American author Kathy Acker was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Working through an experimental and avant-garde tradition, she wrote numerous novels, essays, poems, and novellas from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. As a postmodernist, plagiarist, and post-punk feminist, she continues to inspire generations of writers, philosophers, and artists. Get Rid of Meaning is the first comprehensive publication on Acker’s work from an artistic and literary perspective. It includes previously unpublished material from Acker’s personal archive and other collections. The publication is the compilation of a multipart research project including an exhibition and a symposium at Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe.

With contributions from: Kathy Acker, Eleanor Antin, Dodie Bellamy, Hanjo Berressem, Ruth Buchanan, William S. Burroughs, Anja Casser, Georgina Colby, Leslie Dick, Claire Finch, Johnny Golding, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Anja Kirschner, Chris Kraus, Sylvère Lotringer, Douglas A. Martin, Jason McBride, Karolin Meunier & Kerstin Stakemeier, Avital Ronell, Carolee Schneemann, Daniel Schulz, Matias Viegener & McKenzie Wark.

Internationally noted performance artist Eleanor Antin presents here the texts of four arresting works: Before the Revolution, Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev, Who Cares About a Ballerina, and Help, I’m in Seattle. These sharply satirical and occasionally nostalgic works focus on Antin’s character Eleanora Antinova, a ballerina of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Eleanora Antinova is presented as a lost modernist heroine reminiscing about her days at the center of the radical art and classical ballet worlds.

The publication Mobil, autonom, vernetzt, Kritik und ökonomische Innovation in Ephemera der Konzeptkunst, 1966–1975 deals with the advertisements and exhibition announcements printed by Jan Dibbets, Adrian Piper, Daniel Buren and Eleanor Antin between 1966 and 1975. These ephemera—simultaneously works of art, advertising instruments, and documentations for artistic actions—are exemplary for the communication-based, flexible, and mobile practice of conceptual art. A 2015 interview with Barbara Preisig discussing ephemera can be found here.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition I’M NOT A NICE GIRL! Eleanor Antin, Lee Lozano, Adrian Piper, Mierle Laderman Ukeles at K21 Düsseldorf.

The point of departure for the exhibition is a series of documents that have rarely or never been shown before— letters, concepts, and photographs from the Archive Dorothee and Konrad Fischer which chronicle contacts between the internationally influential gallerist Konrad Fischer and Lucy R. Lippard, as well as women Conceptual artists from the late 1960s and early 1970s such as Eleanor Antin, Hanne Darboven, Agnes Denes, Adrian Piper, Lee Lozano, Charlotte Posenenske, and Alina Szapocznikow.

Published on the occasion of the 2017 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 24 September, 2016–2 January, 2017), The Uses of Photography examines a network of artists who were active in San Diego between the late 1960s and early 1980s and whose experiments with photography opened the medium to a profusion of new strategies and subjects. Working within the framework of conceptual art, these artists introduced urgent social issues and themes of everyday life into that seemingly neutral territory, with photographic works that took on hybrid forms, from books and postcards to video and text-and-image installations. If photography had come to occupy a new, more prominent position in the art world of the late 1960s, largely within the context of conceptual art, much of the medium’s radical potential nonetheless remained latent.

Tracing a crucial history of photoconceptual practice, The Uses of Photography focuses on an artistic community that formed in and around the University of California San Diego, founded in 1960, and its visual arts department, founded in 1967. Artists such as Eleanor Antin, Allan Kaprow, Fred Lonidier, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, and Carrie Mae Weems, to name a few, employed photography and its expanded forms as a means to dismantle modernist autonomy, to contest notions of photographic truth, and to engage in political critique. The influence of these artists is felt throughout the global contemporary art world today, yet their common roots in San Diego—a military town far removed from the art world—has rarely been acknowledged. While these artists are celebrated internationally for their individual achievements, this exhibition is the first to explore how their practices emerged at a critical time and place.