Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE” (1969) was a major intervention in feminist performance practices and public art. The proposal argued for an intimate relationship between creative production in the public sphere and domestic labor—a relationship whose intricacies Ukeles has been unraveling ever since. In 1977, she became the unsalaried Artist-in-Residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation, a position that enables her to introduce radical public art into an urban municipal infrastructure.

Through archival research, this monographic publication focuses on Ukeles’s work ballets—a series of seven grand-scale collaborative performances involving workers, trucks, barges, and hundreds of tons of recyclables and steel—which took place between 1983 and 2012 in New York, Pittsburgh, Givors, Rotterdam, and Tokamachi. Over the past four decades, Ukeles has pioneered how we perceive and ultimately engage in maintenance activities. The work ballets derive from her engagement in civic operations in order to reveal how they work though monumental coordination and cooperation. Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Seven Work Ballets is the first monograph on Ukeles’s seminal practice, and is as much an artist’s book as an art-historical publication.

Edited by Kari Conte. Contributions by Kari Conte, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Mierle Laderman Ukeles; conversation with Tom Finkelpearl, Shannon Jackson, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Designed by Marc Hollenstein.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition The Retraction of Things curated by Lukas Töpfer at KW Berlin. Edition 350.

Noelle Kocot is the author of six books of poetry, most recently, Soul In Space (Wave Books, 2013). Kocot also translated Tristan Corbiere’s poems from French which appear in a book called Poet By Default (Wave 2011). She is the recipient of numerous awards for her poems, including The American Poetry Review, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Literary Foundation, The Fund for Poetry and The Academy of American Poets. Kocot’s work has been widely anthologized, including in Best American Poetry 2001, 2012 and 2013 and Postmodern Poetry: A Norton Anthology.

Published by Fivehundred places, founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His Poetry collection, Far District: Poems (2010), won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. Other honours include a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner Journal and the Academy of American Poets’ Larry Levis Prize. He is the Meringoff Sesquicentennial Fellow Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University and a contributing editor to the literary journal, Toungue: A Journal of Writing & Art.

Published by Fivehundred places, founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman.

Catalogue Raisonné of Atsuka Tanaka’s painting practice from 1957–2000.

Atsuko Tanaka was a Japanese avant-garde artist best known for her Neo-Dada Electric Dress (1956), a garment made from hundreds of lightbulbs painted in primary colors. This iconic work, which she wore to exhibitions, functions as a conflation of Japanese traditional clothing with modern urbanization, bringing an unexpected and challenging interpretation to both. “I wanted to shatter stable beauty with my work,” Tanaka once said. A member of the Gutai movement, much of her work used domestic objects like lightbulbs, textiles, doorknobs, and doorbells. With these objects, the artist was able to create work about the body without a body present. She maintained a broad practice that included performance “happenings,” sculpture, and installation, while her later work focusing on two-dimensional painting, with colorful organic abstract shapes connecting circles and lines.

Reprint of Nemam vremena (1979) [I Have No Time (1979)] (1983) by Mladen Stilinović. The 1983 version was offset printed by Edition Dacic, Tubingen, in an edition of 150 copies. Nemam vremena (1979) [I Have No Time (1979)] was the first printed version of I Have No Time, and was an Artist’s Edition, 70 copies. It was offset printed in Zagreb, seven sheets, softcover, stapled, 17.5 x 13.5 cm. Nemam vremena (1978) [I Have No Time (1978)] was the original version of I Have No Time. It was handwritten by Mladen Stilinović in pencil on paper, nine sheets (four written on), cardboard covers, stapled, 17 × 24 cm.