Artists publishing/Index

Title	Year	Artists	Place	Lang
Bizzarie di Varie Figure	1624	Giovanni Battista Braccelli	Livorno	-	PDF, JPG
		body, mannerism The fifty plates of the Bizzarie di Varie Figure [Oddities of Various Figures] are the liveliest and most original etchings of a highly creative, if little known, Florentine artist, Giovanni Battista d’Antonio Braccelli (active 1616–49). The Bizzarie exhibit characteristics of Mannerism, which originated in Italy in the 16th century. (...) See Sue Welsh Reed (Library of Congress, 2000).
Die träumenden Knaben	1908	Oskar Kokoschka	Vienna	DE	PDF (1917)
		art, dreams, jugendstil, poetry, psychoanalysis, sexuality In 1907, Fritz Waerndorfer, the financial backer of the Wiener Werkstätte, the leading design workshop in Vienna, commissioned Oskar Kokoschka, still a student at Vienna’s Kunstgewerbeschule (School of decorative arts), to make an illustrated fairy tale for his children. Kokoschka instead delivered a haunting poem about awakening adolescent sexuality set on far-off islands, away from the modern city and bourgeois life. (...) See Rosa J.H. Berland (Source, 2008).
Klänge	1913	Wassily Kandinsky	Munich	DE	PDF (DE), PDF (EN)
		art, avant-garde, poetry, sound Kandinsky’s self-described “musical album,” Klänge [Sounds], consists of thirty-eight prose-poems he wrote between 1909 and 1911 and fifty-six woodcuts he began in 1907. In it, he emphasizes the physiological impact of the sonic quality of language, often repeating words until focus on meaning subsides and new focus on aural character of words emerges. These poems were instrumental in Kandinsky’s development of abstraction. (...) See Christopher Short (Tate Papers, 2006).
La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France	1913	Blaise Cendrars, Sonia Delaunay-Terk	Paris	FR	PDF, MP3 (1985), HTML (EN)
		abstract art, avant-garde, poetry This collaborative book features a poem by Blaise Cendrars about a journey through Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express in 1905, during the first Russian Revolution, interlaced with an almost-abstract pochoir print by Sonia Delaunay-Terk. The work is considered a milestone in the evolution of artist’s books as well as modernist poetry and abstract art. (...) See Blaise Cendrars (1950), Ekaterina Likhtik (Drunken Boat, n.d.).
Tango s korovami: zhelezobetonnye poemy	1914	Vasily Kamensky	Moscow	RU	PDF
		concrete poetry, cubo-futurism, futurism, poetry, typography, visual poetry Tango s korovami [Tango With Cows] by the Russian futurist poet Vasily Kamensky, printed in an edition of 300, has become famous primarily for being made entirely of commercially produced wallpaper, with a series of concrete poems – visual poems that employ unusual typographic layouts for expressive effect – printed onto the recto of each page. (...)
Piedigrotta: col manifesto sulla declamazi one dinamica sinottica	1916	Francesco Cangiullo	Milan	IT	PDF
		futurism, poetry, visual poetry Francesco Cangiullo's Piedigrotta: Manifesto on the Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation theorizes a kind of robotic and syncopated declamation. The title and cover illustration come from an annual Naples folk tradition, a pyrotechnic feast with extraordinary fireworks. These elements suggest the explosive thrust of Mt. Vesuvius, the volcano that stands over the gulf of Naples. (...) See Mladen Ovadija (2013).
Some French Moderns Says McBride	1922	Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp)	New York	EN	PDF
		art criticism In 1922, Henry McBride, who had been close to Duchamp for years, commissioned him to design a book for his art essays. The resulting pamphlet was composed of eighteen cardboard sheets, held together by three rings. Its title, Some French Moderns says McBride, is spelled out in twenty-seven separate file tabs attached to the right edge of each page; when viewed from the verso, these same tabs spell out the name of the book’s publisher: ‘SOCIÉTÉ ANONYME INCORPORATED’. (...) See David Joselit (Infinite Regress, 1997), Caroline Cros (Marcel Duchamp, 2006).
Dlia golosa	1923	Vladimir Mayakovsky, El Lissitzky	Berlin	RU	PDF
		avant-garde, constructivism, graphic design, poetry, typography Dlia golosa [For the Voice], a collection of 13 poems by Mayakovsky, “constructed” by Lissitzky, has long been recognized as one of the finest achievements of Russian avant-garde bookmaking, a tradition in which poets and artists collaborated to create books that attained the status of art objects. By any reckoning, For the Voice is a landmark event in the history of modern graphic design. The book was inspired by the “new optics,” where ideas are given form through printed letters, turning them into pictorial signs, and by “words that are seen and not heard,” as Lissitzky wrote. (...)
Lidantiu faram	1923	Ilya Zdanevich (Iliazd)	Paris	RU, FR	PDF
		dada, futurism, poetry, typography, visual poetry, zaum Lidantiu faram [Le-Dantyu as a Beacon] is a play typed in zaum language by the Georgian-French artist-typographer Ilya Zdanevich. It remains an unsurpassed example of visually fascinating typographical contrivances and was to exert a decisive influence on the typographical component of international dadaist poetry. (...) See Lewis Blackwell (20th-century Type, 2004: 35), Alan Bartram (Futurist Typography, 2005: 50-69).
Die Kunstismen / Les Ismes De L’Art / The Isms of Art: 1914–1924	1925	El Lissitzky, Hans Arp	Munich / Leipzig	DE, FR, EN	PDF
		1910s, 1920s, architecture, art, art history, avant-garde, film This book begins with definitions by well-known artists of the various movements, or forms of art, of the period. They range from Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Abstract Art, through Metaphysicians, Suprematism, Simultanism, Dadaism, Purism, Neoplasticism, Merz, Proun, Perism, Constructivism, to Abstract Film. The section is followed by reproductions illustrating each movement. (...)
Die Scheuche: Märchen	1925	Kurt Schwitters, Käte Steinitz, Theo van Doesburg	Hannover	DE	PDF, JPG (EN), PDF (ES)
		dada, de stijl, graphic design, typography In Die Scheuche: Märchen [The Scarecrow: A Fairytale] phrasing borrowed from German fairytales, grammar lessons, and religious texts combine into a formal hybrid that is cast in type. For the creators of this children’s book, such serious play with ready-made genres and print components offered a means of collecting the fragments of the past and assembling them to rebuild for the future. (...) See Leslie Atzmon (Design Issues, 1996).
Abeceda	1926	Vítězslav Nezval, Karel Teige	Prague	CZ	PDF
		alphabet, avant-garde, dance, photography, poetry, typography Abeceda [Alphabet] is a landmark work of the artists’ collective Devětsil, active in Prague and Brno in the 1920s. “In Nezval’s Abeceda, a cycle of rhymes based on the shapes of letters, I tried to create a ‘typofoto’ of a purely abstract and poetic nature, setting into graphic poetry what Nezval set into verbal poetry in his verse, both being poems evoking the magic signs of the alphabet.” – Karel Teige. (...)
Descriptions of Literature	1926	Gertrude Stein	Englewood, NJ	EN	PDF
		book, literature One of the rarest of all Stein’s publications. (...)
Básne v kresbách	1930	Mikuláš Galanda	Bratislava	-	PDF
		avant-garde The rare artist’s book Básne v kresbách [Poems in Drawings] by Slovak avant-garde painter and designer Mikuláš Galanda was published in the year he began teaching at the School of Arts and Crafts in Bratislava. (...)
Sovetskaya eroticheskaya azbuka	1931	Sergey Merkurov			PDF
		alphabet, art, sex The so-called Sovetskaya eroticheskaya azbuka [Soviet Erotic Alphabet] by the monumentalist sculptor Sergei Dmitrievich Merkurov (1881-1952), the author of numerous monuments to Stalin (including the three largest in the USSR) and Lenin. See Ross Wolfe (2013).
Emilie přichází ke mně ve snu	1933	Jindřich Štyrský	Prague	CZ	PDF (1997, EN)
		collage, dreams, eroticism, sexuality, surrealism Jindřich Štyrský (1899–1942) was a painter, poet, photographer, collage artist and editor. A founding member of The Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia he edited Erotická revue that included illustrations by well-known Czech artists and had an imprint called Edice 69 (Edition 69) where Emilie přichází ke mně ve snu [Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream], a portfolio of 10 erotic surrealist photo-collages, appeared in 1933 as its sixth and final volume. Štyrský believed that in pornography he had found a destabilizing medium that could be used to subvert established social and artistic norms. Bohuslav Brouk, a psychoanalyst affiliated with the Czech surrealists, contributed an afterword in which he commented forcefully on the subject of pornography as art. Despite its small run of 69 copies, the book is now considered a masterpiece of Czech Surrealism. (...)
Ler dla canpane	1948	Jean Dubuffet	Paris	FR	PDF, JPG
		outsider art An early work of Dubuffet, written phonetically and illustrated with six linocuts and woodcuts. The author presented it as “le premier texte publié en langue française vivante depuis les Serments de Strasbourg” [the first text published in French as a living language since the Oaths of Strasbourg]. Issued in 150+15 copies. (...)
Poésie de mots inconnus	1949	Iliazd	Paris	FR	PDF, JPG
		avant-garde, dada, poetry, sound poetry, visual poetry An early anthology of experimental visual and sound poetry featuring poems by 21 avant-garde authors and illustrated with seven woodcuts, six etchings, two engravings, three drypoints, two aquatints, and six lithographs. (...) See Johanna Drucker (Amodern, 2016).
Yves Peintures	1954	Yves Klein	Madrid	FR	PDF, JPG
		art Peintures was Yves Klein’s first public gesture as an artist, featuring pages of “commercially printed papers” that were seemingly reproductions of paintings that, in fact, didn’t exist. (...) See Denys Riout (Yves Klein, 2006: 26).
Fin de Copenhague	1957	Asger Jorn, Guy Debord	Copenhagen	FR, DA	PDF
		situationists Fin de Copenhague [Goodbye to Copenhagen] is the first collaboration between Asger Jorn and Guy Debord. The book is credited to Jorn, with Debord listed as “Technical Adviser in Détournement”. The pages include text in English, French, German, and Danish; illustrations of whisky bottles beer bottles and cigarettes; aeroplanes and ocean going liners; cartoons of well dressed men and pretty girls and various maps of Copenhagen. Each page is covered with a second layer of coloured ink drops and drips, most of which go right to left, emphasising the direction of the book from beginning to end. (...) See: Christian Nolle (Virose, 2005), Bart Lans (TU Delft, 2008).
Mémoires	1958	Asger Jorn, Guy Debord	Paris	FR	PDF (1959, 254 mb), PDF (1993), PDF (2015, EN)
		situationists Mémoires [Memories] is the second of their two collaborative books made by Jorn and Debord whilst they were both members of the Situationist International. The pages consist of phrases, photos, drawings and cartoons that Debord cut out of other works, and then pasted up in a randomly suggestive manner. Debord then had Jorn taint these ‘prefabricated elements’ with paint. The colors suggest possible readings of the phrases or simply lend a mood to the images. These plates were then bound in sand-paper to destroy any other books it came into contact with–Debord calls them an anti-book. The book was published at Jorn’s expense and given away as a sumptuous gift to friends. (...) See >Christian Nolle (Virose, 2005), Bart Lans (TU Delft, 2008), Ian Thompson (2015), Thomas Hvid Kromann (2016, DA).
An Anthology of Chance Operations	1963	La Monte Young, Jackson Mac Law	New York	EN	PDF
		art, avant-garde, conceptual art, fluxus, music, poetry A source-book of early Fluxus classics. A collection of texts, scores for events, instruction cards, experimental poetry, and much more by artists musicians, poets, and dancers, who founded Fluxus, minimalism, conceptual art, and other experimental practices. Includes Henry Flynt’s first essay on concept art. (...)
Twentysix Gasoline Stations	1963	Edward Ruscha	Alhambra, CA	EN	PDF, ZIP
		photography Twentysix Gasoline Stations is the first artist’s book by the American artist Ed Ruscha. Published in April 1963 on his own imprint National Excelsior Press, it is often considered to be the first modern artist’s book, and has become famous as a precursor and a major influence on the emerging artist’s book culture, especially in America. The book delivers exactly what its title promises, reproducing 26 photographs of gasoline stations next to captions indicating their brand and location. From the first service station, ‘Bob’s Service’ in Los Angeles where Ruscha lived, the book follows a journey back to Oklahoma City where he had grown up and where his mother still lived. The last image is of a Fina gasoline station in Groom, Texas, which Ruscha has suggested should be seen as the beginning of the return journey, ‘like a coda’. (...) See Rosalind Krauss (Under Blue Cup, 2011: 73-78).
Water Yam	1963	George Brecht	Germany	EN	PDF (1972)
		fluxus Originally published in Germany, June 1963 in a box designed by George Maciunas and typeset by Tomas Schmit, Water Yam has been re-published in various countries several times since. It is now considered one of the most influential artworks released by Fluxus. The box, sometimes referred to as a Fluxbox or Fluxkit, contains a large number of small printed cards, containing instructions known as event-scores, or fluxscores. Typically open-ended, these scores, whether performed in public, private or left to the imagination, leave a lot of space for chance and indeterminancy, forcing a large degree of interpretation upon the performers and audience. (...)
Barakei	1963	Eikoh Hosoe, Yukio Mishima	Tokyo	JP	PDF, PDF (1985, EN)
		body, eroticism, photography The legendary photobook Barakei — Killed by Roses is a collaboration between photographer Eikoh Hosoe and writer Yukio Mishima. Hosoe used props, personal belongings and backgrounds readily available in Mishima’s house to cast the renowned writer as his subject in a sequence of surreal scenery. (...) See Eikoh Hosoe (ASX, 2010).
Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings	1964	Yoko Ono	Tokyo / New York	JP	PDF (EN, 1970, part), PDF (ES), PDF (PT)
		art, conceptual art, poetry Yoko Ono's Grapefruit has become famous as an early example of conceptual art, containing a series of “event scores” that replace the physical work of art – the traditional stock-in-trade of artists – with instructions that an individual may, or may not, wish to enact. (...)
As Is When	1965	Eduardo Paolozzi	London	EN	PDF
		machine, pop art As Is When is Eduardo Paolozzi’s homage to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein created after reading his biography written by George Vaughan Wright. Wittgenstein’s study of linguistic systems coincided with Paolozzi’s love of toys and games and influenced his approach to the “syntax” and “vocabulary” of picture-making. The work began as a series of collages whose components were drawn from Paolozzi’s vast collection of found printed ephemera, which included such diverse materials as Woolworth wrapping paper and clippings from engineering manuals. Each of them was accompanied by quotations from Wittgenstein’s own writings or passages from the biography book. See Wendy Weitman (Pop Impressions, 1999).
Flux Year Box 2	1965- 1968	George Maciunas		EN	PDF
		art, fluxus Flux Year Box 2, a signature Fluxus production, is a boxed anthology of works that was edited and assembled by Fluxus “chairman” George Maciunas beginning in about 1965. Like all Fluxus editions, the contents of each box varies depending on what Maciunas had available at the time. (...)
12 x 9	1967	Álvaro de Sá	Rio de Janeiro	-	PDF
		concrete poetry, visual poetry A process-poem [poema processo] by the Brazilian poet, critic and philologist. (...)
Screen Tests / A Diary	1967	Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol	New York	EN	PDF
		film, photography, poetry The 54 stills of Screen Tests/A Diary–which picture actors and poets, socialites and thieves, models, consumers of amphetamine, painters, filmmakers, and musicians–are frame enlargements from short black-and-white silent-film portraits made between 1964 and 1966 by Andy Warhol with the assistance of Gerard Malanga and/or Billy Linich, also known as Billy Name, who lived at the Factory. Each still consists of one or two entire frames from the film footage, and part of either one or two additional frames. (...) See Reva Wolf (Art Journal, 1993), Gary Comenas (warholstars.org, 2005).
Store Days: Documents from The Store, 1961, and Ray Gun Theater, 1962	1967	Claes Oldenburg	New York	EN	PDF
		art, happening, installation art, performance, performance art, sculpture, theatre In December 1961, Oldenburg opened The Store in the rented storefront at 107 East Second Street that served as his studio, which he called the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company. A fully elaborated manifestation of the project that he had begun months earlier, The Store conflated two disparate types of commerce: the sale of cheap merchandise and the sale of serious art. Oldenburg packed more than one hundred objects into the modestly sized room, setting previously exhibited reliefs alongside new, primarily freestanding sculptures. Everything was available for purchase, with prices starting at $21.79 up to $499.99. After The Store closed, on January 31, 1962, Oldenburg used the space to stage a series of performances collectively titled Ray Gun Theater. (...)
Striptease	1967	Soňa Švecová	Prague	EN	PDF
		fluxus Striptease is a small, handmade album. Its intimate scale, and the cover’s floral fabric and closeup portrait of the artist, suggest a diary or keepsake book. Within the volume’s pages Švecová recorded and reflected on her work, which ranges from pasted photographs and typed descriptions of Aktual group activities to a decorated comb and hand-stitched statements conveying her interest in clothing design and fashion (“Be a tailor for yourself”). (...) See Kim Conaty (MoMA Post, 2015).
Wrinkle	1968	Liliana Porter	New York	EN	PDF, GIF
		new york graphic workshop Ten photoengraved etchings; with an interview by Emmett Williams. (...)
Xerox Book	1968	Seth Siegelaub, John W. Wendler	New York	EN	PDF
		art, conceptual art Perhaps one of the most revered artists’ publications of the 1960s, the Xerox Book, published by dealers Siegelaub and Wendler is a xerox book in name only. Conceived by Siegelaub as an inexpensive artists’ publication – each artist was afforded twenty-five pages [plus a cover / title page] to execute a site specific project for the publication. The resulting projects were among the most important ever printed by these artists Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris and Lawrence Weiner. When going to press Siegelaub discovered that xeroxes would be more expensive than traditional offset lithography so the xeroxing was forgone for reasons of expense, however, the name of the intended publication lives on. (...) See Zachary Sachs (ContainerList, 2011), Jack Wendler (2012, video).
Four Basic Kinds of Straight Lines	1969	Sol LeWitt	London	EN	PDF
		art, conceptual art LeWitt's small book of cross-hatched lines is an early example of his career-long interest in the production of art by systematic means--in this case, by mathematical permutations. (...) See Anne Evenhaugen (Smithsonian Libraries, 2013).
Miss Vietnam	1969	Wolf Vostell	San Francisco	EN	PDF
		art, fluxus, happening Contains “Genesis and Iconography of My Happenings”, “Miss Vietnam”, and “Hommage to Durer”. (...)
Návod k upotřebení	1969	Jiří Kolář	Most	CZ	PDF, HTML (EN)
		collage, poetry A collection of collages and “destatic” poems from the Czech experimental poet and artist. (...) See Pavlína Morganová (Sešit, 2013, CZ).
The History of Violence in America	1970?	Stan VanDerBeek	Boston?	EN	PDF
		art, collage, education, machine, mass media, media, participation, performance Stan VanDerBeek was part of the “Rockefeller Artists-in-Television” residency program at Boston public television station WGBH from 1969–1970, during which time he produced the simulcast television program Violence Sonata. The program, directed by David Atwood and Fred Barzyk, was transmitted simultaneously on both Channels 2 and 44 on 12 January 1970, with the suggestion that viewers place two television sets side-by-side. The series of collages entitled The History of Violence in America was conceived as layouts for reproduction and publication in a booklet to accompany the broadcast. (...) See Melissa Ragain (X-TRA, 2012).
Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard	1969	Marcel Broodthaers	Antwerp	FR	PDF
		poetry Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard [A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance] is a close copy of the first edition of the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem of the same name, published in 1897, but with all the words removed, replaced by black stripes that correspond directly to the typographic layout used by Mallarmé to articulate the text. Often included in exhibitions tracing the history of the artist’s book, the work is seen as a seminal example of the European post-avant-garde. (...)
Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts / Lehren und Lernen als Auffuehrungskuenste	1970	Robert Filliou	Cologne/New York	EN, DE	PDF (EN/DE), PDF (FR, 1998)
		art, art education, education, fluxus, pedagogy, performance art "Off and on 3 years of work and now VERLAG GEBR. KOENIG, KOELN – NEW YORK publishes the first draft of TEACHING AND LEARNING AS PERFORMING ARTS by ROBERT FILLIOU and the READER if he wishes, with the participation of JOHN CAGE, BENJAMIN PATTERSON, GEORGE BRECHT, ALLEN KAPROW, MARCELLE, VERA and BJOESSI and KARL ROT, DOROTHY IANNONE, DITER ROT, JOSEPH BEUYS. It is a Multi – book. The space provided for the reader’s use is nearly the same as the author’s own” (...) See Hannah Higgins (Fluxus Experience, 2002: 188–189, 195–207).
Fantastic Architecture	1971	Wolf Vostell, Dick Higgins	New York	EN	PDF
		architecture, art, city, collage, fluxus, manifesto Published by Dick Higgins’ own seminal Something Else Press, Fantastic Architecture is an adaptation of the German book Pop Architektur (Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf, 1969) and features artists involved in Fluxus, pop and conceptual art movements addressing the field of architecture through collages, captions and mini-manifestos. (...)
Journal of the Identical Lunch	1971	Alison Knowles	San Francisco	EN	PDF, JPG
		fluxus, food A journalistic account of a series of performances of a single piece. The book begins with a description of ‘the identical lunch’ which consists primarily of ‘a tunafish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo, and a large glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup.’ These were eaten ‘many days of each week at the same place and at about the same time.’ (...) See Johanna Drucker (The Century of Artists’ Books, 1995: 345-346).
Navilouca: almanaque dos aqua-loucos	1974	Torquato Neto, Waly Sailormoon	Rio de Janeiro	BR-PT	PDF
		art, brazil, cinema, concrete art, concrete poetry, counterculture, poetry, tropicalia Navilouca was a Brazilian avant-garde art and poetry magazine, of which only a single issue appeared. (...)
Sonic Meditations	1974	Pauline Oliveros	Baltimore	EN	PDF
		listening, sound 25 meditations for musicians of all ages and skill levels, to help them learn how to focus on, listen to, and produce sound naturally. An important work in the development of Oliveros’ Deep Listening. (...) See Pauline Oliveros (Painted Bride Quarterly, 1976), William Osborne (2000), Kerry O'Brien (New Yorker, 2016), Bradford Bailey (The Hum, 2016), Emma Warren (Bowers & Wilkins, 2017).
The Book of Breeething	1974	William S. Burroughs	Essex	EN	PDF (1975)
		A short essay on Egyptian hieroglyphics, Hassan i Sabbah, The Curse of King Tut and state-coups. With illustrations by Robert F. Gale. (...)
Un voyage en mer du nord	1974	Marcel Broodthaers	Brussels / London	FR	PDF
		book, image, painting See Rosalind Krauss (A Voyage on the North Sea, 2000), Cathleen Chaffee (Yale U Art Gallery, 2011).
For Publication	1975	Dan Graham	Los Angeles	EN	PDF
		conceptual art, mass media For Publication reproduces a series of Dan Graham’s projects carried out between 1965 and 1969 that both drew from and were made to be inserted into the mass media. His Schema deal with quantifying linguistic and stylistic information from magazine articles; Detumescence was one of many projects that Graham deployed in paid advertising space of various magazines, as was Dan Graham Inc. and Likes: A Computer-Astrological Dating-Placement Service. Income Piece and the proposal for Aspen Magazine are reproduced as is Homes For America, originally published in Arts Magazine from Dec 1966-Jan 1967. In a section on Information, Graham situates his data-organization practices in the context of Ramon Llull, Borges, Marshall McLuhan, Mallarmé and Roy Lichtenstein. (...)
Joseph Beuys: Coyote	1976	Caroline Tisdall	Munich		PDF (2008, 226 mb)
		art, performance art, photography Coyote was the first attempt to capture a performance by Joseph Beuys in book form. Beuys’s action, I Like America and America Likes Me, took place in May 1974, when he spent seven days and nights in a room with a wild coyote. The artist’s activities during his confinement with the coyote followed a repeated pattern. He employed a number of objects: felt, a walking stick, gloves, a flashlight and the Wall Street Journal – fifty copies were delivered daily. Over the period of a week, man and beast developed a mode of wordless co-existence, a two-sided performance that became rich with assumed meanings. Caroline Tisdall, a longstanding friend of the artist, who has written extensively on Beuys and has directed films about him, took most of the photographs and wrote the accompanying text. (...) See Jan Verwoert (e-flux, 2008).
Félicia / par elle-même. Hommage et depassement de Debord	1976		Paris	FR	PDF
		detournement, situationists Anonymous pamphlet outlining an aesthetic informed by Situationism. (...)
Photo Grids	1977	Sol LeWitt	New York	-	PDF
		art, conceptual art, grid, minimal art A book of forty six plates, each with nine color photographs taken and arranged in a tic tac toe grid by the artist with an eye to pattern. Subjects include paneled doors, window panes, gates and fences, cement and mosaic floors, metal bridgework, etc. Three years later LeWitt published Autobiography, which used the same grid format to tell the story of his daily life. (...)
Ray Johnson Ray Johnson	1977	Ray Johnson	New York	EN	PDF
		art, art criticism, mail art Reproduces several texts and works by Johnson, a number of essays by William S. Wilson, and photographs of Johnson by Toby Spiselman. (...)
Ray Johnson, Ray Johnson, Ray Johnson	1978	John Willenbecher	New York	EN	PDF
		mail art Reproduces a number of artworks, poems, and mail art examples by Johnson, an essay on Willenbecher by William Wilson, and several reproductions and prose works by Willenbecher. (...)
The Yellow Book	1978	Anna Banana	San Francisco	EN	PDF, JPG
		dada, mail art A special rubber stamp art issue of Dadazine modified by Anna Banana. (...)
Book of Typewriter Art	1982	Bob Neill	Cornwall	EN	PDF
		typewriter, typewriter art Bob Neill, artist of the typewriter, was born in the Kent village of Aylesford and practises as a professional Hypnotherapist in the County Town of Maidstone. He first started typing pictures on his typewriter in 1960, having read about a woman in Spain who was producing this form of typewriter art. His first effort was a portrait of a magazine cover-girl which was published in the Star evening newspaper. (...)
Code Poems from The International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations	1982	Hannah Weiner	Barrytown, NY	EN	PDF
		code, communication, poetry "I am interested in exploring methods of communication that will be understood face to face or at any distance, regardless of language, country or planet or origin, by all sending and receiving." (...) See Hannah Weiner (1969).
De Ridder Retrospective	1983	William Levy, Willem de Ridder	Groningen	NL, EN	PDF
		art, fluxus, performance, radio art, theatre Book with comic strips, conversations and a chronology of Dutch radio art maker, magazine editor and Fluxus member Willem de Ridder, issued to accompany his retrospective at the Groningen Museum in the Summer of 1983.
Transpoets	1989	Ry Nikonova, B. Constriktor, Serge Segay, A. Nik	Trento	RU	PDF
		avant-garde, collage, poetry, transfurism, zaum A work of transfurist art and poetry. (...)
History of the/my Wor(l)d	1990	Johanna Drucker	Cambridge, MA	EN	PDF, JPG
		feminism, history, memory A striking alternative to the familiar telling of historical events, Drucker’s account of mythic and major events in the course of western civilization marches roughshod over received traditions. The combination of typographic innovation, visual puns and linguistic play are unique elements of her style. A richly suggestive work interweaving official history and individual memory. (...) See Johanna Drucker & Tate Shaw (Journal of Artists' Books, 2007).
NovaText	1990	Critical Art Ensemble	Brooklyn, NY	EN	PDF, JPG
		criticism, poetry, text The texts "The Critical Function", "Unknown Fact Number One", "Always Already", "The Funest Experiment", "Like A Big Dog", and "This Will Be the Death of Chit-Chat" are letterpressed onto thin, white handmade papers. These lift, like veils, to reveal the “hidden texts” and “annotations” to each piece printed on a sturdier green paper. (...)
Escritas arcaicas	1991	Wlademir Dias-Pino	Rio de Janeiro		PDF
		concrete poetry A book composed of colour plates first created in the early 1970s by the Brazilian poet and graphic artist Wlademir Dias-Pino. Published as one of the 1,001 volumes of Enciclopédia Visual [Visual Encyclopedia] series. (...)
Sex	1992	Madonna	New York	EN	PDF
		body, nudity, photography, popular culture, sex, sexuality One of the most controversial books of the 1990s, now long out of print. (...) See Isabella Rossellini (Huffington Post, 2014).
Gasbehälter	1993	Bernd & Hilla Becher	Munich	DE	PDF (EN)
		architecture, art, conceptual art, gas, industrial architecture, photography Typological, repetitive, at times oddly humorous, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of industrial structures are, in their cumulative effect, profoundly moving. In this work, the Bechers’ present four principally different forms of gas holders or gas tanks in 140 photographs taken during the years 1963-1992 in Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, and the United States. The subjects are photographed under overcast skies that eliminate expressive variations in lighting; the Bechers make no attempt to analyze or explain them. Captions contain only the barest of information: time and place. On the subject of gas holders, the Bechers limit their remarks to a minimal functional description, leaving the aesthetic dimension of their subject to the photographs themselves: much of the fascination of these photographs lies in the fact that these unadorned metallic structures, presumably built with little concern for their visual impact, are almost invariably striking in appearance. (...)
Fish Story	1995	Allan Sekula	Düsseldorf	EN	PDF (2002)
		capitalism, photography The Fish Story project focuses on the quest for centers of maritime power past and present and the political interest in the change in the economic infrastructure of industrial ports yielded by late-capitalist rule in its phase of multinational and global expansion. This is the third project of the American photographer and historian Allan Sekula in his cycle on the imaginary and real geography of the advanced capitalist world. (...)
Silent Movie	1995	Chris Marker	Columbus, OH	EN	PDF
		cinema, film, film history, silent cinema, silent film In Silent Movie, Marker employs five-channels of video, each a thematic exploration of early cinema. Film images disclosing ‘The Journey,’ ‘The Face,’ ‘The Gesture,’ and ‘The Waltz’ occupy four of the monitors while on the fifth (and middle) monitor is a collection of ninety-four silent-era intertitles, ‘telling short, mysterious pieces of unknown stories.’ These moving images travel through a computer interface that assembles an ever-changing array of sequences. At any given moment, each passage is in unique juxtaposition with the other images passing across the surrounding monitors. Coloration, tone, and association are governed by chance contiguities; even the intertitles narrate across a field of fluid relationships. (...)
JFL: What Does ""Why"" Mean?	2002	Octavian Esanu	Stuttgart	EN	PDF
		philosophy of art Hilarious and profound. This book has so many layers of meaning that you can read it every day for the rest of your life. In 2001, while residing at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, artist and curator Octavian Esanu read hundreds of interviews and essays by artists and art critics. He then formed a new text out of questions about art, that he culled from his readings. Each question is duly footnoted. (...)
Artist's Diary 2003	2003	Heath Bunting	Bristol	EN	PDF, JPG
		Heath Bunting rarely puts his thoughts and feelings on screen with words. Usually, they were blazoned across networks in passionate expressive structures which he draws from the ever encroaching apparatus repressive. His artist’s diary for 2003 provides provocative insight into his character and the evolution of his work. (...)
Schadenfreude Book Kassel	2003	Luchezar Boyadjiev	Kassel	EN	PDF
		appropriation, art, balkans, contemporary art "This is my artist’s book based on the altered and heavily manipulated catalogue of the exhibition of contemporary art from the Balkans titled In the Gorges of the Balkans, 2003, in Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany. The book is part of my work-in-progress titled Schadenfreude Guided Tours (2003), which originated in and with this show. The work is the visual-textual summary of the tours." (...) See Luchezar Boyadjiev (Manifesta Journal, 2003).
A Collection of Google Street Views	2008–	Jon Rafman	Montreal	EN	PDF (1), PDF (2), PDF (3)
		art, google, photography, surveillance Jon Rafman has spent a considerable amount of time capturing and compiling Google Street View images that fulfill an artistic quality rather than purely informative. (...) See Jon Rafman (ArtFagCity, 2009), Jon Rafman (2010).
Aluminium: Beauty, Incorruptibility, Lightness and Abundance, The Metal of the Future	2008	Graham Harwood	Bolzano	EN	PDF
		history of technology, industry, technology, video Aluminium is a futurist graphic book and film about the social history of aluminium. In 2009 it will be 100 years since Marinetti set out the Futurist manifesto in which advocated the consumption of metal bolts and engine oil to turn men into machines. Marinetti believed in speed, machines and violence, values that for him were epitomised in the recent invention of aluminium. Drawing on archival footage from the aluminium industry, Harwood derives algorithms from the Futurist Manifestos to create the books cells by recording only the differences between key video frames. Caption texts are gathered up and edited together by issue crawlers as they search across the Internet. Aluminium takes the futurist logic of the 20th Century and turns it back upon its self.
D.I.Y. Satellite	2009	Song hojun	Seoul	EN, KO	PDF (KO), PDF (EN)
		diy, hardware, open source, software, space A zine by Song hojun, the leader of Open Source Satellite Initiative for developing a D.I.Y. satellite. Based on the artist’s sketch and manual of D.I.Y. Satellite, the publication contains thoughts on private space program, its execution plan, and things are going to happen afterward. (...)
XYM	2009	Marlie Mul, Yngve Holen		EN	PDFs
		art A project initiated by Marlie Mul and Yngve Holen. (...)
Light Transformer Prototype	2010	Adrien Lucca	Brussels	FR	PDF
		colour, design, light, mathematics Le présent travail est le fruit d’une recherche qui s’étendit sur plus d’un an, et que cette première publication n’épuise pas. [..] J’ai voulu offrir à son lecteur ou à sa lectrice une véritable expérience de lecture – au sens peut-être le plus conservateur du terme – doublée d’une expérience visuelle et tactile de première main. Je prétends ainsi leur communiquer une synthèse d’observations et de pensées privées, personnelles. Cet essai pourra par conséquent contenir des erreurs ou des naïvetés qui m’auront échappées. Avant tout, j’espère y avoir trouvé un point d’équilibre entre contenus vusuels, textuels et stylistiques. (...) See Haseeb Ahmed and Adrien Lucca (2011), Adrien Lucca (2012).
Katz	2011	Ilan Manouach	Ixelles	FR	PDF
		appropriation, comics, conceptual comics Katz is a pirated edition of Art Spiegelman’s seminal graphic novel Maus. Katz is an exact copy of the French edition of Maus, with the difference that all the animal characters, have been redrawn as cats. See M. Hulot and Ilan Manouach (Ough, 2012), Xavier Guilbert and Ilan Manouach (du9, 2012, FR), Bill Kartalopoulos (World Literature Today, 2016).
56 Broken Kindle Screens	2012	Silvio Lorusso, Sebastian Schmieg		EN	MOBI, ZIP
		book, e-book, glitch 56 Broken Kindle Screens is a print on demand paperback that consists of found photos depicting broken Kindle screens. The Kindle is Amazon’s e-reading device which is by default connected to the company’s book store. The book takes as its starting point the peculiar aesthetic of broken E Ink displays and serves as an examination into the reading device’s materiality. As the screens break, they become collages composed of different pages, cover illustrations and interface elements. (...)
Afronauts	2012	Cristina De Middel	Cádiz	EN	PDF
		africa, documentary, photography, space race, zambia In 1964, still living the dream of their recently gained independence, Zambia started a space program that would put the first African on the moon catching up the USA and the Soviet Union in the space race. Only a few optimists supported the project by Edward Makuka, the school teacher in charge of presenting the ambitious program and getting its necessary funding. But the financial aid never came, as the United Nations declined their support, and one of the astronauts, a 16 year old girl, got pregnant and had to quit. That is how the heroic initiative turned into an exotic episode of the African history, surrounded by wars, violence, droughts and hunger. (...) See Aline Smithson (Lenscratch, 2012).
Critical Making	2012	Garnet Hertz	Hollywood	EN	PDF, PDFs
		3d printing, art, contemporary art, critical making, design, diy, diy biology, engineering Critical Making is a handmade book project by Garnet Hertz that explores how hands-on productive work ‐ making ‐ can supplement and extend critical reflection on technology and society. It works to blend and extend the fields of design, contemporary art, DIY/craft and technological development. It also can be thought of as an appeal to the electronic DIY maker movement to be critically engaged with culture, history and society: after learning to use a 3D printer, making an LED blink or using an Arduino, then what? See Regine Debatty (We Make Money Not Art, 2013), Blue (Engine Institute, 2013).
Flash + Cube, 1965-1975	2012	Marget Long	New York	EN	PDF
		1960s, light, media technology, photography, vietnam war, war A book about the Sylvania flashcube — the space-aged, flash photography device, revolutionary in 1965 and nearly obsolete by 1975. Assembled from a wide range of archival materials — a “terrorist letter,” G.I. photographs from Vietnam, Sylvania flashcube advertisements, as well as Long’s photographs and photomontages—the book explores the links between light, war, history and photography. (...) See Anna McCarthy (Social Text, 2012).
The SKOR Codex	2012	La Société Anonyme	Amsterdam	-	PDF
		archive, archiving, art, code, data, digital heritage, media art, preservation The SKOR Codex is a printed book which will be sent to different locations on earth. It contains binary encoded image and sound files selected to portray the diversity of life and culture at the Foundation for Art and Public Domain (SKOR), Amsterdam, and is intended for any intelligent terrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find it. The files are protected from bitrot, software decay and hardware failure via a transformation from magnetic transitions on a disk to ink on paper, safe for centuries. Instructions in a symbolic language explain the origin of the book and indicate how the content is to be decoded. (...) See Annet Dekker and La Société Anonyme (Open!, 2014).
A Bestiary of Spam Characters	2013	André Castro, Silvio Lorusso	Berlin	EN	PDF
		spam Booklet resulting from the workshop “Spam Publishing” held at Transmediale 2013, Berlin. (...)
Bon Ton Mais Non	2013	Irena Haiduk		EN	PDF
		art, manifesto An 80 point manifesto on polite art. Like every intimate dinner party, Bon Ton Mais Non requires one symphony orchestra, a pastry chef, a large mirror, and the fact of cannibal sirens. (...)
Diagrammatic Writing	2013	Johanna Drucker	Eindhoven	EN	PDF
		book, diagram, gestalt theory, graphic design, text, writing Diagrammatic Writing is a poetic demonstration of the capacity of format to produce meaning. The articulation of the codex, as a space of semantically generative relations, has rarely (if ever) been subject to so highly focused and detailed a study. The text and graphical presentation are fully integrated, co-dependent, and mutually self-reflexive. (...) Johanna Drucker (Iowa Review, 2014).
Diff in June	2013	Martin Howse	Brescia	EN	PDF
		archive, data, language Diff in June tells a day in the life of a personal computer, written by itself in its own language, as a sort of private log or intimate diary focused on every single change to the data on its hard disk. Using a small custom script, for the entire month of June 2011 Martin Howse registered each chunk of data which had changed within the file system from the previous day’s image. Excluding binary data, one day’s sedimentation has been published in this book, a novel of data archaeology in progress tracking the overt and the covert, merging the legal and illegal, personal and administrative, source code and frozen systematics. (...)
1887 – Splendide Hotel	2014	Dominique Gonzales-Foerster	Paris	FR, EN	PDF
		1880s In Splendide Hotel – 1887 there is one sole room and it is transparent, containing apparitions of all literary, musical, scientific and abstract sorts. From an internal monologue to quantum physics to the gramophone and bioluminescence, within this little book there is a collection of nearly all the references serving to rebuild this hotel within the Cristal Palace to reveal 1887 as the birth year of our universe. (...)
Theory	2015	Kenneth Goldsmith	Paris	EN, FR	PDF (EN), PDF (FR)
		language, literature, poetics, poetry, theory, writing Theory offers an unprecedented reading of the contemporary world: 500 texts – from poems and musings to short stories – printed on 500 pages assembled in the form of a ream of paper. Curated by the author-poet, this collection maps out the various issues and trends in contemporary literature in a world currently being shaken up by everything online and digital, and calls for the reinvention of creative forms. (...)
Dark Sound	2016	Mikel R. Nieto	Frankfurt/M.	EU, ES, EN	PDF, MP3
		ecuador, environment, field recording, oil The book contains “Ecopolitik”–an introduction as an epilogue by José Luis Espejo, a letter to the Huaorani people, two research texts and one bertso, descriptive texts and photos of recordings, a possible chronology, a glossary, a compilation of several texts with testimonies, reports and declarations from different people, groups, institutions, and publications in reference to the impact—direct or indirect—of the noise from the oil industry during its various phases of development on the people, the environment and the fauna. (...) See reviews.
A Physical Book	2017	Liza Daly		EN	PDF
		book A Physical Book makes a digitized book ‘physical’ by rendering it in a simulated space where properties like gravity, friction, and velocity all apply. The program randomly perturbs the letters, then takes a snapshot at a point in time, re-assembling the images into a new, ‘un-digitized’ book. The raw, uncorrected scanned text of The Up-To-Date Sandwich Book: 400 Ways to Make a Sandwich (1909) is re-imagined as this 251 page book. (...)
a, A Novel	2017	Derek Beaulieu	Paris	EN	PDF
		conceptual writing, uncreative writing, visual poetry a, A Novel is an erasure-based translative response to Andy Warhol’s eponymous novel. Beaulieu carefully erases all of the text on each page of the original work, leaving only the punctuation marks, typists’ insertions and onomatopoeic words. The resultant text is a novelistic ballet mécanique, a visual orchestration of the traffic signals and street noise of 1960’s New York City. This visually powerful half score/half novel highlights the musicality of non-narrative sounds embedded within conversation. (...)
1000 Infrathins	2018	Kenneth Goldsmith	Philadelphia	EN	PDF
		aesthetics, infrathin Infranthin is the space between spaces, the sound between sounds, the sensation between sensations; neither here nor there, this nor that, but both—all at the same time. The closest metaphor is the fourth dimension, which is best illustrated by a cube collapsing in on itself and at the same time expanding. I know. It’s not very helpful. But that’s the whole point—it’s a moving target, a ball of contradictions; just when you think you’ve got it, it’s escaped you. Marcel Duchamp gave six instances of the infrathin. We wrote 1000 of them. (...)
Emotions Go to Work	2018	Zoe Beloff	Colchester	EN	PDF
		capitalism, emotion, technology Emotions Go to Work is an investigation into how technology is used to turn our feelings into valuable assets. One might call it the transformation of emotion into capital. It asks what is at stake in our relationship with the companions we call smart objects? What does the future hold in store for a world where people are treated more and more like things, while the billions of gadgets that make up the Internet of Things are increasingly anthropomorphized, granted agency? (...)
An Exhibition Turned Into an Global Feminist Protest Turned Into a Catalogue	2018	Purple Noise	Amsterdam	EN	PDF
		cyberfeminism, feminism, noise, social media, technology In the summer of 2018, a German artist, famous for having a past as cyberfeminist and a present as technofeminist, was invited to Stuttgart in the South of Germany, to create an exhibition dealing with issues of gender and technology as part of a large festival. During her research, she got in touch with numerous fellow artists and activists, and in a process of collective realization, they found that the time has come, not for another exhibition, but for a global technofeminist upheaval. (...)
Secrets at Mediacity Seoul	2018	Sam Hart, Sarah Hamerman	Amsterdam	EN	PDF
		encryption, information, secrecy Secrets at Mediacity Seoul traces a genealogy of artworks that examine the secret as an information structure, from the conceptual artworks of the 1960s to works that consider secrecy and encryption in today’s social and technological context. (...)
Enduring Liveness: An Imaginary Retrospective of Tino Sehgal’s Constructed Situations	2018	Annet Dekker	Amsterdam	EN	PDF
		art documentation, performance, performance art The key functions of a museum are the collection, presentation, preservation and education of cultural and artworks for the enjoyment of, and to educate, the public. Performance art has been notoriously difficult for museums to handle, despite the ‘easy’ presentation the non-materiality of the art form challenges the conventional methods and practices of a museum. Artist Tino Sehgal had added to these problems, persisting in having no documentation of his performances, or better his ‘constructed situations’, in whatever form or way. This catalogue presents three perspectives that open up the potential of documentation as a method to generate new articulations and ways of understanding, thinking and performing. (...)
Flux until Sunrise	2018	Geraldine Juárez	Gothenburg	EN	PDF
		ceramics, display, electronic waste, screen The book combines an interview with Esther Leslie about Materialismo Mágico with documentation of my material exploration of what she refers as the Liquid Crystal Epoque. The book includes the recipes for LCD and Gorilla screen-glazes. (...)