A fascinating account of Frank O'Hara in the prime of his creative life in New York, told through notes, images, and poems by his friend Bill Berkson.
Poet and art critic Bill Berkson (1939–2016) had planned for many years to write a lengthy study on his friend and mentor Frank O'Hara (1926–1966) but died with the project still incomplete. This volume reproduces the sketchbook in which Berkson gathered notes, images, and poems about O'Hara, focusing on his memories of their collaborations in New York, from their initial meeting in 1960 to O'Hara's untimely death in 1966. A Frank O'Hara Notebook offers a fascinating first-person account of the heyday of O'Hara's creative life, and memorably sketches the heady social milieus of the poetry and art worlds of New York that O'Hara inhabited in the early 1960s. In addition to an exact-scale photographic reproduction of Berkson's handwritten notebook, this volume includes a typesetting of Berkson's notes and two texts on O'Hara derived from these notes published under Berkson's direction, titled “A Frank O'Hara File” and “What Frank O'Hara Was Like.” The book shows the evolution of Berkson's ideas from notes to fragmentary phrases and sentences into finished pieces of writing. Ultimately, this collection reveals as much about Berkson's writing practice as it does about his famous subject and friend.
The book's translation of Berkson's handwritten notes and collaged material into type honors the idiosyncratic format of Berkson's handwritten text, precisely following the line breaks, capitalizations, and drawn graphic elements in the holograph. The book also includes an introduction by fellow New York School poet Ron Padgett and an afterword by Berkson's wife, curator Constance Lewallen.

A Frank O'Hara Notebook (No Place Press)

Arts & Photography

Berkson, Bill

History & Criticism

no place press

How Silicon Valley, the dark net, and digital culture have affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth.
In October 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Ross William Ulbricht was arrested at the Glen Park Public Branch Library in San Francisco, accused of being the “Dread Pirate Roberts” and mastermind of a dark net drug marketplace known as Silk Road. Ulbricht was an ardent libertarian who believed Silk Road―described by the New York Times as “the largest, most sophisticated criminal enterprise the internet has ever seen”―was battling the forces of big government. He was convicted two years later of money laundering, computer hacking, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics and sentenced to life in prison.
Art historian Pamela Lee reads this event as a fairy tale of disruption rather than an isolated episode in the history of the dark net, Silicon Valley, and the relationship between public libraries and digital culture. Lee argues that the notion of “disruptive” technology in contemporary culture has radically affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth. Against the backdrop of her account of Ulbricht and his exploits, Lee provides original readings of five women artists―Gretchen Bender, Cecile B. Evans, Josephine Pryde, Carissa Rodriguez, and Martine Syms―who weigh in, either explicitly or inadvertently, on the nature of contemporary media and technology. Written as a work of experimental art criticism, The Glen Park Library is both a homage to the Bay Area and an excoriation of the ethos of Silicon Valley. As with all fairy tales, the book's ultimate subjects are much greater, however, and Lee casts a critical eye on collisions between privacy and publicity, knowledge and information, and the past and future that are enabled by the technocratic worldview.

The Glen Park Library: A Fairy Tale of Disruption (No Place Press)

Lee, Pamela M.

Video and performance artist Anne Walsh's encounter with and multipart response to surrealist painter Leonora Carrington's novel The Hearing Trumpet.
Contributions by Dodie Bellamy, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Claudia LaRocco
Over the past decade, artist Anne Walsh has created an ongoing, multipart response to surrealist painter Leonora Carrington's novel The Hearing Trumpet (written in the early 1960s, published in 1974). Walsh's interdisciplinary works, encompassing video, writing, and performance, chronicle her time with the nonagenarian author and, ultimately, her assumption of the identity of the aging artist. Hello Leonora, Soy Anne Walsh is a visual and written “adaptation” of Carrington's feminist novella, offering a narrative in fragments: a middle-aged artist named Anne Walsh falls in love with the 92-year-old author of a book about a 92-year-old woman who is placed in a sinister and increasingly surreal retirement home.
Walsh courts the author, travels to Mexico to meet her, fantasizes about adapting the book for film, and spends the next decade searching for The Hearing Trumpet's form and cast. Having discovered in Carrington's novel a thrilling, subversive example of old age, Walsh casts herself as an “Apprentice Crone.” She stalks old people and takes selfies with them. She becomes a mother, passes through menopause. She sings her daughter's Disney movie songs at “elder theater” classes. She studies and rehearses the trauma, the affliction, the indignity that is old age, and she writes to Leonora Carrington. 
The story is told through facsimiles of hand-written letters, annotated research notes, post-it note flow charts, cast lists, scripts, and a photographic e ssay that loosely narrates Walsh's visits to Carrington in Mexico City, with additional texts by writer Dodie Bellamy, art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson, and poet and critic Claudia La Rocco.

Hello Leonora, Soy Anne Walsh (No Place Press)

Walsh, Anne

Three nails for J. Robert Oppenheimer, more than half a century after the Manhattan Project.
For Want of a Nail takes as its starting point a series of curious memoranda sent from J. Robert Oppenheimer's office in October 1943 and archived in the Los Alamos Historical Museum, in which the eminent scientist repeatedly requests a nail in the wall upon which he could hang his hat. The persistence and specificity of the request for this nail inspired the international art collective Futurefarmers to create, by hand (and after more than a half-century delay), three nails for the theoretical physicist: one forged from a meteorite, one cast using 1943 steel pennies, and a third made by re-fusing Trinitite, a material formed by residue from the Trinity nuclear bomb test.
Growing out of a site-specific contribution to an exhibition in Santa Fe, New Mexico, this book engages the region's complex nuclear history as it relates to land use, resource extraction, and the far-reaching decisions that were made within the Manhattan Project. Throughout this multidisciplinary project, Futurefarmers constructs a narrative that runs parallel, and in some cases counter to, the conventional accounts of the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer, its chief architect. Through video stills, production shots, essays, and interviews―presented in a book with uncut, unopened pages that the reader may cut to access more images―For Want of a Nail not only opens new ways to think about the region's particular atomic history, but also prompts more general reflections on how knowledge and narrative are embedded and communicated in material objects, both ephemeral and ancient.
Contributors Peter Galison, Patrick Kiley, Lucy Lippard, Megan Prelinger and Rick Prelinger, Anne Walsh

For Want of a Nail (No Place Press)

Swaine, Michael

Futurefarmers

Franceschini, Amy

The final iteration of Rainer's dance rant A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies, accompanied by texts offering a real-time account of Rainer's creative process. Choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer has long investigated the ways in which movement can be a political act in and of itself--on the stage, on the screen, or at the lectern. In Revisions, Rainer pushes her interest in embodied activism to a new arena- what she calls the "dance rant." This volume includes the final iteration of Rainer's latest dance rant, entitled A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies. This performance piece evolved in live presentations in Dublin, Stockholm, and New York before being expanded and adapted in written form here. In this now-completed work, Rainer mobilizes her rage and bafflement at contemporary political events through the guise of Apollo, Leader of the Muses.

Revisions: Essays by Apollo Musagète, Yvonne Rainer, and Others

Rainer, Yvonne

Exit Interview: Benjamin Buchloh in conversation with Hal Foster

FOSTER, HAL

Buchloh, Benjamin H.D.

Essays and reminiscences by one of the preeminent art historians of our time, spanning more than four decades.\nAn Oblique Autobiography assembles a new collection of essays and reminiscences by one of the preeminent art historians of our time. Spanning more than four decades of Yve-Alain Bois's work as a scholar, journal editor, and occasional curator, this volume traces a deeply personal itinerary through an important era of art history, in which the discipline—in part occasioned by Bois's own journey from France to the United States—was significantly reformulated by new methodologies.\nDetailing Bois’s early relationships with figures such as Roland Barthes, Hubert Damisch, Lygia Clark, and Jacques Derrida, as well as his extended engagements with Rosalind Krauss, Ellsworth Kelly, and Martin Barré, these essays track Bois's intellectual commitments against the backdrop of an evolving academic field. With texts that range from academic journal articles to obituaries, written from 1976 to 2021, An Oblique Autobiography reveals the range of Bois’s authorial voice and offers a remarkable self-portrait of one of art history’s primary protagonists.

An Oblique Autobiography

Bois, Yve-Alain

A history of design teaching from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s told through essays, interviews, remembrances, and primary materials. With contributions by more than forty of the most influential voices in art, architecture, and design, After the Bauhaus, Before the Internet traces a history of design teaching from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s through essays, interviews, and primary materials. Geoff Kaplan has gathered a multigenerational group of theorists and practitioners to explore how the evolution of graphic design pedagogy can be placed within a conceptual and historical context. &nbsp; At a time when all choices and behaviors are putatively curated, and when "design thinking" is recruited to solve problems from climate change to social media optimization, the volume's contributors examine how design's self-understandings as a discipline have changed and how such changes affect the ways in which graphic design is being historicized and theorized today.

After the Bauhaus, Before the Internet: A History of Graphic Design Pedagogy

Graphic Design

The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men

Lord, Catherine

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