We’re pleased to introduce our second subscription of X Artists’ Books: Haiku, Mad Clot on a Holy Bone, Oracular Transmissions, and Regionalia. These four books feature thoughtful journeys through seasons, theatrical works, community art interventions and anti-gentrification efforts, and conversations between old friends. 

Haiku (2019) originated in New York City in 1964, when Beat Generation poet Diane di Prima gave West Coast assemblage artist George Herms a series of seasonal poems that would lead him to create a suite of woodcuts illustrating them. This is the first bound book of Haiku and commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the poems’ printing by Herms in 1967 and the formation of his LOVƎ Press. Haiku includes reproductions of di Prima’s thirty-two short poems and Herms’s thirty-six woodcuts as well as an essay by curator Sarah C. Bancroft, “On Making Haiku.”

Mad Clot on a Holy Bone: Memories of a Psychic Theater (2020) is the first published collection of the work of playwright and artist Asher Hartman and his Gawdafful National Theater company. The book includes three plays by Hartman: Purple Electric Play (PEP!), Mr. Akita, and Sorry, Atlantis: Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge; as well as a full color insert, contributions by Janet Sarbanes and Lucas Wrench, and a conversation between Asher Hartman and Mark Allen (who produced the three featured plays in collaboration with Machine Project) and Tim Reid (a playwright and performer who joined the Gawdafful company in 2018, as the assistant director of Sorry, Atlantis). Mad Clot on a Holy Bone is co-edited by Mark Allen and Deirdre O’ Dwyer and designed by Becca Lofchie. 

Oracular Transmissions (2020) weaves together three of Etel Adnan and Lynn Marie Kirby’s collaborations: Back, Back Again to Paris (2013), a rogue broadsheet and video contribution to Adnan’s 2013 solo show at the Wattis Institute; Alhambra Exchange (2016), a text-only video presented at Crunch Gym in San Francisco as part of the larger neighborhood intervention The Alhambra Project; and Transmissions (2017), a performance and video borne of conversation and drawings made by Adnan and Kirby in Paris for If Not Apollo, the Breeze, an exhibition curated by Jordan Stein at KADIST in San Francisco. These projects are re-presented and interpreted by designer Brian Roettinger, along with poems by Denise Newman, a friend to both Adnan and Kirby, and an introductory essay by Jordan Stein. 

Regionalia (2020), a bilingual catalogue co-published with Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, documents the research, projects, and culminating exhibition generated during Cog•nate Collective’s artist residency at Grand Central Arts Center. The 128-page catalogue includes an additional 32-page insert drawn from public conversations that took place throughout the exhibition. Designed by Stephen Serrato of ELLA, the publication contains texts by Cog•nate Collective, Christian Zúñiga, and a dialogue between the artists and Karen Stocker.