Lincoln Kirstein

The Program Notes

Randall Bourscheidt

In the hands of a dance enthusiast like Lincoln Kirstein, the mundane form of the program note became a short essay providing useful information for the audience and beating a drum for the value of classical dance and the intimacy achieved by the greatest choreographers and their living or historical musical collaborators. This delightful collection of notes from the School of American Ballet, from the man who brought Balanchine to America, shows the young Kirstein learning about ballet and passing this knowledge on to his readers, and eventually espousing a New Deal faith in the power of American culture to transform traditional modes into populist expressions with a native resonance. A modest but irrepressible complement to Lincoln Kirstein’s other published work, in his inimitable voice.

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JUTTA KOETHER

f.

Isabelle Graw & Daniel Birnbaum (Eds.)

First published in German in 1987, this is artist and writer Jutta Koether’s meditation on painting. In novella form, f. follows several disembodied female characters as they consider velvet, coral, the curtain, money, color, red. These objects, these things, help the narrator and other characters come into being, but it is paintings that embody who the narrator really is: “Even if I’m their hostage when I look at them, I’m not inferior to them. I lie down, stand, or sit in front of them and, in this moment, I’m everything they affect in me.” Unlike people, paintings are fixed, explicit with their intentions and challenges—in the end they will still be here, outlasting those who made them or who looked at them. A facsimile of the original German publication is included in this volume.

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QUINN LATIMER

Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems

Quinn Latimer’s arresting writings find expression in literature and theory as well as contemporary art and its history. Moving from Southern California to Europe, crossing geographies and genres, her texts record specters and realities of culture, migration and displacement, compounding the vagaries of rhetoric and poetics with those of personal history and criticism. Composed in the space between the page and live performance, Latimer’s recent essays and poems examine issues of genealogy and influence, the poverty and privilege of place, architecture’s relationship to language, and feminist economies of writing, reading and art making. Shifting between written language and live address, between the needs of the internal and the external voice, Like a Woman is refrain, litany and chorus. Latimer is a California-born poet and critic with writings and readings featured internationally including REDCAT, Los Angeles; Qalandiya International, Ramallah/Jerusalem, and Venice Architecture Biennale. Latimer is editor in chief of publications for dOCUMENTA (14) (2017).

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Legende

Alexis Vaillant

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LET’S START PLAYING THE GAME

Freek Lomme & Veerle Devreese (Eds.)

Life’s a game—but who are the players? Let’s Start Playing the Game, a reader designed to accompany the 2015 exhibition, proposes play as a synonym for social interaction. Offering a variety of perspectives by artists, designers and writers, and including four new games that were featured in the exhibition by artists Heyheydehaas, Julien Carretero, Thomas Lommee and Uglycute, along with several existing game-oriented works by artists Mireia c. Saladrigues, John Körmeling, Ryan Gander and Aurelien Froment, this publication playfully blends conversations about production, dialogue and wonder. Contributors Petra Van Brabandt, Paul De Bruyne, Florian Schneider, René ten Bos, Laurence Scherz and Harvey Herman explore how in game playing, rules are reinvented, innovation and dialogue stimulated, and anarchy and flexibility tolerated, among many other fascinating topics.

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THE LIBRARY WAS

OOMK

The Library Was reimagines the function, aesthetic and culture of the library in thecontext of an austerity-stricken future. The book includes interviews with London based library enthusiasts, a profile of the revolutionary Cuban librarian Marta Terry González, a reassessment of The Five Laws of Library Science (as they do and don’t apply to the collection of contemporary zines) and an account of the stolen library of the late Saudi novelist Abd al-Rahman Munif. It also describes the work of a semifictional group of readers and activists called The Library of Aimless Yet Meaningful Pursuit. Contributors to this publication include zine specialist Leila Kassir; publishing house and artists’ collective Fehras Publishing Practices; reader, writer and researcher Hudda Khaireh; and Rianna Jade Parker, founder of the artists’ collective The Lonely Londoners. The author, OOMK, is an art collective and biannual publication run by Heiba Lamara, Sofia Niazi and Rose Nordin.

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LIFE ON SIRIUS

The Situationist International and the Exhibition after Art

Daniel Birnbaum & Kim West (Eds.)

Evolving out of the All the King’s Horses series, a multinational project made up of seminars, exhibitions and events following the Situationist International and its network of related groups to various places in Europe, this new publication by Daniel Birnbaum and Kim West looks back at the Situationist confrontations with museums and its meaning today. Organized jointly with Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Life on Sirius traces a path beyond the Situationists’ negativity, anti-art techniques and slogans to outline a sustainable, micro-political alternative. At its center is the concept of play as a lever of instrumentalization. The Situationists were arguably the last and most influential avant-garde movement of the European postwar era. The Situationist International, the hub of the movement that developed several famous concepts and methods in the 1950s and 1960s aimed at transcending art and tearing down established culture continues to be influential on contemporary art and thinking today.

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HANNE LIPPARD

This Embodiment

Following her previous publication with Broken Dimanche Press (2013), Nuances of No, Berlin-based artist Hanne Lippard (b. 1984) has curated a visual-poetic rendering of her language and voice-based performance works. Lippard uses her past experience as a graphic designer to deconstruct her stories into physical patterns and sonic word plays suggestive of concrete poetry in This Embodiment. Over the past years, Lippard has focused on the production of language solely through the usage of her hypnotic and soothing voice as a way to convey the discrepancy between content and form. Performative readings and audio installations use repetition and differentiation, consonance and variation to evoke phrases and images associated with contemporary topics such as work, success, and lifestyle. Included will be Lippard’s most recent work, ß, exhibited at the KW Institute, Berlin (2017). Recipient of the ars viva prize 2016, Germany, Lippard has performed throughout Europe and the UK.

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LIVING LABOR

Cora Fisher & Milena Hoegsberg (Eds.)

Living Labor considers the increasing subordination of life to work. In response to the eroding boundaries between work and life, and against the historic backdrop of the Scandinavian labor movement, the writers gathered in Living Labor propose viable forms of refusal and imagine prospects for a post-work future.

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LOOSE MONK

Poems by Fabian Peake

Jeremy Akerman & E ileen Daly (Eds.)

Using repetition and spatial gaps to convey emotion, atmosphere and a sense of time, painter and poet Fabian Peake’s shaped poems are surprising and disquieting. Peake draws on nature, memory and everyday life to create works that, although concrete in look, are distinct from the hard abstraction of concrete poetry of Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters and Paul Klee. Loose Monk presents 41 works written over 20 years and neatly demonstrates the parallels between how he builds poems and constructs paintings. In the introduction, Peake discusses the relationship between art and writing, some of his underlying themes and the nature of poetic form and abstraction with editors Jeremy Akerman and Eileen Daly.

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