NEWSLETTERHalf Letter Press News July 2010 "Was there ever a vanguard without enlightened industrialists? Is it possible to shock the bourgeoisie in the twenty-first century? Does anyone have ears to hear what activists are saying? Or has the privatization of knowledge destroyed even the common space where words have their meaning?" - Brian Holmes, in Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society //////////////////// Hello! Have you told your friends about Half Letter Press? Now is the time to share* your love of Half Letter Press with your friends, family, students, and colleagues. 2010 has been a great year so far and we are excited to continue to bring you some of our favorite writing, art, and work from some of our favorite writers, artists, and workers! Big News: Half Letter Press is proud to announce that we are the sole North American distributor of Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society, the beautifully written and amazingly designed book by writer Brian Holmes. Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society was published by the Van Abbemuseum of the Netherlands, in collaboration with the central European curatorial collective WHW (based in Zagreb, Croatia) as the second publication in the Van Abbemuseum Public Research Series. This series is dedicated to putting new knowledge about the political possibilities of art and its institutions into the public domain. We had to raise the price a bit on our latest import of this book in order to cover shipping costs but we fully believe that you will feel the price is justified when you see how exceptional this book is. We have plenty of copies so tell your friends, students, activists and teachers (we offer volume discounts)! Read on for descriptions of this and so many more items that we're proud to carry at Half Letter Press! Need to contact us? Want to let us know what you think of a past purchase? Email publishers@halfletterpress.com. *like to share? you can see horribly entertaining videos, the latest HLP updates, and more at Half Letter Press' very own Tumblr blog. //////////////////// NEW & NOTABLE  Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society by Brian Holmes 414-page hardcover book $30 Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society contains a selection of texts and essays by the writer Brian Holmes. His writing in this book engage with the possibilities and problems of geopolitics and geopoetics. Holmes is a crucial contemporary writer and thinker whose insight into current social and political developments and how they relate to artistic processes opens up a new field of "geocritique". Holmes writes about people and projects extending across Central and South America, Europe, and Asia. He examines networks, art work, films, institutions, and protest movements for the signs of how future progressive strategies might be shaped. The texts here are connected in part with the long-term collaborative research project Continental Drift (explored on Holmes' website linked above). This book is absolutely beautiful (lovers of the hot pink and black combo will rejoice)! It is a real pleasure to hold in ones hands and read. Escape the Overcode was designed by Dejan Kršić.  Power/Exchange by Deborah Stratman 8.5" x 5.5" staple-bound, 50-page, photocopied booklet $9 We are big fans of Deborah Stratman's films and other projects. We wish that there were many more publications by her and/or about her work. Power/Exchange was made as part of a project that Stratman mounted in Wendover, Utah, at the Center for Land Use Interpretation's residency site. Stratman built a visitor-operated radio tower in Wendover. More about the project is viewable here. Power/Exchange is a double booklet - meaning, a different booklet starts from each side. One booklet is Power and the other is Exchange. Both contain maps, diagrams, and extensive photographs describing the communications and energy corridors that serve Wendover, Utah. All content is written, photographed, and edited by Deborah Stratman.  3 Acres On The Lake: DuSable Park Proposal Project Edited by Laurie Palmer 128 page perfect bound softcover book $12 Artist, educator, and collaborator (in the former collaborative group Haha) Laurie Palmer initiated this compelling project. An early stage of 3 Acres On The Lake was included in an exhibition at Temporary Services' old office space in downtown Chicago years ago. The book 3 Acres On The Lake: DuSable Park Proposal Project followed a greatly expanded exhibition at the now-defunct not-for-profit art space Gallery 312. From the book: "In 1988, the city of Chicago declared three acres of public land along Lake Michigan the future home of DuSable Park - a green refuge dedicated to Chicago's first settler, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable. The park has yet to emerge, however, and it is possible that these three lakefront acres could be sold to developers. In 2001, Chicago artist Laurie Palmer sent out an open request for proposals, and the resulting artwork became an innovative exhibit." A wide variety of artists, architects, and activists made proposals in an effort to shed light on the plight of DuSable Park to the public. 3 Acres On The Lake includes fascinating and thought-provoking renderings of the imagined DuSable Park, as well as commentary on the project as well as public space issues. Some of the contributors included in the book are Michael Piazza, Esther Parada, Harold Jefferies, Tom McDonald, N55, the Neighborhood Writing Alliance, the Stockyard Institute, Marianne Fairbanks, Lillian Martinez, Paul Wittenbraker, and Half Letter Press' own Brett Bloom and Salem Collo-Julin.  It Is Always Like This by IC-98 and Temporary Services 5" x 6.9" perfect bound, 36-page softcover book $8 Temporary Services are longtime fans of the work of Finnish collaborative group IC-98. This book documents a public project that our two groups collaborated on in Turku, Finland. Everything in Turku, as in most cities, is in its predictable and expected place. Bikes lean against walls, signs hang on stores, advertisements are pasted on poles, and every fixture has an obvious function. The public art is predictable too. It is made from durable materials; it looks like it has been around forever and will stay around forever. As a small but visible challenge to this tedious routine, we teamed up to build and circulate a series of twenty-five wooden sandwich board signs which carried phrases that advertise nothing and were not always positive. Many of the texts, written collaboratively by both of our groups, point to our frustration with the monotony of city spaces and the high degree of political control that is exerted over them. The signs were lightweight enough to easily pick up, and we gave them handles to further encourage viewers to move them as they wished. We did not want to make something as fixed or permanent as the situations we are critical of. Our placements of the signs in public were viewed as suggestions, and others quickly moved the signs to places of their own liking. We strove to create a situation that we could not control, reflecting our wish not to be controlled by others. Be sure to check out the other IC-98 titles that we carry to learn more about this interesting group! //////////////////// Patches & Buttons! Do you have an unadorned lapel? A messenger bag that needs to be a little more personal? We can help.  LAACM Patch by Brennan McGaffey embroidered patch $5 LAACM stands for Low Altitude Atmospheric and Civic Modifications. This project, organized by Brennan McGaffey in 2001, used rockets with payloads that created micro-alterations of a city's near atmospheric environment. There were five different payloads that, when released into the air, propagated the designed effects determined by the use of therapeutics, noise and EMF screening, weather adjustment, and unusual optic events. The launch schedule was distributed over a five month period. These patches were made in the spirit of the community of rocketeers nationwide who often make patches to document their events and groups. More information on this project and McGaffey's other work can be found here.  Monster Masher Nickel Bag (Button Pack 1) (Button Pack 2) by Destroy All Monsters (Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Jim Shaw) trading cards, buttons $5 each These are two different bag packs designed by the group Destroy All Monsters for a 2009 exhibition at Printed Matter in New York. Each pack contains three different buttons and two different Destroy All Monsters trading cards. //////////////////// Free Stuff! Don’t forget to check out our FREE BOX, Half Letter Press’ collection of PDFs available to download. We keep these PDFs of hard-to-find and/or out-of-print publications that we think are worthy of dissemination available for your free use. Titles include work by Ant Farm, Lloyd Kahn, and Artists Meeting for Cultural Change. If you like what you see on the Free Box page, please consider sending us a donation in the amount of your choosing. //////////////////// Temporary Services Announcements Give Us The Bags! We're making new banners from recycled plastic shopping bags as part of our ongoing Personal Plastic project. You can see the fruits of our previous labor here and here. If you have excess clean plastic grocery bags, or plastic sleeves that your newspaper is delivered in, we'll take 'em! Any color except clear will work. Feel free to mail your bags to Temporary Services, PO Box 121012, Chicago, IL, 60612, USA. Thanks!  Lookit what we can do with your bags! Mobile We're hard at work at a book that examines Mobile Structures. Check out our old resource page for some information about what these structures are and examples of some of them out in the field: http://www.temporaryservices.org/mobile_struct_rsrce.html We would like your input about projects, structures, mobile services, or mobile stations that we should write about, explore, or document. Is there a group or person that you think we should interview? As you will see from our resource page, we are interested in structures that come from a variety of fields and not just the visual arts. Email us at publishers@halfletterpress.com with your suggestions. Thanks! Art Work and more We announce current and future Art Work events and exhibitions at http://www.artandwork.us/category/events/. Check out http://www.artandwork.us/2009/12/distribution/ to find a contact near you that may still have free copies of the newspaper or may be organizing a discussion. We are pleased to have limited copies available through the Half Letter Press website. In June, Óscar Martin & Roberto Vidal curated an exhibition called De Zines at La Casa Encendida in Madrid. The exhibition features independent publications, including work from Temporary Services. Around 400 zines, periodicals, art books, and other publications are on display at La Casa Encendida until the end of summer. La Casa Encendida will be keeping all of the publications as part of their public archives once De Zines closes. More information is available in English and Spanish at http://www.lacasaencendida.es. Our collaborator Brett Bloom is proud to announce that he is moving to Europe in August 2010. Brett will be teaching at Det Jyske Kunstakademi (The Jutland Art Academy) in Arhus, Denmark in addition to his work in Temporary Services and co-running Half Letter Press. We wish him the best of success in his new endeavor and encourage our European friends to give Brett and his partner, the artist Bonnie Fortune, a warm welcome! //////////////////// HOW TO ORDER You can use your credit or debit card or Paypal account through our website. We will also accept alternative methods of payment including some trades. Some ideas are here: http://halfletterpress.com/store/index.php?main_page=page&id=1 To use an alternate method of payment, please contact us about it first and we can give you instructions on how to complete the transaction. Send an email to: pubishers@halfletterpress.com. ATTENTION STORES, DISTROS, SCHOOLS, LIBRARIES! We offer volume discounts to schools and libraries and wholesale pricing to stores and distributors on some titles. Please contact us for details. HOW TO HANG WITH US ON THE SOCIAL MEDIA THINGERS Become our Fan on FACEBOOK. Follow our tweets on TWITTER: http://twitter.com/halfletter We'll TUMBLR for ya over by here: http://halfletterpress.tumblr.com/ About this newsletter: Half Letter Press News is a monthly message to fans, friends, and customers of Half Letter Press. To join or leave the email list for this newsletter, or to change the address where you receive it, please email publishers@halfletterpress.com |
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