Report from the Gutenberg Galaxy (Blaker), 3: Archive Has Left the Building (2017)

A publication released in connection with the exhibition Archive Has Left the Building, the third iteration of The Gutenberg Galaxy at Blaker (2013-15), which takes as its point of departure the archive of the artist Guttorm Guttormsgaard, a collection of tens of thousands of objects he has collected with the intention of “documenting necessary impulses to keep one’s spirits up.” The archive is located in a former dairy in Blaker, a village 40 km northeast of Oslo. Guttormsgaard has referred to the printed book as a model for his own artistic practice. The project aims to reimagine the book today.

Contributions by Matthew Fuller, Scandinavian Institute for Computational Vandalism (SICV), Ellef Prestsæter, Karin Nygård, Institutt for Degenerert Kunst.

Edited by Karin Nygård and Ellef Prestsæter
Publisher Rett Kopi, Blaker, 2017
Open access
70 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (40 MB)
See also previous two volumes.

Nicholas Thoburn: Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (2014–) [EN, SC]

“No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text.

Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.””

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2016
Cultural Critique Books series
ISBN 9780816621965, 0816621969
xvi+372 pages

Interview with author: Ron Hanson (White Fungus, 2020).
Reviews: Filipe Carreira da Silva (Contemporary Political Theory, 2017), Anthony Iles (Mute, 2018), Samuel A. Moore (Cultural Studies, 2018), Ola Ståhl (Parallax, 2018), Nick Thurston (Comparative Critical Studies, 2019), Martin Paul Eve (American Literature, 2019), Terrine M. Friday (Canadian Journal of Communication, 2019), Simone Murray (Left History, 2019).

Publisher (EN)
Publisher (SC)
WorldCat (EN)

Anti-knjiga: Materijalni tekst i političko izdavaštvo (Serbo-Croatian, 2014, 1 MB, added on 2017-5-2)
Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (English, 2016, HTML; PDF, updated on 2019-7-2)

Danske kunstnerbøger / Danish Artists’ Books (2013) [Danish/English]

This publication “offers the first comprehensive presentation of Danish artists’ books – pioneers, main works, periods, links to international movements, contemporary artists’ books – via a wide range of contributions from Danish scholars, art critics, and artists as well as from some of the leading international scholars within the field including Anne Moeglin-Delcroix and Johanna Drucker. This dual-language edition presents the artists who have had the greatest impact on the artist’s book tradition in Denmark, including Asger Jorn, Per Kirkeby, Tal R, Lene Adler Petersen, Albert Mertz, Jytte Rex, Henrik Have, Per Kirkeby, Claus Carstensen, Stig Brøgger, Jesper Fabricius, Christian Vind and Goodiepal.”

Edited by Thomas Hvid Kromann, Louise Hold Sidenius, Maria Kjær Themsen and Marianne Vierø
Publisher Møller, Copenhagen, and Walther König, Cologne, 2013
ISBN 9783863354749, 3863354745
300 pages

Review: Gustavo Grandal Montero (Art Libraries J, 2015).

Exhibition
Publisher (1)
Publisher (2)
WorldCat

PDF (9 MB, updated on 2021-1-14)