END MATTER

Katrina Palmer

UK-based contemporary artist Katrina Palmer builds sculptures using words. In 2013, she won a competition for “groundbreaking site-specific proposals that transform the cultural landscape” run by BBC Radio 4 and Artangel. Palmer worked with a piece of land that had been hollowed out by quarrying—the Isle of Portland, Dorset—to produce a haunting narrative and site-specific walk. The artist book book End Matter forms one part of Palmer’s story-sculpture. Comprised of the sitework’s documentary vestiges—appendices, acknowledg- ments, an epilogue, an index, a map, photographs and postscripts, and audio sections from her broadcast (which one can listen to online or while walking around Portland)—the book tells the story of the loss of Portland’s stone through the mysterious work of The Loss Adjusters, who are responsible for balancing the material and historical shifts of the island’s being. A compelling blend of imagina- tion and reality from this young and adventurous artist.

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EP VOL. 2

Design Fiction

Alex Coles & EP In-Lab (Eds.)

While volume 1 of the EP series was devoted to the early Italian avant-garde, volume 2 looks at the new fascination with fiction as a strategy in negotiating the complex relationship between design theory and practice. Newly commissioned interviews and essays by artists, designers and writers shed light on formations of parafiction like “The Middle of Nowhere,” a quixotic construction of sense, or algorithmic ambiguity, pushing the debate further into speculative, real-fictitious terrains. Included are Paola Antonelli, The Atlas Group, Paul Bailey, Alex Coles, Marcel Dickhage, Anthony Dunne, Umberto Eco, Experimental Jetset, Vilém Flusser, Verina Gfader, Huib Haye van der Werf, Will Holder, Sophie Krier, Carrie Lambert- Beatty, Lucas Maassen, Valle Medina, Philippe Morel, Rick Poynor, Fiona Raby, Benjamin Reynolds, Ilse van Rijn, Cathleen Schuster, Hiroko Shiratori and Bruce Sterling. The EP series moves fluidly between art, design and architecture, by publishing “extended play” thematically edited pocket books as median between popular magazines and academic journals.

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AN EQUINE ANTHOLOGY

Central Pivot Series – Volume 2

Nell Boeschenstein, Josh Garrett-Davis, Richard Saxton & Kirsten Stoltz (Eds.)

The second publication in the new pocket-sized Center Pivot Series from Richard Saxton’s alternative Colorado-based art and environmental collective, M12, and co-published by M12’s Last Chance Press and Jap Sam Books, An Equine Anthology explores the cultural history of the American horse. Interdisciplinary in approach, the series explores and connects the changing realities of rural landscapes and communities around the world, presenting an array of curated notes, documents and research ephemera combined with images, poetry and more formal visual and written works. Stitching together nonlinear histories, testimonies and interpretations of equine culture from the American Southwest and beyond, this anthology includes horsemeat recipes, rodeo histories, photographs and paintings of “the horse” by contemporary western artists. Contributors include noted animal welfare advocate Temple Grandin, M12 founder Richard Saxton, Wapke Fenstra from Myvillages, novelist Josh Garrett-Davis, native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and New Mexico–based photographer Clea G. Hall, among others.

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ERASMUS IS LATE

Liam Gillick

Out of Print

The central character of Erasmus is Late is Erasmus Darwin, opium-eater and brother of the more famous Charles who is indeed late. Late for a dinner party that he himself is giving and whose illustrious guests, already assembled around his table, include: Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy; Masura Ibuka, co-founder of Sony; and Murry Wilson, father of Brian Wilson.

Whilst the guests wait, Erasmus dawdles through contemporary London becoming waylaid by different sites, which represent for Gillick, the development of free-thinking; Gillian Gillick, the artist’s mother, illustrates these sites with line drawings. Erasmus Darwin epitomises for Gillick the activity of free-thinking; a form of political pursuit dependent on wealth and leisure and problematic in its relationship to ‘unfree’ thought and the working classes.

On one level a guide to contemporary London seen through the eyes of a Georgian, Erasmus is Late is also an examination of pre-Marxist positions, an ill-researched investigation of a Utopian optimism that is struggling to predict the future.

Second Edition. Originally published 1995.

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TICIO ESCOBAR

The Invention of Distance

Adriana Almada (Ed.)

This bilingual volume inaugurates a series of books honoring writings by major art critics from around the world. An incisive commentator on the unexpected connections between the art of indigenous peoples and contemporary art, Paraguayan art critic/curator Ticio Escobar has been a prominent figure in Latin-American criticism for over 30 years. Combining philosophical reflection with ethnographic observation, Escobar defends the relevance of indigenous art as a creator and producer of genius forms. The essays in this volume are arranged into four thematic sections and tied together by one of the writer’s most crucial ideas: the importance of distance when confronting a work of art. Escobar was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (1998) and the inaugural International Association of Art Critics Prize for Distinguished Contribution to Art Criticism (2011). His writings, collected here for the first time, are complimented with writings by Marek Bartelik and Adriana Almada.

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EVEN THE DEAD RISE UP

Francis McKee

Nina Power (Ed.)

Even the Dead Rise Up, and the political becomes personal. In Francis McKee’s first novel, observations of séances, scientific advances, group education outings, and Kurdish protests for the disappeared become mixed with his own Tarot-influenced visions; a haunting spirit appears; the relation between political resistance and Spiritualism is cast as an insurrectionary force and a millenarian energy. McKee pushes language to match the raw material of the stories, which are documented through journal entries that move from Scottish islands to Puerto Rico. The author is an Irish writer and curator working in Glasgow. Since 2006 he has been the director of the CCA, Glasgow, and a lecturer and research fellow at Glasgow School of Art. He has written How to know what’s really happening (Sternberg Press, 2016) and co-published extensively on the work of artists linked to Glasgow. Even the Dead Rise Up is published by Book Works as part of the Common Objectives series and edited by Nina Power.

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EXTENDING THE DIALOGUE

Urška Jurman, Christiane Erharter & Rawley Grau (Eds.)

Representing 12 countries throughout Eastern Europe, the 18 authors in this fascinating reader include past grant recipients, awardees and jury members of the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory at the ERSTE Foundation, Austria, since 2008. Extending The Dialogue is a survey collection of urgencies and agencies in art history, art writing, art and cultural production from across this cultural-political geography. Authors’ scholarly, curatorial and cultural investments provide a referential—if fragmented and incomplete— picture of current conditions in art and culture within the region in the 21st century. Subjects covered address art within geopolitics, feminist, post-colonial and minority positions and issues of power. Contributors include Edit András, Fouad Asfour, Keti Chukhrov, Karel Císar, Ekaterina Degot, Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes, Alenka Gregoric, Daniel Grún, Sabine Hänsgen, Tímea Junghaus, Klara Kemp-Welch, Miklavž Komelj, Lev Kreft and Aldo Milohnic, Kirill Medvedev, Piotr Piotrowski, Jelena Vesic, Raluca Voinea and WHW.

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THE FABRICATOR’S TALE

Katrina Palmer

Experimental writer and artist Katrina Palmer uses language as a material which she performs in private readings or in live, public performances. Her second publication from Book Works, The Fabricator’s Tale, is comprised of 24 tense and violent stories intertwined to form a narrative whole but twisted into a parody of a novel. Reminiscent of the extremist storytelling of William Burroughs and Kathy Acker as well as the Cinema of Transgression, Palmer’s nightmarish fantasies pack a visceral punch. Neatly contained in this compact novel-scaled publication, the short, abstract and disturbing vignettes expose the repressed tensions and malaise of contemporary life in a fantasy-space that upends male/ female power relations, the animate and inanimate, and the cracking points of human subjectivity. Based in London, Palmer is also the author of The Dark Object, and recently awarded the new but highly acclaimed UK Artangel Open Commission.

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Fault Lines

Art In Germany 1945–1955

John-Paul Stonard

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FEATURE RECONSTRUCTION

Shezad Dawood

London-based artist Shezad Dawood uses this book to expound upon his film, Feature, which deconstructs the iconography and mythology of the classic Hollywood western by presenting a series of live performances that were linked by the Battle of Big Horn narrative. “My family’s originally from India and Pakistan, I was born in London in Hammersmith and I’ve lived in various cities and countries,” Dawood has explained. This work is “a meeting ground of the myth of the American West and Islamic mysticism, looking at the way that both mythologies began in the desert.” This book guarantees you’ll never watch a John Wayne western the same way again.

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