to exceed one hundred words."

These techniques, best known in Cage’s musical compositions, push the Diary into the category of constrained writing, but the insights, anecdotes and quotations (often truncated) are so rich that the conceit does not overwhelm the reader.

In much the same way that he did not object to incidental sounds interfering with his music, Cage's playful meandering here includes excerpts from the radio, television and overheard conversation, alongside quotations from books and newspapers, recipes even. These are randomly spliced and often unattributed. The collaged or cut-up writing style (which Cage refers to as “a mosaic”) was popularized by William S Burroughs, who learned it from artist and writer Brion Gysin. It can be traced back further, to Dadaist Tristan Tzara, and even Lewis Carroll:

“For first you write a sentence,

And then you chop it small;

Then mix the bits, and sort them out

Just as they chance to fall:

The order of the phrases makes

No difference at all.”

- Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur, 1881

While the stories are decidedly more personal than Cage’s other writings, it is a diary in the loosest sense of the term, in that it slights chronology and features very little in the way of confessional biography. There are no candid passages, for example, about choreographer Merce Cunningham, Cage’s romantic partner for half of his life. Even a figure as radically unconcerned with convention such as Cage was still coy about his sexuality in pre-Stonewall America, but it is shocking how many contemporary biographies still describe their relationship as one of mere “collaborators”.

Many of Cage’s favourite subjects are included in the text(s), such as Zen Buddhism, chess,  mushrooms and music. He muses on a wide variety of subjects, including composing:

"He wanted me to agree that the piano tuner and the piano maker have nothing 

to do with the composition. The younger ones had said: Whoever 

makes the stretcher isn’t separate from the painting." 

education:

“Encouraged, instead of frightened, children could learn several languages before 

reaching age of four, at that age engaging in the invention of their own languages. 

Play’d be play instead of being, as now, release of repressed anger.”

utopia:

"It's impracticality is no longer to be assumed."

and the new arts:

"We still have everything we used to have. The Mona Lisa's still with us, for 

instance. On top of which we have the Mona Lisa with a moustache". 

This is one of several references to Marcel Duchamp, who Cage counted as a close friend and chess partner. He frequently mentions other artists, composers, writers and thinkers, including Henry David Thoreau, Arnold Schoenberg, Marshall McLuhan, Margaret Meade, David Tudor (the pianist who first performed Cage’s legendary silent composition 4’33”), Jasper Johns, James Joyce and Buckminster Fuller. In the forward to M (Writings ’67 - ’73), Cage cites the latter as the project's inspiration:

“I began the Diary optimistically in 1965 to celebrate the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, his concern for human needs and world resources, his comprehensive scientific designs for making life on earth an unequivocal success, his insistence that problem solving be continuously regenerative.”

Four more instalments of the Diary appeared in M, after first being published in a variety of important artists’ periodicals.

In June of 1966, Cage performed the first text at the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado, and it was reprinted in the the Spring 1967 issue of Aspen Magazine. Founded by Phyllis Johnson, Aspen was a multi-media periodical that billed itself as “the first 3-dimensional magazine”. Ten issues were published between 1965 and 1971 as either boxes or folders, which contained audio recordings, films, posters, artist multiples and other objects, alongside texts by authors, poets and artists. Johnson commissioned guest editors and designers, including Andy Warhol, Dan Graham, Jon Hendricks, Brian O’Doherty and Angus MacLise.

Diary was included in Issue #4, designed by Quentin Fiore, and titled The McLuhan Issue, which showcased the ideas of cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan (who had recently collaborated with Fiore on his most recent book The Medium is the Massage). Cage cites McLuhan on the second page of the Diary (“As McLuhan says everything happens at once”), the first quotation after Kierkegaard. Other McLuhanisms liberally pepper the text. The McLuhan Issue also included several posters, a flexi-disc record of electronic music, an article about a nature trail for the blind and a folder of advertisements, which includes a Something Else Press newsletter.

In addition to publishing possibly the most important series of artists’ books ever (including Cage’s Notations), the Something Else Press produced a series of twenty staple-bound booklets under the name The Great Bear Pamphlets. Many of the contributors were involved with either Fluxus, Happenings or experimental poetry (or all three), and several were once students of Cage. The series included projects by George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Al Hansen, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Claes Oldenburg, Nam Jun Paik, Diter Rot and Emmett Williams. The third part of Cage’s ongoing serial Diary was published as Great Bear #11.

The following year another Diary entry (subtitled Continued) would appear as part of Issue #4 of S.M.S., William Copley’s portfolio periodical which took a very similar approach to Aspen. The August 1968 issue also featured contributions by Arman, James Lee Byars, Christo, Roy Lichtenstein, Lil Picard and La Monte Young. Cage’s Diary was printed on heavy stock paper with a beautiful mylar cover printed with colored split-fountain typography (see below).

Other periodicals to publish the Diary entries include Tri-Quarterly (1969), Liberations (1971) and New Literary History (1971). When the texts were compiled in X, M and A Year From Monday, by the Wesleyan University Press, they were reproduced in black and white. The Siglio editors, though, were drawn to the use of colour in the Great Bear Pamphlet, as they recount in the afterword:

"Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, in collaboration with Cage, employed a two-colour process (using various mixtures of red and blue) to add another chance-determined layer to the text. The use of colour was an additional step which imbues the text with greater physicality, something that seems both musical and sculptural. The varying typefaces, the patterns of indentation, and - most dramatically - the shifts in colour give the words a spatial dimension. These qualities ask us to hear the words as well as see them."

They go on to explain the process they used to determine the layout, colour and typefaces for the text, and the questions they asked themselves to ensure the end result would turn out well (based on Cage's belief that the success of chance determinacy is based on the quality of questions being asked).

The producers of the John Cage tribute CD A Chance Operation faced a similar dilemma in 1993. How could they honour the spirit of Cage with a recording, when Cage himself famously didn't own a record player, preferring to listen to the sounds of traffic? Their solution was to divide the dozen or so tracks into 99 sections so that the disc could be played continuously without interruption, or put on shuffle for an almost infinite set of possibilities.

Cage made a recording of the Diary in Maur, Switzerland in June of 1991, a little over a year before his death. The typography of the published versions determined the stereo distribution, microphone placement, and volume. On the resulting 8 CD box set, Cage's warm tone feels like a disembodied voice in your head. Prior to the Siglio volume, this was the only way to own the complete text.

Cage would continue to write and revise and reorganize the Diary throughout his life. He planned ten sections and was working on the 9th when he died in August of 1992. He notes in the forward to X: Writings ’79-’82 (which included the final Diary entries) that he was hoping to “find a way of writing which comes from ideas, is not about them, but which produces them.”

Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) is out of print and sells for between $60 and $80 US on the secondary market. A second, soft-cover expanded edition is available from the publisher (see next post).  

Felix Gonzalez-Torres | Photostats

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Photostats

Siglio Press, 2020

88 pp., 8.25 x 6.5", hardcover

Edition size unknown

Released in November of last year, this volume is co-edited by Richard Kraft and Lisa Pearson, with writings by Mónica de la Torre and Ann Lauterbach.

Available from the publisher, here, for $36 US. 

Visit Siglio Press all weekend long at the Printed Matter Virtual Artist Book Fair. 

"Made at the height of the AIDS crisis, in a pre-internet era, the photostats—a series of fixed works with white serif text on black fields framed behind glass to create a reflective surface—are profoundly suggestive lists of political, cultural, and historical references. These works disrupt linear time, the seemingly causal relationships of chronology, and hierarchies of information as they ask how we receive and prioritize information, how we remember and forget, and how we continuously create new meaning. The photostats have a deep kinship with poetry in their use of specificity and ambiguity, operating as open fields: each juxtaposition and its oblique friction illuminates connections and disconnections.

The photostats also recall the screen—the television, and now the computer and phone—in which information is furiously delivered, and we are challenged to parse substance from surface, what we choose to assimilate from what we choose to reject. In the gallery, the glass surface of the framed photostats brings the viewer into an intimate relationship with the work as she may literally see herself in it—reflecting, too, her own assumptions. Now, as we find ourselves thirty years later, in a global pandemic, with a national reckoning in the face of enduring protests against police brutality and racial injustice, there is more to see of ourselves in the photostats and their uncanny multiplicity: layers of history with which we are only beginning to grapple as a society, grief in the wake of devastating loss, and the possibility of reinvention and regeneration.

Intended as discrete space to closely read the photostats with sustained attention, this elegant, clothbound volume opens from both sides: on one side, the framed photostats are reproduced as objects as one might encounter them in a gallery; on the other, white texts appear on full-bleed black fields to be read as writing. Its intimate size and its attention to the book as a physical object create a new way to experience the photostats.

In between the two sides, there are gorgeous and thought-provoking writings by poets Mónica de la Torre and Ann Lauterbach that do not explicate the work but instead enter it. Lauterbach penetrates the atmosphere of the photostats, contemplating mourning and memory while invoking Gonzalez-Torres’s spirit of generosity. De la Torre mines Gonzalez-Torres’s dates and references in her constraint-based essay, tracing time from past to present, while keenly attentive to the impossibility of linearity. Both demonstrate the richness of the work and its potential to inspire multiple readings."

- press release

 

The Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair

PMVABF launches today at 4pm with countless participating vendors, including Art Metropole, backbonebooks, Book Works, Bywater Bros. Editions, Draw Down Books, Fillip, Jonathan A. Hill, Bookseller, NERO EDITIONS, New Documents, Nieves, Primary Information, RE/Search and Search & Destroy, RITE Editions, siglio, Slow Editions, Tenderbooks, Three Star Books, White Columns, Whitechapel Gallery and dozens and dozens of others. 

Watch for a live worldwide drawing event in honour of the late Jason Polan, and a performance by ambient musician Laraaji. 

An incomplete list of the many vendors participating this year: 

& Half Letter Press

3 Hole Press

8-Ball Community

A Magic Mountain

A Published Event

A.I.R. Gallery

a/b Books

Aarati Akkapeddi & Philipp Schmitt

Aaron Krach

ABC (Artists’ Books Cooperative)

After 8 Books

 aka Bunker Basement

AKIO NAGASAWA Gallery | Publishing

Alder & Frankia

Alicia's Klassic Kool Shoppe

Allied Productions, Inc./Le Petit Versailles

Almighty & Insane Books

Almine Rech Editions

Alternate Projects

AMBruno

André Frère Éditions

Andrew Miksys

Animal Press

Anteism Books x The Hole

Antenna's Press Street Press

Anthology Editions

Anthology Film Archives

Aperture

Arcana: Books on the Arts

Arcangel Surfware

Archive Books

Arquitectura y fantasía 

Art Metropole

Art Museum

Art Resources Transfer (A.R.T. Press)

ARTFORUM/BOOKFORUM

Arthur Fournier Fine & Rare

Artphilein Editions

Atelier Éditions

Autonomedia 

AVARIE

B&D Press

backbonebooks 

Bad Student Press

Bard Graduate Center Publications

BASEMENT

Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum

billy ocallaghan / 

Bitter

blisterZine

BLOW UP PRESS

BOA NOITE

BOM DIA BOA TARDE 

BOMB Magazine

Book Works

Books for All Press

Brain Washing from Phone Towers 

Bread and Puppet Press

Brian Cassidy Bookseller 

Brick Press

Bricks from the Kiln

Bronze Age

BULK SPACE

Bywater Bros. Editions

Caboose / The Smudge

Calipso Press

CAMP BOOKS

Candor Arts

Capricious 

Carlo Quispe

Carnage NYC

Caroline Paquita-Kern

Case Publishing

Cash Machine

CASSANDRA Press

Center for Book Arts

Centre d'édition 

Chimurenga 

Christina Martinelli

Christopher Branson

Clifton Meador

Clown Kisses Press

Co—Conspirator Press

Cody DeFranco

Cold Cube Press

COLLI independent art gallery

Colour Code

Coloured Publishing

Colpa Press

Connecticut

Contemporary Art Review 

Conveyor Editions

Corraini Edizioni

Cory Emma Siegler

Counterbound

cpress

crevasse

cripple

CRISIS EDITIONS + DANE PRESS

Dale Wittig

Danarti Zine

Dancing Foxes Press

Datz Press 

David Kordansky Gallery

David Zwirner Books

Deadbeat Club

DelMonico Books

Desapê

Dia Art Foundation

Diagonal Press

diasporan savant press

dispersed holdings

District of Columbia (D.C.)

Dizzy Magazine

dmp editions

Dobbin Books

Dongola Limited Editions

Draw Down Books

Dream Press

Drum Machine Editions

East of Borneo

ECU Press/Libby Leshgold Gallery

Ecuador

Ediciones El Fuerte

Edition Patrick Frey

Edition Taube

Edizione Multicolore

EFA Robert Blackburn 

EMBAJADA 

Endless Editions

EXILE Books

EYE IN VISION

F Magazine

Façadomy

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Siglio Press Announce New Ray Johnson title

Frog Pond Splash: Collages by Ray Johnson was announced today as being released this fall by Siglio Press. The title is edited by Elizabeth Zuba and will include texts by Johnson confidant William S. Wilson.


"This gemlike Ray Johnson book celebrates his friendship with writer and logophile William S. Wilson in pictures and words.

Dubbed "Ray Johnson's Boswell," writer and logophile William S. Wilson was one of legendary artist Ray Johnson's closest friends and biggest champions. He was also perhaps Johnson’s most trusted poetic muse and synthesizer of referents and references. The influence was mutual: throughout their lifelong friendship, begun when both men were in their twenties, writer and artist challenged and enriched one another’s work.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition of Ray Johnson works from Wilson's archive at the Art Institute of Chicago, Frog Pond Splash embodies the energy, expansiveness and motion of their work and their friendship. Editor Elizabeth Zuba has selected short, perspicacious texts by Wilson (from both published and unpublished writings) and collage works by Johnson to create juxtapositions that do not explicate or illustrate; rather, they form a loose collage-like letter of works and writings that are less bound than assembled, allowing the reader to put the pieces together, to respond, to add to and return to the way Johnson required of his correspondents and fellow travelers.

Taking its title from Wilson's haiku equivalence of Johnson's process, Frog Pond Splash is a small book but many things: a collage-like homage to their friendship, a treasure chest of prismatic "correspondances," as well as an unusual portrait of the disappearing, fractured Johnson through Wilson's words. Zuba's nuanced selection and arrangement of images and texts in this sumptuous little volume honors Johnson's "open system" (which rejected closed and consistent meanings, codes and symbols) in its open, associative, and intimate playfulness.

- D.A.P.  listing

Previously Siglio Press have published Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson and a reprint of Johnson's classic Something Else Press title The Paper Snake.

Frog Pond Splash is due to be released on November 20th, 2020.

Siglio Press

Siglio Press has published books by and about Marcel Broodthaers, John Cage, Sophie Calle, Dick Higgins, Ray Johnson, Nancy Spero and many others (see post below on their new Bernadette Mayer book). For the month of June they are donating a quarter of their revenue to Black Lives Matter causes.

Visit their site here.

Bernadette Mayer | Memory

Bernadette Mayer
Memory
New York City, USA: Siglio Press, 2020
336 pp., 10 x 7.25"., hardcover
Edition size uknown


Originally published in 1975 (see previous post), long out of print and selling for between two and five hundred dollars on the secondary market, Bernadette Mayer's Memory has just been re-issued by Siglio Press. The new title features 1100 colour illustrations, while the original was strictly text.

"In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer embarked on an experiment: For one month she exposed a roll of 35mm film and kept a daily journal. The result was a conceptual work that investigates the nature of memory, its surfaces, textures and material. Memory is both monumental in scope (over 1100 photographs, two hundred pages of text and six hours of audio recording) and a groundbreaking work by a poet who is widely regarded as one of the most innovative writers of her generation. Presaging Mayer’s durational and constraint-based diaristic works of poetry, it also evinces her extraordinary—and unheralded—contribution to conceptual art.

Mayer has called Memory “an emotional science project,” but it is far from confessional. Rather, this boldly experimental record follows the poet’s eye as she traverses early morning into night, as quotidian minutiae metamorphose into the lyrical, as her stream of consciousness becomes incantatory. The space of memory in Mayer’s work is hyper-precise but also evanescent and expansive. In both text and image, Mayer constructs the mercurial, fleeting consciousness of the present moment from which memory is—as she says—“always there, to be entered, like the world of dreams or an ongoing TV show.”

This publication brings together the full sequence of images and text for the first time in book form, making space for a work that has been legendary but mostly invisible. Originally exhibited in 1972 by pioneering gallerist Holly Solomon, it was not shown again in its entirety until 2016. The text was published without the photographs in 1975 and has been long out of print."

- Siglio Press release

The title is available from the publisher, here, for $45 US. Also available is a signed and numbered deluxe version, in an edition of 31 copies. These copies are accompanied by a unique 6x 9 archival print housed in a vellum envelope inside the book. The special edition is currently available for $235. 

Bernadette Mayer | Memory

Bernadette Mayer
Memory
Planfield, USA: North Atlantic Books, 1975
196 pp., 8.9 x 6.5 x 0.4 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown

Mayer's fifth book began in July of 1971 when she began experimenting with her memory. She shot a roll of 35mm film every day for a month, and kept a rigorous journal. In February of the following year, Memory was shown at 98 Greene Street in New York City: the unedited photographs were mounted on the wall in chronological order, while a recording of narration played over speakers.


“It’s a diary of one month. I wrote incessant notes and made drawings about everything that happened every day.  I wrote down as much as I could without interrupting my life.  It was the month of July, 1971.  I had chosen the month at random without knowing what I would be doing during that month, because I didn’t want to choose a time to do this experiment that would be particularly loaded, or particularly interesting or dull.”

"MEMORY was 1200 color snapshots, 3 x 5, processed by Kodak plus 7 hours of taped narration. I had shot one roll of 35-mm color film every day for the month of July, 1971. The pictures were mounted side by side in row after row along a long wall, each line to be read from left to right, 36 feet by 4 feet. All the images made each day were included, in sequence, along with a 31-part tape, which took the pictures as points of focus, one by one & as taking-off points for digression, filling in the spaces between."

- Bernadette Mayer

The title is long out of print, but last week Siglio Press has released an expanded version, which couples the text and images together for the first time. See next post. 

Siglio Pop-up at MoMA

Beginning today and continuing until July 31st, the publisher Siglio Press has been invited as the second "limited circulation publisher" to be hosted at the newly designed Museum Store at The Museum of Modern Art.

Founded in 2008 by Lisa Pearson and now based in New York’s Hudson River Valley, Siglio is "driven by its feminist ethos and dedicated to publishing uncommon books that live at the intersection of art and literature." The word 'siglio' is defined as the inverse to a boundary (and the tongue-like organ of a bee).

Siglio will launch it's two spring releases—Memory by Bernadette Mayer and The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, edited by Lucy Ives - at the venue. Other titles featured include books by or about Joe Brainard, Marcel Broodthaers, Sophie Calle, John Cage, Dick Higgins, Dorothy Iannone, Ray Johnson and Nancy Spero.

They will also publish The Improbable, a tabloid-style bulletin modelled on Higgins’ Something Else Newsletter, in three issues over the course of the residency. They will include works in a range of forms (essays, treatises, lists, playlets, questionnaires, travelogues, visual art works, etc.) by an eclectic roster of poets, writers, artists, scholars, and curators: Claudia Rankine, Mary Ann Caws, Lucy Ives, Wayne Koestenbaum, Clive Phillpot, Mónica de la Torre, Nicole Rudick, Farnoosh Fathi, Sally Alatalo, Andrea Andersson, Amaranth Borsuk, Elizabeth Zuba, and Matvei Yankelevich, among others. Issues of  The Improbable will be available at the Museum Store at MoMA for free at the pop-up, while supplies last.

Emmanuel Plat, Director of Merchandising, MoMA Retail says, “We are pleased to present Siglio’s list to our audience to further the work they have done to bring art and literature to life.”

Siglio Pres Sale

Currently Siglio Press is offering 25% off of all stock (with a few minor exception). Use the code BOOKJOY when checking out. Siglio Press has published titles by or about Marcel Broodthaers, John Cage, Sophie Calle, Dick Higgins, Dorothy Iannone, Ray Johnson, Bernadette Mayer and many others.

The sale runs until December 9th. Details at http://sigliopress.com.

Boston Art Book Fair

The third annual Boston Art Book Fair takes place this weekend, from November 8th to the 10th, at the Cyclorama at Boston Center for the Arts (539 Tremont St Boston).

Exhibitors include Anthology Editions, Aperture, Benjamin Ogilvy Projects (pictured above), Bomb Magazine, MIT Press (above), DAP, Draw Down Books (above), Homocats, Random Man Editions, Siglio Press (above) and over a hundred other artists and publishers. The event will also feature installations, DJs, workshops and panel discussions. The Boston Art Book Fair is curated and founded by Randi Hopkins and Oliver Mak.

For more information, visit the website, here.

Ken Friedman on Dick Higgins

Fluxus artist and sometimes Fluxus historian Ken Friedman shared this message with friends and colleagues today:


"Dear Colleague,

Last November, Siglio Press published a collection of Dick Higgins’s writings titled Intermedia, Fluxus, and the Something Else Press. Steve Clay of Granary Books and I edited it, and Lisa Pearson of Siglio Press realised it in a beautiful edition that would have pleased Dick immensely. The book includes a lovely biographical memoir about Dick by his daughter, Hannah Higgins.

This book meets exacting standards that Dick set in the essay for the Something Else Press 1965-1966 catalogue, “What to Look for in a Book — Physically.” Natalie Kraft’s elegant design moves between well set pages with rich illustrations and Dick’s own scholarly footnotes for some writings with documentary reproductions of Dick’s own publications for key works, as well as for Dick’s cover designs for many works. Martha Ormiston’s cover uses a Wolf Vostell photo of Dick performing Danger Music, a reminder of just how lively and musical Dick Higgins was.      

In the half year since the book was published, it has been the subject of reviews in Artforum, Artist’s Books & Multiples, Brooklyn Rail, Glasstire, Hyperallergic, Kirkus, Leonardo, Svenska Dagbladet, White Hot Magazine, and more. Many of the reviews offer a deep, reflective look at Dick’s contributions to the arts of the late 20th century — and the shadows he continues to cast on the arts of our time. Siglio built a terrific web page for this book, and it allows you to link direct to most of the reviews, with essays by Natalee Harren, Dave Dyment, Jennie Waldow, Michael Galbreth (of the Art Guys), James Gibbons, Jack Ox, Mark Bloch, and Bengt af Klintberg, the Fluxus artist and a Something Else Press author.

http://sigliopress.com/book/dick-higgins/

To celebrate the advent of May, Siglio is offering a 20% discount on this book. Even if you have the book already, the page is worth a look with its links to some fine reviews.

If you haven’t yet seen it, I invite you to visit the Dick Higgins page at Siglio Press.

Warm wishes,

Ken"


See previous post for an event taking place tonight at Printed Matter.