Artwords Press 2010
272 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781906441241
13 x 19.5 cm English text. Softcover
At the end of Nadja André Breton notes an extract from a morning newspaper: a wireless operator in charge of the telegraph post on the Ile de Sable had picked up a fragment of a message. It said 'Something isn't right', but did not give the position of the aeroplane at that moment and due to the very bad atmospheric conditions and the interference produced by them, the operator was unable to make out any other phrase or to enter into communication. The message was transmitted on a wavelength of 625 metres, and given the strength of reception, the wireless operator was able to localise the aeroplane within a radius of eighty kilometres. It was a real press article, from 27 December 1927, and possessed, for Breton, the value of an oracle, revealing what he called 'le hasard objectif ' (objective chance). 'Something isn't right', but nonetheless with that message is carried also the message of transmission itself, the act of sending and receiving.
Transmission is the act of passing something on, via a channel. One might make a list of ways of transmission, including wisdom, enlightenment, education, messages sent over a distance through electrical or electronic means, and disease (which has both locus and route). In transmission, there is a move from one to another, and each may be changed in the move, in the encounter. To date, our transmission (or Transmission) has encompassed a yearly lecture programme, an annual symposium, a print portfolio, five volumes of discussions between speakers, both artists and academics, and their audiences (Transmission: Speaking and Listening), an on-going series of books (The Rules of Engagement), and a series of chapbooks (Transmission: Host) produced as an exchange between a host and his/her guest. There is research, there are documents, and these are carried wherever co-respondents announce themselves. There is oral transmission and there are written records; the former may be assumed to be less trustworthy than the latter and also, somehow more true (that it is constructed, subjected to careful editing or victim of lost recordings, is often forgotten).
Transmission Annual, our new locus and route, extends our work, which has followed a theme, though as a theme it has no rules (does not pathologies its object), other than those of hospitality (to honour the guest, we might say, though the guest has his/her own duties and obligations); Transmission Annual draws on broader horizons, wider paths, diverse fields. It is not an annual, completing its cycle in a yearly season; its appearance relies on time, money, and goodwill. However, we aim to produce an account of the proceedings, a statement of profit. Price: £16.50
46 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781906441227
13.5 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Dumb Fixity arose from a desire to measure an abstract set of phenomena, working on the premise that 'things can speak', and to find a means of hearing what they 'are telling us'. To define the field, we needed a system of measurement, a guage to plot the characteristics and inner allegiances of 'objects'. The first question was how we could negate the subjective interpretations of our human perspective - if we could transcend our human desire to name, label, and catagorise matter and meaning. The answer was that it is impossible: there is no avoiding our disadvantaged position of being human; we cannot escape comprehending and defining the world through our language. How then do we hear a shared language of the mountain, the fox or the lamp?
We had to take another tack. The structures that we set out to negate, those of language and mapped opinion, needed to be embraced. A spatial structure was designed to measure this 'other language', with a grid of fixity, framed by an access of indices. A number of specialist researchers from anthropology, philosophy, and animism to semiotics, design, particle physics, and art were invited to participate in the research process, re-orienting a series of objects/things by placing them in the structure and contributing to a series of roundtable discussions. This investigation is a process of fixity, an attempt to plot the proximities, connections, and allegiances of things, and trace the associations of the their auras. Price: £5.99
Artwords Press 2009
16 x 16 page books B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781906441203
12 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Transmission: Host is a series of chapbooks derived from an annual lecture series organised by Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. Each week a host selects, presents, and looks after his or her guest. A critical engagement between host and guest is assumed. There is an ethics of hospitality, of making the stranger welcome. A host has a standard of conduct, and historically, hospitality has been seen as a code, a duty, a virtue, and a law. In this second series, each host invited a guest who was a stranger. Stranger' implies one who is not known, but also incorporates the foreigner, or indeed, the odd/eccentric/uncanny. Following Jacques Derrida, the stranger is one who is irreconcilably 'other' to oneself, but with whom one may co-exist without hostility, to whom one must respond and to whom one is responsible. The stranger reminds one of the other at the heart of one's being.
Contributors:
Breda Beban and David Cotterrell, Caroline Bergvall and Nick Thurston, Gordon Cheung and Lesley Sanderson, Tom Dale and Rose Butler, Wouter Davidts and Jaspar Joseph-Lester, William Hunt and TC McCormack, Nancy Hwang and Michael Corris, Melanie Jackson and Becky Shaw, Marko Mäetamm and Sharon Kivland, Jeremy Millar and Andrew Sneddon, Pil & Galia Kollectiv and Michelle Atherton, Olivia Plender and Hester Reeve, Snæbjörnsdóttir & Wilson and Chloë Brown, John Timberlake and Julie Westerman, Lee Triming and Gary Simmonds, Guido van der Werve and Carol Maund Price: £10.00
48 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9781906441197
15.5 x 23 cm English text. Hardcover
"We might rethink that 1960s TV footage of suited-up Apollo astronauts waving in the Florida sunshine to wonder what public reaction might have been had those sterile antechambers disgorged air force colonels with newly re-modelled and socketed crania or eyes, proboscises or extra limbs; what reaction Kennedy's announcement of the Apollo Program might have received had he simultaneously declared the subsumption of the US into some pan-global structure of governance and resource management; that the mission objective was Proxima Centauri, not the Moon. Televisual history re-imagined thus becomes a delirious Gothic dream…"
The Bussard Ramjet was a concept proposed in 1960 by the distinguished physicist R.W. Bussard in which advanced civilisations would be able to travel the vast distances between the stars by constructing engines that would gather hydrogen atoms in deep space, subsequently fusing them to produce a directed jet of thermonuclear plasma.
In the works reproduced in Bussard Ramjet Timberlake addresses notions of realism and fiction in photography and their proximity to constructions of utopias and dystopias. Photographic landscapes are partially re-painted in a photorealist style suggesting future or past events. Interweaved with these images and bearing on 9/11, fusion-theory and space travel, John Timberlake's compelling, three part narrative weaves Sci-Fi with contemporary realism to counter tarnished and myopic notions of 'future' civilisation(s) and landscape.
Published in collaboration with Artis Den Bosch, 's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands Price: £9.99
Artwords Press 2008
14 x 14 page books B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781906441210
The host selects and presents his or her guest. A critical engagement between host and guest is assumed; what exactly that relationship is made evident through discussion. There is an ethics of hospitality, of making the stranger welcome. A host has a standard of conduct, and historically, hospitality has been seen as a code, a duty, a virtue, and a law. There is a bond between host and guest, and here, the bond is formed by the engagement in the practice of art. Something is shared between host and guest, and this is shared with others, who are guests as well. The audience is also a host, with all the responsibilities that implies, receiving the stranger/guest with goodwill, liberality, and grace.
1. Host: Paul Haywood & Steve Hawley
2. Host: Sharon Kivland & Cesare Pietroiusti
3. Host: Nick Stewart & Matthew Noel-Tod
4. Host: Jeanine Griffin & Jan Verwoert
5. Host: Andrew Sneddon & Alec Finlay
6. Host: Rose Butler & HAG
7. Host: Hester Reeve & Brian Catling
8. Host: Julie Westerman & Christine Borland
9. Host: Sharon Kivland, Jaspar Joseph-Lester & Michael Corris
10. Host: Carl Von Weiler & Phyllida Barlow
11. Host: Jaspar Joseph-Lester & Roman Vasseur
12. Host: T.C. McCormack/Torsten Lauschman
13. Host: Lesley Sanderson/Paul Morrison
14. Host: David Cotterrell/Phil Coy Price: £10.00
Artwords Press 2006
43 pages ISBN 0954390881
Analysis is a collectively authored text examining contemporary collaborative art practice whilst grounding authorship in a social ontology. Despite the 'death of the author', the artist remains a possesive individual. Even collaborative practices - which Analysis differentiates from collective - confirm this, comprising individuals pooling their resourses only to serve their common private interests, effectively continuing to treat individuals as the basic social unit. Collectivity, Analysis argues, inverts this formula. treating the social as the basic unit from which the individual arises. It is the latter, therefore, that has the potential to transcend possesive individualism for contemporary art.
RRP £5.99
10% online price saving Price: £5.39
Artwords Press 2005
46 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954390865
Art on Terror: The incendiary device of philosophy is the result of a discussion at Floating ip Gallery, Manchester, addressing the relationships between theory and practice, philosophy and art, after a reading of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's The Man Without Content. Agamben proposes that as art establishes itself as its own a priori, the artist becomes a 'man without content' and the pure inessence of art's principle looms terrifyingly large. Terror here is akin to 'divine terror', a confrontation with the abyss. The danger is not that art is dead, but that it is the 'living dead', surviving its groundless foundations. Under the brilliant fire of such radical theory, how can art transform into new substances rather than be consumed by its own premises and what is said/read becomes a doing? Price: £5.99
Artwords Press 2004
37 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954390849
15 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Autopoeisis: novelty, meaning and value addresses the value of novelty in contemporary culture, and is co-authored from the point of view of two disciplines: fine art and anthropology. Sections of the text re-authored jointly while others are authored individually. There has been a process of question and answer and further revision, including instances where one author corrects or annotates the text of the other. Texts weave around each other thematically, sometimes in sympathy, sometimes in contrast. Images are drawn from the research practice of both authors.
Born in Australia, 1957, Simon Biggs moved to the UK in 1986.A visual and inter-disciplinary artist, he places the computer and interactive systems at the centre of a practice addressing issues around identity and reality as social constructs. He is currently Research Professor in Digital Art at Sheffield Hallam University and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge.
James Leach is Research Fellow, King’s College, Cambridge, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. He has undertaken long-term field research on the Rai Coast in Papua New Guinea. Recent work has focused on ownership, including intellectual and cultural property in Papua New Guinea, and knowledge production more widely. He is currently engaged in comparative research on creativity and ownership in inter-disciplinary collaborations in the UK. Price: £5.99
Artwords Press 2007
38 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781906441005
The blue guitar is you. It shapes you. As surprise, by surprising you. You collaborate and lay hands on this guitar, sometimes reject it but cannot escape the delicacy of its riffs and affirmations. Whether it comes from Picasso, Michael Tippett, Derek Bailey, Rilke or Jacques Derrida, the blue guitar is a thing affirmed, a yes played over a final no. This book is a book is a book of comical roots: super-roots, radishes, beetroots, gooseberries, bobby dazzlers, and seabows. It is a prison book, a book of legend and song, a picture book, a book of the same, of affirmations as colours. It is a book of the freshly rooted and radically purposeful in poetry, figured out here by Wallace Stevens and his poem 'The Man with the Blue Guitar.' Price: £5.99
60 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954390857
Sharing an interest in the operation of weaving with regard to textual materialism and material text, the authors follow the operation of folding, cutting and biding, the operations that constitute the making of a book. The work contains two main sections, one on folding and the other on cutting, with a concluding section on binding. The sections on folding and cutting dramatize two approaches to the entanglements of thought, reflection and aesthetic practice. In the first, precedence is given to a conceptual elaboration of the fold in parallel with the reservations of an art of the fold that resists formalisation. The philosophical concentration on a logic of form in relation to practice and questions of process is deconstructed. Whilst the first section traces a philosophical and scientific investment in pre-established design, the second ruins this through attending to the possibilities that arise through cutting, generic interplay and bricolage. The book unbinds as it works from the tightly woven to a loosening of its threads, where finally the book cannot contain the book. Price: £5.99
43 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954390830
Disorientation and spectacle in retail architecture traces the development of new retail and entertainment sites through three examples: Bluewater shopping centre (Kent), Canary Wharf shopping centre, and Selfridges department store. The authors ask if disorientation and spectacle can continue to properly engage with the imagination when fantasy has become part of everyday experience. They speculate if the ever-changing demands of a collective imagination have forced a mutation in the way disorientation and spectacle are considered by designers and architects,and ask if the challenges faced by retail and entertainment corporations might offer new possibilities for the wider cultural sphere of the practices of both art and architecture.
Nayan Kulkarni works across media and disciplines. His practice engages with site specificity through photography, architecture and video, using a language of space, structure, light and perception. His current public realm projects include the Belgrave Baheno Peepul Centre (Andrzej Blonski Architects), Bristol Broadmead Development (Chapman Taylor Architects), The Light Observation Group, Optima, Birmingham. Nayan Kulkarni is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.
Jaspar Joseph-Lester’s research addresses the status of illusion in contemporary space. The social, economic and political determinations of retail space have been an important part of this research, formulated through a longstanding engagement with video installation. He has exhibited his work at The British School at Rome, Asprey Jacques Gallery and KX Gallery (Hamburg). Jaspar Joseph-Lester teaches theoretical studies in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. Price: £5.99
Artwords Press 2002
36pp 0954390806
'I remember a film of a room that looked like an exhibition space for a warehouse show in London circa early 90s…'
In early June 2002 both Matthew Collings and Matthew Arnatt separately visited the internationally renowned contemporary art exhibition, Documenta11 in Kassel, Germany. Collings as an official journalist for the art magazine Modern Painters and Arnatt as an art tourist. In the weeks immediately following their visits they initiate a very frank and candid correspondence articulating their thoughts about this major international art event and its curatorial agenda.
In their exceptionally open dialogue both writers bring to the debate personal opinion and reflection, whilst expanding their criticisms to include wider, concurrent UK exhibitions and artists.
Documenta 11 is a unique and engaging discussion by two respected commentators on the contemporary art world. Price: £4.50
35 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 095439089X
Drafts/Draughts documents a conversation exploring the migration of ideas between real and imagined, conceptual and material in the making and reception of contemporary art. Explaining the poetic and conceptual potential of key functions in computer-aided design packages as suggestive devices for thinking, it attends to a range of issues currently preoccupying those involved in academic and professional art contexts. These include strategies for teaching fine art, the relationship of academic research to art practice, the complexities of working with experst from other disciplines, and techniques for engaging audiences and participants. Price: £5.99
136 pages ISBN 9781906441036
17.5 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
Media-culture is an undeniable force in our lives. Its pervasive and pleasurable power has primarily been located in discourses on 'spectacle' and the persistent connections between technology and dominance. however, when traditional modes of critique produce and use a media-culture, the question of how our experiences of images constitute the political is mperative.
This first collection of essays edited by the research group Curating Video brings together an international field of researchers from the realms of cultural studies, visual art, psychoanalysis, and political philosophy to explore new contexts and issues that are crucial to understanding the experience and meaning of images. Without idealising or demonising media culture these essays interrogate the critical status of lens-based media, taking up the pressing dilemmas of a politics of the image and its contemporary condition.
With essays by Amanda Beech, Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Sharon Kivland, Norman Klein, Suhail Malik, Matthew Poole, Uriel Orlow and Johanna Sumiala
RRP £12.95
10% online price saving Price: £11.65
38 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954390873
Misleading epiphenomena takes Park Hill, a one-thousand-unit housing estate designed between 1957 and 1960 by Sheffield City Council, as the prompt for observations and conversations, addressing questions as varied as northern identity, architectural modernism, corporation, social housing, the sublime, ruin, the uncanny, aura, entropy, writing and the disciplinary limits of the authors. While Park Hill is the ‘site’ of encounter, reflection and inversion emerge as the processes and methods of exchange. Price: £5.99
52 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954390822
In On record:advertising, architecture and the actions of Gina Pane, Maude-Roxby examines the involvement of the live art photographer as part of a performance event. Her previous interviews with photographers have brought to light the collaborative aspect of their work with the principal performance artist and the way in which individual photographic styles influence how any performance is ultimately seen. Maude-Roxby became fascinated with the photographs of Françoise Masson, documenting the actions of Gina Pane. This is the first published interview with Masson, describing the trajectory of her career as a photographer and her work with Pane in the context of her practice.
Alice Maude-Roxby is an artist whose work has been shown widely in UK and Europe; she completed an extensive review of performance photography through interviews with the photographers who documented seminal 1970s performances. Her essay, ‘The Delicate Art of Documenting Performance’ is published in Tate Liverpool’s catalogue Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance, 2003.
Françoise Mason worked for numerous periodicals,including Plaisir de France and L ’Oeil,and has extensively documented historical buildings for La Documentation française. She worked closely with the architect Martin Van Treeck to develop photographic methods for recording architectural space.Masson is also known as the photographer who documented the actions of radical body artist, Gina Pane. Price: £5.99
54 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781906441029
What did the chained men in Plato's allegory of the cave see when they looked at the shadows on the wall? Did they see pictures of the world or rather, reflections of their own imagination? What is the difference? Shadows examines the relation between image and mind from the point of view of the scientific image-archive and from the image-repertoire of a number of artists. Each of these perspectives shows a bond between perception and production, while simultaneously revealing an element that appears to be inexplicable, an enigmatic gap that may provide a key to the way we view the world and its images, the cave and its shadows. Price: £5.99
46 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781906441012
Chikamatsu Monazaemon (1653-1724) comments that 'art is something that lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal'. This is the origin of a discussion which recalls the experience and associated imaginings of the European gardens of the seventeenth and eighteenth century and their distant cousins, the stroll gardens of the Tokogawa and Meji periods of Japan. The shared use of the borrowed landscape or 'shakkei' allows for further enquiry into the similarities and difference. The three authors, through discussion, correspondence, and visits to particular gardens, built a relationship through the sharing of references and experiences.
The garden reveals itself as a bountiful source of inspiration, a place of escapism, a cultural and social signifier, and as a place for thinking Price: £5.99
54 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954390814
In Sun-Shine, Moonshine Conroy / Sanderson and Gabriel Gbadamosi take up and challenge the rules of engagement, making up their own conventions as they go along. The text and images were developed over six months, in dialogues that took place both in the artists' studio and elsewhere. Images were made in response to conversations and writings were constructed on images, which then returned to visual representation. The work is founded on Jonathan Swift's satire Gulliver's Travels, and, like Swift, the authors reflect on identity and difference, the foreign and the far-fetched. In an entwining of text and image, figures (as tropes and real people) playing Gulliver (as tourist, stranger, lover or other) float disappear, double and mirror each other. Price: £5.99
