In 1965, Jay DeFeo (1929–89) was evicted from her San Francisco apartment, along with The Rose, the two-thousand-pound painting that would make her legendary. The morning after her front window was sawed open to make way for the colossus, DeFeo attempted to salvage Estocada, a large-scale painting on paper stapled directly to her hallway wall. Unfinished and never documented, the little-known piece was ripped down in chunks, saved, and reanimated years later in the studio through photography, photocopy, collage, and relief.

Rip Tales traces Estocada’s material history, woven into this narrative are other Bay Area stories that likewise privilege transformation, multiplicity, intuition, and absence. Drawing on interviews and personal experience, curator Jordan Stein explores these themes in the work and lives of artists Zarouhie Abdalian, April Dawn Alison, Ruth Asawa, Lutz Bacher, Bruce Conner, Dewey Crumpler, Trisha Donnelly, and Vincent Fecteau.

A talk with Jordan Stein and Hilton Als about the book here.

Open the Kimono is a chronological record of remarks from cable TV ads, movies, news radio, novels, airplanes, subways, sidewalks and elevators from 2013–2018.

American artist Lutz Bacher made work spanning an array of media since the 1970s. The game of hide-and-seek she played with her own self by working under a masculine pseudonym since early on in her career can serve as a helpful entry point to Bacher’s artistic practice. It centered around issues of identity, power structures, and violence, all the while remaining ambiguous and enigmatic.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibiting of Lutz Bacher’s work Elvis Moan (2008/2013, Sound, 5’ 13’) in the basement of Fridericianum, Kassel, from 3 April–5 September, 2021.

A publication printed on the occasion of MOMMY, a group show that considered the mother, with work by Lutz Bacher, Susan Cianciolo, Sonya Hamilton, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Eliot Porter, Jeff Preiss, Aura Rosenberg, Diane Simpson, Barbara T. Smith, Frances Stark, and Rosemarie Trockel. It also included new site-specific works by Cathy Wilkes and Anicka Yi, and a performance by Karin Schneider.

Selected writings by Lydia Davis, Doris Lessing, Elena Ferrante, Lisa Baraitser, Silvia Federici, Sara Ruddick, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Thomas Nagel, Anne Truitt, and Maggie Nelson.

A PDF of the reader can be downloaded here.

Invitation produced on the occasion of Lutz Bacher, What’s Love Got to Do With It at Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 7 September, 2018–6 January, 2019.

American artist Lutz Bacher made work spanning an array of media since the 1970s. The game of hide-and-seek she played with her own self by working under a masculine pseudonym since early on in her career can serve as a helpful entry point to Bacher’s artistic practice. It centered around issues of identity, power structures, and violence, all the while remaining ambiguous and enigmatic.

In Untitled (2017), Donald Trump’s signature is enlarged and repeated on white paper that runs across the walls of all three exhibition galleries. The work is intersected by hastily scribbled notes from everyday life in Open the Kimono (2018), and ostensibly meaningful, zen-inspired sentences in Black or White (2018), which pass by in an endless loop on giant screens.

In his catalogue essay, curator Anthony Huberman explains that the works in this exhibition ‘reflect on what it could mean to contest the regime of the machine’. That is, they question the worship of usefulness in modern scientific civilisation, which is refused or even ridiculed by each piece on show. It’s a strong concept, and potentially extends to how the works are placed in the labyrinthine space of the Secession. If the point is to produce friction, then the disorganisation of Other Mechanisms—the inability of its parts to add up to a coherent whole—is a paradoxical form of success.

Concept: Anthony Huberman. Texts: Jennifer Alexander, Franco Berardi, Benjamin H. Bratton, Gilles Châtelet, Gilles Deleuze, Keller Easterling, Vilém Flusser, Sigfried Gideon, Martin Heidegger, Anthony Huberman, K.G. Hultén, Maurizio Lazzarato, Pamela Lee, Les Levine, Jean-François Lyotard, Robert King Merton, Meredith Meredith, Lewis Mumford, Gerald Raunig, Nishant Shah, Robert Snowden, Joseph Vogl. Images: Zarouhie Abdalian, Lutz Bacher, Nairy Baghramian, Eva Barto, Patricia L. Boyd, Nina Canell & Robin Watkins, Jay DeFeo, Trisha Donnelly, Harun Farocki, Howard Fried, Jacob Kassay, Garry Neill Kennedy, Frederick Kiesler, Pope.L, Louise Lawler, Sam Lewitt, Park McArthur, Jean-Luc Moulène, Cameron Rowland, Sturtevant, Danh Vo.