Rosemary Mayer began her career in the late 1960s, experimenting with conceptual art. In 1971, she began to focus on the use of fabric as a primary medium for sculpture, to more actively pursue opportunities to exhibit her work, and to participate in a feminist consciousness-raising group. This was a pivotal period in Mayer’s life and career, and she documented it in remarkable detail in her 1971 journal.

With deep self-awareness and honesty, Mayer reveals herself, at age 28, in the process of committing more fully to life as an artist. In her journal, she records her ambitions and insecurities about her work, as well as her opinions about the art around her. She also chronicles how being an artist was interwoven into all aspects of her daily life, from concerns about money, to hanging out with friends, to being in love. The result is a striking document of the entanglement of art and life and an intimate view into the New York art scene of the 1970s, which, for Mayer, included Vito Acconci, Donna Dennis, Bernadette Mayer, Adrian Piper, and Hannah Weiner, among many others.

This 21st issue of F.R. David is edited by Will Holder with Andrea di Serego Alighieri. Seemingly more fragmented than usual, it includes contributions, quotes, found materials, and excerpts from Maggie Nelson, Charles Mingus, Octavia Butler, John Keats, Alice Notley, Paul Abbott, Bernadette Mayer, Fred Dewey, John Cage, Marion Keiner, Anne Carson, and others. An afterword by Nicolas Schoffer entitled “Microtime” concludes this wandering, inscrutable journey.

René Daniëls is considered one of the most eminent Dutch painters of his generation. In his work he links art and its rich history to literature and everyday life, following in the footsteps of, amongst others, Marcel Duchamp and René Magritte. Ambiguity and double meanings play an important role in what he calls “visual poetry”.

Produced on the occasion of the 1987 exhibition Marcel Broodthaers in Zuid-Limburg Foto’s/Photographies/Photographien 1961–1970 at the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht. With a foreword by Alexandre van Grevenstein, and texts by Marcel Broodthaers and Ian Jeffrey.

A pictorial record of the exhibition Japanese Photography 1930s, Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, 1988, which collects photographs from the emerging photography of the era. Approximately 340 illustrations of the work of photographers such as Kiyoshi Koishi, Shoji Ueda, Ei-Q, Koshiro Onchi, Nakaji Yasui, Iwata Nakayama, Shinzō Fukuhara, Kineo Kuwabara, Terushichi Hirai amongst others.

Allan Sekula was one of the most important figures in modern photography of the second half of the twentieth century. His work focused on a critique of the links that photography has always maintained with the economy, work and the politics of representation. From his beginnings in the seventies, Sekula became a reference by incorporating textuality into photography in a way that had been previously denied it by modern art. His book Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983 (1984), a key work of the new photographic discourse of the late twentieth century, enshrined him as one of the least orthodox historians of the medium.