The misappropriated notion of care and the paths for its rehabilitation.

The Delusions of Care is a culmination of three long essays that ruminate on notions of care in our contemporary and historically. It is concerned with the appropriation of care by the capitalist establishment as much as supremacists of all kinds. What can we consider as care and who gives care for what reasons. Stuck in the cup de sac of a pandemic that has brought most of the world to its knees, these questions seem of some pertinence. The reflections in this book spanning a critique of care from the regimes of birth control through police brutality to the storming of the Reichstag in the summer of 2020, that very much set precedence to the storming of the Capitol Hill by Trumpists and White supremacists. The book does not only point out the pitfalls of a corrupted notion of care, but tries to offer paths for rehabilitation, restoration, restitution through a non-selfish spirit of care.

A book produced in conjunction with Bauer Verlag’s eponymous series of screenings at the Studio/Cinema in Brooklyn. Bauer Verlag was established in 2012 in Frankfurt as an artist collective to publish text-based books by artists and friends.

With contributions from Nicholas Vargelis, Kerstin Stakemeier, Steve Beck, Lis Rhodes, Leslie Bauer, Érik Bullot, C.Vanaik, VUE Committee, Shirley Clarke, Hilary Harris, Giuliana Bruno, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Peter Larsen, Elissa Suh, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Storm de Hirsch, Mark Fisher, Bruce Baillie, Rachel Haidu, Kai Althoff, Jennifer Reeves, Karl Holmqvist, Eros in Le Wind, Marie Menken, Jonas Raam.

Angola to Vietnam is Christopher William’s 1989 artist’s book based on his photographic piece of the same title featuring twenty-seven images of glass flowers from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. “Drawing from the Peabody’s cache of sculptural specimens, Christopher Williams selected only those plants native to countries in which state-sponsored murders occurred in 1984. The information affixed to each photograph mimics the museum’s labels, but here Williams places the country of origin above the flower’s Latin name, subtly foregrounding the political over the natural. By referencing government-sanctioned atrocities, Williams calls attention to the flowers’ colonial origins, as the science of botany is rooted in the tangled and often exploitative history of international exploration and trade”.

Program was produced by Bergen Kunsthall on the occasion of the exhibition For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 10), curated by Solveig Ovstebo. With texts by Solveig Øvstebø, Diedrich Diederichsen, John Kelsey, and Christopher Williams, and design by Christopher Williams and Petra Hollenbach.

Christopher Williams’ work operates within the conventions of advertising, the superficiality of surface, and, ultimately the history of Modernism. In photography, film, performance, sculpture, graphic design, and video, the process of reproduction is the artist’s point of entry; from there he exposes the flaws in a near-perfect, carefully constructed reality. Each image, whether architectural or figurative, natural or manufactured, is subject to the conditions of production and the inevitable boundaries of the pictorial surface.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Piero Manzoni at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 13 March–26 April, 1970.

SM Cat. No 474.

Designed by Wim Crouwel.

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

Homework by Snack Syndicate (Andrew Brooks & Astrid Lorange) collects twenty-seven texts written over the course of 2016–2020. Homework considers the manifold ways that embodied life (birth, death, love, friendship, solidarity, race, gender, sexuality, citizenship) are conditioned by a world that appears both ruinous and full of potential. Snack Syndicate asks how to read ruins and how to read the prophecy of hope that threads together a long history of survival and struggle. The book offers a guide for this reading, taking study to be a lifelong practice. It suggests a model for homework as the promise we make to each other through study and to the ghosts who carry us forward.

Introduction by Tom Melick and designed by Robert Milne.