Artist Avigail Moss’s pamphlet is the fourth in The Social Life of the Book series, Paraguay Press’s collection of commissioned texts dealing with books, and how they engage with the circulation of ideas and the agency of social situations. Moss examines Marianne Wex’s Let’s Take Back Our Space: “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, a book of photographs tied to second-wave feminism in Germany during the 1970s and the larger international movement at the time.

Designed by Will Holder.

Speaking about her work, Wex notes that her endeavor was “based on the assumption that body language is the result of sexoriented, patriarchal socialization, affecting all of our ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ role behavior.” Her discovery was that “body language and bodily ideals between sexes have become increasingly divergent.”

The resulting body of photographic collages is unique: they combine the history of street photography and the typologies of the Becher School with conceptual art imperatives, especially in their possibilities for modular recombination. Let’s Take Back Our Space might be classified, non-exhaustively, as a feminist broadside, an encyclopedia of gesture, an ethnographic portrait of Hamburg in the 1970s, a genealogical tract on art history, a neglected classic of appropriation art and a kind of autobiography.

BAD VISUAL SYSTEMS is an extension of the exhibition with the same title held at the Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand in late 2016. Through paying close attention to both colour and texture the publication brings together elements seen in the show and transforms and reconfigures them into the framework of the A4 page: the tongues of Judith Hopf’s concrete serpents become cartoon-style cut outs, Ruth Buchanan’s 13m long banner of wavy lines becomes a place holder that repeats throughout the book while Marianne Wex’s work is discussed in detail in a new essay by Mike Sperlinger. The book also includes an introduction to the project by Christina Barton and a fold-out index of exhibition snapshots. Designed by HIT Studio. Photography by Shaun Waugh, Sophie Thorn, Jim Barr.