We started making machines together in 2010. These machines consisted of a sensor and device couplet, by which a sensor would trigger a device to perform a simple task. We experimented with sensor inputs like passing cars and tasks like heat guns blowing up trash bags, or later we would connect the machines to trains and have them push little cardboard cars back and forth. Still triggered by trains, the machines now move clock parts.

We disassemble mechanical clocks, take their parts and combine them with L-brackets, screws, washers, nuts, motors, felt, rubber bands, fishing line, and heat shrink tubing. The characteristics of the clock parts constrain and guide our activities. As we reinvent their function, the parts become less and less recognizable, their movements more and more estranged.

—Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, 2023

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Park McArthur: Contact M bringing together, for the first time, artworks made between the 2010s and 2020s. These artworks and the forms they take are guided by personal and social meanings of disability, delay, and dependency.

Co-organized by Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach and mumok in Vienna, the exhibition is a collaboration between both institutions and will be presented simultaneously at both locations. Questions of simultaneous experience and access to art and culture shape this project’s format and purpose.

Here, in a new work by the author of The Dark Object, a series of tense and violent short stories are intertwined to form a narrative whole – a collection, with a twisted narrative structure, that parodies the form of a novel.

When the protagonist, the dysfunctional Reality Flickers, meets the psychotic Heart Beast (aka the fucker), death, sex and sculpture collide in the stories that form The Fabricator’s Tale.

Palmer’s misanthropic characters are embedded within their own obsession with objects, exposure, voyeurism, and the sexualised abuse of power. They appear to exist in a highly dysfunctional world, that parodies, and replicates both the conditions of art, and its place in contemporary society.

Black Slit documents a process whereby Katrina Palmer learned to throw a knife, using vibrantly painted clay objects as her targets. The setting is a studio/office/classroom/bedsit at night – a multi-purpose space which must be prepared for the action. We see a sofa-bed being made in low light, a knife laid on a table before it flies through the air, and then the focus shifts to the targets themselves. The clay was still wet and unstable when struck by the blade, resulting in unpredictable radical disruptions to the colour and shape of these hand-crafted forms. Alongside filming and editing footage of the knife throwing, Palmer practised drawing lines, to make a series of works on paper which are also reproduced in this book.

An artist is invited to take up residency in a gallery filled with historical paintings. They are meticulously crafted, maintained, and revered. She begins to make an audit of the paintings, outlining the depictions of violence, subjugation and physical tension on public display. Eleven arrows in a torso, someone’s hair cut as they sleep, a man nailed to a cross. Horses, decapitations, memorable lobsters. Written in sparse, urgent fragments that invite closer reading, The Touch Report, turns the reader’s gaze into the dark, to question our notions of ‘civilisation’.

From the 1970s until her death, Louisiana-born artist Tina Girouard (1946–2020) was a dedicated experimental artist, collaborator and art worker. Alongside her individual creative endeavors, she nurtured and was a part of numerous influential artist communities and organizations in New York, Louisiana and Haiti, including the Anarchitecture Group, the interdisciplinary cohort of 112 Greene Street, the restaurant Food, The Kitchen, P.S. 1 and the Festival International de la Louisiane. Her acts of upkeep, including domestic labor traditionally associated with “women’s work,” blurred the boundaries between artmaking and what she called life-making.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.