Garnet Hertz (ed.): Critical Making (2012)

“Critical Making is a handmade book project by Garnet Hertz that explores how hands-on productive work ‐ making ‐ can supplement and extend critical reflection on technology and society. It works to blend and extend the fields of design, contemporary art, DIY/craft and technological development. It also can be thought of as an appeal to the electronic DIY maker movement to be critically engaged with culture, history and society: after learning to use a 3D printer, making an LED blink or using an Arduino, then what?

The publication has 70 contributors ‐ primarily from contemporary art and academia ‐ and its 352 pages are bound in ten pocket-sized zine-like volumes. The project takes the topic of DIY culture literally by printing an edition of 300 copies on a hacked photocopier with booklets that were manually folded, stapled and cut. The 300 finished copies were primarily given away for free to project contributors, individuals and institutions important to them. Some of the handmade copies were traded for reviews, photographs, videos, lectures and were given to library archives.

Due to the large demand for this content, the entire collection had been scanned and released on conceptlab.com/criticalmaking and through the Twitter account @criticalpdfs.”

Publisher Telharmonium Press, Hollywood/CA, November 2012
Open Access
10 booklets, 352 pages total

Reviews: Debatty (We Make Money Not Art, 2013), Blue (Engine Institute, 2013).

single PDF (36 MB)
PDF contributions (67 pieces)

Eccentric Manifesto (1922/1992)

“The ‘Depot of Eccentrics’ which on the 9th July 1922 published The Eccentric Manifesto–a pamphlet ‘the size of an ordinary letter’–proved an ephemeral collaboration. In the words of subsequent critics, ‘difference of opinion’, ‘stern criticism’ caused its dissolution soon after The Factory of Eccentric Actor’s first productions–a stage version of Gogol’s The Wedding (1922) and a Cocteau inspired piece in three acts, Foreign Trade on the Eiffel Tower (1923).

A great rarity, the manifesto itself does not seem to have been any more influential than the ‘depot’ which published it. Containing four articles–by Leonid Trauberg, Grigori Kozintsev, Sergei Yutkevich and professional gambler Georgii Kryzhitskii–its post-civil war Petrograd print issue was limited to 1000 copies. Of these ‘a majority’ were entrusted by Yutkevich to Pravda critic Khrisanf Khersonsky to spread around Moscow ‘using his contacts’. Sales went badly however and the whole stock was dumped in Khersonsky’s basement where, when the house caught fire, it was ‘completely destroyed.’

[…] Kozintsev and Trauberg later made the film New Babylon (1929), subtitled “Assault on the Heavens–episodes from the Franco Prussian War and the Paris Commune 1870-71”, based less on Karl Marx than on the history of the Paris Commune written by P.O. Lissagaray. [The screenings were accompanied with an ensemble playing a score by Dmitri Shostakovich]. … In later years Shostakovich was to claim that ‘my troubles on the political front began with New Babylon.'” (from the Introduction)

First published in Russian in St Petersburg, 1922
Translated and with an Introduction by Marek Pytel
Cover by Clifford Harper
Publisher Eccentric Press, London, 1992
22 pages
via Reality

Entry on Factory of Eccentricity in Saint Petersburg Encyclopedia (in English)

Publisher

PDF (lo-res), GIF images
Title page of Russian edition

Wolf Vostell, Dick Higgins (eds.): Fantastic Architecture (1971)

Published by Dick Higgins’ own seminal Something Else Press, Fantastic Architecture is an adaptation of the German book Pop Architektur (Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf, 1969) and features artists involved in Fluxus, pop and conceptual art movements addressing the field of architecture through collages, captions and mini-manifestos.

With works by Gerhard Rühm, Claes Oldenburg, Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters, Erich Buchholz, John Cage, Wolf Vostell, Richard Hamilton, Hans Hollein, Pol Bury, Stefan Wewerka, Dick Higgins, Addi Koepcke, Bici Hendricks, Geoffrey Hendricks, Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Beuys, Milan Knížák, Dennis Oppenheim, Franz Mon, Carolee Schneemann, Ben Vautier, Robert Filliou, Diter Rot, Ay-o, Francis Starr, Alison Knowles, Philip Corner, Douglas Huebler, Michael Heizer, Jan Dibbets, K.H. Hoedicke, Jan Jacob Herman, Buckminster Fuller, Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri.

Texts from German translated by Joachim Neugroschel
Publisher Something Else Press, New York, 1971
ISBN 0871100894, 9780871100894

Reprint (Primary Information, 2015, added 2015-8-18)

PDF (49 MB)