Artist’s publications
«Pensar es un acto revolucionario»: las publicaciones de artista de Marie Orensanz
This text, published here in the University of Salamanca’s Umática online journal, analyzes Marie Orensanz’s artist publications. After beginning her career as a painter in the 1960s, Argentine artist Marie Orensanz (La Plata, Argentina, 1936) created a significant number of artist publications in the 1970s and 1980s, alongside her sculptural and pictorial practice. These publications, … Continued
Ensayo 7: Marianne Wex’s ‘LET’S TAKE BACK OUR SPACE’, a Case Study
The German artist Marianne Wex earned a degree in Fine Arts and subsequently taught typography for several years at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HfbK). Her best-known work, the research project and book Let’s Get Back Our Space – ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures (Frauenliteraturverlag Hemine Fees, 1979), … Continued
Ensayo 5: Lliure associació – Un recorregut per la biblioteca de Mela Dávila Freire
“A library is not the same as an archive: it lacks a system of hierarchies that determines the place that each book occupies within it in relation to the others. This does not mean, however, that any haphazard and disorderly accumulation of titles constitutes a library. Certainly, almost all libraries started in the same way: … Continued
The ARCO catalogue is dead, long live the ARCO catalogue!
“…Thus, the ARCO catalogue functions, to a certain extent, as a paper replication of the fair’s space. Although the correspondence between the large three-dimensional volume that the fair occupies and the much smaller two-dimensional surface that unfolds in the printed volume is far from direct, the fact is that one moves through the catalogue’s pages … Continued
Layer upon Layer (Christo & Jean-Claude / Shunk and Kender / Sotillo) [Ensayo 3]
This micro-exhibition included three elements: a poster featuring a photograph of the installation Valley Curtain by Christo and Jeanne-Claude (1972), a display stand holding a copy of the book of the same title published by the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas in 1975, which was designed by renowned Álvaro Sotillo, and a facsimile reproduction … Continued
Ed Ruscha’s “The Books of Ed Ruscha” | Fondation Jan Michalski
In the film The Books of Ed Ruscha (23’), directed in 1969 by Ed Ruscha (1937- ) himself, some of his iconic conceptual books are leafed through, unfolded and read by his accomplice Mason Williams. The books Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1963), Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), or Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) reveal … Continued
Ensayo 2: We Want to Know
The second Essay is a poster designed to be folded and mailed. The intended recipients were, initially, the people who had participated in a simple survey aimed at gathering references to publications by female artists between 1960 and 1990. The front of the poster contains about a hundred titles that were identified through this survey, … Continued
Un espacio tomado quizás por fantasmas
“…While artist’s publications know how to ‘speak’ about space in different ways, when they are part of an exhibition, they inhabit the exhibition space and interact with it, often problematizing it in an obvious way. Can an open book be displayed in a glass case, out of reach of visitors who are also its potential … Continued
El que pot un llibre 13: «Apariciones, Enric Farrés Duran» | MACBA
Session No. 13 of the series of talks and presentations What a Book Can Do, organized by Anna Pahissa at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, was dedicated to discussing Apariciones, an artist’s book by Enric Farrés Duran published by the museum itself. Apariciones had been published in conjunction with Farrés Duran’s exhibition Cosas que … Continued
Ensayo 1: El ensayo (polifónico)
The Ensayos series was launched in late 2021, coinciding with the start of a wide-ranging research project aimed at redefining—from a feminist and, to the extent possible, decolonial perspective—the canon that historiography has established for the artist’s book genre. The aim of this series is to present partial research findings in a variety of printed … Continued
Camiño Negro. Fotografías de Damián Ucieda
In 2020, María José Jove Foundation from A Coruña invited me to be, in collaboration with Juan de Nieves, the editor of a publication by photographer Damián Ucieda, in which Ucieda’s photo essay was to be presented alongside a selection of archival documentation illustrating the project’s context. “In addition to the photographs from Camiño negro, … Continued
Beyond This Point, Nothing is Fiction
The artist’s book Aparicions / Apariciones is part of the exhibition project Coses que pasen, in which the artist Enric Farrés Durán uses the institutional archive of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) as a primary source of materials and inspiration. For the preparation of this project, as with other people who had been … Continued
Un espacio hecho de espacios tras espacios
José-Miguel Ullán’s writing, which has been extensively analyzed and discussed, has often been noted for the difficulty of pigeonholing it into currents, trends, literary groups, and other commonly used classificatory contexts. José-Miguel Ullán, in fact, did not write only “literary” poetry. Is the same true of his visual poetry, or of the books he collaborated … Continued
«Constructive Contact between Us»: Other Books and So by Ulises Carrión | Artpool Art Research Center
In 2020, the international conference Artists, Archives and Networks, held in Budapest (Hungary) commemorated the 40th anniversary of the foundation of Artpool, which had come into being as an independent archive, but had become, by then, an organization named Arpool Art Research Center and connected to the university. The conference aimed to map the cultural-political-historical … Continued
“No Order, No Neatness. Books and Magazines from the 1980s”
1980 signalled an important moment of change at multiple levels. Politically, Western societies undertook a deep conservative turn, while market philosophy spread relentlessly to all walks of life, including culture and art, rapidly affected likewise by the “logic of late capitalism” enunciated by Jameson. In the arts, a number of phenomena coexisted during this decade. … Continued
Puntos de vista. Algunos usos de la fotografía como recurso editorial
«En sus horas de trabajo, Haacke se dedicó a observar a los visitantes y aprovechó para tomar numerosas fotografías que documentan…»
«El Universo (que otros llaman biblioteca): colecciones documentales privadas en Europa» | Arts Santa Mònica
The 5th International Symposium on Artist Books, organized by the artist publications fair Arts Libris (Barcelona, 2018) and moderated by art historian and curator Glòria Picazo, focused on artist’s books collecting. Participants in the sessions included João Fernandes, deputy artistic director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; Anne Thurmann-Jajes, from the Center … Continued
Gesa Lange: Im Halbkreis Neben der Lampe
«…Tatsächlich sind die assoziativen Bindungen zwischen Gewebe und Textualität sehr eng: etymologisch stammt das Wort Text der lateinischen Vokabel textum ab, dem Partizip des Verbs texere, das „weben, flechten; kunstvoll zusammenfügen“ bedeutet…»
Legible – Visible. Between the Film Frame and the Page
«How is a book similar to a film? The range of back-and-forth relatioinships that can be established between print media – books, comics, posters, postcards, etc. – and cinema, video and other audiovisual formats clears the way for an extremely broad workspace, wich a large number of artists have assiduously traversed since the invention of cinematography at the end of the nineteenth century…»
“Legible – Visible. Between the Film Frame and the Page”, Barcelona (Spain) and Cuenca (Ecuador)
I curated the exhibition Legible – Visible. Between the Film Frame and the Page with the assistance of Maite Muñoz, while Ricardo Duque and Tiago Pina, from studio Todojunto, were in charge of the display design. Editorial Tenov, from Barcelona, published the accompanying book with the same title. The exhibition aimed to explore the links of … Continued
Modificar lo dado. La experimentación espacial en los libros de Francisco Pino
«…El corpus poético de Pino, aparecido en numerosos volúmenes de poemas y en colaboraciones con revistas, siguió desarrollándose por los cauces esperados para un poeta de vanguardia hasta 1970, momento en que, con la publicación de Solar —a la edad de 68 años—, su trabajo dio un nuevo e importante giro experimental…»
Granma’s Room. An Attempt at Recording what Happens when Nothing Happens
«One day in 2004, Gesa Lange was invited to visit the estate of a good friend’s family. The property comprised a house and several adjacent buildings – a stable, various out-buildings and sheds. Noticing Lange’s interest in these run-down edifices…»
Dear Reader, Don’t (Only) Read
«Manuel Raeder has been working on publishing and design projects for more than 15 years. He has run his own design office, Studio Manuel Raeder, since 2009, and in 2013 founded the publishing label Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite , a platform for challenging…»
Dora García, Read with Golden Fingers (L’Innommable – Samuel Beckett)
“En la primera década de los 2000 Dora García inició una serie de obras, realizadas a partir de volúmenes de obras literarias, que ha proseguido ampliando hasta la actualidad. En esta serie, además de materializar su constante interés por estudiar los fenómenos vinculados al lenguaje y la comunicación, la artista pone en juego su habilidad para explorar…”
El cubo blanco reducido a tamaño de bolsillo. La publicación como práctica curatorial y artística
«Venecia, mayo de 2015: la 56 edición de la exposición internacional de arte se inaugura entre los destellos de las cámaras fotográficas y el relumbre de los invitados vip. Pocos días después comienzan a aparecer, tanto en la prensa diaria como en la especializada, numerosas críticas y reseñas. De ellas se desprende que la impresión que parece haber calado entre los comentaristas es que esta edición de la Bienal…»
“This is the Cover of the Book”
The exhibition This is the Cover of the Book, which I curated together with Moritz Küng, presented ca. 50 books – artists’ books, photobooks and reference books – that are related in different ways to artists’ book publishing. The title refers to the seminal Book by George Brecht (New York, 1926-Cologne, 2008), published in 1964/1972 … Continued
How to Do Things with Email: My Holy Nacho
«In June 2013, Jamie Allen and Bernhard Garnicnig took three steps to set in motion the collaborative, fragmented and remotely controlled project My Holy Nacho. To start with, they selected six different used objects that were being sold on well-known web pages. Then…»
“My Holy Nacho”
The core of My Holy Nacho, an artistic project by Jamie Allen and Bernhard Garnicnig, is “immaterial” work: remote, delocalized, triggered only by instructions sent by digital means. Over more than a year, these two artists commissioned various services from successive industrial suppliers throughout the world, limiting their communication to mere emails. My contribution to … Continued
¿Por qué tener miedo al futuro? La colección de colecciones del Centre de Documentació de La Panera
«…El arranque de los fondos documentales de La Panera coincidió con la cuarta edición de la Biennal Leandre Cristòfol, celebrada en 2004. Aquella fue la edición de la Biennal en la que por primera vez se incluyeron publicaciones de artista en la exposición…»
Autor, actor, lector. El camino de la performance al libro
«La conferencia performativa es un subgénero de la performance en el que los recursos, la técnica y las herramientas de las conferencias académicas se ponen al servicio de la práctica artística. Las conferencias performativas suelen echar mano…»
«Autor, actor, lector. El camino de la performance al libro»
Autor, actor, lector. El camino de la performance al libro surge del encargo que recibí del Centro de Documentación de La Panera para realizar el capítulo 5 de la panera online, una serie de exposiciones en forma de vídeo dedicadas al libro de artista.
New formats, new roles, new agents: Artists’ publications in Spain since 2000
“More than half a century has passed since the legendary 1960s, which are unanimously considered the era of the expansion and consolidation of artist publications—although, in fact, their beginnings date back to the Russian avant-garde, Futurism, and even earlier moments. It could be said that this medium has entered a new golden age: in recent … Continued
“Possible Forms of Action” – Book Showcase #3
Early in 2013, I was invited to curate and present Book Showcase #3, a selection of books which would be presented in the context of the exhibition Intervened Library, for which the curatorial collective Hablar en arte had invite a number of artists to intervene on already existing books, thereby creating one-of-a-kind artist publications. For … Continued