Whatever Isn’t Anything Else
Take a look at contemporary artists’ publishing through the work of Adam Pendleton, Kandis Williams, and Nora Turato.
Gee Wesley
Feb 11, 2022
Writer, critic, and curator Lucy Lippard wrote in 1985 that, “Like performance art, artists’ books are best defined as whatever isn’t anything else. They aren’t quite photobooks, comic books, coffee-table books, fiction, illustration.” In the decades since Lippard’s pronouncement, the artist’s book has endured largely due to this indeterminate position. For many artists, independent publishing occupies an intermediary space between the more thoroughly defined areas of their practice. In the work of Adam Pendleton, Nora Turato, and Kandis Williams, that imprecision is precisely the point. For them, publishing represents not only a means to an artistic end but a guiding logic for how their work complicates received understanding of language, learning, and historical fact. Their new and forthcoming projects reveal how publishing continues to afford artists the opportunity to circumvent the traditional terms used to evaluate and perceive contemporary art.
Nora Turato’s forthcoming project pool 5 squarely occupies the interstitial space that Lippard ascribed to both the artist’s book and performance. Turato intuitively culls fragments of speech from the Internet, books, media headlines, product packages, personal correspondence, and her own writing to assemble “pools” of text. Part script, part archive, part prop, part performance, Turato’s work is a constant practice of reading, consuming information, and feeding those parts of speech into textual pools from which the artist performs. Each of Turato’s pool projects are distinct; the presentations often involve the artist performing within installations of hundreds of copies of the publication stacked on pallets in the exhibition spaces. In MoMA’s Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, Turato will activate these reservoirs of accumulated fragments through performances that straddle poetics, design, and publishing. While the artist trained as a book designer at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, her work transitioned from textual video and voiceover pieces to live performance. Turato often performs amid posters and other graphic arrangements, recalling installations by Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, who similarly explore the subtle power of language to script and discipline human action.
Nora Turato. Spread from Pool 4. 2020
Saidiya Hartman. Venus in Two Acts. Cassandra Press, 2021
The power of publishing allows one to wield the discursive means through which value and attention is assigned in contemporary art. A case in point is Cassandra Press, an artist-run publishing and educational platform founded by artist Kandis Williams. Williams’s own work spans collage, performance, and multimedia. Since its founding in 2016, Cassandra Press has used low-cost print readers to circulate rigorous dialogues on race, cultural studies, and critical theory.
A zine released in 2021 by Cassandra Press is currently on view at MoMA in the Critical Fabulations gallery. The zine includes a reprint of the essay “Venus in Two Acts” by cultural historian Saidiya V. Hartman. In the essay, Hartman coined the phrase “Critical Fabulations” as a way of reckoning with the countless gaps and absences found in archives and historical records, especially those relating to the lives of enslaved people. In order to redress history’s omissions, Hartman uses storytelling to imagine not only what was, but also what could be. The zine, which you can read online, was initially distributed to students of Cassandra Press and art- and community-based organizations.
Cassandra Press employs affordable readers as a tool to “spread ideas, distribute new language, propagate dialogue centering ethics, aesthetics, femme driven activism, and black scholarship because y’all ain’t listening.” Titles such as White Savior (2019), Re: Black Twitter (2018), and Reader on GET OUT Interraciality and PTSD (2017) cover topics such as misogynoir, cultural representation, and the politics of visuality, exploring publishing as a public space for tracking and circulating the collective learning that transpires outside the frameworks of formal education.
The pairing of Hartman and Cassandra Press is significant given the extent to which her work unpacks print media’s historical role as a force of governmentality that has occluded the humanity of Black lives. African Americans were excluded from the archives throughout slavery, and have also been overrepresented in print via the regimes of surveillance and identification, in documents like ship ledgers, slave passes, manumission papers, free badges, black codes, and fugitive slave notices.
Publications create communities and conjure imagined ones. Together, print capitalism and the printed document were crucial to the formation of national consciousness throughout the history of the West. Independent publishing displaces the state’s monopoly on the production of collective identity. As artist and educator Paul Soulellis wrote about the role of publishing in 20th century life, “Publishing performs, compels, attracts, confuses, scripts, manipulates. To publish is fundamentally a political act.” Yet in the hands of artists and independent practitioners, print shifts from reifying fixed historical accounts of the past and reinscribing fixed social identities, and is transformed into a practice of radical self-determination.
Installation view of gallery 214, Critical Fabulations, MoMA.
Adam Pendleton. Spread from Black Dada Reader. 2021
Adam Pendleton’s current exhibition Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? frames history and the artistic canon not as closed structures but as a porous framework for revision. A reader accompanies the installation but is conceived as part of the work, serving as a primer and a handbook on the exhibition. Pendleton’s Who Is Queen? A Reader includes photocopies of texts that have been critical to Pendleton’s practice, by figures such as Glenn Gould, Michael Hardt, and Ruby Sales, alongside images of Resurrection City and Pendleton’s own drawings.
The publication is the fifth in a series of reader-style publications that the artist has produced, along with Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths (2021), Black Dada Reader (2017), i/on interiors (2011), RADIO (2011), and grey-blue grain (2010). Black Dada Reader became the root of the artist’s subsequent publishing, pulling together texts by thinkers and writers such as Hugo Ball, Joan Retallack, and Stokely Carmichael. More recently the artist has founded an imprint that he operates called DABA. It publishes artists’ books and experimental writing that explore the relationships between conceptual practices, Blackness, and the avant-garde. Titles include a collection of Brion Gysin’s “permutated poems,” as well as EECCHHOOEESS, a reissue of conceptual writings by Norman H. Pritchard, a member of the Umbra group, a collective of Black writers founded in 1962.
Recent presentations of artist publishing by Adam Pendleton, Nora Turato, and Kandis Williams continue MoMA’s long legacy of collecting historical print materials. This legacy includes displays of Eastern European artists’ magazines and publications by UNI/vers(;), Endre Tót, and Nedko Solakov, on view in Gallery 208: After the Wall, as well as Latin American mail art by Ulises Carrión and Eugenio Dittborn, on view in Gallery 205: Print, Fold, Send.
Long after the alleged death of print, contemporary artists continue to employ independent publishing as a means of extending their practice into new realms. Artist publishing remains a vital tool for usurping the didactic function of the book, challenging the supposed fixity of language, and recirculating and inscribing the supposedly ephemeral forms of performance and live action.
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