Edited with Kathrin Benthele, Anna Gritz, and Ghislaine Leung*, the 22nd issue, “Zeros and Ones” turned out to be a nice issue…
F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises.
The 22nd issue, “Zeros and Ones” turned out to be a nice issue. Edited with Kathrin Benthele, Anna Gritz, and Ghislaine Leung by retroactively compiling their sourced footnotes to the exhibition handout of the 2021 exhibition Zerosand Ones, which they curated at KW, Berlin. Dedicated to the book of the same name (Sadie Plant’s Zeros + ones: digital women + the new techno culture, 1997), the issue embodies a (cybernetic*) reading & writing machine, pointing out the co-co-authorship of the work of the artists shown at KW.
* “I hope to bequeath to the generations a Calculus of the Nervous System” Ada Lovelace, November 1844
120 x 192mm, 180 pages, 4 colour plates, two bookmarks, an otherwise unavailable postcard donated by the Stanley Brouwn estate, and…SIXTEEN possible covers, reproducing a work by Lutz Bacher.
The 21st issue, “Take, Eat” is edited by Will Holder, with Andrea di Serego Alighieri.
F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises.
The 21st issue, “Take, Eat” is edited by Will Holder, with Andrea di Serego Alighieri. Andrea’s image-heavy talk on word spacing and vocalisation runs all the way through, on the right-hand pages: the opposite pages contain responses from Will. The issue almost stifles the triangulated space of image, context and commentary; and speaks of the moment between words, things, people, images, perception, past, present and future, between Andrea’s pages and Will’s, as where meaning might breathe.
120 x 192mm, 184pp b/w, with postcard and two bookmarks in three colours.
Finally, although the format is structured, there’s little concern for conserving a consistency of style in the sentences – some are long, some are short, some are serious, some are silly.
“As a student nurse learning medical terminology, I became fascinated with understanding the roots of words. When I had a young family, words were a principal source of entertainment: it was not unusual for one of the children to slip from their chair at the dinner table and fetch a dictionary in order to settle a dispute or satisfy someone’s curiosity. Then I became a teacher and brought this love of words into the classroom. My habit of word collecting became the children’s habit – my pupils became ‘word-lovers’ and ‘list-makers.’
I casually collected homophones for years. When introducing homophones into the classroom, the kids found definitions dull; the typical reaction was, ‘Yes, but give me a sentence using the word!’ and this idea emerged: a book of sentences demonstrating the meanings of homophone pairs or sets.”
“The sentences reflected my own life experiences: my girlhood on a Saskatchewan farm during the Depression; my years as a nurse, parent, and teacher; my college major in geography; and my interest in politics. To supplement these personal topics, there were many calls to family and friends – to my art-historian daughter, my pilot son and nurse daughter-in-law, to my veterinarian son and his business-professor wife, my retired-teacher friend, and my best friend’s fisherman husband. They were bombarded with questions like: How is this word used as a noun? This is a flying word, can you help me out here? Can you give me a sentence that shows how a surgeon would use this? […]”
“There are a few other things that I would like to share.
First of all, I would like to clarify the book’s terminology. In my earliest years of teaching, the term ‘homonym’ was applied more broadly than today’s precise usage: the words we once studied as ‘homonyms’ are usually ‘homophones’ — words that sound the same but have different meanings and, typically, different spellings and derivations. The term ‘homonym,’ on the other hand, is now consistently limited to the various meanings of a single spelling. In this book I have only included homonyms when they are contained within a larger homophone set.
Secondly, this book does not contain an exhaustive list. […]
Finally, although the format is structured, there’s little concern for conserving a consistency of style in the sentences – some are long, some are short, some are serious, some are silly.”
(from Afterword: “I have always loved words” by the author)
Author: Sue Nixon Editor and typesetting: Riet Wijnen Copy editor: Janine Armin Design: [Linda, at] Mevis & van Deursen
133 x 213mm, 424pp b/w, with full-colour cover with clear acetate dust-jacket printed in full-colour.
This publication was [intitated by Riet Wijnen, and] realized as part of the Ruisdael- Stipendium [awarded to her in] 2018 and made possible with the financial support of kunstwegen; State of Lower Saxony; Landkreis Grafschaft Bentheim; City of Nordhorn; and Mondriaan Fonds.
This 20th issue is edited by Will Holder; paying attention to difference; and transformations between accident⎱design 249
acorn⎱oak 293–94, 297–98
adult⎱child 95, 139, 207, 308
alphabetic⎱postliterary 3
alphabetic⎱postalphabetic 3, 5
alphabetic⎱analphabetic 5…
F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. The 20th issue, “Correctional Facility” is edited by Will Holder paying attention to difference; and transformations between
…the issue’s “theme” is better off unaccounted for, and up in the air, like a flock of birds (creatures who feature heavily), circling around performance, listening bodies, given time, and loving relations.
F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. The 19th issue, “very good*” is edited with Paul Abbott. Like music, the issue’s “theme” is better off unaccounted for, and up in the air, like a flock of birds (creatures who feature heavily), circling around performance, listening bodies, given time, and loving relations.
This issue serves as a reader for “We can still see the horizon (and it’s curved)” a Summer residency at Hospitalfield, Scotland; led by Will Holder and Paul Abbott.
120 x 192mm, 208pp b/w, with two bookmarks in three colours.
F.R.DAVID is co-published with KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
The work with Paul Abbott on this issue is an outcome of Prospectus: A Year With Will Holder, generously hosted by KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2017.
Will Holder’s work is supported by a Paul Hamlyn Foundation award.
…had its beginnings in prosody, the measure of language, geometry, and a notion of imagist transcription, even. A two-dimensional exercise, it turns out, on paper.…
F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. The 18th issue, “Recto Verso” is edited by Will Holder, and had its beginnings in prosody, the measure of language, geometry, and a notion of imagist transcription, even. A two-dimensional exercise, it turns out, on paper. Words were tuned out, in favour of the volume of values our bodies exchanged: “the historical and bodily movement of language amongst subjects.” Attentions turned—taking (the measure of) classes in body language: the non-verbal: the insinuated: the reverse-side of image: the backside, and, oddly: Oh no: we don’t speak about that—to the next page…
120 x 192mm, 208pp b/w, with postcard, fold-out and two bookmarks in three colours.
1.
Lyn Hejinian’s unpublished prose poem which (in her better-known essay The Rejection of Closure) the author reads closely as model for various, open, equitable relations between language and things
1. Lyn Hejinian’s unpublished prose poem which (in her better-known essay The Rejection of Closure) the author reads closely as model for various, open, equitable relations between language and things (such as human bodies, as emphasised in
2. a commentary exploring the destituent potential of Hejinian’s faltering poetic corpus, in “A Draft of Resistance” by Andrea di Serego Alighieri), in
3. an envelope.
225 x 305mm, 12pp b/w and colour laserprinting in letterpressed envelope.
Edition of 250 25 copies signed by Lyn Hejinian (available on request)
The issue departs from Wojnarowicz’s grief at the loss of loved ones during the 1980s AIDS crisis, and anger at the US government for their willful neglect of this loss.
F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. “Black Sun” the 17th issue, edited by Will Holder in conversation with Krist Gruijthuijsen, to accompany the exhibitions David Wojnarowicz Photography & Film 1978–1992, Reza Abdoh, and TIES, TALES AND TRACES. Dedicated to Frank Wagner, Independent Curator (1958–2016), at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
The issue departs from Wojnarowicz’s grief at the loss of loved ones during the 1980s AIDS crisis, and anger at the US government for their willful neglect of this loss. The issue assembles a chorus of various gendered and sexual positions, all seeking support, love and intimacy in linguistic, architectural and bodily structures, all the while under threat of collapse. These voices are threaded together with excerpts from Julia Kristeva’s white, feminist, psychoanalytical, semiotic Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia (1992).
120 x 192mm, 224pp b/w, with postcard by Lyle Ashton Harris, and two bookmarks in three colours.
Typographers normally design using other people’s words and eventually accept a situation in which they are limited to making only slight modifications in a given text even when a syntactic rephrasing could make the message more understandable. […]
F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. “what I mean is—” the 16th issue, edited by Will Holder.
F.R.DAVID is concerned with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practice. […] Typographers normally design using other people’s words and eventually accept a situation in which they are limited to making only slight modifications in a given text even when a syntactic rephrasing could make the message more understandable. […] The intention is not to provide a course in typographic history or style, but to provide experiences based on language as communication of a perceptual/cognitive idea or event, language as presented visually—enhancing perceptual meaning, and language as invention or systematic structure. […] I’m the robotic kid looking through digital eyes past the windshield into the pre-invented world […] Material, that is to say unformed or unshaped matter, is the field where authority blocks independent experimentation less than in many other fields […] 15—Craft’s gestural intelligence is apt to discover material potential only by internalising and inhabiting the specificities of a tradition. This tradition knows JOY IS FORMAL INTELLIGENCE. CRAFT’S TRADITION IS JOY […] The resources of expressive art have never been cheaper, the productivity of the individual expressive artist has never been higher, the accomplishment of a density of surface effects in contemporary artworks has never been easier to bring about. […] it is not so much what we want as what we want to want, or what keeps us wanting […] plastic, wondrous plastic! ideal for the girl on the go, easy to care for, hard to care about, plastic. whether it’s a fast escape from an unhappy household, or running for dear life down some dark alley, plastic works for you. […]
120 x 192mm, 224pp b/w, with postcard and bookmark in 3 colours.
“I must explain to you first that the novel is not intended as a work of art—at least, not as it stands. It is a means to an end. I want to clear up an old tangle.…”
“I must explain to you first that the novel is not intended as a work of art—at least, not as it stands. It is a means to an end. I want to clear up an old tangle. Well, I do not put my personal self into my poems. But my personal self [Hilda Doolittle] has got between me and my real self, my real artist personality [H.D.]. And in order to clear the ground, I have tried to write things down––in order to think straight, I have endeavored to write straight. But I hope to come clear and then turn to my real work again. You must remember that writing poetry requires a clarity, a clairvoyance almost. I have been too weak to dare to be clairvoyant. I have tried instead to be merely sensible. I mean in the common sense of that word. In the long run, the clairvoyance is the only sanity for me. But in the novel I am working through a wood, a tangle of bushes and bracken out to a clearing, where I may see clear again.”
H.D., letter to John Cournos, July 9th 1918 (?), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL MSSA24, Box 17, Folder 582 (emphases added). The penultimate word was crossed out by H.D. herself.
This edition of H.D.’s Palimpsest was produced for THE GREEN MAN (Lucy Skaer with Fiona Connor, H.D., Will Holder, Nashashibi/Skaer, Hanneline Visnes); with a sole distribution point – in direct relation to the work of Lucy Skaer – of 500 free* copies, at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, UK, from 26 July to 6 October 2018.
Typeset by Will Holder, using Apple’s Enhanced Dictation, reading Palimpsest, Houghton Miflin, 1926. (Letterpress by Henri Darantiere, Paris, for Contact Editions)
Copy-edited by Rosa Aiello reading Palimpsest, Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. (Linotype)
This third edition reproduces the punctuation of the 1926 French typesetting of English text. Certain spellings are maintained with due consideration for an American writer living in 1920s London. Additional suggestions to spelling are inserted between square brackets.
The cover uses a stencil with parts taken from the geometric construction of Roman capitalis quadrata, inherited from the classical Greek alphabet.
This production would not have been realised without Rosa Aiello, Stuart Fallon, Tessa Giblin, Bitsy Knox, Emmie McLuskey, Tiina Poldaru, Lucy Skaer and Christopher Wait.
Two transcripts of films by Moyra Davey and Hervé Guibert. ‘Both “Wedding Loop” [2017] and “Modesty, and Immodesty” [1991] frame the daily practice of being and becoming undone by others.
Two transcripts of films by Moyra Davey and Hervé Guibert.
Both Wedding Loop [2017] and Modesty, and Immodesty [1991] frame the daily practice of being and becoming undone by others. Moyra watches and waits and corals people in the light; removes liquor bottles; takes pills; holds a man’s body on the subway; holds a child; mourns Hannah; takes portraits of loved ones. Guibert visits his doctors and nurses; gets a massage; talks to his beloved great-aunts, Suzanne and Louise; waits for T. and C. to return from the market; is brought into the ocean by a lover.
A document of their lives, death underscores these works. Guibert faces his own demise. Davey grieves Hannah, and bears witness to the suffering of others. Offering a way of saying goodbye, the works are an act of self-salvation, an ode to the risks taken to express uncertainty.
Doubt is what allows a gesture to have heart.
The closing words of an accompanying text by curator Janique Préjet Vigier, on the occasion of her exhibition, L’IMPUDEUR: Hervé Guibert, Moyra Davey, at CCS Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, NY. April 8 to May 27, 2018.
Edited and illustrated by Chris Evans, and co-published with Para Site, Hong Kong.
“The ritual of the job interview can be considered as a courtship that’s conditioned by protocols that ask for a quite particular display: with social relations as material, a dance of conformity, the attempted imagining and echoing of expectations.”
Edited and illustrated by Chris Evans, and co-published with Para Site, Hong Kong.
“The ritual of the job interview can be considered as a courtship that’s conditioned by protocols that ask for a quite particular display: with social relations as material, a dance of conformity, the attempted imagining and echoing of expectations.”
This anthology of commissioned writing includes contributions by Nadim Abbas, Howie Chen, Heman Chong, Matthew Dickman, Jason Dodge, Angie Keefer, Holly Pester, Natasha Soobramanien, Marina Vishmidt, and Jonas Žakaitis.
Designed by Will Holder. 136 x 278mm, with over-sized spine; 60pp b/w offset, and three airbrush drawings by Chris Evans, reproduced in riso on fold-outs.
“I realized very slowly over a period of time that the activity of framing a performance and the intentions that accumulate around that activity produce a certain anxious kind of mode, and I became bothered by the flurry of activity and how it tends to mask so many things.”
F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. “Flurry” is the 15th issue (a best-of, of sorts) edited by Will Holder.
“I realized very slowly over a period of time that the activity of framing a performance and the intentions that accumulate around that activity produce a certain anxious kind of mode, and I became bothered by the flurry of activity and how it tends to mask so many things.”Pauline Oliveros in conversation with Robert Ashley (1976)
“Flurry” came about after being asked to propose ten books for acquisition by the Rietveld Academy library (Amsterdam) and give a talk about that selection. Preferring to reproduce original material over commentary (or commentary as materiality), and allowing others to speak, Will prepared a reading back and forth between the ten books. It soon became clear that this reading could provide a backbone for an issue of F.R.DAVID. Associated material came up in the process of transcription; including a lengthy afterword by Danny Hayward, commenting on Verity Spott.
120 x 192mm, 208pp b/w, with postcard and bookmark in 3 colours.
EU 10 (excluding postage)
Buy now (through rile*)
F.R.DAVID is co-published with KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Will Holder’s work is supported by a Paul Hamlyn Foundation award.a
This 14th issue is concerned with bodies, ecology, empathy, gazing at the world, and reading (environments) from non-anthropocentric POVs—nonetheless described and written by humans. Animals, birds, and trees feature heavily.
F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. “Recognition” is the 14th issue, edited with Scott Rogers.
“Recognition” is concerned with bodies, ecology, empathy, gazing at the world, and reading (environments) from non-anthropocentric POVs—nonetheless described and written by humans. Animals, birds, and trees feature heavily.
Copernicus told us that the earth was not the center. Darwin told us that man is not the center. If we listened to the anthropologists we might hear them telling us, with appropriate indirectness, that the White West is not the center. The center of the world is a bluff on the Klamath River, a rock in Mecca, a hole in the ground in Greece, nowhere, its circumference everywhere. Perhaps the utopist should heed this unsettling news at last. Perhaps the utopist would do well to lose the plan, throw away the map, get off the motorcycle, put on a very strange-looking hat, bark sharply three times, and trot off looking thin, yellow, and dingy across the desert and up into the digger pines.
Ursula K. Le Guin, A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be (1982)
120 x 192mm, 240pp b/w, with postcard and bookmark in 3 colours.
SOLD OUT
Co-published with KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. The time spent with Scott Rogers – and the journal’s launch at KW – are part of Prospectus: A Year with Will Holder.
Will Holder’s work is supported by a Paul Hamlyn Foundation award.
Thanks to the generosity of de Appel, Amsterdam, we can offer you these back issues of F.R.DAVID
F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, edited by Will Holder, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. From 2007–14 it was published by de Appel, Amsterdam. The journal is now co-published with KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
“Iditorial”
Seven editorials to imaginary issues of F.R.DAVID, penned by Dieter Roelstraete (author of editorials to the first series of the journal); with an afterword by F.R.DAVID.
“With Love,” takes correspondence and calligraphy—or letter-writing—as model for information theory, and adaptive, cybernetic relations.
“Spin Cycle”
Concerned with captioning, commentary and description. Edited with Mike Sperlinger.
“All distinctions are mind, by mind, of mind” has a split personality, allowing comparative readings between left/ right, good/ bad, manic/ depressive.
“in memoriam…Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau” adds a new score and production by Postcommodity and Alex Waterman to a suite of four early scores by the American composer Robert Ashley.
Eighty-page programme book score, and libretto, for performances by Indigenous musicians of in memoriam…Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau and Robert Ashley’s in memoriams… at The Banff Centre, Banff: July 12, 2017; The Winspear Centre, Edmonton: July 18, 2017 at 7 pm.
[from back cover] …in memoriam Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau adds a new score and production by Postcommodity and Alex Waterman to a suite of four early scores by the American composer Robert Ashley. The fifth score honours the lives of Mary Cecil, Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau, three Indigenous women from territory at the turn of the Century as it became the province of Alberta. This significant addition continues Ashley’s project investigating the connections between musical forms and constructs of historicization, opening a conversation regarding whom and how we memorialize individuals and inscribe their legacies.
[from essay by Candice Hopkins] What histories are remembered and who is doing the remembering? What form do these rememberings take? It is not as simple as taking down one monument and replacing it with another. We need to ask more questions, take note of the voids that stand in for the past, and actively make way for other voices, particularly those are trapped under the ‘sea ice of English’. “Listen for sounds”, writes the Tlingit poet and anthropologist Nora Marks Dauenhauer, “They are as important as voices. Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen.”
CONTENTS Foreword, Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective with Alex Waterman
in memoriam…Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau Score & Libretto
dear Clayton,
this is an extra and extra-special letter to you–with Caterpillar in mind. In the past few months both THE NATION and NEW REPUBLIC have chosen NOT to publish brief and pointed letters of mine and I feel their failure to do so points up a fear on their part of possibly endorsing my stance by merely printing the words.
You are in a position not to share their fears, though you may very well disagree with what I have to say—which perfectly fine. All I ask is that the statement be presented so that it may be mulled by others–and hopefully attended to by those who have spirit and imagination still towards a possible common well. (NOT, note, “weal”—we may have enough welts, wealth, and wheels.)
Briefly then.
Next year—or the year 1968, the year “hard upon” us—is likely to see an American election pitting LBJ against the likes of Ronald Reagan. It hardly matters, you will admit, who the GOP candidate is; he will be all but another LBJ. In sum, it won’t matter which way the vote goes—
for there is NO CHOICE. This is not new, of course*—but it never has been quite so obvious as now. And in the face of an election that figures to be very close, there IS meaning in having an alternative. The one I propose is extremely radical—in every way–and it is more than “a ticket”.
I propose that those who, like myself, are sick of the politicks of money—which is what politicks is clearly all about these days, if it has ever been otherwise—vote by writing in (or pasting in on the machines) the names of ALLEN GINSBERG and MUHAMMAD ALI.
In hard terms, let me be understood. These votes need no convention, no signatures on petitions, no campaign funds, no more publicity than that which occurs spontaneously. It doesn’t even require the assent of either candidate. They stand for and are the images of our responsibility, of an a-political society. This has nothing to do with oldtime anarchy. It has to do with a profound recognition that neither war nor revolution is needed—but education and a sense that there are values that we all share and that have nothing to do with money as power.
This is not a hoax. And it is over and above any endorsement of psychedelics or boxing or black power. These suggested candidates are NOT power ploys; they have always behaved AS individuals and AS poets. They bring into the open virtually every American prejudice. They are transparently not buddies, not of any “party”.
I feel strongly that a vote of even a million persons would make a tremendous dent in the election—especially where it will weigh the “difference” between the main contenders for the power crown. And even more vitally it will reveal a deeper community between people everywhere, for such elections no longer are imply national phenomena.
But unless this possibility is realised—and at just such extremity—we let a rare opportunity pass without a sign of recognition.
The 13th issue of F.R.DAVID is edited with Riet Wijnen, and has its origins in her Registry of Pseudonyms, an online database which accounts for who is who and why who is who. ‘Inverted Commas’ follows ‘pseudonym’ through names, naming, bodies, brains, self, author, other, reader, labour.
F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, edited by Will Holder, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. This 13th issue of F.R.DAVID is edited with Riet Wijnen, and has its origins in her Registry of Pseudonyms, an online database which accounts for who is who and why who is who. ‘Inverted Commas’ follows ‘pseudonym’ through names, naming, bodies, brains, self, author, other, reader, labour.
Co-published with KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Financially supported by Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Kunsthuis SYB.
This book proposes that description is one way to design, reproduce and enable access to things. Between October 2016 and December 2017, Will Holder will recall and describe hundreds of tiny material decisions made in response to a specific context of past collaborators’ work.
STAPLES! proposes that description is one way to design, reproduce and enable access to things. Between October 2016 and December 2017, Will Holder will recall and describe hundreds of tiny material decisions made in response to a specific context of past collaborators’ work. For example:
STAPLE, steel (not stainless), twenty pieces. Bik Van der Pol’s expansive “research” – and its relations to imperfect representations of a collective past – resulted in the proposal of a series of sixteen-page, black and white stapled booklets (wrapped in a full-colour image section, and coloured paper cover printed in black ink) edited by Lisette Smits and published, when needed, to accompany work. Editorial and design decisions towards an imagined 240 page, glued book could be discovered, learned from, and adapted, piecemeal. This process would be visible to the reader. This five-year series of publications was considered ‘too complicated.’ Nevertheless the proposed model was maintained, and came to represent an alternative, but rejected past. The short-term responsiveness of the stapled booklets’ designs vs. a glued book’s long-term significance became hypothetical. Raddraaier, the printer, passed on the binder’s advice to stagger the staples at different heights along the booklets’ spines, to minimise bumps. Bik Van der Pol, Past Imperfect, Casco Issues No.9 (ed. Lisette Smits), Casco, Utrecht / Revolver, 2005. 978-3-865882-18-9.
STAPLE It is suggested that the widespread adoption of the staple was instigated by the nazi’s demonstration of its potential for dissemination. Along with DIN standards – staples were described by Jan Tschichold as “the devil’s work.” Christopher Burke, Paul Renner: the art of Typography, Hyphen Press, 1999. 978-0-907259-12-1