Book Description

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Fiction. California Interest. African & African American Studies. Latinx Studies. Middle Eastern Studies. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Art. Film. Music. Art Criticism. BLANK SIGN BOOK is a collection of innovative art writing from poet and essayist Anne Lesley Selcer. Writing in the confluence of politics and aesthetics through the work of Ana Mendieta, The Otolith Group, Juliana Huxtable, Dolores Dorantes, Janet Cardiff, Ragnar Kjartansson, and more, Selcer's debut collection culminates the interdisciplinary thinking and formal risk of fifteen years of public critical writing. Selcer's work has been nationally and internationally commissioned and solicited by museums, galleries and art magazines. Anchored by the feminist, queer, and decolonial thought of Susan Sontag, Saidiya Hartman, Lisa Robertson, Micha Cárdenas, and many more, BLANK SIGN BOOK explores representation from the image to the agora. The essays are embedded deeply within the pleasure of art and the power of artist. They consider topics from the materiality of the internet, protest, sound, and gentrification, to teenage literary obsession, femicide, and decolonized time. BLANK SIGN BOOK unfolds within Selcer's decade long investigation of Western beauty, from which two award-winning poetry publications have emerged. With lyricism, incisive clarity and a deep commitment to the power of art and artists as a vehicle for experimental advocacy and radical insight, BLANK SIGN BOOK displays Selcer's capacious and assiduous grasp as an art writer and cultural thinker to be read for decades to come. BLANK SIGN BOOK emerged from Anne Lesley Selcer's tenure as inaugural Art Writing Fellow at Southern Exposure.