Leslie Dick
Voluptuous Panic / Digital Whirlpool / Digital Panic / Voluptuous Whirlpool

Voluptuous Panic/Digital Whirlpool engages the work of Roger Caillois (1913–1978), in particular his extraordinary essay on mimicry, first published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure in 1935, where Caillois argues that insects and other animals who practice camouflage are not primarily motivated by a wish to survive. Whether through imitating less vulnerable creatures (such as butterflies with wings patterned in shapes that resemble large eyes) or disappearing into their environment to the point of invisibility, Caillois sees such mimicry as a luxury, even a dangerous luxury, invoking the compulsive pleasures that accompany the dissolving of distinctions between self and other. Ignoring Darwin’s theory of evolution, this poetic proposition implicitly links mimicry to Freud’s idea of the death drive. In his later writing on play and games, Caillois outlined four fundamental structures of play that may prove useful in thinking about other human practices, such as art. In particular, his description of the delights of disorientation, such as children spinning in circles or the experience of thrill rides at the fair, recalls our contemporary experience within the digital realm, where the erasure of distinct boundaries and locations imparts an echo of our eventual demise.

Varese Group Pamphlet Series #1
Stapled softcover
16 pages, English
5.2 x 8.2in
ISBN 978-0-473-61109-5
USD 5 / NZD 10

Michael Ned Holte
Bog Time

Bog Time considers the electronic music of Pauline Oliveros circa 1966-67, coinciding with her time as the director of the Tape Music Center at Mills College in Oakland, California. An inventor of pioneering tape delay techniques, Oliveros began to explore the possibilities of the Buchla synthesizer in the electronic music studio at Mills, with the window open to the “bog” below. Soon after, she presented a 12-hour “Tape-athon” before leaving Mills and the Bay Area for a teaching position at UC San Diego. In this new context, she would develop her influential “Sonic Meditations” and the mandala-based scores that are the foundation of her eventual Deep Listening philosophy. This pamphlet focuses attention on an important moment of transition for Oliveros, both personally and musically.

Varese Group Pamphlet Series #2
Stapled softcover
32 pages, English
Drawings by Ruoyi Shi
5.2 x 8.2in
ISBN 978-0-473-61110-1
USD 5 / NZD 10

Warren Olds
ESC*

Bob Bemer invented Y2K. In his work as a computer scientist he also proposed the escape (ESC) character be included in the new ASCII standard when it was developed in 1960 to help standardize electronic communications. In modern keyboard-use the ESC key is generally mapped to some form of interrupt: no, quit, cancel, stop, or abort. In 1960 computer interfaces were still keyboard-only and Bemer formalized the idea that an escape key could signal a switch of modes, from language to instruction – that subsequent characters entered were to be interpreted and not displayed. It allowed for an expansion of the alphabet present on the keyboard, giving space for individual letters to also embody actions. ESC* reproduces a selection of asterisk forms cut from medium-density fibreboard (MDF) and printed (on paper) by participants at an April 11, 2021 Varese Group workshop in Oratia, Aotearoa New Zealand. These works illustrate a short text by Olds exploring the magic of the asterisk and some of its contemporary applications.

Varese Group Pamphlet Series #3
Stapled softcover
16 pages, English
5.2 x 8.2in
ISBN 978-0-473-61111-8
USD 5 / NZD 10

Sasha Portis
Changing States

In this lyric essay, Changing States, the narrator follows/tracks various movements: from New York to California, winter to spring, living to dead, awake to asleep, from Germany to New York. The narrative takes place after her father died suddenly of a heart attack, one year into the pandemic lockdowns. The narrative unfolds in a dream-like fashion, moving forwards and backwards in time, through dreams, mental wanderings and research that took her back to earlier upheavals, like her German Jewish grandmother’s escape from Nazi Europe in 1938. The narrator expands her understanding of the self, family and what it means to belong. As the psychoanalyst and novelist Lisa Gornick put it, “every character requires at least three generations to understand how they emerged.”

Varese Group Pamphlet Series #4
Stapled softcover
24 pages, English
5.2 x 8.2in
ISBN 978-0-473-70297-7
USD 5 / NZD 10

Marta Fontolan
The intelligence of intelligibility

As a review of Bedros Yeretzian’s 2022 exhibition “Enemies”, which took place at Commercial Street Gallery in Los Angeles, The Intelligence of Intelligibility is also an allegorical retelling of the story of Cassandra, the Trojan priestess who was cursed by Apollo, after spurning his advances, to always see the future but never be believed. The seven works that comprised Yeretzian’s show all feature Amy Winehouse, another tragic cultural figure, rendered through various layers of remove, with lurid, “sickly intimate” paparazzi images translated through a free ASCII image generator and an online sourced typeface simulating the International Code of Signals. Fontolan sifts through the data of Claude Shannon’s information theory, Fluxus artist Henri Chopin, and Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytical take on Cassandra in order to recover Yeretzian’s larger subject. “To live as Cassandra does not only mean being able to see the future, as it requires a consistent read on the present,” she observes. “We enact a mapping of the surroundings and an interpretation of visible patterns, in the hope of connecting those fabled dots, as if to scan the social and power infrastructures we inhabit.”

Varese Group Pamphlet Series #5
Stapled softcover
24 pages, English
5.2 x 8.2in
ISBN 978-0-473-70299-1
USD 5 / NZD 10

Lucy Skaer
Rural Works

Transposing a conversational, visually-rich slide lecture into book form, Rural Works spans time and space from a peat bank on the Isle of Lewis, to a gallery in London’s Financial District where a Roman temple dedicated to the cult of Mithra was unexpectedly unearthed, back to Lewis and the beginnings of a filmic bestiary made in collaboration with Rosalind Nashashibi. As Skaer has noted, “I think it’s an embodied investigation into place. Which is what all my shows also are! The pamphlet describes the first chapter of something I am now much further embedded into—a change from exhibition-making to a more permanent form of creative place making here on the island.” Spinning a nonlinear yarn, the author’s first-person account considers economy and change, questions of value, and whims becoming iconography layered in time, among many other imbricated points of interest. It is, more simply, an absorbing story of an artist’s growth and evolution.

Varese Group Pamphlet Series #6
Stapled softcover
24 pages, English
5.2 x 8.2in
ISBN 978-0-473-70298-4
USD 5 / NZD 10

Fiona Connor
+1 310 951 9459
First monograph

Texts by Sarah Lehrer Graiwer, Travis Diehl, Jan Bryant, and Kimberli Meyer

Dual softcover
164 pages
82 colour and 16 black+white images
English

First edition 1000 copies
Dimensions 8.9 x 11.2 x 0.6in
Designed by Fount–via, Warren Olds & Felix Henning-Tapley
Printed in Aosta, Italy
ISBN 978-0-473-49434-6

RRP USD 45 / NZD 75 / EUR 38

Four years in the making, Fiona Connor, +1 310 951 9459 documents exhibitions from a fifteen-year period of Connor’s practice. During this time, Fiona Connor, +1 310 951 9459 remained open, its conversations shifting, as the working party explored how to represent Connor’s ongoing project. The resulting book (which has been in a state of pending release since March last year, COVID stutter-stepping, missing its 1301PE launch) reflects the densely faceted, collaborative nature of the practice, itself documentation, resemblance, archive, phenomenal mimicry.

Fiona Connor, +1 310 951 9459 was developed by the artist in collaboration with designers Warren Olds and Felix Henning-Tapley (Fount–via), writers Jan Bryant, Travis Diehl, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Kimberli Meyer, and photographer Alex North. Hinging on Connor’s archive, this publication project is furnished with paint chips, screen shots, floor plans, press releases, recorded conversations, and the contributors’ reflections on their close involvement with the work.

The book’s process started with ‘Project Documents,’ a 2017 artist’s talk at University of Nevada, Las Vegas that was developed graphically with Fount–via and included the Project Documents section of Fiona Connor, +1 310 951 9459. The talk aimed to destabilize photographic documentation as the authoritative voice of exhibitions and went on to trace wide circles around projects as an alternative way of finding their center.

Texts were commissioned by Hopkinson Mossman (Connor’s New Zealand gallery at the time) from crucial conversation partners Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Travis Diehl and Kimberli Meyer from Los Angeles, and Jan Bryant from Melbourne. On various trips to Auckland in 2017 and 2018, Olds and Connor worked together on layouts and approached photographer Alex North about having his portrait on the cover, and the artist’s father, Bruce Connor, about writing the contributors’ biographies.

In 2019 Connor visited the art bookmakers Musumeci in Aosta, Northern Italy and took up residency there for a week during the final stages of the design process. At this point June 20th, the distribution project as Fount-via and Connor were working on, was gently launched. The book was printed in early 2020 – but soon after, Northern Italy became an early epicenter for the Coronavirus pandemic, causing delays in the book’s printing and delivery.