Edition of 125
numbered

What did the generation that came of age during the sixties do for an encore? Many of the answers seemed to have slipped below the media’s plumb line. A Letter to My Father and My Unborn Son, a journal by Aram Saroyan with art by Gailyn Saroyan, takes us to the American bicentennial year, 1976, as the young poet and artist await the arrival of their third child in Bolinas, a small coastal village in rural Northern California. Here is the day-to-day journey of a young family–at once intimate, surprising, and funny.

Printed in Los Angeles, California
2018

Harvard Design Magazine 45 – Into the Woods | Spring/summer 2018

To go “into the woods” is to enter both nightmare and wonderment, chaos and serenity. The woods are the threatening realm of wolves and witches, yet also a space of peace and introspection. They confound and illuminate, disorient and clarify, endanger and protect. The woods are where we “come to our senses,” and where we embrace our wilder selves. They are a space of complex life forms and ecological destruction; of growth and decay; of fantasy and ritual; of secrets and control; of hiding and? the hidden.

The woods are often framed as a nonurban place; an entity separate from, and opposed to, the city—even the world; an eternal refuge that can smoothly be entered and exited, gone into and back out of. But how much of our woods still remains to go into—and on what terms?

As designers, we encounter the woods as building site, as obstacle, and as resource—territory to be cleared, but also to be preserved, cultivated, tamed, or simulated. Wood itself—along with its products like lumber, wood pulp, silvichemicals, and charcoal—fuel the building industry and feed architecture. In a period of accelerated climate change, the planet’s woods are disappearing, burning up, threatening and threatened by human existence. How can we holistically address the woods and its ecosystems, and the life and life-giving power they contain?

This issue of Harvard Design Magazine treks into the woods to come to terms with its precarious status as habitat and resource, and to challenge assumptions about wood as material. We won’t be “out of the woods”—this looping conundrum—any time soon, even if the woods as we once knew it, and might still imagine it, has ceased to exist. At the intersection of wilderness, urbanization, and myth, “Into the Woods” embraces contradiction, challenges destruction, and revisits our roots, biological and architectural alike.

“Into the Woods” combines contributions by noted critics and theorists including Milica Topalovic, Lawrence Buell, T. J. Demos, Rosetta Elkin, Jack Halberstam, and Maria Tatar; practitioners Dogma, Alexander Brodsky, Dilip Da Cunha, Eelco Hooftman, and Paulo Tavares; as well as artists Tang Chang, Maria Thereza Alves, Janet Cardiff, and Bas Princen; anthropologists Anna Tsing and Eduardo Kohn; and philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

Harvard Design Magazine 45 is edited by Jennifer Sigler and Leah Whitman-Salkin, and published by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD).

For those who would seek to influence others, the dissemination of ideas is
paramount. Similarly, for those holding ambition to secrete knowledge for reasons of
authority, or to protect the fruits of intellectual labour for reasons of profit or ethical
concern, distribution is key. Certainly before, but more importantly since the
Gutenberg Bible, the predicament of the power of knowledge has lain not with its
generation but with the control of its dispersion.

This new volume in the critically acclaimed Occasional Table series of books
published by Open Editions focuses attention on the act of distribution as a subject
for serious creative consideration and one of great social and economic importance.
Contributors from a variety of backgrounds paint a big picture that embraces the
actions of the individual alongside the workings of global markets. From the
attention-seeking impulse of the poseur, to the democratisation of art and knowledge
in the form of books, pop music, digital networks, self-organised libraries, and the
question of what can be known, and by whom, the urge to disseminate is explored
here as an elemental phenomenon of our time.

Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) remains one of the most important landscape architects in the history of the field. His distinctive and widely acclaimed work has been featured and referenced in numerous sources, yet few of Burle Marx’s own words have been published.

This collection of a dozen of Burle Marx’s lectures, most of which have never before been available in English, fills that void. Delivered on international speaking tours, they address topics such as Concepts in Landscape Composition, Gardens and Ecology and The Problem of Garden Lighting. Their publication sheds light on Burle Marx’s distinctive ethic and aesthetic of landscape, as “the real art in living.”

“By their very nature secret practices, being secret, are generally hard to comment on. Still, we can imagine that the institution of secret marriage must be at least as old as that of the public one, possibly older, in fact, if one is to imagine the birth of ‘coupledom’ as taking place between two people alone under the cover of night. Secret marriage today remains an incalculable part of the institution – and perhaps one of its most romantic forms. […]

As though to compensate, we celebrate the secret ceremony – gay, straight or non-binary – not with equal but greater fervour. Just as a stolen glance is more arousing, a forbidden tryst more urgent, so too is the secret marriage more alive, more keen. Marry in secret in solidarity, in lust, out of an exhaustive need. Marry in secret and do with the heart what the gun cannot: melt the frozen conflicts, be they in Abkhazia or in Glendale.”

Excerpt from the publication

Offset print, 26 × 20 cm, 16 pages, stitched binding, mimeograph print
Edition of 35

support (at) mottodistribution.com

Bilingual edition of 50 (Portuguese and English)

Offeset digital print Munken Pure paper.

Interview series by Ana João Romana in 29 chapters.
Artists, editors, librarians, collectors, and curators.

Esta conversa acompanha a mostra bibliográfica com o mesmo título presente na vitrine do átrio e na Biblioteca de Arte.

Com
Ana João Romana, que orienta a conversa com André Cepeda (artista e fundador da Inc. – Livros e Edições de Autor), David Guéniot (Editor – Ghost Editions), Luiza Teixeira de Freitas (curadora e colecionadora), Pedro Barateiro (artista) e Ana Barata (bibliotecária – Biblioteca de Arte e Arquivos Gulbenkian).

Série de entrevistas a intervenientes ligados ao livro de artista (artistas, editores, livreiros, colecionadores, curadores e bibliotecárias), no âmbito do doutoramento de Ana João Romana. Publicar a estória/história do livro de artista em Portugal.

On the occasion of their exhibition at the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Slavs and Tatars present Kirchgängerbanger: a new, bi-lingual (Eng/DE) reader on Johann Georg Hamann, the 18th century polemicist, frenemy of Kant, and proto-Postmodernist who critiqued the Enlightenment with an unlikely mix of Lutheran theology and vulgar sexuality, enough to make even Bataille blush: “My coarse imagination has never been able to conceive of the creative spirit without genitalia.” With an introduction by Slavs and Tatars and a selection of Hamann essays including the triple-platinum hits “New apology of the Letter H” and “New Apology of the Letter H by Itself”.

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Die vorliegende Publikation erscheint im Rahmen der Ausstellung “Alexander Kluge. Gärten der Kooperation” im Württembergischen Kunstverein Stuttgart: einer umfassenden Einzelausstellung des Schriftstellers, Filmemachers und Theoretikers Alexander Kluge, die auf der gleichnamigen Schau im Kunstzentrum La Virreina in Barcelona basiert. In enger Zusammenarbeit mit La Virreina sowie Alexander Kluge selbst hat der Kunstverein eine Neufassung und Erweiterung von sieben Eizelaspekten dieses Projektes entwickelt.

Entsprechend der Ausstellung setzt sich auch das Buch aus sieben “Inseln” zusammen, die jeweils mit einem Bild und Text aus Alexander Kluges Büchern eingeführt werden. Darüber hinaus versammelt es eine Auswahl ergänzender Texte von Alexander Kluge, die auch ind er Ausstellung zu finden waren.

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The publication accompanies the exhibition “Alexander Kluge: Gardens of Cooperation” in the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart: a comprehensive solo exhibition by the writer, filmmaker, and theorist Alexander Kluge, based on the show of the same name at the La Virreina Art Center in Barcelona. In close collaboration with La Virreina and with Alexander Kluge himself, the Kunstverein has developed a new version and expansion of seven individual aspects of this project.
The book, like the exhibition, is composed of seven “islands”, each introduced by a picture and text from Alexander Kluge’s books. In addition, it brings together a selection of complementary texts by Alexander Kluge, also found in the exhibition.

German / English

19 x 12.5 cm

ISBN: 9782940524723

199 pages

Co-published by Motto Books & Würtembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart

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Give Up Art is a collection of critical writings by author Maria Fusco. Operating across fiction, criticism, and theory, Fusco’s work forges a contemporary space for critical art writing internationally. Give Up Art brings together nearly two dozen essays, reviews, and smaller pieces published between 2002 and 2017.

Maria Fusco is a Belfast-born writer based in Scotland. Her award-winning writing crosses the registers of criticism, ction, and theory. Her work has been translated into ten languages.

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The Serving Library Annual comprises a number of individual “Bulletins” organized around a theme for an international audience of designers, artists, writers, and researchers. Newly published by ROMA Publications in a yearly format, this inaugural issue is realised in collaboration with Public Fiction, a journal and exhibition-maker based in Los Angeles. It deals with acts of civil disobedience and other forms of resistance, particularly in view of the relationship between entertainment and power. Contributors include Hilton Als, Tauba Auerbach, Anne Carson, Mark Leckey, Adrian Piper, Frances Stark, and Martine Syms.

Public Fiction’s next project, which runs broadly concurrent to this new Annual’s lifespan, is named The Conscientious Objector — a multifaceted endeavour commissioned by West Hollywood City Council that unfurls in parts from September 2017 to April 2018. Curated by Public Fiction founder Lauren Mackler and Serving Library editor Francesca Bertolotti-Bailey, The Conscientious Objector comprises a series of “commercials” produced by artists for public access TV, an exhibition of artworks and performances at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture’s Schindler House in West Hollywood, and the present publication.

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