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.

Published to accompany the exhibition Words and Places Etel Adnan, The Ninth Page: Etel Adnan’s Journalism 1972–74 , collects and translates articles written by Adnan during the early 1970s for the Beirut-based francophone newspaper Al-Safa. In addition to the articles, the publication includes a Foreword by Leigh Markopoulos, an introductory essay by Simone Fattal, an interview with Adnan by Jesi Khadivi and Heidi Rabben, and a newly commissioned essay by Andrew Weiner, all responding to Adnanʼs journalism and its fraught sociopolitical context. It also includes a copy of the exhibition guide with writing on the exhibition by Antonia Marsh and on Adnan’s writing by Rebecca Roy.

The articles selected for The Ninth Page challenge preconceptions about Beirut’s political climate in this moment while also offering up a portrait of an entire cosmopolitan, international worldview that is social and cultural as often as it is political. The diverse subjects Adnan covers document the rich cultural scene of Beirut on the brink of civil war, a political cataclysm addressed with great force later in Adnanʼs landmark books Sitt Marie Rose (1978) and The Arab Apocalypse (1980). By focusing on her time as a journalist, The Ninth Page fills a discursive gap in the chronicling of Adnan’s written history, enriching her painting and writing practices. Images of the original newspaper articles are also projected in the exhibition space.

A Brief History of Invisible Art is a fully illustrated catalog with essay by Ralph Rugoff, which brings together artworks from six decades that place a pronounced emphasis on the conceptual and communicative possibilities of the work of art, while bypassing its seeming requirements of visibility and materiality. In surveying this terrain, the exhibition includes works that represent a wide range of aesthetic practices and that engage with surprisingly diverse concerns. Whether underscoring the role of the audience, mocking the theological aura of museum rhetoric or calling attention to the importance of linguistic description in cultural production, these works prompt us to see through the more grandiose distractions of contemporary art and so to think more clearly about its underlying functions.

Featured Artists: Art & Language, Michael Asher, Robert Barry, James Lee Byars, Maurizio Cattelan, Jay Chung, Trisha Donnelly, Tom Friedman, Carsten Höller, Bethan Huws, Bruno Jakob, Yves Klein, Glenn Ligon, Jonathan Monk, Gianni Motti, Andy Warhol.

This latest book by the artist Moyra Davey is based on two related group of works, Les Goddesses (2011) and Hemlock Forest (2016), which each take form through text, photography, and film. Layering introspection and personal narratives with meditations on the lives and works of other writers, filmmakers, and artists—ranging from 18th-century feminist writer and activist Mary Wollstonecraft to Chantal Akerman, and Moyra Davey’s own five sisters. The book is conceived and published in collaboration with the artist Galerie Buchholz and Dancing Foxes Press. The book contains, alongside numerous reproductions, an introductory text by Aveek Sen and transcriptions of the texts for both film projects by the artist.