Elizabeth Newman is best known as a visual artist whose practice encompasses a variety of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Writing, too, is central to her art. As indicated by the twenty-five or so texts compiled in this book, all dating from the last fifteen years, Newman’s literary output extends beyond her studio practice. Many of these texts are about artworks and exhibitions—her own as well as those of other local artists: they serve a critical rather than an aesthetic function. As such, these writings offer valuable insight into Newman’s artistic intentions and motivations, and her commentaries on the art of her peers constitute a compelling partial survey of art produced in Melbourne over the last decade and a half.

Edited by David Homewood and designed by Robert Milne.

Deimantas Narkevičius creates complex, poetic explorations of post-Soviet Europe and the relationship of its peoples to the past. Often adopting the aesthetic and techniques of documentary filmmaking, he employs interviews, archive footage, animation and still photography to grapple with questions about our political and moral obligations to history, memory and society. Although rooted in the history of his native Lithuania, Narkevičius’s films find a wider resonance as deeply intimate studies of ordinary lives lived at times of remarkable turmoil and change.

This publication is produced on the occasion of Narkevičius’s first solo exhibition in the UK and features an interview with the artist by Martin Clark.

Florian Pumhösl processes the tropes of art, architecture and graphics of the modernist avant-garde to create new aesthetic systems through painting, film and installation. He addresses the legacy of modernism through its canon of abstract visual language, from utopian architectural plans and buildings to innovations in publishing, the politics implicit in exhibitions and the motifs of early experimental filmmaking.

This particular body of work furthers the artist’s involvement with cartography and territorialization. The reliefs originate from stamp drawings of simple linear and rectangular progressions, and are made by pouring plaster into silicone molds; however, the initial forms are hand-constructed, and the final works hand-painted.

Designed by Martha Stutteregger.

An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations in Dance.

Tracing a period in her life from the 1969 Woodstock Festival through the following years living on the land, this singular dance artist’s direct and poetic writings bring a turbulent transitional era to life. Arriving in New York in the early 60’s from California, she brought with her a series of pieces that proved to be a serious influence on the development of “post modern” dance in years to come. Her “dance-constructions” were based on a concern with bodies in action, the movement not being stylized or presented for its visual line but rather as a physical fact. Combining drawings, “dance reports” (short descriptions of events whose movement made a deep impression on the author’s memory), and documentary materials such as scores, descriptions, letters to colleagues, and photographic records of performances, Forti’s eye toward creating idioms for exploring natural forms and behaviors is evident throughout.

*This is the reprint by Contact Editions and not the original 1st edition by Novia Scotia College of Art and Design from 1974.

Dimitrijević gained an international reputation in the seventies with his Casual passer-by series, in which gigantic photo portraits of anonymous people were displayed on prominent facades and billboards in European and American cities. The artist also mimicked other ways of glorifying important persons by building monuments to passers-by and installing memorial plaques in honour of anonymous citizens.

A debutante frees a hyena from the zoo so that it might take her place at her coming-out ball; an artist paints a portrait of a man’s dead wife, but finds she has painted herself instead; a woman makes love to a boar underneath a mountain of cats; a chicken is roasted with the brains and livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve and drops of divine liqueur; two noble sisters wonder whether anybody can be ‘a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense’; a psychoanalyst must decide what to do with the gift of a team of Russian rats trained to operate on humans.

In this first complete edition of Leonora Carrington’s short stories, written throughout her life from her early years in Surrealist Paris to her late period in Dirty War-era Mexico City, the world is by turns subversive, funny, sly, wise and disarming.

More information here.