Urgent Publishing After the Artist’s Book: Making Public in Movements Towards Liberation (2021)

This talk was delivered online at the Contemporary Artists’ Book Conference, hosted by the Center for Book Arts at Printed Matter’s Virtual Art Book Fair, February 27, 2021. While I was giving the talk (which can be viewed here), Be Oakley of GenderFail Press texted me and asked if they could publish the talk as a book. Within days, Be had designed and published GenderFail’s book version, an edition of 200 (and subsequent new editions) that sold widely and continues to circulate. I also delivered the talk at The Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, England, on June 11, 2021, for the Experimental Publishing IV—Critique, Intervention, and Speculation Symposium.

The text was later published by Apria Journal in the Netherlands in March 2021, and can be read online here.

“Neo-fascism and neo-liberalism are consuming everything in their paths, including ‘resistance.’ The idea that graphic design, book arts, or ‘publishing as artistic practice’ can be radical is no longer an option. I reject these efforts. Instead, let’s create and circulate radical messages, and form new kinds of publics, far away from traditional institutions of knowledge production and disciplinarity. These messages will be illegible to some. Urgent artifacts are not easily digestible and they resist canons and containers.

Let’s gather as we are right now at this conference, and shift from the I to the we, to the communal work of shared practice. We’ll find new energy and motivation by stepping away from traditional notions of publishing as an individual artistic practice. Away from the market-facing domination of the artists’ book as it’s evolved during the last fifty years.

Let’s find hope and inspiration in the messy, slow work of artists’ collectives, activists, poets, and organizers working today, engaged in the principles of urgentcraft. And in the multiple histories of publishing that are yet to be written, choosing to focus specifically on those who are left out, those who work outside of art world whiteness, those who devote themselves to making public as an ongoing, urgent formation towards justice and liberation.

This is an ethics and a politics of urgent making that I’ve sketched out, and this is our call to shape, evolve, share, and manifest these ideas within our everyday work.”

Read “Urgent Publishing After the Artist’s Book” (with original slides) →

Read “Urgent Publishing After the Artist’s Book” at Apria Journal →