The JAB Anthology


Book Description

This anthology of articles selected from The Journal of Artists’ Books contains some of the best critical writing on artists’ books produced in the last quarter of a century. Driven by the editorial vision of artist Brad Freeman, JAB began as a provocative pamphlet and expanded to become a significant journal documenting artists’ books from multiple perspectives. With its range of participants and approaches, JAB provided a unique venue for sustained critical writing in the field and developed a broad subscriber base among institutional and private collectors and readers. More than two hundred writers and artists from nearly two dozen countries around the globe were published in its pages. The JAB Anthology contains contributions by many renowned figures in the field including: Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Janet Zweig, Monica Carroll, Adam Dickerson, Alisa Scudamore, Mary Jo Pauly, April Sheridan, Doro Boehme, Gerrit Jan de Rook, Océane Delleaux, Brandon Graham, Jérôme Dupeyrat, Ward Tietz, Paulo Silveira, Philip Cabau, Leszek Brogowski, Lyn Ashby, Tim Mosely, Debra Parr, Pedro Moura, Levi Sherman, Catarina Figueiredo Cardoso, Isabel Baraona, and the editors.




The Roots of Cane


Book Description

The Roots of Cane proposes a new way to read one of the most significant works of the New Negro Renaissance, Jean Toomer’s Cane. Rather than focusing on the form of the book published by Boni and Liveright, what Toomer would later call a single textual “organism,” John Young traces the many pieces of Cane that were dispersed across multiple modernist magazines from 1922 through 1923. These periodicals ranged from primarily political monthlies to avant-garde arts journals to regional magazines with transnational aspirations. Young interweaves a periodical-studies approach to modernism with book history and critical race theory, resituating Toomer’s uneasy place within Black modernism by asking how original readers would have encountered his work. The different contexts in which those audiences were engaging with Toomer’s portraits of racialized identity in the Jim Crow United States, yield often surprising results.




H.F. Henderson: Understanding Molecular Typography


Book Description

Artist book by Woody Leslie that is a fictional textbook about the fictional science of molecular typography. Molecular typography is the study of the chemical and physical underpinnings of letters - letters are molecules composed of atomic building blocks known as typtoms. The book is designed as a field guide for the layman with scientific explanations and detailed character diagrams for all letters.




Nevada


Book Description

One of Vogue's Best Books of 2022 So Far, Buzzfeed's Summer Books You Won’t Be Able To Put Down, Book Riot's Best Summer Reads for 2022, and Dazed's Queer Books to Read in 2022 "[Nevada] is defiant, terse, not quite cynical, sometimes flip, addressed to people who think they know. It is, if you like, punk rock." —The New Yorker "Nevada is a book that changed my life: it shaped both my worldview and personhood, making me the writer I am. And it did so by the oldest of methods, by telling a wise, hilarious, and gripping story." —Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby A beloved and blistering cult classic and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction finally back in print, Nevada follows a disaffected trans woman as she embarks on a cross-country road trip. Maria Griffiths is almost thirty and works at a used bookstore in New York City while trying to stay true to her punk values. She’s in love with her bike but not with her girlfriend, Steph. She takes random pills and drinks more than is good for her, but doesn’t inject anything except, when she remembers, estrogen, because she’s trans. Everything is mostly fine until Maria and Steph break up, sending Maria into a tailspin, and then onto a cross-country trek in the car she steals from Steph. She ends up in the backwater town of Star City, Nevada, where she meets James, who is probably but not certainly trans, and who reminds Maria of her younger self. As Maria finds herself in the awkward position of trans role model, she realizes that she could become James’s savior—or his downfall. One of the most beloved cult novels of our time and a landmark of trans literature, Imogen Binnie’s Nevada is a blistering, heartfelt, and evergreen coming-of-age story, and a punk-smeared excavation of marginalized life under capitalism. Guided by an instantly memorable, terminally self-aware protagonist—and back in print featuring a new afterword by the author—Nevada is the great American road novel flipped on its head for a new generation.




The One and the Many


Book Description

DIVExamines questions of agency, artisanship, and identity in relation to collaborative art practice./div




Diagrammatic Writing


Book Description

Diagrammatic Writing is a poetic demonstration of the capacity of format to produce meaning. The articulation of the codex, as a space of semantically generative relations, has rarely (if ever) been subject to so highly focused and detailed a study. The text and graphical presentation are fully integrated, co-dependent, and mutually self-reflexive. This small book work should be of interest to writers, bibliographers, designers, conceptual artists, and anyone interested in the meta-language of diagrammatic thought in graphic form.




Modern Art Despite Modernism


Book Description

Essay by Robert Storr. Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry.




Visualization and Interpretation


Book Description

An analysis of visual epistemology in the digital humanities, with attention to the need for interpretive digital tools within humanities contexts. In the several decades since humanists have taken up computational tools, they have borrowed many techniques from other fields, including visualization methods to create charts, graphs, diagrams, maps, and other graphic displays of information. But are these visualizations actually adequate for the interpretive approach that distinguishes much of the work in the humanities? Information visualization, as practiced today, lacks the interpretive frameworks required for humanities-oriented methodologies. In this book, Johanna Drucker continues her interrogation of visual epistemology in the digital humanities, reorienting the creation of digital tools within humanities contexts. Drucker examines various theoretical understandings of visual images and their relation to knowledge and how the specifics of the graphical are to be engaged directly as a primary means of knowledge production for digital humanities. She draws on work from aesthetics, critical theory, and formal study of graphical systems, addressing them within the specific framework of computational and digital activity as they apply to digital humanities. Finally, she presents a series of standard problems in visualization for the humanities (including time/temporality, space/spatial relations, and data analysis), posing the investigation in terms of innovative graphical systems informed by probabilistic critical hermeneutics. She concludes with a final brief sketch of discovery tools as an additional interface into which modeling can be worked.




Neoliberal Apartheid


Book Description

This is the first comparative analysis of the political transitions in South Africa and Palestine since the 1990s. Clarno s study is grounded in impressive ethnographic fieldwork, taking him from South African townships to Palestinian refugee camps, where he talked to a wide array of informants, from local residents to policymakers, political activists, business representatives, and local and international security personnel. The resulting inquiry accounts for the simultaneous development of extreme inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing the poor in South Africa and Palestine/Israel over the last 20 years. Clarno places these transitions in a global context while arguing that a new form of neoliberal apartheid has emerged in both countries. The width and depth of Clarno s research, combined with wide-ranging first-hand accounts of realities otherwise difficult for researchers to access, make Neoliberal Apartheid a path-breaking contribution to the study of social change, political transitions, and security dynamics in highly unequal societies. Take one example of Clarno s major themes, to wit, the issue of security. Both places have generated advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing the racialized poor. In South Africa, racialized anxieties about black crime shape the growth of private security forces that police poor black South Africans in wealthy neighborhoods. Meanwhile, a discourse of Muslim terrorism informs the coordinated network of security forcesinvolving Israel, the United States, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authoritythat polices Palestinians in the West Bank. Overall, Clarno s pathbreaking book shows how the shifting relationship between racism, capitalism, colonialism, and empire has generated inequality and insecurity, marginalization and securitization in South Africa, Palestine/Israel, and other parts of the world."




A Poetics of the Press


Book Description

Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. Art. The publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry in 1960, as well as the Vancouver and Berkeley poetry conferences, sparked a poetic renaissance. It was an era rich in exploration and innovation that articulated a new relationship between form and content. Simultaneously, American artists began working with the book as a creative medium that rivaled the European tradition of the early twentieth century. This book is the first collection of interviews with some of the pioneers working at the intersection of the artists book and experimental writing that continues to this day. Includes interviews with Keith & Rosmaie Waldrop, Tom Raworth, Lyn Hejinian, Alan Loney, Mary Laird, Jonathan Greene, Alastair Johnston, Johanna Drucker, Phil Gallo, Steve Clay, Charles Alexander, Annabel Lee, Inge Bruggeman, Matvei Yankelevich, Anna Moschovakis, Aaron Cohick, and Scott Pierce. Co-published with Cuneiform Press.