#siglio press

[thearistocratsblog]

Architecture Against Mortality (Arakawa & Gins)

Imagine a house that you could live forever in. What does it look like? Do its walls slope? Are they made of fish scales? Do they give off an incandescence that seems to change with the time of day, the year, the weather? Is its kitchen shaped like a fried egg? Is the living room a sun-drenched valley, or a stretch of desert dunes to climb over in coffee breaks? Do you sleep upside-down like a cocooned insect, so that every day, upon waking, you could stretch into the limbs of your new body and enter the world afresh?

For the late Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa, two interdisciplinary artists and speculative architects active in the radical postwar art scene of New York, the age-old conundrum of human mortality had one solution: an embodied architecture. Rejecting the modernist idea of architecture as “a machine for living in”, they refuted the Cartesian split between mind and body. Gins and her life-work partner Arakawa sought to develop, in their own words, buildings that would serve as “interactive laboratories of everyday life.”

“We have decided not to die,” reads the catalogue of Gins and Arakawa’s 1997 Guggenheim exhibition, Arakawa + Gins: Reversible Destiny. The succinct declaration perfectly encapsulates their lifelong ambition, and is consequently picked up by much of the writing on their work. But long before they established the Reversible Destiny Foundation in 2010, or began to realize their architectural projects in the early aughts, Gins and Arakawa fleshed out these ideas in a body of collaborative works that spanned poetry, painting, film, drawing, and performance.

“Candy-coloured walls, sloping floors and a serious aversion to right angles would keep residents on their toes”

Their first shared project, The Mechanism of Meaning, was initiated in 1963: a year after the two met while studying at the Brooklyn Institute of Painting. An indication of the intensity and duration of the collaboration to follow, the resulting open-ended series of works spans two editions and three decades. It includes over 160 painted panels, charcoal drawings, and later, when the technology became available, computerized renderings. Using text, found objects and images, the works function as a kind of visual puzzle that questions the precise intersection of art, experience and thought, often picking apart meaning language through instruction and play.

As Arakawa continued to explore viewership and the body through painting, Gins used writing to uncover the relationship between reading and the body. For both artists, language was a tool to open up the worlds constructed on canvas and in words. Together they built a lexicon of paradoxes, where ambivalent words like cleave (the act of both cutting and joining) and blank (simultaneously suggesting absence and presence) brought viewers and readers into a state of suspension and unknowing; a state understood by Gins and Arakawa to be the gateway to immortality.

Word Rain, a profoundly atmospheric novel by Gins that plays with the multi-sensory experience of reading, can be found (among her other world-bending writing) in a new Gins reader, published by Siglio Press and edited by Lucy Ives. Reading it, I am reminded of a passage from Olga Tokarzuck’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel, Flights, first published in English in 2017: “…a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest… that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.”

[unofficialchronicle]

NEAR UDAIPUR, 2008, 15 1/8

essay that references this piece: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/04/03/an-egoless-practice-tantric-art/

[artbookdap]

FRIDAY!! March 31 at 7 PM, @cara_the_org presents the launch of 'Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul,' published by Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, Siglio Press and the California African American Museum. The evening will include a reading and conversation between Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Cammock and writer, editor and art historian Re'al Christian. Due to limited seating, reservation is strongly encouraged. RSVP via linkinbio!⁠ ⁠ CARA: Center for Art, Research and Alliances⁠ I Will Keep My Soul: Helen Cammock in Conversation with Re'al Christian⁠ Friday, March 31 at 7 PM⁠ 225 West 13th Street⁠ ⁠ @cammockhelen @followriversinstitute @sigliopress @caaminla https://www.instagram.com/p/CqYXJCZuiZA/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[thelonguepuree]

Bernadette Mayer’s Memory was never meant to be a book. In a 1978 lecture, Mayer describes trying to step “away from the printed book” with this project: for the month of July 1971, she kept a journal and exposed a roll of 35 mm film each day, later recording herself narrating the images (while viewing the slides by projector) and reprocessing her memories via each medium. When “Memory” was originally shown the next year at 98 Greene Street—snapshots developed from the slides had been arranged chronologically on one wall in a long, horizontal grid, while a six-hour audio recording of the final text played—nobody wanted to buy the work, she explained, “as there was nothing to sell.” Later, in a letter to the poet Nada Gordon, Mayer suggested there was at least one offer: an editor from Praeger proposed printing a full-color version in exchange for sex. “I told him I would love to make love to him”—she explains that he was ��quite attractive”—“but only if he wouldnt [sic] publish my book, and then I’m afraid I asked him to leave.”

Diana Hamilton, “Bernadette Mayer’s Memory” in BOMB (x)

[magictransistor]

Anonymous. 17th Century Abstract Tantric Painting. Rajasthan, India.

[sequential-li]

I’ve got a review of Anouck Durand’s book Eternal Friendship over at The Comics Journal today. Check it out!

[tyler-cain]

A few pages from Karen Green’s book Frail Sister, an unsettling, uncanny work of “docu-fiction” and “vis-fiction” (a la Vis-Po) that explores the life and times of a young woman, Constance, who performs as a musical prodigy during the Great Depression and then goes off to Italy during WWII. When she returns stateside, things go awry and her life begins to spiral, and I won’t say anymore about what happens.

The book is a collage, a “rescued history,” according to the publisher, Siglio Press, of a missing woman’s life. It’s told through found photos and correspondence to and from Constance, letters from her close sister, her brother, and various men who fell for her whether abroad during the war or stateside.

It’s a wild ride and beautifully assembled.

[mentaltimetraveller]

Detail from “Room 25” 

Sophie Calle, The Hotel (Siglio Press, 2021)

[thinkingimages]

In 1971, the poet Bernadette Mayer spent the entire month of July attempting to capture the movement of her attention and the formation of her memories. Over the course of those thirty-one days, she wrote two hundred pages and shot more than a thousand 35mm slides. The resulting project, Memory, is oceanic. Each of Mayer’s daily journal entries rolls and eddies as she allows herself to thoroughly investigate the elasticity of language and the contours of her mind. Arrayed in grids, the photographs—of grass, cats, friends, flags, skies, boats, herself, the moon—fix into place the minutiae of her days. Later this month, Siglio Press will publish a new edition of Memory that collects the full sequence of images and text for the first time in book form. Mayer’s diary entry and photographs for July 7 appear below.

Do you have access to a T? Do you have access to a xerox machine? This is a major fate hate weigh your fat. So lost so you’re lost how lost can you be when everywhere you turn it’s morning & a flag’s going up over a map: 2 bean sprouts resting on a snow pea pod & then, it snows, it snows for the first time it snows buckets it snows mainly. It snows rain snow gets rid of a lot of germs, says x of the piemonte ravioli co. we pack our pasta in boxes it’s homemade & speak about the weather: homemade stolen electric typewriters it isnt one yet stolen cassette tape recorder he had schemes. Between recorder & he is: the difference between me & the maharajah. We dont we wont atone for that we leave it as it is so, lost you’re lost how lost can you be when everywhere you go it’s morning & the sun’s coming up over a map: & the map a map to alford massachusetts to a certain place in alford massachusetts within the town lines it goes like this forward: start up the car past golf course along winding road across route 183 past j&k’s house (blue & yellow) up to T in road (chesterwood sign) follow the sign make left the road turns to dirt follow the arrows who? Till the road it’s dirt veers off in two directions always bear right on the dirt road. Veering right watch for oncoming cars on this narrow dirt road you’ll go by a white fence just pass by it when you get to real road, asphalt, that’s route 41, take a left go over a small bridge quickly (it’s green) you go a tenth of a mile & make the first right up & around the black surface of winding cobb hill road, if you’re careful you see the sign. Winding & uphill until you read a complex of buildings that looks like a textbook farm, if you make the right right in a second you’ll be passing a big red barn on the left, watch for the cows & people on the road & incidentally here’s where the road — if you walk on it you’ll see — looks like it was hit, the surface of the road, by a series of small meteors burning holes making holes making burns in the surface of the black hard asphalt brown burns. Go right on till you see a small sign that’s faded over it says alford five miles & something else, this is your first left on the road — if you’re on a motorcycle at night you’ll notice here that the temperature of the air is considerably warmer than before, we are in some kind of valley air pocket but after driving a few miles uphill it seems inexplicable except to the people who live here, here we also pass a dream-like farm nestling in the valley’s expensive soil, after making this left the road suddenly turns to gravel — I think this was probably temporary so dont count on it but the gravel begins as you cross the west stockbridge-alford town line sign. Just after you’ve passed the alford brook club or just before alford brook itself is almost invisible like a light on the shore of the country we’re making for, we’re almost there, go about 1.3 miles on this road & then stop at the house...

The Paris Review / Continue Reading... +

[retentionalfinitude2]

“We open our eyes and ears seeing life each day excellent as it is. This realization no longer needs art though without art it would have been difficult (yoga, zazen, etc.) to come by. Having this realization, we gather energies, ours and the ones of nature, in order to make this intolerable world endurable.”

--John Cage, Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)

[The reprint by Siglio Press is yet another lovely literary object from John Cage.]

[pho---to---graph]

From Memory by Bernadette Mayer, Siglio Press, 2020. Image courtesy of Bernadette Mayer Papers, Special Collections & Archives, University of California, San Diego.

[hyperallergic]

Since the 2012 death of Argentine artist Mirtha Dermisache — who was known but underappreciated in her lifetime — her legacy has steadily consolidated as her work, which straddles the line between writing and visual art, receives posthumous attention. In 2014, BOMB published a folio of her work, New York’s Drawing Center and London’s Drawing Room included her in a joint exhibition, and the American poet Patrick Durgin penned a thoughtful appreciation of her oeuvre for Jacket2. In 2017, The Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires exhibited the first ever Dermisache retrospective. And in 2018, Siglio and Ugly Duckling Presse, two of the foremost American presses at the nexus of art and literature, have teamed up to publish Selected Writings, an enticing selection of her early output.

(via Mirtha Dermisache's Writing Is a Rorschach test)

[virtualmemoriespodcast]

Episode 474 - Nicole Rudick

Author, critic and editor Nicole Rudick joins the show to celebrate the publication of her amazing book, What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)Biography of Niki de Saint Phalle (Siglio Press). We get into Niki de Saint Phalle's word-paintings & what they tell us about the arts of revelation and concealment, Nicole's shifting concept of biography & the tyranny of the archives, the role of the audience/reader in art, and why Nicole's first big post-pandemic trip will be to Niki's Tarot Garden in Tuscany. Follow Nicole on Twitter and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

Check out the new episode of The Virtual Memories Show

[artbookdap]

In advance of the highly anticipated publication of 'What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle' by @nicole_rudick … @thedailyheller speaks with @sigliopress publisher Lisa Pearson @print_mag ⁠ ⁠ We highly recommend this interview, not only to learn about the forthcoming book, but to read about Siglio, "a small, fiercely independent press driven by its feminist ethos and its commitment to writers and artists who obey no boundaries, pay no fealty to trends, and invite readers to see the world anew by reading word and image in provocative, unfamiliar ways."⁠ ⁠ Read up via linkinbio!⁠ ⁠ #nikidesaintphalle #nikidesaintphallebiography ##nikidesaintphalleautobiography https://www.instagram.com/p/CZKs_LcJc1o/?utm_medium=tumblr