Other Books and OH – online insert no. 1, Wexner Center Store

On page 106 of No Philosopher King: An Everyday Guide to Art and Life under Trump (which you can order now from Amazon or Barnes & Noble), at the beginning of Chapter 5 (‘Media/Medea/Medya’), you can read:

[c]onsider the book you are now holding. If this is a blog to book situation, how did the blog facilitate the translation from books (and other objects) to an online format?

Now of course, you are reading these words on a screen, but still, they can act as portals to other books, many of which were found in one place in particular: the Wexner Center Store in Columbus, Ohio (where you can also buy this book, including a special numbered and signed version of this very post! I know you want to stop reading and immediately buy it here). So many of my daily posts about art and life under Trump would never have existed if it wasn’t for this place. Take for example my extended account of whiteness, coloring books and Classics that opens our Chapter 4 (‘Moving White Bodies’, pp. 76-81). I wouldn’t have supplemented two of Sarah E. Bond‘s articles about polychromy and ancient Greek and Roman sculpture with a discussion of Glenn Ligon’s work if I hadn’t picked up a copy of the artist’s book Coloring: New Work by Glenn Ligon at the WexStore. (See from the label on the back, my copy dates back to 2006, when I had just arrived in Columbus!).

To celebrate the pivotal role the WexStore has played in writing No Philosopher King, what follows is a list of books that I bought there, split between their current locations at my home and at my work. I thank Matt Reber, the one and only artshop_manager, and everyone at the Wexstore, for your hospitality during my (very!) regular visits. (And no Matt, I do not want to see a copy of that list you have of all the books I have bought over the years!).

Now I feel a great sense of privilege to finally have my book take up space on your shelves.

At home

On Value (pp.98, 113-4) a little black book that I returned to again and again.

Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen (pp. 269-9, 298-303) don’t miss her amazing work currently on show in Gallery B – Lo Precario/The Precarious.

Soundwalk Collective: Medea (p. 115) there is still a copy left in the Store – can you find it?

Monica Ross: Ethical Actions, A Critical Fine Art Practice (p. 41) will send you back online, justfornow.

Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige: The Rumors of the World – Rethinking Trust in the Age of the Internet (pp. 269-270) a title that speaks for itself – where was the drone shot down yesterday? On “your” side or “our” side? On whose side is the truth?

1971: A Year in the Life of Color by Darby English (p. 168) Joe Overstreet (1933-2019) was still alive when I picked up this book.

Before Pictures by Douglas Crimp (pp. 169-171) my copy is now signed and sits next to On the Museum’s Ruins (c.f. Ch. 3 “On Classicisms’ Ruins”)

William E. Jones: Imitation of Christ (p. 88) the genius loci of the Store, which should really be renamed the William E. Jones Archive of Filth.

Coloring: New Work by Glenn Ligon (pp. 76-81, 290) see above, below and everywhere else.

Intersubjectivity, Vol.1 (pp. 48, 119) boring title for an incredible book where I found Alain Badiou’s ‘New Classicism’, Hito Steyerl’s Caesarian Lorem Ipsum and rediscovered Paul Chan’s New New Testament.

Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World (pp. 316-7) transported me to an alternative reality where Trump wasn’t president and when Cuban communists took over Trump Tower.

At work

Lee Lozano: Private Book 1 (pp. 43, 323) with post-its reminding me to look forward to future dialogues on her Symposium.

Carcerel Capitalism by Jackie Wang (p. 132) a book that arrived at precisely the right time to change the future. Read it!

Seductive Exacting Realism by Irena Haiduk (p. 141) unleashed the power of the Sirens under oppressive regimes when I returned from encountering them at documenta 14.

Eric Baudelaire’s Anabases (p. 307) appears on only one page of the book, but stretched out to eight posts on the blog.

7 Days: My Art Life (p. 24) is our older sibling at AC Books and appeared as I finished the series of blogposts to offer our ‘we’ a way to materialize.

Gordon Bennett: Be Polite (pp. 293-9) completely transformed the way I think about Plato’s Cave, Narcissus and the limits of our world.

William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time (p. 107-9) I can’t remember if I bought it here or online, but still, it keeps on ticking.

Mark Bradford: Tomorrow is Another Day (pp. 127-133) is a prime example of how a book sent us on a journey, even if, as with this year, I was not able to reach Venice in person.

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933-1957 (pp. 155-7) annotated by quotes from Plato’s Republic by students from the Drawing Ideas class (taught with artist Suzanne Silver).

Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions (pp. 270-3) is a monster of a book and one of my most recent purchases. Here I fell through Deana Lawson’s Portal and have never looked back.

Footnote added June 8, 2024

When I wrote this post and made the insert for NPK for the WexStoreI used as my title as pun on Other Books and So, Ulises Carrión’s bookshop in Amsterdam from 1975-1979. Carrión’s text ‘The New Art of Making Books’, which I read in the documenta 14 Reader was a significant inspiration for the form of NPK. I recall seeing a selection of Carrión’s archive materials at the New New Gallery (a name the documenta 14 curators gave for an old post office venue in Kassel that seems to nod to Carrión’s), which included this:

Next to Carrión’s archived (archiefed!) works of postal art sat a selection by Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, who I mentioned in yesterday’s footnote to the post

Everything is Signed by Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt

following the link in the article ‘Companion, Peace’, from Experiments in Art Research: How Do We Live Questions Through Art?, edited by Sarah Travis, Azlan Guttenberg Smith, Catalina Hernández-Cabal, Jorge Lucero, a post-Minus Plato dialogue with Angela Baldus. Why, when Carrión and Wolf-Rehfeldt would sit side by side in glass display cases in 2017, was the latter missing from the canon-forming anthology Correspondence Art: Source Book for the Network of International Postal Art Activity? With Ali Smith’s puns on my mind (as I am re-reading her Companion Piece), I remember when I played the pedant and pointed out that Angela had missed the accent on Carrion’s name (since added back in, by her? the editors? the academic publishing machine?), I was thinking of carrion as in the dead rotting flesh of an animal (curliew or curfiew? You choose!). Carrión or Carrion? You choose! Other Books and So or Other Books and OH – you choose! Archief or Mischief? You choose. Everything is a Sign or Nothing is a Sign? You choose.

Footnote added June 9, 2024

You can stay here or go to:

Bouquet, with Cornelius Cardew

You choose!