The reprint of two out-of-print artist’s books self-published in the 80’s by the Japanese artists collective The Play, with a previously unreleased documentation.

Staging most of their actions, “without particular reason,” in “natural outdoor spaces,” and admitting they “only like[d] the infinite time and space of open air,” The Play is a fluctuating art collective gathering individuals with various personalities and skills, formed in 1967 in the Japanese Kansai region. Still active today the group has constantly devised its own methods for collective actions and the ways for transmitting them, its members coming together to create the possibility of an event without any concern for its result. Its persistence and longevity have set The Play apart from other groups in Japanese art history, never completely integrated, yet never completely at the margins. Refusing to distinguish art from life, The Play underlines an attitude and an outlook focused on playing, sincerity and humour, notions that remain crucial today.

“God is a circle whose centre is everywhere but whose circumference is nowhere”. Circle means perfection, cyclicity, superiority of the divinity, but also instability and movement. Bruno Munari selects and describes in this little, extraordinary encyclopedia, several uses of this fascinating and mysterious form, unstable and hieratic at the same time.

Bruno Munari (24 October, 1907–30 September, 1998) was an Italian artist, designer, and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in modernism, futurism, and concrete art, and in non-visual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning, and creativity.

“You throw something into the sea, and the sea (after an unspecific and indeterminable amount of time) hands it back to you carved, finished, smoothed, shiny or polished according to the material and wet too because that way colours are brighter”. Reflections on the sea as creator of ‘useless’ design objects.

Bruno Munari (24 October, 1907–30 September, 1998) was an Italian artist, designer, and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in modernism, futurism, and concrete art, and in non-visual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning, and creativity.

Guy Mees’s (1935–2003) photographs, videos, and above all his fragile works on paper are characterised by a formal rigour combined with sensitivity and delicacy. The uniqueness of his oeuvre lies precisely in its avoidance of conventional aesthetics and discursive classifications. A leading figure of the Belgian avant-garde, Mees left behind an outstanding body of work that transgresses geometric abstraction, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and applied art.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Le choix des femmes at Le Consortium and Frac Bourgogne, Dijon. Including Hanne Darboven, Gretchen Faust, Isa Genzken, Marthe Wéry, Laurie Parsons, Jessica Stockholder, Judith Barry, Annette Messager, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, François Vergier. With texts by Eric Colliard, René Denizot, Xavier Douroux, Franck Gautherot, Bernard Marcadé.

Since the late 1960s, Luis Camnitzer has created works in a variety of media—including installation, printmaking, drawing, and photography—that expose our collective indifference to the violence governments inflict on individuals.

A pioneer of conceptual art, Camnitzer critiques current political realities with a perspective informed by his first-hand experience of dictatorships in Latin America.

Last Words was originally composed in the wake of New Jersey’s historic decision to abolish the death penalty and as the US Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of lethal injections. The short, continuous text is a montage of select final statements by Death Row prisoners, collected from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s public records online and chosen because they include the word ‘love’.