Scrapbook of the Sixties is a collection of published and unpublished texts by Jonas Mekas, filmmaker, writer, poet, and cofounder of the Anthology Film Archives in New York. Born in Lithuania, he came to Brooklyn via Germany in 1949 and began shooting his first films there. Mekas developed a form of film diary in which he recorded moments of his daily life. He became the barometer of the New York art scene and a pioneer of American avant-garde cinema. Every week, starting in 1958, he published his legendary “Movie Journal” column in The Village Voice, writing on a range of subjects that were by no means restricted to the world of film. He conducted numerous interviews with artists like Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Erick Hawkins, and Nam June Paik. Some of these will now appear for the first time in his Scrapbook of the Sixties. Mekas’s writings reveal him as a thoughtful diarist and an unparalleled chronicler of the times—a practice that he has continued now for over fifty years.

Jonas Mekas (*1922, Semeniškiai / Lithuania), lives and works in New York. Film-maker, writer, poet and co-founder of the Anthology Film Archives one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde film. Mekas’s work has been exhibited in museums and festivals worldwide.

92 black-white images, adhesive bound softcover

Designed by Fabian Bremer and Pascal Storz

€28.00

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Follow Me is a book created for the exhibition by Susan Philipsz in the city of Genoa. Designed on the basis of a contemporary Baedeker, this book offers an original itinerary in the city, read through the work of the Scottish artist, invited by the Museum of Villa Croce in conceiving an exhibition inside the historic center of the city. The book is thus a city-guide that links different places and times, and that also moves from the habit of moving, investigated as a typical phenomenon of the Grand Tour – and that is the origin of the term “tourism”.

Susan Philipsz (Glasgow, 1965) won the prestigious Turner Prize in 2010 and has presented her installations in 2007 at Skulptur Projekte, Muenster, in 2012 at documenta13, Kassel and in 2015 at the Istanbul Biennial. Susan Philipsz has gained widespread recognition in the international artworld for the sharp execution of her works, unique in their genre, based on the rigorous analysis of the history, memory, and traditions of a specific place that she transposes into immaterial architectures creating an introspective environment for the “viewer”. The universal narrative of loss, hope, and homecoming is conveyed through the reproduction of tunes and melodies that, blending with the genius loci, generate a subjective storytelling.

€25.00

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Under the Clouds: from Paranoia to the Digital Sublime

Since the second half of the twentieth century, we have lived under the shadow of two clouds: the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb, and now the ‹cloud› of information networks. How did the symbol of post-war paranoia become the utopian metaphor for today’s interconnected world? Under the Clouds confronts the interrelated effects and affects of these two clouds on life and work, leisure and love, and on images, bodies and minds, through contributions from an intergenerational group of artists.

Texts by
Enrico Baj & Sergio Dangelo, Thomas Hirschhorn, Sean Landers, Metahaven, Seth Price, João Ribas, Frances Stark, Hito Steyerl, Stan VanDerBeek

€34

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What you are holding in your hands is the printed manifestation of Alfred Palestra. At first, it took shape as a workshop with a group of high school students from Lycée Émile Zola in Rennes, designed as a method to comprehend plural narratives. The workshop aimed to develop skills to interpret a very particular historical constellation: The school was the place where Alfred Jarry almost met Alfred Dreyfus. It served as the location for the second Dreyfus trial in 1898, held just after Jarry had graduated from there. The Lycée thus became the cradle of the avant-garde during the cataclysm of the republic.

Universities and art schools alike have been subjected to the pressure of recent austerity politics and the ongoing attempt to transform higher education according to the demands of reigning neoliberals. In this context, it is urgent to conceive of alternative frameworks and methodologies of study–whether within, outside or at the margins of academic institutions.

This book examines the current interest in education through a series of conversations with artists, theorists, activists and educators -including Suhail Malik, Brian Holmes, Ruth Sonderegger, Gerald Raunig, Judy Chicago, Gal Kirn, Mohammad Salemy, Melissa Gordon, Marina Vishmidt and Andrea Fraser-who are all actively involved in developing new models of study. Ranging from self-organized learning to critical teaching methodologies, the alternatives gathered here offer a resource for those interested in the renewed politicization of education, new modes of knowledge production and teaching methodologies.

€ 23.00

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The Communist Manifesto was first printed as a 24 page pamphlet in February 1848, in London. Since that time, it has been reproduced in countless contexts — making it not only one of the most widely read texts ever, both one that continues to be disputed for the efficacy of its call to action. It has been subject to various editions and translations, but the various covers that package the manifesto exemplify the complexity of ways it has been received, perceived, used and abused across different times and places. All publishers are presented with the paradoxical issue of how to design its cover and market such a text — to confront it both in terms of form and function, use and exchange value.

01.01.CM presents over 100 covers of The Communist Manifesto, compiled by the Museum of Ordure from its collection. The book is turned inside out to draw attention to its material form and historical conditions: the covers have fascinating stories to tell of hopes and anticipated futures – for instance, in their use of particular imagery and in the signs of wear through human use – and draw attention to the excesses of capitalist production. This notion of excess is fundamental to the overall project of the Museum of Ordure in its attention to the management of human waste and identification of ordure. What value do readers place upon the Manifesto in a situation where radical politics appears to have been reduced to commodity form, nostalgia or mere curiosity?

01.01.CM was published as part of the exhibition: Systemics#3: Against the idea of growth, towards poetry (or, how to build a universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later), in Kunsthal Aarhus (16jan.–30mar.).

editing/design Geoff Cox and Mathias Kokholm
image editing Lasse Krog Møller
assistant Michael Roloff

A very red book!

€30.00

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The Black Mountain College (BMC), founded in 1933 in North Carolina, is considered by its multidisciplinary and experimental education thought as one of the most innovative schools in the first half of the 20th century. Visual arts, economics, physics, dance, architecture and music were taught here on an equal footing; Teachers and students lived together in a democratically organized community. The first rector of the school was John Andrew Rice, among many other gifts here Josef Albers, John Cage, Walter Gropius and Buckminster Fuller courses. At BMC, many avant-garde concepts were developed. The image-rich band appears on the exhibition Black Mountain. He is the first comprehensive publication on the Black Mountain College in the German-speaking countries and traces the history of this legendary school in its basic features after.

Eugen Blume, Matilda Felix, Gabriele Knapstein, Catherine Nichols (ed.)

Language: German

€34.00

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Could it be that fundamental aspects of abstraction remain to be discovered? Abstraction is usually conceived of formally and pictorially, whereby its underlying thought patterns often recede into the background. This book attempts to question the notion of abstraction and art history’s use of it by opening the term up to new interpretations in relation to the public and social spheres of activity. Numerous artistic contributions as well as essays by Gerrit Gohlke, Stefan Heidenreich, Alexander Koch, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Petra Reichensperger, Raimar Stange, Marcus Steinweg, and Vlado Velkov indicate various ways of reconsidering abstraction as a process and a method of artistic production.

€22.00

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Jean Sénac (1926–1973) was a controversial Algerian poet that was murdered in Algiers. Published by Centre culturel français d’Alger & Éditions Rubicube in 2004, this book is an homage to Sénac’s poetic and photographic appearances.

€120.00

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