The 5th installment of The Social Life of the Book series is a an assemblage of text fragments taken from different books by LA-based writer Chris Kraus, conceived and annotated by artists and writers Jon Bywater, Louise Menzies and Marnie Slater. By reading through Kraus’s texts looking for traces of New Zealand, where she grew up, the three Kiwis question the representation of the distant; how it is embodied by characters, situations, language, and in the writing/reading dynamics Kraus creates.

The Social Life of the Book is a collection of commissioned texts dealing with books, and how they engage with the circulation of ideas and the agency of social situations. It brings together artists, publishers, writers, designers, booksellers, etc. who consider books less as finished objects or forms but for their disruptive potential and their ability to produce new relationships, new publics and new meanings.

Designed by Will Holder.

In 1949 Munari designed for the first time a series of “libri illeggibili” (illegible books), which abandoned textual communication in behalf of aesthetic function only. Paper is no longer the support of only text, but it also communicates a message through the format, the colour, the cuts and their successions. The elements that usually set up a book (like the colophon and the title-page) are removed, and the reading seems the execution of a melody, with always different tones during the sequence of the pages.

Casco’s issuing of renowned American dancer and choreographer Deborah Hay’s solo dance score No Time to Fly (2010) publicly addresses delay in our lives and work. The experience of delay in our lives and work. The experience of delay indicates the notion of time particular to the contemporary condition of production and communication. It is even more palpable in the practice of publishing. The publication No Time to Fly is motivated by the delayed Casco publication the Grand Domestic Revolution Handbook. Hay’s score prompts one to rethink how to see, respond, behave, and act, especially with respect to our habitual works, sense of disjointed time, and disturbed perception. With cover image by artist Judith Hopf.

Produced on the occasion of Carol Bove’s exhibition The Foamy Saliva of a Horse at the Common Guild, Glasgow, 20 April–29 June, 2013. With texts by anthropologist Tim Ingold & psychoanalytic psychotherapist Derek Raffaelli.

Produced on the occasion of Michael E. Smith’s exhibition at Ludwig Forum fur internationale Kunst, Aachen, 21 April–23 June, 2013.

“Smith’s inspiration comes from his perception of the economic and social crisis in the USA, a general decline foreshadowed long ago by the demise of the automotive industry in his hometown, Detroit. A moment of assertion against the pressure of such conditions materialises itself in his objects and shows itself clearly in his titles and video clips.”—Ludwig Forum

With essays by Brigitte Franzen, Simone Menegoi, Dieter Roelstraete, Anna Sophia Schultz and Chris Sharp.

Produced on the occasion of two exhibitions of Robert Kinmont’s work; Listen, Kunsthaus Glarus, 10 February–5 May, 2013 & Measure, Kunstlerhaus Bremen, 8 June–1 September, 2013.

Although the Californian conceptual artist Robert Kinmont’s work dates back to the late 1960s and the beginning of 1970s, this is the first monograph of his work. Kinmont is primarily concerned with his environment, the Californian landscape. He works with simple, mostly natural materials, and places them in relation to his body and his life. Probably his best known work, entitled 8 Natural Handstands (1969/2005), a series of photographs showing the artist doing handstands in abandoned landscapes, on the edges of cliffs, river beds, forests and deserts, was illustrated in Lucy Lippard’s book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Not so long afterwards, Kinmont retreated from art practice for the following three decades.