Publications

Transmission: Host (2010)
HOST: THE FRIEND. BOUND EDITION 2010

Edited by Jamie Crewe and Sharon Kivland
Designed by Alan Rutherford
Artwords Press 2010
16 x 16 page books B&W reproductions. ISBN
12 x 21 cm English text. Softcover

Transmission: Host is a series of chapbooks derived from an annual lecture series organised by Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. Each week a host invites his or her guest and a critical engagement is assumed. There is an ethics of hospitality: a host has a standard of conduct, and historically, hospitality has been seen as a code, a duty, a virtue, and a law. In 2009–10 we took up the idea of the friend. In the course of a life, friendships change but this is not to say that friends are interchangeable. What kind of friendship is possible between artists, between works of art, between men and women? What is a real friend? A dream from which one wakes to say, after Montaigne, who says it after Aristotle: O my friends, there is no friend

Contributors:
Tim Etchells and Penny McCarthy, Roderick Buchanan and Andrew Sneddon, Amanda Beech and Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Kelly Large and Becky Shaw, Jane Harris and Gary Simmonds, Juan Cruz and Sharon Kivland, André Stitt and Hester Reeve, Kate Davis and Julie Westerman, Lindsey Seers and Chloë Brown,Taconis Stolk and TC McCormack, Neville Gabie and David Cotterrell, James Pyman and Conroy/Sanderson, Hollington & Kyprianou and Rose Butler

Transmission: Host (2009)
HOST: THE STRANGER. BOUND EDITION
Edited by Sharon Kivland
Artwords Press 2009
16 x 16 page books B&W reproductions. ISBN
12 x 21 cm English text. Softcover

Transmission: Host is a series of chapbooks derived from an annual lecture series organised by Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. Each week a host selects, presents, and looks after his or her guest. A critical engagement between host and guest is assumed. There is an ethics of hospitality, of making the stranger welcome. A host has a standard of conduct, and historically, hospitality has been seen as a code, a duty, a virtue, and a law. In this second series, each host invited a guest who was a stranger. Stranger’ implies one who is not known, but also incorporates the foreigner, or indeed, the odd/eccentric/uncanny. Following Jacques Derrida, the stranger is one who is irreconcilably ‘other’ to oneself, but with whom one may co-exist without hostility, to whom one must respond and to whom one is responsible. The stranger reminds one of the other at the heart of one’s being.

Contributors:
Breda Beban and David Cotterrell, Caroline Bergvall and Nick Thurston, Gordon Cheung and Conroy/Sanderson,
Tom Dale and Rose Butler, Wouter Davidts and Jaspar Joseph-Lester, William Hunt and TC McCormack,
Nancy Hwang and Michael Corris, Melanie Jackson and Becky Shaw, Marko Mäetamm and Sharon Kivland,
Jeremy Millar and Andrew Sneddon, Pil & Galia Kollectiv and Michelle Atherton, Olivia Plender and Hester Reeve,
Snæbjörnsdóttir & Wilson and Chloë Brown, John Timberlake and Julie Westerman,
Lee Triming and Gary Simmonds, Guido van der Werve and Carol Maund

Host: Bound Edition 2008
Editor: Sharon Kivland
Designed by Alan Rutherford
Artwords Press 2008
14 x 16 page books B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781906441210
12 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
The host selects and presents his or her guest. A critical engagement between host and guest is assumed; what exactly that relationship is made evident through discussion. There is an ethics of hospitality, of making the stranger welcome. A host has a standard of conduct, and historically, hospitality has been seen as a code, a duty, a virtue, and a law. There is a bond between host and guest, and here, the bond is formed by the engagement in the practice of art. Something is shared between host and guest, and this is shared with others, who are guests as well. The audience is also a host, with all the responsibilities that implies, receiving the stranger/guest with goodwill, liberality, and grace.

Contributors:

Paul Haywood & Steve Hawley, Sharon Kivland & Cesare Pietroiust, Nick Stewart & Matthew Noel-Tod, Jeanine Griffin & Jan Verwoert,
Andrew Sneddon & Alec Finlay, Rose Butler & HAG, Hester Reeve & Brian Catling, Julie Westerman & Christine Borland, Sharon Kivland, Jaspar Joseph-Lester & Michael Corrsi, Carl Von Weiler & Phyllida Barlow, Jaspar Joseph-Lester & Roman Vasseur
T.C. McCormack/Torsten LauschmaN, Lesley Sanderson/Paul MorrisoN, David Cotterrell/Phil Coy

Transmission: The Rules of Engagement
Series Editors: Sharon Kivland and Ben Hillwood-Harris
Available from Art Words

On Record: Advertising,Architecture and the Actions of Gina Pane
Alice Maude-Roxby & Francoise Masson
Artwords Press 2004
52 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954390822
15 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
In On record:advertising, architecture and the actions of Gina Pane, Maude-Roxby examines the involvement of the live art photographer as part of a performance event. Her previous interviews with photographers have brought to light the collaborative aspect of their work with the principal performance artist and the way in which individual photographic styles influence how any performance is ultimately seen. Maude-Roxby became fascinated with the photographs of Françoise Masson, documenting the actions of Gina Pane. This is the first published interview with Masson, describing the trajectory of her career as a photographer and her work with Pane in the context of her practice.

Disorientation and spectacle in retail archictecture
Nayan Kulkarni & Jasper Joseph-Lester
Artwords Press 2004
43 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954390830
15 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Disorientation and spectacle in retail architecture traces the development of new retail and entertainment sites through three examples: Bluewater shopping centre (Kent), Canary Wharf shopping centre, and Selfridges department store. The authors ask if disorientation and spectacle can continue to properly engage with the imagination when fantasy has become part of everyday experience. They speculate if the ever-changing demands of a collective imagination have forced a mutation in the way disorientation and spectacle are considered by designers and architects,and ask if the challenges faced by retail and entertainment corporations might offer new possibilities for the wider cultural sphere of the practices of both art and architecture.

Autopoeisis: novelty, meaning and value
Simon Biggs & James Leach
Artwords Press 2004
37 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954390849
15 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Autopoeisis: novelty, meaning and value addresses the value of novelty in contemporary culture, and is co-authored from the point of view of two disciplines: fine art and anthropology. Sections of the text re-authored jointly while others are authored individually. There has been a process of question and answer and further revision, including instances where one author corrects or annotates the text of the other. Texts weave around each other thematically, sometimes in sympathy, sometimes in contrast. Images are drawn from the research practice of both authors.

Book unbinding: the ontological stain
Vera Dieterich & Caroline Rooney
Artwords Press 2005
60 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954390857
13.5 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Sharing an interest in the operation of weaving with regard to textual materialism and material text, the authors follow the operation of folding, cutting and biding, the operations that constitute the making of a book. The work contains two main sections, one on folding and the other on cutting, with a concluding section on binding. The sections on folding and cutting dramatize two approaches to the entanglements of thought, reflection and aesthetic practice. In the first, precedence is given to a conceptual elaboration of the fold in parallel with the reservations of an art of the fold that resists formalisation. The philosophical concentration on a logic of form in relation to practice and questions of process is deconstructed. Whilst the first section traces a philosophical and scientific investment in pre-established design, the second ruins this through attending to the possibilities that arise through cutting, generic interplay and bricolage. The book unbinds as it works from the tightly woven to a loosening of its threads, where finally the book cannot contain the book.

Sun-Shine, Moonshine
Conroy / Sanderson & Gabriel Gbadamosi
Artwords Press 2005
54 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954390814
13.5 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
In Sun-Shine, Moonshine, Conroy / Sanderson and Gabriel Gbadamosi take up and challenge the rules of engagement, making up their own conventions as they go along. The text and images were developed over six months, in dialogues that took place both in the artists’ studio and elsewhere. Images were made in response to conversations and writings were constructed on images, which then returned to visual representation. The work is founded on Jonathan Swift’s satire Gulliver’s Travels, and, like Swift, the authors reflect on identity and difference, the foreign and the far-fetched. In an entwining of text and image, figures (as tropes and real people) playing Gulliver (as tourist, stranger, lover or other) float disappear, double and mirror each other.

Art on Terror: the incendiary device of philosophy
Hester Reeve, Simon Bayly, Bulent Diken and Tony Trehy
Artwords Press 2005
46 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954390865
13.5 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Art on Terror: The incendiary device of philosophy is the result of a discussion at Floating ip Gallery, Manchester, addressing the relationships between theory and practice, philosophy and art, after a reading of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s The Man Without Content. Agamben proposes that as art establishes itself as its own a priori, the artist becomes a ‘man without content’ and the pure inessence of art’s principle looms terrifyingly large. Terror here is akin to ‘divine terror’, a confrontation with the abyss. The danger is not that art is dead, but that it is the ‘living dead’, surviving its groundless foundations. Under the brilliant fire of such radical theory, how can art transform into new substances rather than be consumed by its own premises and what is said/read becomes a doing?

Misleading epiphenomena
Steve Dutton, Steve Swindells & Barbara Penner
Artwords Press 2005
38 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954390873
13.5 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Misleading epiphenomena takes Park Hill, a one-thousand-unit housing estate designed between 1957 and 1960 by Sheffield City Council, as the prompt for observations and conversations, addressing questions as varied as northern identity, architectural modernism, corporation, social housing, the sublime, ruin, the uncanny, aura, entropy, writing and the disciplinary limits of the authors. While Park Hill is the ‘site’ of encounter, reflection and inversion emerge as the processes and methods of exchange.

Analysis
Dave Beech, Mark Hutchinson & John Timberlake
Artwords Press 2006
43 pages. ISBN 0954390881
13.5 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Analysis is a collectively authored text examining contemporary collaborative art practice whilst grounding authorship in a social ontology. Despite the ‘death of the author’, the artist remains a possesive individual. Even collaborative practices – which Analysis differentiates from collective – confirm this, comprising individuals pooling their resourses only to serve their common private interests, effectively continuing to treat individuals as the basic social unit. Collectivity, Analysis argues, inverts this formula, treating the social as the basic unit from which the individual arises. It is the latter, therefore, that has the potential to transcend possesive individualism for contemporary art.

Drafts/Draughts
Julie Weterman & Joanne Lee
Artwords Press 2006
35 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 095439089X
13.5 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Drafts/Draughts documents a conversation exploring the migration of ideas between real and imagined, conceptual and material in the making and reception of contemporary art. Explaining the poetic and conceptual potential of key functions in computer-aided design packages as suggestive devices for thinking, it attends to a range of issues currently preoccupying those involved in academic and professional art contexts. These include strategies for teaching fine art, the relationship of academic research to art practice, the complexities of working with experst from other disciplines, and techniques for engaging audiences and participants.

The slender margin between the real and the unreal
Andrew Sneddon, Gavin Morrison & Kiyoshi Okutsu
Artwords Press 2007
46 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781906441012
13.5 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Chikamatsu Monazaemon (1653-1724) comments that ‘art is something that lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal’. This is the origin of a discussion which recalls the experience and associated imaginings of the European gardens of the seventeenth and eighteenth century and their distant cousins, the stroll gardens of the Tokogawa and Meji periods of Japan. The shared use of the borrowed landscape or ‘shakkei’ allows for further enquiry into the similarities and difference. The three authors, through discussion, correspondence, and visits to particular gardens, built a relationship through the sharing of references and experiences.The garden reveals itself as a bountiful source of inspiration, a place of escapism, a cultural and social signifier, and as a place for thinking.

Shadows
Daniel Gustav Cramer, Florian Kempf & Phillip Seidel
Artwords Press 2007
54 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781906441029
13.5 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
What did the chained men in Plato’s allegory of the cave see when they looked at the shadows on the wall? Did they see pictures of the world or rather, reflections of their own imagination? What is the difference? Shadows examines the relation between image and mind from the point of view of the scientific image-archive and from the image-repertoire of a number of artists. Each of these perspectives shows a bond between perception and production, while simultaneously revealing an element that appears to be inexplicable, an enigmatic gap that may provide a key to the way we view the world and its images, the cave and its shadows.

The Blue Guitar
Sarah Wood & Jonathan Tiplady
Artwords Press 2007
38 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781906441005
13.5 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
The blue guitar is you. It shapes you. As surprise, by surprising you. You collaborate and lay hands on this guitar, sometimes reject it but cannot escape the delicacy of its riffs and affirmations. Whether it comes from Picasso, Michael Tippett, Derek Bailey, Rilke or Jacques Derrida, the blue guitar is a thing affirmed, a yes played over a final no. This book is a book is a book of comical roots: super-roots, radishes, beetroots, gooseberries, bobby dazzlers, and seabows. It is a prison book, a book of legend and song, a picture book, a book of the same, of affirmations as colours. It is a book of the freshly rooted and radically purposeful in poetry, figured out here by Wallace Stevens and his poem ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar.’

Non-relational Aesthetics
Charlie Gere and Michael Corris
Artwords Press 2008
36 pages B&W reproductions ISBN 9781906441043
13.5 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
‘Relational Art’ and ‘relational aesthetics’ are commonplace terms in contemporary art discourse. Defined as a ‘set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space’ and as an aesthetic theory consisting in judging art works on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt’. In such an aesthetics, art is seemingly required to act as a replacement for the binding of the community through the rituals of religion.Non-relational Aesthetics proposes that all discourse involves alterity, difference and deferral. Non-relational Aesthetics offers a concept of art as an ethical encounter with the other, and the idea of art as ‘hospitality’ is anticipated as an alternative to that of ‘relational aesthetics.’

DUMB FIXITY: THE IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION
TC McCormack, Martin J Gent & Esther Leslie
Artwords Press 2010
48 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 978190644122
13.5 x 21 cm English text. Softcover

Dumb Fixity arose from a desire to measure an abstract set of phenomena, working on the premise that ‘things can speak’, and to find a means of hearing what they ‘are telling us’. To define the field, we needed a system of measurement, a guage to plot the characteristics and inner allegiances of ‘objects’. The first question was how we could negate the subjective interpretations of our human perspective – if we could transcend our human desire to name, label, and catagorise matter and meaning. The answer was that it is impossible: there is no avoiding our disadvantaged position of being human; we cannot escape comprehending and defining the world through our language. How then do we hear a shared language of the mountain, the fox or the lamp?

The Transmission series is a collaboration between Site Gallery, Sheffield Hallam University School of Cultural Studies and the Showroom Cinema, in which invited artists and occasionally speakers from other disciplines, present a discourse on their practices in relation to a given theme. Opening up the debate to a wider audience the subsequent discussions form part of a publication. Although the lectures are absent from the publication, the speakers retain their presence in other ways; through short introductory texts to their practice, works conceived for the pages, and as a dialogue with others.

The publication series was edited by Sharon Kivland; the programme was co-ordinated by Lesley Sanderson and Sharon Kivland, with Site Gallery and subsequently co-ordinated by Emma Cocker, Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Sharon Kivland.

Designed by Patrick Ward with Ben Weaver, the books are distributed by Cornerhouse Publications

Transmission: Speaking and Listening Volume 1
Contributors: Sophy Rickett, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Cornford & Cross, Vong Phaophanit, Laura Godfrey-Isaacs, Mary Evans, Andrew Grassie, Roxy Walsh, Dutton & Peacock, Breda Beban, Sharon Kivland, Jane Prophet, Alan Johnston, Noble & Silver,Kristin Mojsiewicz, Neal Beggs, Sonia Boyce, Simon Patterson. Adam Chodzko, Daniel Marques, Susan Johanknecht, Laura Horelli, Jane Rendell, Duncan McLaren. Two essays, by Jane Rendell and Duncan McLaren frame the discussions. The essays, like the discussions, explore what it means to speak, to listen, and to construct meaning or work in the interstice between the two.

Transmission: Speaking and Listening Volume 2
Although the lectures are absent from this book, the speakers retain their presence in other ways; through short introductory texts to their practice, works conceived for the pages, and as a dialogue with others. Four essays by Darian Leader, Sarah Wigglesworth, Michael Archer & Clementine Deliss frame the discussions. The essays, like the discussions, explore what it means to speak, to listen, and to construct meaning or work in the interstice between the two.

Transmission: Speaking and Listening Volume 3
Contributors: Jananne Al-Ani, David Bate, Kate Blacker, Kathrin Böhm, Pavel Büchler, Conroy / Sanderson, Mikey Cuddihy, Eggebert-and-Gould, Dan Hays, David Mabb, Monica Oechsler, Simon Periton, Paul Rooney, George Shaw, Sarah Staton, Jemima Stehli
essays by Jeanne Randolph and David Thorp.
This volume takes up two themes: Ornament and Utility, which addresses the question of aesthetic judgement and the use (or usefulness) of a work of art; and Responsibility, which considers the ideology of artistic production.

Transmission: Speaking and Listening Volume 4
Contributors: Gabriel Gbadamosi, Christopher Landoni, Goshka Macuga, Elizabeth Price, Nigel Cooke, Julian Walker, Nick Stewart, Steve Edwards, Simon Morris, Victor Burgin, Mark Titchner, ArtLab, C. Cullinan and J. Richards, Lucy Harrison, Brigid McLeer, Vera Dieterich and Caroline Rooney, Jane Rendell, Sally O’Reilly, and Pavel Büchler.
This volume takes up two themes: Provenance, which generally means the place of origin, and here takes on rather more complex meanings in relation to art and art objects, and the market or value systems that contain them; and Inscription, which addresses the reading of works of art, when they are produced as texts or incorporate text within them. Also included is a symposium on Inscription.

Transmission: Speaking and Listening Volume 5
Contributors: Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Becky Shaw, Ryan Gander, Neal Rock, Imogen Stidworthy, Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska, Nayan Kulkarni, Mike Marshall, Carey Young, Dave Beech, Robert Milin, Doug Fishbone, Richard Wentworth, Hewitt and Jordan, Malcolm Miles, Amanda Beech, and Chris Oakley.
Volume 5 addresses the habits and rituals shaping our everyday lives, and their relation with art. When taken out of the context of the everyday and made into works of art, those practices that we perceive as natural or real appear as constructed fabrications. In exploring the theme of daily encounters , artists and writers address the ways in which art may provoke and antagonize patterns of behaviour and systems of belief that often remain unquestioned. The contributors consider how works of art appropriate and re-deliver the naturalized and the everyday as a series of fictions and, in so doing, reflect the mechanisms and frameworks constructing our lives.