Produced on the occasion of A Void: Henri Chopin, Guy de Cointet, Channa Horwitz at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf 16 May – 30 June, 2013.

Each in their own way, Henri Chopin, Guy de Cointet and Channa Horwitz dedicated themselves to analyzing systems of meaning and working out their rules-based connections, transforming or reinventing them in the process. Horwitz’s drawings are indebted to the aesthetics of notation, the close link between idea, process and work. With the help of a set of rules she creates complex structures whose vibrating pictorial structure masks their underlying logic. Chopin, a key figure in French visual poetry and sound poetry—explored the relationship of chaos and order with his typewriter poems while de Cointet left behind numerous drawings full of codes and puzzles, in which he transformed meanings into visual signifiers.

Published here for the first time, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s little known poems which preceded her typewritings and participation in the international mail art network from East Berlin.

Including the work of Jiří Kolář, Ferdinand Kriwet, Hansjörg Mayer, Maurizio Nannucci, Ito Motoyuki, Seicchi Niikuni, Timm Ulrichs, Jiří Valoch, Pedro Xisto, Claus Bremer, Augusto de Campos, Haraldo de Campos, Jochen Gerz, Eugen Gomringer, Bohumila Grögerová & Josef Hirsal, Gerhard Rühm, Herman de Vries, Emmett Williams, Ugo Carrega, Siegfried J. Schmidt.

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

Four postcards in a folder published by Guy Schraenen éditeur, 1978. Argentinian artist Mirtha Dermisache wrote dozens of books, hundreds of letters and postcards, and countless texts. Not a single one was legible, yet, in their promixity to language, they all resonate with a mysterious potential for meaning. Using ink on paper, Dermisache invented an array of graphic languages, each with its own unique lexical and syntactic structure, laden with poetic and sometimes visceral suggestion.

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

Initially, inspired by the experimental visual poetry of the mid-sixties, Ketty La Rocca critically investigated questions of communication in the age of mass media. She soon began addressing herself in her work as both an artist and a woman in a desire to find “another” language to express difference and the non-identical. She worked with collage, photography, video, text, drawing, and performance to develop a language of gestures and appropriated imagery of disempowerment. But her work was only granted the short time span of a decade’s production, during which she underwent a rapid artistic development with enormous energy and intelligence.

This book is the first international monograph on Ketty La Rocca’s works and writings. With texts by Emi Fontana, Pier Luigi Tazzi, Angelika Stepken and Ketty La Rocca

American poet Norman H. Pritchard’s second and final book, EECCHHOOEESS was originally published in 1971 by New York University Press. Pritchard’s writing is visually and typographically unconventional. His methodical arrangements of letters and words disrupt optical flows and lexical cohesion, modulating the speeds of reading and looking by splitting, spacing and splicing linguistic objects. His manipulation of text and codex resembles that of concrete poetry and conceptual writing, traditions from which literary history has mostly excluded him. Pritchard also worked with sound, and his dynamic readings—documented, among few other places, on the album New Jazz Poets (Folkways Records, 1967)—make themselves heard on the page.