Search results for ""Author Steve Clay""

Threads, a series of talks devoted to the art of the book, includes poets, scholars, artists and publishers. It explores and enriches relationships between various strands of book culture that are often approached in isolation--poetry and writing, visual and performing arts, collaboration, design, printing, independent publishing, literary history, critical theory and material culture. The premise for the series was very similar to the kind of interdisciplinary approach to the book that has interested Granary Books and Cuneiform Press all along. A book is never more successful than the relationship between its parts; the philosophical and material connections between the writing, art, design, typography, translation and distribution are more significant than excellence in any isolated area. Threads began in March 2009 and concluded in October 2012. There were 12 speakers: Alan Loney, Charles Alexander, Simon Cutts, Buzz Spector, Jerome Rothenberg, Cecilia Vicuña, Jen Bervin, Kathleen Walkup, Johanna Drucker, Keith Smith, Richard Minsky and Emily McVarish.

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Dick Higgins and his Something Else Press epitomized the riotous art of the ‘60s There are few art-world figures as influential—and as little known—as Dick Higgins (1938–98), cofounder of Fluxus, "polyartist," poet, scholar, theorist, composer, performer and, not least, the publisher of the legendary Something Else Press. In 1965 he restored the term "intermedia" to the English language, giving it new dimension to recognize the dissolution of boundaries between traditional modes of art-making and the open field for new forms that cannot be compartmentalized. His own contributions to intermedia are many—as a participant and instigator of happenings, as writer and composer straddling traditional and vanguard forms, among others—but it was Something Else Press (1963–74) that redefined how "the book" could inhabit that energized, in-between space. Something Else Press was as much a critical statement and radical experiment as it was a collection of books by some of the most luminary artists and writers of the 20th century: Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Ray Johnson, Dieter Roth, Bern Porter, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Emmett Williams, Robert Filliou, and George Brecht, among many others. Along with his Great Bear Pamphlet series and the Something Else newsletter, Higgins exploited and subverted conventional book production and marketing strategies to get unconventional and avant-garde works into the hands of new and often unsuspecting readers. Edited by Granary Books publisher Steve Clay and Fluxus artist Ken Friedman, this judiciously curated and indispensable compendium of essays, theoretical writings and narrative prose dives deep into the ever-influential ideas that Higgins explored in theory and practice. Clay and Friedman have chosen works that illuminate Higgins' voracious intellectual appetite, encyclopedic body of knowledge and playful yet rigorous experimentation in a selection that includes many writings long out of print or difficult to find.

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