MASTER ROCK

Maria Fusco

In what is both archival document and poetic homage, Belfast-born writer Maria Fusco evokes Ben Cruachan, the largest peak on the west coast of Scotland through three historical voices—the tunnel tigers, the Irish explosives experts who carved out the mountain for a power station; Elizabeth Falconer, the artist who created a mural inside that only the site’s workers see; and Granite, the 450-million-year-old rock of Cruachan itself. This artful publication weaves together Fusco’s script, extensive archival black-and-white images documenting Power Station construction, the artist’s mural and the deep and powerful voice of the mountain to create a poem of words and images. Based on the performance broadcast conducted live from inside the mountain for BBC Radio 4, UK, October 2015, Master Rock is a quiet but powerful exploration by a woman artist of the drive to conquer—and feel oneness with—the forces of nature.

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THE MEASURE OF REALITY

Maija Timonen

Helsinki and UK-based artist Maija Timonen invites us to listen in on her private thoughts, dreams and conversations in this thoughtful and self-analytic look at a woman’s creative and heterosexual crises against the anxieties of our time. Difficult social and economic pressures are meticulously and obsessively decrypted and re-encrypted by Timonen’s unnamed female protagonist, who subjects everyday occurrences and encounters to scrutiny and interpretation, often with recourse to psychoanalytic theory. Short stories are interspersed with a letter, a list of forgotten browser tabs, a treatment for an unmade film and a variety of dating scenarios. Timonen’s work, spanning filmmaking, writing and performance, has in recent years focused on the troubled interrelation between mind and body and the consequences of the changing economic landscape on women’s lives. This publication is part of G.S.O.H., a series of artists’ publications edited by Clunie Reid for Book Works.

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THE MEDIUM OF CONTINGENCY

Robin Mackay

What is the relationship between art, intellect and financial capital? This collection of texts is a product of an exhibition and critical dialog at Thomas Dane Gallery, London, addressing the notion of “contingency” as it has become crucial both in contemporary philosophy and art. Transcriptions of lectures by Reza Nagarestani, Elie Ayache and Matthew Poole discuss the need for artists to abandon notions of autonomy and acknowledge the greater networks to which they belong. The publication also includes a group discussion with the exhibition organizer, gallerist Miguel Abreu, and artists Scott Lyall and Sam Lewitt, that explores how a contemporary reading of the notion of “contingency” is relevant to contemporary artists.

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MENGELE’S SKULL

The Advent of Forensic Aesthetics

Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman

In the aftermath of World War II, two notorious Nazi villains were exposed in different ways. Adolf Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem in 1960, beginning the “era of the witness” in the prosecution of human rights abuses. Josef Mengele escaped Germany and lived out his life hidden in Argentina. After Mengele’s death in 1985, his body was identified on an examining table in a morgue by a group of forensic scientists in Brazil. This book, based on a presentation by the authors, explores the emergence of the object in human rights, the conditions of its presentation, and the aesthetic operations involved in deciphering the “speech of things.”

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MERCEDES BENZ

Iphgenia Baal

Mercedes Benz is a dysfunctional love affair strung out over SMS, BBM, email and Facebook. Set in a barely credible 2011 London, Iphgenia Baal’s third novel, edited by cult author Stewart Home, describes a world where Bow E3’s high-rise estates are no longer the Ends, awful art parties do little to dispel 1990s nostalgia and downward mobility proves to be a much more intoxicating drug than heroin. If the story told here isn’t a tragedy, love is dead! Iphgenia Baal, a London-based writer (and formerly a journalist) has been published in Smoke: A London Peculiar, The White Review, and The Milan Review. She has also self-published two zines: The Gentle Art of Tramping and No! No! No! No! No! No! No! In 2011, Baal was nominated for the Granta Young British Novelist award for her first book, The Hardy Tree.

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MICHAEL BRACEWELL: THE SPACE BETWEEN

Selected Writings on Art

Michael Bracewell

Critic, novelist and cultural voyeur Michael Bracewell is not a writer who’s easy to classify. Born in 1958, a veteran of the British punk scene, he is a shockingly wide-ranging intellect whose influences range from Aubrey Beardsley to Enrico David. One of the most influential commentators on modern and contemporary art, he has been a regular contributor to Frieze since its inception.

In an engaging collection from the outstanding British art publisher Ridinghouse, Bracewell explores connections between the visual arts, pop music, modern iconography and various sub-cultures. These finely crafted essays appraise the vision and ideas of individual artists and the relation of their work to its broader cultural context. Bracewell has written extensively on artists including Gilbert & George, Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley, Wolfgang Tillmans, Anish Kapoor, Keith Coventry, John Stezaker, Glenn Brown and Damien Hirst.

Reading Bracewell is sheer pleasure. His British colleagues describe his work as “lyrical” and “inspired.” One critic calls him “the poet laureate of late capitalism,” while another says his prose “shimmers with metaphysical warmth.” Even allowing for critical exaggeration, there’s no question this is a writer of huge talent, with a lot to say.

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JOHN DOUGLAS MILLAR

Brutalist Readings
Essays on Literature

Niamh Dunphy (Ed.)

Not since the surrealists and high moderns have artists engaged writing as an art form, until now. Noted contemporary writer, poet and professor John Douglas Millar’s timely and significant examination of contemporary artist-produced literature proposes a framework for understanding current conceptual writing. Divided into two parts, Millar first focuses on conceptual writing as a critique of literary institutions, disembodied labor and high-capitalist digital production; and second, on the work of contemporary artists experimenting with writing. Engaging current debate on the place of artist-produced writings in the context of contemporary art, Millar covers a variety of subjects including conceptualism and romanticism, allegory, appropriation, dialectical images, conceptual writing and the digital in the work of Paul B. Preciado, Chris Kraus and Pierre Guyotat, among others. Charting the highs and lows of the conceptual turn in poetics and tracing avant-garde literary genealogies, Brutalist Readings explores radical histories of writing and its current potential.

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Mime Radio

Benjamin Seror

Future (Ed.)

A story about how language and perception intermingle, Mime Radio was performed as spoken word by French artist Benjamin Seror at a series of events over a two-year period before being transcribed and edited into this novel. The story follows five eccentric characters who meet at a Los Angeles bar called Tiki Coco and join “Challenging Reality Open Mic” night for amateur inventors and performers. Eventually the group moves into a Hudson River Valley house to pursue experiments in thought transmission and other tools for shifting reality. In the process, they get caught up enabling a character from ancient Greek mythology, Marsyas, to recover his voice—a very ancient voice—and unbeknownst to them unleash a disaster. In his performances where speech is the principal subject and tool, Benjamin Seror narrates long improvised stories inspired by a mix of phantoms of literature, art history and everyday adventures.

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MOVEMENTS AND CENTR ES

Hard Cores In Hard-Hearted Chords
Freek Lomme & Joan van Barneveld

Onomatopee curator, art critic and poet Freek Lomme and artist Joan van Barneveld are connected by their dedication to the “hard cores in hard-hearted chords.” Their collaboration—an illustrated collection of poems—eloquently records their respective travel adventures and pays tribute to their shared need for a sense of place while in transition. Lomme’s poems evolved between 2008 and 2014 while he was on the road; Van Barneveld made her sketches and silkscreens of photos from a visit to Los Angeles. During Joan van Barneveld’s exhibition at Onomatopee’s art space, Lomme and Barneveld decided to combine her visual material with his unpublished poems. The result is an artist’s book that exudes the palpable energy of their commitment to depth while engaging art’s potential to articulate the indeterminate as they search for a profound, honest position in an expanding world.

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THE MYTH OF ARTISTHOOD

Camiel van Winkel

Artisthood is a myth—even today. Just as the so-called “aura” of the work of art, demolished on countless occasions in the 20th century, rises repeatedly from the ashes, so too do clichéd ideas about the visionary artist and the healing power of art continue to recur. Are all artists, by definition, trapped in the myth of artisthood? Can this myth be ignored, diffused or even dismantled? Art historian and philosopher Camiel van Winkel’s celebrated 2008 essay, one of the first published in a series by the Mondriaan Fund (former Fonds BKVB), explores those specific questions. In the five years since its original publication, the text, which developed from the author’s involvement in a research group at AKV|St. Joost, has made a significant contribution to the discourse on what it means to be an artist today. This new English-language edition was prepared with Van Winkel, who contributed a new afterword.

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