OEI # 90-91: Sickle of Syntax & Hammer of Tautology offers the first English language overview of the history of concrete and visual poetry production in socialist Yugoslavia between 1968 and 1983. By focusing on mass-produced examples of concrete poetry, this publication presents these poetic experiments as organically linked to social movements, critical theories, and youth cultural revolutions. In his extensive introduction, Sezgin Boynik, the guest editor of this special issue of OEI, discusses concrete and visual poetry in socialist Yugo-slavia as an uneven and combined development, and emphasizes its confrontational and organizational aspects. By means of interviews, translations, reproductions, and theoretical and historical statements, OEI # 90-91 offers a picture of a very lively scene of concrete and visual poetry in Yugoslavia, which unfortunately is not as recognized interna-tionally as it would deserve. Hoping that OEI # 90-91 could contribute to this task in a substantial way, we present episodes from the early years of OHO formation and its complex theories of words and things; an interview with Rastko Močnik on programmed art and political formalism; militant polemics of Goran Babić; Signalist contradictions; subjective structural devices of Judita Šalgo; zaum experiments of Vojislav Despotov; detective meta-texts of Slavoj Žižek; poetic self-management studies of Vujica Rešin Tucić; a feminist historicisation of Ažin school for experimental poetry; democratisation of visual poetry by Westeast; selections from special issues of the journals Pitanja, Problemi, Ulaznica, Dometi, Delo, Koraci, Vidik, Pegaz, and many other materials translated here for the first time and presented in one publication.

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Lies and Diet Coke is a collection of notes and poems written over the period of one year. It relates to failures in representation, the night time and how technology affects notions of distance and proximity.

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Elisabeth Molin (1985) is a visual artist based between London and Copenhagen, working with video, performance and storytelling. She studied at Chelsea College of Art and Royal College of Art in London. She has shown work at Sixty Eight Institute and Charlottenborg Kunsthal in Copenhagen, The Danish Institute in Edinburgh, Art Current Institute in New York and CCA Scotland. She has been awarded residencies at Cite des Arts in Paris, Danish Cultural Institute in Rome and Athens and at CCA Andratx in Mallorca. In 2013 she was shortlisted for the Tenderflix Award at Tenderpixel Gallery and in 2017 she was awarded a fellowship from Hasselblad Foundation at ISCP in New York.

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written by Ren Hang
translated by Ho King Man
and Casey Robbins
published by BHKM
first edition of 500
printed in Hong Kong
2017

 €59.00

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This book was the last book publish with tradtionnal type setting by the Imprimerie National, printed on heavy paper.
Most of the work reproduced are printed in black, 2 colors (mainly black and red inks) or more as the Piet Zwart page printed in 3 colors (dark blue, red and yellow)

Jérôme Peignot is born in a family of typographer and type creator, his grand-father was the founder of was became Deberny-Peignot. This historical enterprise worked with Balzac and his father Charles had introduced photocomposition in France and directed the Editions des Arts et Métiers graphiques.

Jérôme Peignot is developping this poetry genre called Visual Poetry, Konkrete poetry or just “Typoésie” (Typoetry). What we called a game is the meeting of litterature with typographical art: searching the meaning of the world in the design of words.

This poetry appear with the help of various tools: from letters, to punctuation, numbers and notes, this anthology is divided into five parts: Typography, Visual poetry, figures, Painting, Music.

Typography: Zwart, Cassandra‘s Bifur, Lubalin, etc.

Visual poetry: Gomringer, Mon and Rühm (Germany). Pignatari and the Campos brothers (Brazil). Italian poets, British, Spanish and American enrich this pratice in a rebellious or advertising use. Peignot admits his fascination with work by Ockerse of Solt, Williams and Xisto

Poets: Dotremont Roubaud Crombie, etc.

Painters: Adam Dupuy, Falconet, Hains, Kolar and Melin, Duchamp, El Lissitzky, Magritte and Matisse.

Music: JS Bach, Gounod, Pobst, Ravel, Schoenberg, Webern.

Texts by Leiris, Cassandra, Guy Levis Mano, Raymond Gid, El Lissitzky, Pierre and Ilse Garnier, Excoffon, Dotremont … and Alexandre Sorel as regards music.

 €34.00

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A new collection of poetry by Roberto Harrison.
Publisher by The Green Lantern Press.

Language: English
Pages: 240
Size: 15.2 x 23 cm
Weight: 448 g
Binding: Softcover
ISBN: 9780988418585

€20.00

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Waldo Pardon, Alexandra Myshalov, Nadia de Vries and Adrienne Herr @ Motto Berlin
Saturday March 11th, 6-9pm

‘Class of 2017’ will be a reading in preparation for greater things. Showcasing artists and poets who have little in common, other than their enrollment and an A+ attitude. Come to a presentation of new work by 4 poets.

Most Likely to Get Out of Here:
Waldo Pardon (b. 1997, Belgium) is a writer and filmmaker. For Class of 2017, Pardon will read the first chapter of ‘The Bacterial Anchor,’ his unfinished novel. ‘The Bacterial Anchor’ is a fairy tale that revolves around 4 teenagers, densely keyworded, sinisterly branded, and their pilgrimage to an OG necropolis as soon as they get released from a juvenile detention center in Florida.

Most Likely to Crash on Your Couch:
Alexandra Myshalov (b. 1995 USA) is a writer, globalized subject, and sacrificial object. For Class of 2017, Alexandra will read “Port of call”, a rubric for narcissistic divination that combines confessional narrative and cut ups from Heavier than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain.

Most Liked by Parents:
Nadia de Vries (b. 1991, the Netherlands) is a poet and curator. She is the author of First Communion (2015), R.I.P. Nadia de Vries (2016) and Pain in Translation (forthcoming 2017). In 2016, she curated Sisternhood, a poetry anthology featuring work by European women writing in English. She lives and works in Amsterdam.
http://nadiadevries.com/

Most Likely to Succeed:
Adrienne Herr (b. 1991 USA) is a poet who works heavily with video and performance.
http://adriennes.site/

Matthew Clifford Green is a young painter based in Los Angeles.

On his canvasses Matthew Clifford Green expends the material of oil paint in a near-facetious way, creating works that border the monstrous with the cartoonish. As the surface of his works mound and extend off the canvas, the act of viewership becomes tactile despite its distance, blending sight with touch. The crudeness of Green’s painting style results in works that bend the formal nature of color and the oil medium towards the realm of hyper simplicity, while carefully dodging the fine line of affected naivety.

He has already held plenty solo exhibitions.

IDEA CAR is the artist’s first book of scribbled poetry.

Published by 2nd Cannons Publications & Motto Books in an Edition of 500

20€

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Dear friends and families,

Please join us to celebrate an Asexual international working day on May 1.

With contributions by Nora Schultz, Kayla Guthrie, Nicholas Sewitz, Clarice Lispector, Juliana Huxtable and Keren Cytter.

The event is hosted by Jack Gross.

On the occasion of Motto’s temporary bookstore at Wendy’s Subway, open every Saturday and Sunday from 12pm to 6pm and during evening events, May 1st through May 29th.

**Free Vodka**

May Day for Worker and Communists – “A decidedly non-pagan, asexual May Day celebration is that of International Workers’ Day, a holiday created by socialists and labor organizers in commemoration of the Haymarket Riot of May 4th, 1886 (also called the Haymarket Massacre or, more cautiously, the Haymarket Affair).

In post-Civil War America, the Industrial Revolution was in full blaze and workers were suffering. Machines were replacing skilled laborers, hours were increasing, conditions were worsening, and the wages were inadequate. The revolutionary ideas of socialism and Marxism caught on with many of these disenfranchised and antagonized laborers, and the movement for an eight-hour day had gained powerful momentum. With all of this brewing, disputes and riots ignited again and again. Then at a large protest in Chicago’s Haymarket Square someone threw a dynamite bomb at the cops, which triggered a battle that left at least twelve dead and many more wounded. The riot was followed by a hugely publicized trial and the eventual hanging of four anarchists, the “Haymarket Martyrs.” This violent clash in Chicago became a powerful symbol for radical labor groups. A few years later, the Second International officially initiated the tradition of May Day labor demonstrations that continue still.”

Poetry – “Literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm; poems collectively or as a genre of literature.”

Prose – “written or spoken language in its ordinary form, without metrical structure.”

Vodka – “an alcoholic spirit of Russian origin made by distillation of rye, wheat, or potatoes.”

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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DAVID HORVITZ. MOOD DISORDER BOOK LAUNCH
AT 11:59 PM.
IN RANDY’S DONUTS PARKING LOT, LOS ANGELES.

Xiu Xiu will have a gong to whisper into.*

Ed Steck will call in from Tampa Bay, FL and read poems over speaker phone.**

Michael Smoler will be telepathically reading poems from a donut store in London simultaneously with the launch.

Books will be sold for $15 us cash out of the trunk of my mom’s car. No receipts will be given.

* Xiu Xiu will buy dounuts for the first 21 people who whisper into the gong.

** Unless he falls asleep.

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Mood Disorder documents the propagation of a photograph of David Horvitz across the internet. The image—a self portrait of the artist with his head in his hands, ocean waves crashing in the background—was initially uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons, and placed on various Wikipedia pages. From there, the image began to circulate, appearing on over a hundred websites as a “stock” photo to illustrate articles on a wide range of mental health and wellness issues.

David Horvitz: Mood Disorder
With a text by Ed Steck. Co-published by Chert and Motto Books, Berlin. Designed by The Future.

35 × 25 cm
72 Pages, Staple bound
ISBN: 978-1-927354-23-0
First Edition (2015)
18€

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