★Primary Information
The Mundus
The Mundus is Norman Pritchard’s magnum opus, a mysterious work that is both visual and poetic, literary and mystical. The work was composed between 1965 until at least July 1971, a six-year period during which the author refined and reworked its pages, seeking out new literary forms alongside personal transcendence. As Pritchard mentions in a letter to Ishmael Reed in 1968, “Literature in and of itself doesn’t seem to have a broad enough scope for me anymore.” Despite its ambitions and grand sc…
Primetime Contemporary Art: Art by the GALA Committee as Seen on Melrose Place (Book)
Primetime Contemporary Art is a publication documenting a radical, two-year intervention by the GALA Committee on the primetime television show Melrose Place. Originally published in a limited run in 1998, this extremely rare artist book is reproduced here for the first time as a facsimile edition.
Mel Chin initiated the loose collective of artists known as the GALA Committee in 1995 in response to an invitation to participate in an upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Ange…
The Art Of Noise (Book)
** 2024 Stock ** The Art of Noise presents the 1913 Futurist manifesto “L’arte dei Rumori” as translated by Robert Filliou. Luigi Russolo calls for an infinite expansion of musical vocabulary and sensibility in coordination with that of industrial machinery—“We must enlarge and enrich more and more the domain of musical sounds”—envisioning a machine-based music that would dispense entirely with inherited forms. This publciation made the text widely available in English for the first time. Also i…
Popular Entertainments (Book)
** 2024 Stock ** This collection of musical works is as visually and poetically striking as any of the Great Bears, with the individual pieces flowing together in a sprawling collage. Philip Corner’s Popular Entertainments incorporate pop music as a raw material and a motor, an ever- changing sound source with an aura of heightened energy: pulsating rhythms, dancing, and the frenzy of teenage fans. The spectacular, molten immediacy of the work—which prioritizes intense experiences of listening v…
Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued Part Three (Book)
** 2024 Stock ** The third in John Cage’s series of “Diary” essays (the other parts were published in different contexts), defined broadly as “collections of thoughts that develop out of working and being alive.” The text is formally and discursively roving: its margins, typeface, and color undergo continuous alteration by chance methods as Cage contemplates computers, Erik Satie; life on the road with Merce Cunningham; death; encounters with Mies van der Rohe, Duchamp, and Marshall McLuhan; boo…
Untitled Essay and Other Works (Book)
** 2024 Stock ** This pamphlet presents scenarios for three narratively elaborate Happenings—“Mushroom” (1962), “Paper” (1964), and “Interruption” (1967)—and a key early statement, which originally accompanied the first published Happening in 1958. The essay forcefully propounds Allan Kaprow’s ideas on the practice of art as a radical form of life that perpetually reinvents itself.
Originally published by Something Else Press between 1965 and 1967, the Great Bear Pamphlet series was envisioned b…
A Filliou Sampler (Book)
** 2024 Stock ** The centerpiece of this collection of short works by Robert Filliou is “Yes (An Action Poem),” a performance work involving an extended anatomical analysis of the “adult male poet” (originally performed in collaboration with Alison Knowles and Philip Corner). Also included are several short “plays,” a poem for Emmett Williams and Daniel Spoerri, and a performance work entitled “Five Ways to Prepare for a Space Trip,” all dated 1958-1964.
Originally published by Something Else Pr…
A Look Into The Blue Tide: Part 2 (Book)
** 2024 Stock ** The Blue Tide is a vast, multi-part work that developed out of a diary Diter Roth kept while teaching in the United States between 1964 and 1966 (which Edition Hansjörg Mayer had published in a full-color edition earlier in 1967). This publication consists of excerpts from the continuation of that work—all translated by Roth himself “from color + german into blackandwhite + english”—as well as sketches, diagrams, poetry, and assorted writing.
Originally published by Something El…
Sketchbook, September 1977 (Book)
Sketchbook, September 1977 is an early journal by Greer Lankton written during her time as an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It offers key insights into the artist’s mind before her move to New York in 1978, where she would go on to have a prolific career making lifelike dolls, theatrical sets, photographs, drawings, and paintings.
Containing drawings, behavioral diagrams, and occasionally confessional writing, the journal is a record of imagining the body and mind re…
The Fluxus Newspaper
The Fluxus Newspaper collects all eleven newspapers published by the Fluxus art collective between January 1964 and March 1979. The newspapers were edited by an ever-changing team of artists known as the Fluxus Editorial Council for Fluxus and every issue, except the last two, was designed by Fluxus founder George Maciunas. Although published irregularly, the newspapers were used to promote Fluxus events and publications, especially the group’s famous multiples and Fluxkits, with advertising mat…
Newspaper
416 Pages, softcover - Published by Steve Lawrence and edited with Peter Hujar and Andrew Ullrick, Newspaper was published in New York City between 1968 and 1971. Newspaper was a wordless, picture-only periodical that ran for fourteen issues and featured the disparate practices of over forty artists. With an editorial focus on placing appropriated material alongside new works, the periodical sought to codify a visual language of high and low culture that represented contemporary society in the …
Writing by Artist
Filled with artworks, photos, and memorabilia, this epistolary portrait depicts Wojnarowicz's development as a writer and artist via his heartfelt letters to his Parisian lover.
Dear Jean Pierre (Book)
Filled with artworks, photos, and memorabilia, this epistolary portrait depicts Wojnarowicz's development as a writer and artist via his heartfelt letters to his Parisian lover.
COOP a-script (Book)
COOP a-script is an artist book based on two performance scripts by Fia Backström, extending her exploration of visual and spoken language, global community, bureaucratic jargon, and mood and communication disorders. The first section of the book, “Aphasia as a visual way of speaking, on A-production and other language syndromes,” consists of a text written in four parts. When this work was performed at The Poetry Project in New York City, the artist organized the script across the venue’s floor…
Writings
** 2023 Repress ** Writings is the first collection to widely survey the singular Tony Conrad polymath’s prolific activity as a writer. Edited by artists Constance DeJong and Andrew Lampert, the book spans the years 1961 – 2012 and includes fifty-seven pieces: essays originally published in small press magazines, exhibition catalogs, anthologies, and album liner notes, along with other previously unpublished texts. Conrad writes about his own work, with substantial contributions on The Flicker, …
A Something Else Reader (Book)
368 pages. A Something Else Reader is a previously-unpublished anthology edited by Dick Higgins in 1972 to celebrate Something Else Press, the publishing house he founded in 1963 to showcase Fluxus and other experimental artistic and literary forms. The publication features selections from Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days, John Cage’s Notations, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, Breakthrough Fictioneers, Jackson Mac Low’s Stanzas for Iris Lezak, Gertrude Stein’s Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein, B…
Black Phoenix: Third World Perspective on Contemporary Art and Culture (Book)
*In process of stocking* Primary Information is pleased to announce the release of Black Phoenix: Third World Perspective on Contemporary Art and Culture. Edited and published by Rasheed Araeen and Mahmood Jamal between 1978 and 1979 in the United Kingdom, Black Phoenix remains a key and radical document of transnational solidarity and cultural production in the visual arts, literature, activism, and beyond. This publication collects all three issues of the journal into a single volume.More than…
Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network (Book)
A revelatory compendium of writings, art and ephemera on the ’90s New York collective that fostered a social space for diasporic Asian artists
Writings 1973–1983 on Works 1969–1979 (Book)
An essential and long out-of-print document of formative works by institutional critique progenitor Michael Asher
Note(s): Work(ing) Process(es) Re: Concerns (That Take On / Deal With)
Originally created in 1977 as a single handmade copy, Dara Birnbaum’s Note(s): Work(ing) Process(es) Re: Concerns (That Take On / Deal With) gathers writings, working drawings, photographic documentation, and ephemera from the artist’s earliest video and installation works. The publication was originally produced by Birnbaum and exhibited in Notebooks, Workbooks, Scripts, and Scores at Franklin Furnace in 1977. The book’s vinyl cover and section dividers, hand-folded pages, and color images have…