Over the years 1919–20, the celebrated medical scientist and doctor Carl Julius Salomonsen began giving public lectures and publishing pamphlets regarding a new “epidemic” that had begun to affect the European populace: the increasing ubiquity of modernist art.

In a 1919 pamphlet titled New Forms of Art and Contagious Mental Illness, he wrote: “We stand, at this moment, before a movement in art which is psychopathic in character, and whose victorious journey through all countries is probably caused by the same spiritual disease that gave the older, religious spiritual epidemic such a powerful spread.” This pamphlet and the accompanying talks were countered by a retaliatory pamphlet published by members of Grønningen, a Copenhagen modernist painters group, to which Salomonsen responded with a further pamphlet.

Translated into English for the first time by literary theorist Andrew Hodgson, the entire altercation is gathered in this book, documenting one of the earliest rejections of modernist art.

Edited & Translated by Andrew Hodgson

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For Zitkála-Šá collects a series of scores by artist and composer Raven Chacon.

Paying tribute to Yankton Dakota writer, musician, and activist Zitkála-Šá (b.1876), this publication is structured through a series of scores for thirteen contemporary female Indigenous performing artists: Laura Ortman, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Suzanne Kite, Barbara Croall, Jacqueline Wilson, Autumn Chacon, Heidi Senungetuk, Ange Loft, Joy Harjo, Carmina Escobar, Olivia Shortt, Candice Hopkins, and Buffy Sainte-Marie. The book is supplemented by texts by each artist and a contextualizing essay by Chacon.

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation currently based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A former member of the interdisciplinary art collective Postcommodity, Chacon’s work has been exhibited and performed at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, REDCAT, the Borealis Festival, the 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center.

The Library of Mr. & Mrs. Neutra uses the built environment of Richard and Dione Neutra’s VDL House (1932/1965) as a space for site-specific research into the content and material structure of the modernist architect’s library. Working to document the volumes collected in the Los Angeles residence and studio’s extensive library, this book indexes the specific, lived history of a personal book collection marked by its owner’s professional, personal, and familial relationships.

Published on the occasion of Built In organized in the fall of 2021, co-curated by Erik Benjamins and Marta, Los Angeles.

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Dear friends,

We are pleased to invite you to the book launch of
Pope.L, My Kingdom for a Title in presence of the artist.

7–9 pm Wednesday 3 November 2021

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68, im Hinterhof
10997 Berlin
U1 Schlesisches Tor

My Kingdom for a Title is a collection of writing by Chicago–based artist Pope.L documenting his use of language as a mode of visual, narrative, and performative story telling.

The act of writing has been integral to how Pope.L works and is arguably the most consistent element in his practice. These works take various forms: scripts, short stories, scribbled notes, large scale installation, and painting—many never before released. Assembled here for the first time, My Kingdom for a Title allows the breadth of the artist’s engagement with language to be fully assessed. Within the book, Pope.L’s work is supplemented with extensive endnotes sourced by artist Kandis Williams.

Pope.L is a visual artist and edu­cator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries, and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture to create artworks in various formats including writing, painting, performance, installation, video, and sculpture. Building upon his long history of enacting arduous, provocative, absurdist performances and interventions in public spaces, Pope.L applies some of the same social, formal, and performative strategies to his interests in language, system, gender, race, and community. The goals for his work are several: joy, money, and uncertainty—not necessarily in that order.

Edited by Courtney Willis Blair
Endnotes by Kandis Williams
Published by New Documents in collaboration with Mitchell-Innes & Nash
First Edition (2021)

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I See / You Mean is an experimental novel about mirrors, maps, relationships, the ocean, elusive success, and possible happiness. Through a collage of verbal photographs, overheard dialogue, sexual encounters, found material, and self identi­fication devices (astrology, the I Ching, palmistry, Tarot), it charts from past to future the changing currents between two women and two men­: a writer, a model/stockbroker/maybe dictator, a photographer, and an actor. A lot happens between the lines. Art critic Lucy Lippard wrote this novel in 1970 and became a feminist in the process: “I started writing and realized I was ashamed to be a woman. Then I had to find out why. Then I got very angry. The fragmented visual form came out of contemporary art and the conflicting emotions of 1960s political confrontation; they suggested a new way to put things back together—an open-ended, female way that didn’t pretend conclusions.”

Lucy R. Lippard is a writer, activist, and curator. She is the author of twenty-five books on contemporary art and cultural criticism and has curated some fifty exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

Afterword by Susana Torre
Edited by Jeff Khonsary

First Edition (2021)

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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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In 1970, Trasov assumed the identity of Mr. Peanut, donning a handmade paper mâché replica of the mascot of the Planters Peanut Company. Soon after, he produced The Mr. Peanut Mayoralty Campaign of 1974, a twenty-day performance developed in collaboration with members of the Vancouver arts community. The legume quickly became Trasov’s cipher and central component of his practice. Mr. Peanut Drawings collects nearly a hundred of Trasov’s Peanut drawings together with a text by Nancy Tousley.

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In 1976, Bas Jan Ader’s boat, the Ocean Wave, was found unmanned and partially submerged 150 miles off the coast of Ireland by a Spanish fishing vessel. The Dutch artist’s boat was taken to La Coruña for investigation. Days later, the boat was stolen and the cult of Ader, whose body was never recovered, was truly cemented. In this volume, artists Marion van Wijk and Koos Dalstra, compile ten years of research into this unsolved mystery. The Spanish police report documenting the theft is reproduced in facsimile alongside a translation into English, many pages of additional documentation, and the transcriptions of interviews produced during the editors’ investigations.

The report itself begins on April 27, 1976 and ends on February 1, 1977 and documents history of the Ocean Wave from the discovery of the vessel to the closure of the case. This book is an expanded version of the earlier edition by Veenman Publishers. It includes interviews with Mary Sue Anderson, Don Couto, Charles Esche, and Luis Ramos.

Edited by Marion van Wijk and Koos Dalstra

First Edition (2017)

€45.00

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In The Nine Eyes of Google Street View (2008–), Jon Rafman employs a new approach to the strategy of artistic appropriation, extracting screenshots from Google Street View’s vast online archive to create singular photographs that range from the lyrical to the abject. Selected from the larger collection of images that comprise his ever-expanding project, the images in this volume illuminate in multiple dimensions our mutually constitutive relationship with images and testify to the importance of Nine Eyes in an increasingly codified, image-saturated world.

Rafman’s photographs appear alongside essays on the work by editor Kate Steinmann, Joanne McNeil, Sohrab Mohebbi, and Gabrielle Moser, as well as a text by the artist himself, written in collaboration with Sandra Rafman.

Edited by Kate Steinmann. Designed by The Future.

45€
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Window Seat presents a sequence of images by Vancouver photographer Jennilee Marigomen taken in sleepy beach towns in Mexico. Through a series of simple and beautiful gestures, the project both acknowledges the metaphor of photography-as-window and consciously resists reading the world metaphorically. Rather, the photographs show the benefit of careful attention to the overlooked and often ephemeral beauty in our everyday surroundings—suggesting that the world is made up of neglected sites imbedded in the everyday, which a keen sensibility can animate, arrange, and make deeply compelling for the viewer.

With an essay by Nich McElroy.

€38.00

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