Reading Room catalogue

Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote is an indomitable woman on a formidable quest: to become a knight and defeat the evil enchanters of modern America by pursuing “the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love.”

In this visionary world, Don Quixote journeys through American history to the final days of the Nixon administration, passing on the way through a New York reminiscent of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and a brutally defamiliarized contemporary London. Here transvestites who might play at being Nazis and beautiful she-males enact the rituals of courtly love. Presiding over this late-twentieth-century Leviathan is Thomas Hobbes–the Angel of Death.

Martin Margiela is the designer behind the Belgian fashion house Maison Martin Margiela, famed for such innovations as transparent dresses, external seams, hand-painted jeans and doll’s clothes. Street Magazine was originally published in 1999 by Shoichi Aoki to introduce the Japanese market to Maison Martin Margiela. Volume one covers collections from Spring/Summer 1989 up to Autumn/Winter 1995-1996, and volume two covers all of his collections for women up to Spring/Summer 1999, plus the first presentation of 10, a men’s wardrobe, and Maison Martin Margiela’s participation in three exhibitions held in Brussels, Florence and Rotterdam. It includes photographs by Martin Margiela, Raf Coolen, Tatsuya Kitayama, Ronald Stoops, Barbara Katz and many others.

Set in post-9/11 New York City, Reena Spaulings was written by a large collective of writers and artists that bills itself as The Bernadette Corporation. Like most contemporary fiction, Reena Spaulings is about a female twenty-something. Reena is discovered while working as a museum guard and becomes a rich international supermodel. Meanwhile, a bout of terrible weather seizes New York, leaving in its wake a strange form of civil disobedience that stirs its citizens to mount a musical song-and-dance riot called “Battle on Broadway.” Fashioned in the old Hollywood manner by a legion of professional and amateur writers striving to achieve the ultimate blockbuster, the musical ends up being about a nobody who could be anybody becoming a somebody for everybody. The result is generic and perfect—not unlike Reena Spaulings itself, whose many authors create a story in which New York itself strives to become the ultimate collective experiment in which the only thing shared is the lack of uniqueness.

From before the beginning (which was also, according to them, already the end), the adepts of the Architectonic Order of the Eschaton have worked tirelessly to secure the past, present, and future against the incursions of Neolemurian time-sorcery, eliminating all polytemporal activity, stitching up the future, sealing every breach and covering every track. According to the AOE, the Ccru ‘does not, has not, and will never exist’. And yet….

The texts collected here document the Ccru’s perilous efforts to catalogue the traces of Lemurian occulture, bringing together the scattered accounts of those who had stumbled upon lagooned relics of nonhuman intelligence—a project that led ultimately to the recovery of the Numogram and the reconstruction of the principles of Lemurian time-sorcery—before disintegrating into collective schizophrenia and two decades of absolute obscurity.

Meshing together fiction, number theory, voodoo, philosophy, anthropology, palate tectonics, information science, semiotics, geotraumatics, occultism, and other nameless knowledges, in these pages the incomplete evidence gathered by explorers including Burroughs, Blavatsky, Lovecraft, Jung, Barker, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler, but also the testimony of more obscure luminaries such as Echidna Stillwell, Oskar Sarkon, and Madame Centauri, are clarified and subjected to systematic investigation, comparison, and assessment so as to gauge the real stakes of the Time-War still raging behind the collapsing façade of reality.

One of the most compelling and unnerving collective research enterprises to have surfaced in the twentieth century, the real pertinence of the Ccru’s work is only now beginning to reveal itself to an unbelieving world. To plunge into the tangled mesh of these conspiracies, weird tales, numerical plagues, and suggestive coincidences is to test your sense of reality beyond the limits of reasonable tolerance—to enter the sphere of unbelief, where demonic currents prowl, where fictions make themselves real. Hyperstition.

Blue has run is an intervened facsimile of A Catalog of Textiles and Folkart of Chiapas by the anthropologist Walter F. Morris, published in 1979. The original publication was printed in 100 copies, most of which have been lost or dispersed through various specialized libraries. This catalog listed the items belonging to three collections of fabrics and weaving patterns in South Mexico which Walter F. Morris, called Chip, helped to constitute during mid seventies: the Pellizzi, the Pomar and the Morris Collection. Its DIY quality gives the images an almost abstract twist. This and the painstakingly precise descriptions of the items take the content of the catalog towards territories closer to poetry, drifting it away from its original purpose.

Blue has run pushes this unexpected twist of the original book by subtracting elements from the texts, creating a new reading subject for an open interpretation. The publication follows the exhibition Azul Jacinto Marino by the artist duo Rometti Costales, which took place at Centre d’art contemporain la synagogue de Delme (17 October to 28 February 2016) and which has been selected and supported by the grant committee of the FNAGP.

In one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel “to stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s” (Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author of Fortress of Solitude).

Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there…. The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. Into this disaster zone comes a young man—poet, lover, and adventurer—known only as the Kid.

Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism.

It began with a blinding light, a divine revelation from a mysterious intelligence that called itself VALIS. And with that, the fabric of reality was ripped open and laid bare so that anything seemed possible, but nothing seemed quite right.

Part science fiction, part theological detective story in which God plays both the missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime, VALIS is both disorienting and eerily funny, and a joy to read.

Together and by Ourselves, Alex Dimitrov’s second book of poems, takes on broad existential questions and the reality of our current moment: being seemingly connected to one another, yet emotionally alone. Through a collage aesthetic and a multiplicity of voices, these poems take us from coast to coast, New York to L.A., and toward uneasy questions about intimacy, love, death, and the human spirit. Dimitrov critiques America’s long-lasting obsessions with money, celebrity, and escapism—whether in our personal, professional, or family lives. What defines a life? Is love ever enough? Who are we when together and who are we by ourselves? These questions echo throughout the poems, which resist easy answers. The voice is both heartfelt and skeptical, bruised yet playful, and always deeply introspective.

Manchester, UK. 2080.
It is a subculture whereby people are sexually attracted to the idea of transmitting and receiving STI’s. It started as a counter-culture against computer algorithms that determine every aspect of people’s lives, from careers to romantic interests, where they live, all over the world. The Virosexuals decided to alter their own bodies in order to subvert the algorithm. Now treated as non humans and thus ignored, Virosexuals like Amygdala are left to survive on their own…

Amygdala’s world consists of: her open relationship with Cel, her philosophical musings and drugged-up rants with her best friend Skunk/Winny, as well as her pursuit of all the completely curable (and thus fetishised) meatspace ‘zeases the club scene can offer. She tries to negotiate her body, her sexuality and her desires and find the source of the ‘Petitmort’ threat…!

Amygdala’s dealer ran off on her. She’s out of estrogen, and so when Alejandro offers her a bountiful supply of ‘mones if she works for him – doing what? – she’s not super sure… What she does know: ESCHATOS 2.0 is trying to kill her. There’s a rumour buzzing on The Chat. A deadly virus, nicknamed ‘Petitmort’, is going around. It was manufactured by ESCHATOS 2.0, and maybe only those who have installed the latest update of the Treehouse Link are susceptible. Could Alejandro’s mission for Amygdala be connected to this virus sweeping the underground kink and BDSM scene?

Orion J. Facey’s The Virosexuals, the author’s first novel, is a science-fantasy you won’t regret plugging into.

This publication follows the course of the development of Huyghe’s practice in the last ten years. A conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artist Director of the Serpentine Galleries, and an essay by art historian Dorothea von Hantelmann, offer a comprehensive discussion of this period. Drawings, diagrams, plans, text and reference images, photographs and film stills chart the processof developing works, both realised and unrealised, as well as acting as markers, recording the experience of encountering them.

Seminal projects are focused on, along with other works that were developed simultaneously. The first of these, THE HOST AND THE CLOUD (2009–2010), took place in a former museum in Paris; UNTILLED (2012), which was developed during documenta (13) in Kassel, could be found in the composting area of a public park, and AFTER ALIFE AHEAD (2017) was conceived in a disused ice rink as part of Skulptur Projekte Münster. Huyghe’s most recent work, UUMWELT (2018), which was installed first at the Serpentine Galleries in London, and later at Luma Arles, is the culmination of a ground-breaking approach to exhibitions.

“An Ode to Me and My Unborn Children“ is an artist book, a durational artwork that is a collection of drawings, scans, photographs and poems, that were collected during a six-month period. This book tells a narrative story which is presented as a young woman’s open confession bringing up themes of paranoia, sexuality, worry and hedonism. A sense of mutual manipulation of a romantic relationship is evoked through the poems that are reminiscent to obsessive repetitive thoughts. These thoughts wander between joy, egoism, fear and regret, following self-conviction and denial. These themes are shown through irony and a parody of self-pity and self-implied drama.

The book contains scans of original notes from the doctor’s office and medical laboratories, women’s contraception package inserts, scanned pieces of clothing, flowers, acid-burnt hair – an allusion to the Crime of Passion, which is committed against a romantic partner and is caused by an impulse or due to jealousy.

“An Ode to Me and My Unborn Children“ raises awareness of manipulative behavior and physicality, psychological violence between oneself and another and invites to rethink what is considered to be love within ourselves, and the society.

The varied practice of Paul Chan includes paintings, drawings, video animations and font design, as well as critical writing. The characters in his works are animated beings, jerking and stuttering as they are violently thrust into the clumsy reel – or “real” – of history. Chan explores the intellectual and sexual animus that courses through our collective language and consciousness, drawing on sources as varied as the King James Bible, Marquis de Sade and Samuel Beckett. Part of the 2000 Words series, conceived and commissioned by Massimiliano Gioni, and published by the Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paul Chan: 2000 Words presents the entirety of the artist’s works in the Dakis Joannou Collection and includes an essay by Stephen Squibb that reveals the solitary image and its uncanny animation in Chan’s work.

This book is a close collaboration between artist Jorge Méndez Blake, curator Rodrigo Ortiz Monasterio, and designer Santiago da Silva in the mutual interest on unfinished novels, libraries and the connections that can be made between literature and architecture. Não de China (China Boat) takes as a departure point José Juan Tablada’s writings, seeking the missing connections in order to produce a series of encounters and perspectives into his literature. By unraveling Tablada’s oeuvre, imagining his lost or unfinished works, this book attempts to give contemporary interpretations of some of the seminar themes in his work: Orientalism, the relation between literature and visual arts, and the creation of national identity through art and architecture. This book is written in English and Spanish.

For Real presents the work of thirty up-and-coming Amsterdam artists, including Germaine Kruip, Rob Johannesma, De Rijke/De Rooij, Julika Rudelius, Meschac Gaba, Yvonne Dröge-Wendel, Per Strömberg, Lonnie van Brummelen, Gabriel Lester and Barbara Visser.

A mammoth compendium of 20 years of OMA’s projects, arranged in order of size, S,M,L,XL gives an insight into the restless, ingenuitive thinking of the office through an era when architecture became a mere bystander to the explosion of the market economy and globalization.

Wols (1913–1951) was celebrated posthumously as one of the pioneering artists of the Art Informel movement. His distinctive early photographic work of the 1930s is, however, very little known. In an unusual connection across time and space his work is discussed in relation to that of contemporary American artist Eileen Quinlan (b. 1972). This book, a companion to the exhibition Always Starts with an Encounter: Wols–Eileen Quinlan, curated by Helena Papadopoulos and organized by Radio Athènes at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, in 2016, further explores the relationship between the work of the two artists.

Spectral and suggestive, but also precise and factual, through an indexical structure, a variety of textual forms and inflections, different registers of images and textures, this richly illustrated book reflects on a circular idea of time as it wanders in the abstruse physicality of the photographic. It includes texts by Olivier Berggruen, Quinn Latimer, Helena Papadopoulos, and Laura Preston, as well as two interviews with Eileen Quinlan.

Was Ist Los is a facsimile reproduction of a 2003 essay by Seth Price, bound within a one-of-a-kind spray-painted cover. Previously published as “Decor Holes,” “Unique Source/All Natural Suicide Gang,” “Akademische Graffiti,” and “Depletion,” it was first written to accompany Price’s 2006 album Akademische Graffiti.

Rimbaud originally distributed A Season In Hell to friends as a self-published booklet, and soon afterward, at the age of nineteen, quit poetry altogether. New Directions’ edition was among the first to be published in the U.S., and quickly became a classic. Rimbaud’s famous poem “The Drunken Boat” was subsequently added to the first paperbook printing. Allen Ginsberg proclaimed Arthur Rimbaud as “the first punk” — a visionary mentor to the Beats for both his recklessness and his fiery poetry.

This new edition proudly dons the original Alvin Lustig designed cover, and an introduction by another famous rebel — and now National Book Award-winner — Patti Smith.

One of Matt Mullican’s central and most consequential inventions, the so-called “Rubbings,” are a kind of “frottages,” a technique the artist uses to produce specific pictures.

From the beginning of his career, Mullican looked for pictures that would not be paintings; thus, he used banners, the traditional carriers of signs, posters, and, in 1984, he realized his first “Rubbing.” He used a cardboard plate on which the canvas was placed; by rubbing with an oil stick the cardboard reliefs, forms became visible on the canvas. This way, Mullican was able to transfer complex representations onto canvas; the result is a picture of something that is not present, it is a form of copy. The cardboard plates may be used for other works and so the imagery can reappear in different configurations. Each “Rubbing” is a single work and at the same time a reproduction, like a print, part of a sequence which contains picture elements from different sources.
Following the “Rubbings” from 1984 to recent times, it becomes visible that they represent the motives and themes the artist worked with over the years. The sequence of the “Rubbings” appears therefore like a diary of Mullican’s work.

The book presents a catalogue of the “Rubbings” on canvas from 1984 to 2016. It comprises around 500 works, documented by images and catalogue entries. The book also contains an essay by Dieter Schwarz.

“Invited by Lucie Stahl to respond to her gorgeous and trashy collaged posters, I look back in my diary and am surprised by the number of parallels in our dreams and notations. I’ve never met Lucie Stahl but we live in the same world: oil spills, palm fronds, novelty key chains, sports beverages. Like me, she’s a self-appointed reporter. Stahl’s posters begin with her odd inclination to write down fragments of overheard conversations, ambient thoughts and fleeting anxieties that – once preserved (and obsessively so, under buckets of chemical gloss) function as video-grabs from the deluge of information that we understand, more or less, to comprise consciousness.” (Chris Kraus)

This artist book was published in occasion of an exhibition at Kölnischer Kunstverein (Lucie Stahl & Běla Kolářová, April 14 – May 15, 2011).

Texts: Kathrin Jentjens, Anja Nathan-Dorn, Stefanie Kleefeld, Chris Kraus
Designer: Manuel Raeder and Lucie Stahl
Language: English, German

In Permanent Volta, here are love poems about how queer intimacies invent political and poetic forms, how gender deviance imagines post-sovereign presents and futures. Full of bad grammar, strange sonnets, and truncated sestinas, these poems are for anyone motivated by the homoerotic and intimate etymology of comrade: one who shares the same room. If history sees writers as tops and muses as bottoms, these poems refuse, invert, and evade representation. Here, muses demand wages, then demand the world.

Published in occasion of the exhibition Win a New Car held at MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome) from 3 November 2021 to 6 February 2022.

Contributions by Denise Amann, Paul Andali, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Catherine de Smet, Kim Dohyung, Ed Fella, Hendrik Folkerts, Luca Lo Pinto, Takeshi Matsugami, Mariano Mayer, Jan Mehring, Lari Mörö, Emil Movsis, Walter Pfeiffer, Farid Rakun (Ruangroupa), Michael Satter, Toni Schönbuchner, Suzanne Silver, Jo-ey Tang, Franziska Weinberger, Eric Wrenn, Isia Yurovsky.

(FR) Si Aby Warburg a été le premier à définir une méthode d’interprétation iconologique, s’il a créé une bibliothèque des sciences de la culture unique au monde, l’innovation décisive qu’il a introduite dans le champ épistémologique de l’histoire de l’art est bien Mnémosyne : œuvre absolument originale et unique, dont l’ambition n’est rien moins que de poser les fondements d’une grammaire figurative générale, et qui ouvre des perspectives dont la portée n’a pas encore été totalement mesurée. Par la complexité des problèmes auxquels s’est confronté Warburg face à cet immense corpus d’images, c’est l’attention de l’ensemble des sciences humaines qu’il a attirée sur son œuvre.

Resté inachevé à la mort de l’auteur, ayant mobilisé l’énergie intellectuelle et physique de ses dernières années, Mnémosyne peut être considéré comme l’aboutissement de toutes ses recherches. Il constitue le plus ambitieux corpus d’images jamais réuni, dont la genèse et l’évolution sont liées à une pratique discursive et à un mode de transmission du savoir que préconisait Warburg, mais qu’il convient aussi d’examiner sous l’angle de ses relations avec le problème de la mémoire et avec sa bibliothèque. L’essai de Roland Recht se propose de replacer ce work in progress dans son contexte intellectuel.

Professeur au Collège de France, membre de l’Institut, Roland Recht a donné une impulsion décisive à l’historiographie de l’art par ses publications mais aussi par son enseignement. Il est sans doute l’un des meilleurs connaisseurs des méthodes et des théories de l’histoire de l’art : dès le début des années 1980, il donnait à l’université de Bourgogne un séminaire sur Aby Warburg en un temps où aucun de ses écrits n’avait été traduit en français.