Urgent Publishing After The Artist's Book: Making Public in Movements Towards Liberation by Paul Soulellis

Urgent Publishing After The Artist's Book: Making Public in Movements Towards Liberation
by Paul Soulellis
Designed by Be Oakley
2nd Edition of 400
108 pages
Risograph Printed (Flat Gold and Medium Blue)
March 2024

ORDER HERE

Urgent Publishing After the Artist’s Book: Making Public in Movements Towards Liberation was a performative talk given by artist and designer Paul Soulellis at the 2021 Contemporary Artist’s Book Conference, hosted by the Center for Book Arts during the 2021 Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair.


Attending this live-streamed talk, I was struck by its apparent intersection with my work with GenderFail. While Paul was giving this lecture live, I emailed him as I listened and responded about my hopes to publish Urgent Publishing After the Artist’s Book: Making Public in Movements Towards Liberation as a printed book. Engaging with this information personally and disseminating it as a physical object felt substantial in my position as a publisher.


In the introduction to this talk, Paul states:


“Publishing has always been political, but has it ever felt as urgent as it does now, in the past year's global distress and intersecting crises? There’s a desperate need for new language to express publishing’s renewed urgency and importance. We need new forms of discourse to understand what it means to create and share content outside and against capitalism at ever-rising crisis levels. Existing independent and artistic publishing models provide inadequate support for those engaged in the most radical and experimental modes of urgent sharing and making. We must depart from the familiar language of graphic design, the history of artists’ books and book art, and the debilitating economics of art book fairs, the art world, and the academy. Instead, let’s locate urgent publishing about collapse, failure, mutual aid, and collective care in another place. This newly located understanding of urgent publishing resists definition; it may not look or feel like publishing. And while urgency is certainly central to this proposal, we will question whether the term publishing itself is even relevant. How do we characterize our current condition of collective making and sharing? What is urgent publishing today? Drawing upon decades of radical, anti-capitalist thinking and collective action, including specific moments of interference within the movements towards Black, feminist, and queer liberation, let’s turn away from old, legacy publishing models towards something new: ethics, craft, and politics of urgent making.”

© 2023