Brochure/program published to coincide with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s tour of Japan in 1998. Published by the Nippon Cultural Centre.

Real-Time Realist is a first publication of J-L TF PRESS. This issue of Real-Time Realist explores amazement, distraction, surprise and awe (the blue sector of Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions) with contributions from invited artists distilling the aforementioned emotions.

Edited Charlie Clemoes and Jungmyung Lee. Design by Karlis Krecers. Contributions by Charlie Clemoes, Max Gershfield, Rudy Guedj, Mathew Kneebone, Lieven Lahaye, Carson Lee, Jungmyung Lee, Laura Pappa, Will Pollard, and Josse Pyl

At the forefront of some of the most significant artistic developments of the sixties was a group of New York–based artists that included Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, Mel Bochner, Eva Hesse, Richard Tuttle, and a lesser-known figure named Ruth Vollmer (1903–1982). A German-born émigré, Vollmer devoted her work to the cross-fertilization of science, mathematics, and the visual arts. Drawing from sources as diverse as Plato’s philosophy of mathematics and Bernhard Riemann’s non-Euclidean conception of space, the artist freely experimented with the many permutations of the sphere, from the circle, spiral, and pseudosphere to the ephemeral soap bubble. With her mathematical formalism, Vollmer participated in a constructivist revival, rejecting late-modernist notions of geometric abstraction in favor of “thinking the line.” Featuring selected sculptures and drawings, statements by the artist, and essays by art historians as well as the artists who knew her this book is the first to offer a thorough account of Vollmer’s works.

Texts by Rhea Anastas, Mel Bochner, Ann Reynolds, Nadja Rottner, Kirsten Swenson, Anna Vallye, Lucy R. Lippard, Rolf-Gunther Dienst, Sol LeWitt, Thomas Nozkowski, Richard Tuttle, Ruth Vollmer, Susan Carol Larson.

An essay with the reach and momentum of a novel, Kate Briggs’s This Little Art is a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking on reading, writing and living with the works of others. Taking her own experience of translating Roland Barthes’s lecture notes as a starting point, the author threads various stories together to give us this portrait of translation as a compelling, complex and intensely relational activity. She recounts the story of Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations of Thomas Mann, and their posthumous vilification. She writes about the loving relationship between André Gide and his translator Dorothy Bussy. She recalls how Robinson Crusoe laboriously made a table, for him for the first time, on an undeserted island. With This Little Art, a beautifully layered account of a subjective translating experience, Kate Briggs emerges as a truly remarkable writer: distinctive, wise, frank, funny and utterly original.