Delivered at Harvard in 1988–89 as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, were more like performances, as the audience heard them. Cage calls them “mesostics,” a literary form generated by chance (in this case computerized I-Ching chance) operations. Using the computer as an oracle in conjunction with a large source text, he happens upon ideas, which produce more ideas. Chance, and not Cage, makes the choices and central decisions. Such a form is rooted, Cage tells us in his introduction, in the belief that “all answers answer all questions.”

You can hear an audio recording of the lecture here.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.

John Cage (1912–1992) is routinely hailed as one of the most influential and generative artists of the 20th century, a creator of groundbreaking music compositions, artworks, and works of literature.

Includes two texts by John Cage and the text On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.

Unbidden Tongues #9: Potty Mouth is a collection of what could be described as concrete poetry, written over the past two years by our niece Violet Bartley, now aged five. Typed at a computer and sent exclusively via e-mail, the poems stand as clear evidence of a person in the beginnings of grasping (at) language. Throughout, characters are repeated uninterrupted until margins break them, keys pushed down by a finger not yet strong enough to lift itself up.

Over the years, as her written vocabulary grew and these attempts at communication slowly stacked up into the collection printed here, Violet delivered poem after poem within which different mutations of the word ‘poo’ were uttered in type: poo, poobum, bum poo, ipoo, poop. While simple, often illegible and definitely isolated utterances (she never replies when you send a poem back in turn), they are decipherable examples of someone learning defiance through language.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition anne Krul – ANAGRAMMA TICS with Tabea Nixdorff and Unica Zürn, at A Tale of A Tub, Rotterdam, 31 May–24 August, 2025.

ANAGRAMMA TICS takes the form of an unconventional retrospective, wherein the various facets and outputs of krul’s practice—anagram poetry, art making, education, organising, collaboration and intergenerational dialogue—will be on show for many for the first time. krul worked with artist and typographer Tabea Nixdorff, a pre-existing collaboration which has seen the pair produce new audio works while also translating krul’s anagram poems—a type of poetry made with the guiding principle that either each line or each verse is written with the same set of letters as all other lines or verses in the poem—into spatial installations and sculptures, building on their overlapping interests in poetry and found language, as well as the restrictions inherent to writing.

Designed by Tabea Nixdorff.

Produced on the occasion of Karl Holmqvist’s exhibitions at the Fridericianum, Kassel and gta exhibition/ETH Zurich. Edited by Moritz Wesseler, Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen.

The publication includes all the writing works created over the past thirty years by the artist and author, who was born in 1964 in Sweden and now lives in Berlin. Designed by Dan Solbach.

Embedded in the language of visual and sound poetry, the practice of Tomaso Binga (Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, born 1931 in Salerno) is based on an ironic, insightful questioning of the idea of gender. In her work, this theme is not only a generator of identity, but also a way of looking afresh at the social roles, rights and opportunities traditionally available to women. Her decision to work under a male pseudonym from 1971 onwards was intended to parody male privilege and to provoke a barbed reflection on the political dimension of what it is to be a woman. Her attitude has served as a key marker within the gender equality issues at the center of the debate raging amongst the younger generations.

Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio.