In this book, the 1923 manifesto ‘Active Art’ by Latvian philosopher Andrejs Kurcijs triggers a series of responses by writers, artists and curators on the notion of activism, past and present: art for political purposes, art for its own purpose or art with no purpose. All the texts collected in this volume aim at considering the active part of writing according to the definition given by Kurcijs. It is true of the book design by Laure Giletti and Gregory Dapra too. Contributors include curator Rebeka Põldsam, artists Evita Vasiļjeva and Eva Barto, writers Bella Marrin and Robert Glück, and poet Laura Boullic. It also includes the reprint of an essay from 1987 by James Baldwin, commissioned by the African Center in New York, and an in-depth conversation between the editors of the books and philosopher Ainārs Kamoliņš.
Grace Crowley is a publication by Riet Wijnen, based on letters sent to the Australian artist and pioneer of modernist painting Grace Crowley (1890–1979) by friends, family and colleagues. Parts of those letters, which are now housed in the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the State Library of New South Wales archives in Sydney, were transcribed and categorized by Wijnen in subsections such as ‘Marital Status’, ‘Teaching’, ‘Hosting’, ‘Eurasia’, ‘X’, ‘Being A Woman’, ‘War’, ‘$’, and ‘Making Work’. The result is an alternative biography constructed solely through a living set of relations.
Designed by Marc Hollenstein.
This fourteen-track LP features poems of American poets Susan Howe (b. 1937) and Nathaniel Mackey (b. 1947) as produced by visual artist Shannon Ebner. Juxtaposing historic and recent material from 1991 until 2018, the work brought together here examines the two writer’s lifelong preoccupation with subjects adrift in narratives of dispossession both real and imagined. Liner notes contain excerpts of original interviews as well as reproductions of the poets’ published materials. According to Ebner, “STRAY: A GRAPHIC TONE is the full-length version of what I started in 2016 when I began seeking exchanges with these two poets. I was drawn to their works for their experiments with poetic form – for their politics of poetic form, to be exact – for their poems’ stray figures and stray errant marks.” It was recorded at various locales between 1991 and 2018. The album was edited and produced by Shannon Ebner and mastered and engineered by Joseph Stewart. Designed by Julia Born and Shannon Ebner.
Lynch Fragments brings together a significant selection of works from the homonymous series by the American sculptor Melvin Edwards, created between 1963 and 2016, comprising more than fifty years of what is considered the artist’s central body of work.
Edwards started to produce the Fragments series when he lived in Los Angeles, at a crucial time of the civil rights movement in the United States. The works directly reference the practice of lynching after the abolition of slavery. Denouncing violence against African Americans, Edwards created these steel sculptures as forms between bodies and machines that can also be interpreted as weapons, given the sense of violence and danger suggested by their blunt, angular and protruding shapes. The selection of works in this book reflects the multiplicity of thematic interests and the formal variations across the series.
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.
