This is the fourth volume in Karma’s 11-volume facsimile printing of Lee Lozano’s Private Book project. It is primarily a calendar of Lozano’s personal, artistic and chemical interactions in 1969–1970. A prolific writer and documenter of both her art and her relationships, the public and private, the painter Lee Lozano (1930–1999) kept a series of personal journals from 1968 to 1970 while living in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. In 1972 she rigorously edited these books, thus completing the project. Eleven of these private books survive, containing notes on her work, detailed interactions with artist friends and commentary on the alienations of gender politics, as well as philosophical queries into art’s role in society and humorous asides from daily life.
Produced on the occasion of Lee Lozano, Drawings 1959–64 at Karma, New York, July 12–August 13, 2021.
Lozano’s drawings register a social consciousness that was radical for its time and continues to be groundbreaking in the present day. Her transgressive and experimental illustrations dissect institutionalized power, behavioral propriety, and gender socialization with zealous intensity. Challenging norms of respectability, Lozano’s works are “anti-skill, antisocial, antithetical, a “manly,” macho display, figured in the touch and tone as much as in the innuendos and imagery,” as Tamar Garb aptly notes.
Open the Kimono is a chronological record of remarks from cable TV ads, movies, news radio, novels, airplanes, subways, sidewalks and elevators from 2013–2018.
American artist Lutz Bacher made work spanning an array of media since the 1970s. The game of hide-and-seek she played with her own self by working under a masculine pseudonym since early on in her career can serve as a helpful entry point to Bacher’s artistic practice. It centered around issues of identity, power structures, and violence, all the while remaining ambiguous and enigmatic.
Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Unbidden Tongues #5: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Between the Teeth at Manifold Books, Amsterdam, 28 November, 2021–22 January, 2022.
Drawing on artist, poet and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s extensive and largely unexhibited archive of ‘work on paper’, Unbidden Tongues #5: Between the Teeth is a publication-turned-exhibition and the fifth title in the series. From never-realised film scripts to concrete poetry and artists statements written intimately in the first person, the collection of material selected for this occasion presents the varying ways with which Cha drew on her personal and familial experience as an immigrant to conceptually grapple with language and its mediation and suppression, particularly, in this case, in its written form.
More information on the exhibition can be found here.
A vinyl publication dealing with seductive, nevertheless problematic computer-brain-analogies while acknowledging potential other-than-human intelligence/intelligent behaviour. It unfolds a poetic narrative of a machine that is talking back. This machine questions humans’ thinking and perception of the world in restrictive (binary) categories while expressing at the same time it’s longing for connection and for merging with its surrounding. The vinyl of THE BEHEADING OF THE FRUIT FLY contains electromagnetic sound emission of JUQUEEN, initially the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world, located at the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany.
Instructional Photography: Learning How to Live Now by artist and writer Carmen Winant, is an investigation of a genre of photographs Winant calls “instructional”, it asks: can photographs teach, in and of themselves? If so, how might we look to them to demonstrate new possibilities, from social organizing to self-actualization?
Alternating between found images and shorter, text-based observations (which serve to reinforce, rather than explain, one another), Winant delves into this new category of images through her own collection, understanding them as something beyond, or at least in between, documentary and fine art.