Yves Klein (1928–62) first traveled to Japan as a young man in 1952, motivated primarily by his interest in judo. During his 15 months abroad, Klein had numerous important creative and philosophical revelations that culminated in the launch of his artistic career upon his return to Paris.

Prepared in collaboration with the Yves Klein Archives, this volume details Klein’s relationship with Japan through nearly 150 archival documents, photographs and letters, inviting the reader on his journey from martial arts to fine art at the very beginning of his career. Along the way we learn of Klein’s important encounters with art critic Takachiyo Uemura, painter Keizo Koyama and design professor Masaki Yamaguchi. “Yves Klein Japon” provides essential insight into the origins of Klein’s oeuvre as both a groundbreaking visual artist and prolific writer whose short-lived career helped to transform postwar art.

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‘Critical Designers’ produced by an increasing number of design schools are prompted to address social, political and environmental issues through their practices. Yet, who can afford to continue such effort after graduation?

In a dynamic style holding multiple voices, “Who Can Afford To Be Critical?” discusses the limits that affordability, class and labour impose upon the educational promise of holding a ‘critical’ practice. Why do we tend to ignore the material and socioeconomic constraints that bind us as designers, claiming instead that we can be powerful agents of change? In fact, where does our agency lie?

Instead of focusing on the dream of ethical work under capitalism, could we, instead, focus first on designers’ own working conditions, targeting them as one immediate site for collective action? And can we engage politically with the world not necessarily as designers, but as workers, as activists, as citizens?

With contributions by Silvio Lorusso, J. Dakota Brown, Marianela D’Aprile, Evening Class, Somnath Batt, Danielle Aubert, Jack Henrie Fisher, Alan Smart, Greg Mihalko and DAE students 2021/2022.

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Essays, conversations, selected texts, and a rich collection of thought-provoking artworks celebrate a revolution in bio art. Expertly designed by Omnivore and printed on special papers, including chlorophyll cover and crush citrus and crush cocoa pages.

The texts and artworks in Symbionts provoke a necessary conversation about our species and its relation to the planet. Are we merely “mammalian weeds,” as evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis put it? Or are we partners in producing and maintaining the biosphere, as she also suggested? Symbionts reflects on a recent revolution in bio art that departs from the late-1990s code-oriented experiments to embrace entanglement and symbiosis (“with-living”). Combining documentation of contemporary artworks with texts by leading thinkers, Symbionts, which accompanies an exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center, offers an expansive view of humanity’s place on the planet.

Color reproductions document works by international artists that respond to the revelation that planetary microbes construct and maintain our biosphere. A central essay by coeditor Caroline Jones sets their work in the context of larger discussions around symbiosis; additional essays, an edited roundtable discussion, and selected excerpts follow. Contributors explore, among other things, the resilient ecological knowledge of indigenous scholars and artists, and “biofiction,” a term coined by Jones to describe the work of such theoretical biologists as Jacob von Uexküll as well as the witty parafictions of artist Anicka Yi. A playful glossary puts scientific terms in conversation with cultural ones.

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Attached is a collection of texts that document a diverse range of artworks made by Jessie Bullivant (AU/FI) over the past decade. By replacing the default photographic documentation with written accounts, the artist raises questions about how immaterial artworks are preserved, accessed and ultimately remembered, allowing space for nuances often lost in photographic documentation. As an incomplete survey of the artists’ work, the book blurs the boundaries between art and its documentation, between a conventional monograph and an experimental artist’s book. It gives an exciting glimpse into a committed artistic practice tackling a variety of issues from representation, power and access to subtle social interactions.

Design: Tuukka Kaila
Introduction: Katie Lenanton

Edition of 400

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Modernism/Murderism, translated by Vasvi Oza, brings together, for the first time in English, a forgotten debate on Modern Art that took place in the pages of the Gujarati-language periodical Kumar between 1959 and 1964. Published across various issues, the debate brings into conversation Pherozeshah Rustomji Mehta, a writer and art connoisseur from Karachi, and Jyoti Bhatt, a young artist who had just begun teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda. While Mehta chose to defend what he believed were the timeless and traditional values of art, Bhatt proposed that Modern Art was no stranger to these values and in fact had much in common with them. Alongside the articles by Mehta and Bhatt, the publication also brings together responses to the debate from various readers who interjected in the ‘Readers Write’ column of the periodical, as well as notes from Kumar‘s editor, Bachubhai Ravat, who informally acted as a mediator. Offering a vantage point from which to view the entry of Modernism and its affiliated discourses into the art practices of the region, this volume proposes itself as a reader to these histories and revisits this crucial moment.

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Almanac is a fully trans-led press based in Helsinki, Finland. The first issue of this journal of trans poetics responds to the theme of light/heat, in time for the Summer Solstice. The work includes long form essays, prose and poetry dealing with love, sex, illness, hormones, and other sticky things.

Featuring the work of 15 trans writers: Adam Azzaro, Daphne DiFazio, Mino Buonincontri, Clay A.D, Jenevieve Ting, Saoirse Wall, El Reid-Buckley, Nadine Rodriquez, Iona Roisin, Teddy Binot, Maya Simkin, Fiadh Hoskin, Simon Hauwaerts, D Mortimer and River Ellen MacAskill.

Designed by Roby Redgrave McPherson

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Aren’t we all familiar with the deeply personal experience of waking up alone, in anguish and despair, from the depths of a nightmare? Whether it’s disordered sleeping, sleep paralysis or the more regular frightening dream, the night and its terrors have kept us occupied since the very beginning of humanity. For this issue of Simulacrum, we – together – delve into the furthest corners of our minds to discover the dark and disorienting meaning we might find there. But a nightmare is much more than something to be fearful of. The nightmare is entangled with our histories and can lead us to our deepest selves, by bringing up feelings which we don’t dare to feel in real life. It has provided many creators with inspiration for their art of many forms. As we will discover within this issue of Simulacrum, this personal aspect of the nightmare can lead to incredibly diverse approaches and interpretations that we hope will allow you to reconsider the meaning and feeling that nightmares can bring us.

Authors: Neža Kokol, Joyce Poot, Niels Noot, Jonas van Kappel, Jérémy Bernard, Kenneth Geurts, Denise van Rooij, Kim Mulder, Frank van der Wulp, Laure Vanrijckeghem, Sanne Kabalt.

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Is what is below the surface so fatal?

Becky posed this question in her piece, which speaks to a lot of what we’re trying to capture here in Drown, Good Drown.

In their own way, the writers expressed consciousness and subconsciousness immersed in empathy, stories with sentiment and hints of humor, sadness, and joy. These writings and drawings were made by us ArtCenter College of Design students in the summer of 2022.

Actually, Megan hates summer. As Megan says, “summer’s role is to forever choke and steal what life came after winter.”

She thinks June is okay.

Rachael gave us a downpour of thoughts, an imagistic stream of consciousness straight to our souls, and Sophia spoke in a tender melodic tone provoking a sense of coziness and the tension of intimacy.

While Ibrahim imagined life undersea as a telepathic realm of shadow twins.

Along with Constant’s honesty and vulnerability, we also got to share his quiet but bold humor reflected in his story.

We almost named the publication Esther Williams because of Natalia’s misfit mermaid tale, which inspired us to be who we really are.

My story of reminiscing leads to the end of the book leaving softhearted fragrances of nostalgia.

Me. Cringe.

Drown, Good Drown, I think, is most importantly a collaboration. We’re all so different. You’ll see. But our different perspectives are reflected in drawings and stories. We mish and mash our creative minds for a submersive experience for the reader more than any of us could accomplish on our own.

So we invite you to pour yourself a cool water on the rocks, snorkel through our creative minds, and drown in the world of our stories.

Trust me; it will be a good drown.

– The Editor

*
Type+Authorship is a multi-disciplinary class taught at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. We conjure, discuss, and immediately write our way into a book of collective thematic interest and function within an aggregate studio environment where we design and produce a publication.

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Futuros mejores condensa conversaciones, voces y proyectos a través de los cuales discutir e imaginar futuros espaciales más justos. Futuros que, desde las ruinas del presente, las violencias y exclusiones, imaginan alternativas capaces de vislumbrar nuevas posibilidades. Arquitecturas amables con otras especies y territorios, prácticas espaciales para la hospitalidad, mediadoras de memorias orales y microbianas, nuevos imaginarios para el aprendizaje, nuevas (y no tan nuevas) arquitecturas para el cuidado más allá de la vivienda y tecnologías domésticas al servicio del bien común para una producción espacial todavía por venir.

Autores: Husos Arquitecturas (Diego Barajas y Camilo García), Mariana Pestana, Isabel Gutiérrez Sánchez, Candela Morado, Anna Puigjaner, Superflux, Alejandro Galliano, La Escuela Nunca y los Otros Futuros, Studio Ossidiana.

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“Our curatorial approach strives for a different kind of collaborative model of resource use — in economic terms but also with regard to ideas, knowledge, programs and innovations.” – ruangrupa

The documenta fifteen will be curated by a collective for the first time in its history. Another first: the artistic directors come from Asia. ruangrupa is an association of nine friends who unconditionally combine art with their everyday lives as a practice of living and surviving together under the socioeconomic conditions of their native Indonesia. Fourteen other collectives, so-called lumbung members, have been invited to join ruangrupa in transforming Kassel into a new, sustainable ekosistem. Lumbung, the Indonesian term for a communal rice barn, is the starting point for all their activities and also this documenta.

In this volume of the book series Thoughts on Collective Practice ruangrupa talks about their beginnings, the harsh struggle for survival under the Suharto regime in Indonesia, the post-dictatorship euphoria, student protests, punk, and video culture. About their first art projects, maintaining solidary social relationships, the Indonesian tradition of sharing, and their unusual approach to resources.

The autobiographical conversations are supplemented by five exemplary glimpses into ruangrupa’s projects since 2003 and unpublished archival material.

The Collective Eye (TCE), founded 2012 in Montevideo, organizes exhibitions and symposia on collective practice in art. The collective has pursued a partnership with DISTANZ since 2021, publishing the book series Thoughts on Collective Practice as an extended collective between the publishing team and TCE. Their work aims to strengthen polynational dialogues between different collectives as well as between collectives and theorists. The volume of conversations with ruangrupa is the fourth installation in the series.

The Collective Eye: Dominique Lucien Garaudel, Heinz-Norbert Jocks, Emma Nilsson and Matthias Kliefoth (Eds.)

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