Brandon Stosuy (ed.): Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (2006)

“Sometime after Andy Warhol’s heyday but before Soho became a tourist trap, a group of poets, punk rockers, guerilla journalists, graffiti artists, writers, and activists transformed lower Manhattan into an artistic scene so diverse it became known simply as “Downtown.“ Willfully unpolished and subversively intelligent, figures such as Spalding Gray, Kathy Acker, Richard Hell, David Wojnarowicz, Lynne Tillman, Miguel Piñero, and Eric Bogosian broke free from mainstream publishing to produce a flood of fiction, poetry, experimental theater, art, and music that breathed the life of the street.

The first book to capture the spontaneity of the Downtown literary scene, Up Is Up, But So Is Down collects more than 125 images and over 80 texts that encompass the most vital work produced between 1974 and 1992. Reflecting the unconventional genres that marked this period, the book includes flyers, zines, newsprint weeklies, book covers, and photographs of people and the city, many of them here made available to readers outside the scene for the first time. The book’s striking and quirky design—complete with 2-color interior—brings each of these unique documents and images to life.

Brandon Stosuy arranges this hugely varied material chronologically to illustrate the dynamic views at play. He takes us from poetry readings in Alphabet City to happenings at Darinka, a Lower East Side apartment and performance space, to the St. Mark’s Bookshop, unofficial crossroads of the counterculture, where home-printed copies of the latest zines were sold in Ziploc bags. Often attacking the bourgeois irony epitomized by the New Yorker’s short fiction, Downtown writers played ebulliently with form and content, sex and language, producing work that depicted the underbelly of real life.

With an afterword by Downtown icons Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles, Up Is Up, But So Is Down gathers almost twenty years of New York City’s smartest and most explosive—as well as hard to find—writing, providing an indispensable archive of one of the most exciting artistic scenes in U.S. history.”

With an afterword by Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles
Publisher NYU Press, 2006
ISBN 9780814740118
500 pages

Downtown Collection at NYU’s Fales Library

Reviews: Ed Halter (Village Voice, 2006), Meghan O’Rourke (New York Times, 2006), Tim W. Brown (Columbia Journal of American Studies, n.d).
Commentary: Cynthia Carr (New York Times, 2006), Peter Cherches (2006).

Publisher

PDF (39 MB, updated on 2019-8-23)

A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, 3(1): Post-Digital Research (2014)

“This issue of the journal addresses the messy and paradoxical condition of art and media after digital technology revolutions and critically reflects on the term “post-digital”. The issue is the outcome of a process where a number of researchers, artist-researchers and Ph.D.’s have collaborated in presenting and exchanging ideas around the subject. This follows an earlier call from transmediale festival, Berlin, and a research event at Kunsthal Aarhus. The issue does not present a uniform interpretation of the notion, but includes a variety of positions related to the use of the term, its application within various fields, and how it is reflected in artistic research.”

With contributions by Jamie Allen, Christian Ulrik Andersen, Josephine Bosma, James Charlton, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Geoff Cox, Florian Cramer, Annet Dekker, Jonas Fritsch, David Gauthier, Robert Jackson, Magnus Lawrie, Alessandro Ludovico, Kieran Nolan, Lotte Philipsen, Søren Pold, Eric Snodgrass, Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen and Winnie Soon.

Edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen, Geoff Cox and Georgios Papadopoulos
Publisher Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, Aarhus, in collaboration with reSource transmedial culture Berlin/transmediale, Berlin, Jun 2014
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license
ISSN 2245-7755

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PDFs (updated on 2021-5-4)
PDF (44 MB)

Journal of Visual Culture 12(3): The Archives Issue (2013)

With contributions from Shezad Dawood, Oliver Grau, Gary Hall, Chris Horrocks, Tom Holert, Juliette Kristenesen, susan pui san lok, Sas Mays, Joanne Morra, Nooney, Uriel Orlow, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Trevor Paglen, Vivian Rehberg, Marquard Smith, and Nina Lager Vestberg.

Edited by Juliette Kristensen and Marquard Smith
ISSN 1470-4129
174 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2019-10-13)