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  Pist Protta 89

  Space Poetry

  Someone will probably consider the new Pist Protta 89 a perfect example of the zeitgeist: It seems unusually design-elitist and delicious, while at the same time being devoid of content. There is basically nothing but blank paper, which is also full of holes and absences.

  But we have no doubt that, in all its simplicity, it appeals to the general population. Because there are no agreed-upon, intellectualizing texts, and it can all be experienced here and now with a pair of ordinary eyes in all its concrete paper tactility.

  In addition, the magazine can be read equally well on one side as the other, there is nothing that is up or down, it is very easy to deal with.

  We have sought out the printer, where we have found old, used-up punching tools in the scrap box, which we have revitalized in a new artistic context. Perhaps some of the die-cuts have previously been used for well-known and important works of art, we do not know, but now they appear here again in a completely new role, that of the art journal. It's sustainable recycling!

  It is actually also a counterpart to one of our old issues, Pist Protta 24 from 1994, where we explored the printer's set box and used all the typographic accessories in the form of lines, frames, borders and vignettes for a graphic artwork in his own right.

  Although the new Pist Protta 89 is quite empty, because we have endeavored to completely avoid printing ink, space has nevertheless been found for a single printed image. There really isn't much to say about it, other than that it manifests a proud moment in the history of the Danish foreign service that no one wants to remember anymore.

  And then we must not fail to note that Pist Protta turns 40 here in 2021, and the new Pist Protta 89 is thus a delicious appetizer for the big anniversary publication, Pist Protta 90, which is just around the corner.

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  Tensile: A Sublime Love Story

  Jessica Spring

  Tensile: A Sublime Love Story weaves together a 19th century poem of seduction by Percy Bysshe Shelley, with current research on bisphenol contamination in our environment and bodies gathered by biologist Alyce DeMarais. Used to manufacture plastics and resins for food and drink packaging, bisphenol impacts the endocrine system, impairing development and reproductive health with transgenerational effects. 19th century writers didn’t know synthetic plastic would emerge in 1907 to change the world. In the midst of industrialization, Romantic era poets reinvigorated a spiritual connection to nature by portraying the Sublime. Shelley’s “Love’s Philosophy” celebrates the mingling of rivers and oceans as scientists conclude that exposure to bisphenol contamination is ubiquitous. Illustrations were printed directly from single-use plastics (including bread-bag ties, milk bottle caps, drinking straws and contact lens containers) to create sublime landscapes, and explore the irony of our love affair with this monster of our own creation.

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  Selections from the American Matchbook Company

  Ryan Standfest

  Sixteen matchbook paintings selected from a series of fifty completed between January 2021 and September 2021. Printed by Cache Printing Services.

  "Selections from the American Matchbook Company" is a pamphlet-style book by Ryan Standfest. Each page holds a risograph image of a monochrome matchbook, containing a different message or satirical take on government and societal norms. This work comments on America's class system, policing, and capitalistic greed.

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  The Toe, The Horse, The Sister

  Maria Zahle

  A new book of visual poetry by artist Maria Zahle. This collection of 25 poems are a response to life as an artist, mother, sister, daughter and lover.

  The poems oscillate between lived experience and formal experimentation, described through memories and intimate speculations. The poetry shape-shifts between words and visual marks: insistent groupings of punctuation, drawn shapes and repeating patterns. Each page is a tactile space, with language and image vibrating in tension with each other. This sculptural poetry encourages an active reader.

  Many of the poems reflect on small but vivid events retold and refracted through language. The book is not a linear narrative, but rather an exploration of the ways in which experience and memory collide, fragment and overlap within our consciousness. Throughout our lives, we all exist as a range of selves, taking on various roles – child, adult, artist, friend, stranger. In Zahle’s poems, these selves are present all at once. There is no boundary between a memory, a touch, a word, a thought.

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  Side Effects May Include But Are Not Limited to the Following

  Karen Zimmermann

  "This book is a response to a two-year dive into the world of mental illness, the healthcare system, and the pharmaceutical system that one learns to navigate in a mental health crisis. The profound affects of a serious mental illness are staggering. This is a book about the fine print.

  "For Heather. All text mined from the internet — always full of information some accurate, some not."

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  Cloud Behavior

  Nanna Debois Buhl

  Nanna Debois Buhl’s artist’s book Cloud Behavior is a study of clouds through photographs and drawings, essays, and interviews. During summer 2018, Buhl photographed clouds on medium-format film and experimented with the images in the darkroom. Buhl’s cloud photographs connect to historical thinking about clouds, to scientific research on cloud behaviour, and to the mystical and meteorological contemplation of clouds by August Strindberg.

  Today, climate researchers study cloud behavior to understand how global warming affects the movements of clouds and how, conversely, the movements of clouds might affect global warming. Strindberg and climate researchers share an interest in reading signs and omens in the clouds—and do so with the aid of photography and other means of visualization.

  This connection is unfolded in various ways in the texts of the book: In a text collage by Ida Marie Hede and Nanna Debois Buhl, three fictive characters photograph clouds and speculate about their movements. In their essays, philosopher Dehlia Hannah and literary scholar Andrea Fjordside Pontoppidan connect Nanna Debois Buhl’s cloud studies with philosophical, scientific and literary contemplations of clouds. And in a conversation between physicist Jan Olaf Härter and Nanna Debois Buhl, they discuss thunderclouds and their possible impact on the future climate. The texts are accompanied by pencil drawings, computer simulations and mythological depictions of clouds. Cloud Behavior thus forms a polyphonic narrative of clouds across disciplines and time periods.

  Realized with generous support from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the New Carlsberg Foundation and the Beckett Foundation.

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  The OK Corral

  Elsi Vassdal Ellis

  "The OK Corral" has 54 pages in total, 46 of which include woodcut-type prints in bold red ink. The book is sewn and board-bound, giving it a strong structure. The covers are red with text printed on top in a slightly darker red ink, portraying negative, even violent verbs like “obstruct” and “collude.” The extended colophon is a sheet of paper matching one of the pages in the book with negative descriptors such as “vile” and “wrathful”; on the back of the sheet is an in-depth description of how the book was made.

  While the content of the book does not specifically mention politics, "The OK Corral" clearly makes a statement about the followers of Trump and his administration. The book highlights the negative behavior that has come to be considered acceptable through the normalization of that behavior through Trump's actions, along with the negative ideologies perpetuated by his followers.

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  Pure Mobile VS. Dolce Vita

  Monika Fryčová

  In 2013, Monika Fryčová drove by scooter from Iceland to Portugal and then back again. She brought Icelandic bacalhau to Portugal and took Portugese batata-doce back to Iceland. Her extraordinary journey through Europe is documented in this book.

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  Miami Beach: A State of Things

  Ashley Fuchs

  "'Miami Beach: A State of Things' is an artist book that explores the future environmental impacts on Miami Beach through Risograph and Letterpress printing.

  "The book is folded in varying dimensions to create unique compositional moments—allowing viewers to see the whole or see individual scenes within the book. The visuals are inspired by architecture details like the MacArthur Causeway Bridge, historic maps, and images of events in Miami Beach. These are depicted with compositions of wood type letterforms, to help portray climate change’s potential and drastic impact on Miami Beach’s historical community." — Tipping Point, Mid America Print Council

  Minimal but powerful text discusses the growth and importance of the city’s infrastructure throughout history and more importantly, the fear that it might not last much longer. The front panel, stating “evacuation routes may vanish under the ocean in an emergency,” shows the growing threat of global warming on the city of Miami Beach. The strategic use of orange accents and bold black type, work in the idea of urgency surrounding what needs to be done in order to combat the continuous rise in water levels and to prevent the loss of the wonders of Miami Beach to the detriments of climate change and inundation.

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  Visible Climate: Postcards from America's Changing Landscapes

  Rachel Simmons and Lee Lines

  "This interdisciplinary project was completed in 2020 by Lee Lines (geographer) and Rachel Simmons (artist), colleagues at Rollins College who have collaborated on environmentally themed visual art projects since 2010. 'Visible Climate' is the product of more than 175 hours of field work in our national parks, researching and documenting climate change impacts, followed by a collaborative process of translating visual evidence into an artists' book to shed light on the impacts of climate change in some of our nation’s most iconic landscapes. To create the work, Lines’ original digital photographs (and two historical national park images) were reduced to black and white, transferred to Stonehenge paper, hand-colored and then re-digitized by Simmons. This multi-step process created a selective loss of information and degradation, while the hand-colorization references and challenges romanticized landscapes from postcards produced when the parks were first mass marketed to early 20th century visitors. Lines’ handwritten captions — based on his field work in the parks— imagine the voices of park visitors over decades as they encounter changing habitats, receding glaciers, and drought-altered landscapes." - Rachel Simmons

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  Pist Protta 86/87

  Space Poetry

  The color brown is the mother of all colors, the first and last color in the universe. When you mix all the colors and stir everything together, you get brown.

  In the ideal world it is different, here all colors become gray when mixed, and in the world of light all colors become white light. But in the world of reality, the one we all find ourselves in with all its flaws and irregularities, all colors turn to brown. It is the inevitable outcome of color entropy, the coloristic terminus.

  We pay tribute to the color brown with nothing less than a double edition, PP86/PP87. It is so large that it simply cannot be contained in a single edition. In PP86 we have hand-mixed and printed an exclusive range of browns, 16 shades of brown that stand clean and substantial without frills. In PP87, we have asked 16 artists and writers to write a short text or comment on one of the brown colors that they have each been assigned.

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  The Plague Review Digest

  Ryan Standfest

  A hefty tome that collects all four issues of The Plague Review, a timely journal of immediate visual responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

  "The Plague Review Digest™ is published by Rotland Press. It collects all four issues of the journal The Plague Review that were published from April to October, 2020. Each installment was originally released to the sheltered-in-place in the form of a free digital publication. These versions have been permanently removed from their online platform for this printed anthology."

  "The Plague Review is more mirror than morbid — the mosaic of emotions presented in its pages offer a panorama of the pandemic and the world as we experience it today." — PRINT Magazine

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  Cover Your Mouth

  Jacob Z. Wan

  “Being Chinese and gay, I explore sexuality, relationships, and balance from personal experience through mixed-media book arts. 'Cover Your Mouth' was made with a face mask as the cover and text printed on one long page with stitches. COVID-19 has affected 2020 with tragedies and inconveniences, yet President Trump did not take the pandemic seriously and blamed China for everything. I printed out a speech from President Trump and stitched-out lines with red threads to emphasize the narrative. By altering the text, the speech reveals the truth and facts of the pandemic, instead of blaming others with hatred.” - Jacob Z. Wan

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  Women March

  Gail Watson

  "This book is a photographic record of the 2017 and 2018 Women’s March held in Denver, Colorado as a rebuke and resistance to the election of Donald J. Trump. I attended the first March with a number of friends from my mountain community and the 2018 March with my niece and her young daughter; 3 generations of women making our voices heard. My favorite group chant was 'We need a leader, not a creepy tweeter.' The book is thirteen pages of full-bleed photographs digitally printed on cover paper and two pages of Canson Mi-tientes letterpress printed in white ink. The cover is binders board die cut with a window filled with a pink fake fur “pussy hat” and with a linen bookcloth spine. The front and back cover are foil-stamped." - Gail Watson

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  Pursuit of Wonders

  Andreas Züst and Mara Züst

  Andreas Züst (1947–2000) was fascinated by natural phenomena his whole life long. Even as a child he would stoically take note of the weather conditions three times a day. Later on, as a student of glaciology, he spent whole months at Thule in Greenland drilling ice cores—and shooting countless slides of his research work there. The resulting corpus of photographic material explores ice in a multitude of different forms and escapes determination, ranging from endless icescapes, freshly blown bright white snow, and ice crystals on a window to a glowing blue, a polar bear peering into the camera on an ice-covered beach, and an ice-bound research base camp under the light of the full moon. The opaque blue glow of ice (best viewed as originally presented in a slide show) epitomizes the otherworldly aura of these evocative images. The story of ice and that of a glaciologist’s life and work are told separately in Pursuit of Wonders, but tied together by the prevailing atmosphere of a surreal journey through a world of ice, rounded out by contributions by the film maker Peter Mettler, who was a friend of Züst’s, cultural studies scholar Verena Kuni as well as artists Jimena Croceri and Sarina Scheidegger.

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  Inception

  Islam Aly

  "Inception is inspired by stories and journeys of the refugees. It is a bilingual codex in English and Arabic. The book is based on the twelfth-century Persian verse poem 'The Conference of the Birds' written by Farid Aldin Al-Attar. The poem is about the search for truth and integrity, which is parallel to the refugee’s quest to re-discover themselves. Birds meet to begin searching for their perfect king. But to find him, they need to start a difficult journey. The birds show their doubts and fears to their lead, the hoopoe. He encouraged and supported the birds to be confident, grateful, and honest. The birds start a wondrous journey that only 30 of them completes, they eventually recognize that their king is each of them and all of them. The English text is adapted from Afkham Darbandi translation. The Arabic text is adapted from Badee Mohamed Gomaa Arabic translation 'Manteq Al Tayr.' The bird images represented are from medieval Islamic artwork. Arabic Calligraphy is done by Abdul Karim and Sabri. Inception was made as part of Swarthmore College’s Friends, Peace, and Sanctuary project. Major support for Friends, Peace, and Sanctuary has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage with additional support from Swarthmore College Libraries, the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, the William J. Cooper Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation." - Islam Aly

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  Advice for Travelers

  Aileen Bassis

  In the accordion-bound art book "Advice for Travelers," Aileen Bassis samples one of her poems and brings it to life on paper. The book is twelve pages long and includes photographs, texts, and different shapes on all pages. The text is centered around the idea of "advice" for those who are travelling, with resonating phrases such as "remember a blanket, for nowhere will be soft" alluding to the troubles that immigrants will face when they come to new countries.

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  Infirm

  Gwendolyn Brooks

  Infirm is part of a larger series of prints and books called "Claiming Grace" which address issues of disability, identity, and beauty.

  "The poem is a delight and as I quoted in the colophon ... it was printed 'with my own legs a-wobble. ...' Actually, that is a stretch, since I as a wheelchair user while printing on the Vandercook, it is my wheels that are a bit a-wobble reaching to insert the paper, but it made me smile, thinking both of my wobble, and as Gwendolyn says so beautifully, that we are all enough to be beautiful." — Terry Schupbach-Gordon

  "Somebody wrote to the library and asked that I find books with poems featuring handicapped people for a conference that was going to feature handicapped people. So, I decided I was going to try to write such a poem myself. I have a certain way of feeling about handicapped people. I feel that we're all handicapped to some degree in some dimension, so under the title I wrote 'For handicapped all.'" — Gwendolyn Brooks, Dickinson Electronic Archives

  "Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the most highly regarded, influential, and widely read poets of 20th-century American poetry. She was a much-honored poet, even in her lifetime, with the distinction of being the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize. She also was poetry consultant to the Library of Congress — the first Black woman to hold that position — and poet laureate of the State of Illinois." — www.poetry.foundation

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  The Radiant Republic

  Sarah Bryant

  "In these texts, separated by more than two thousand years, Plato and Le Corbusier each describe a city plan designed to provide a framework for morality and ethics. These works are revered, but they are also deeply troubling. In The Radiant Republic, language from Plato and Le Corbusier has been combined to create a narrative in five parts. Each part is bound separately, and features a portion of an interlocking landscape with no fixed beginning or end." - Big Jump Press

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  Huracán

  Anyelmaidelin Calzadilla Fernández and Steven Daiber

  Steven Daiber: "The text forming the hurricane patterns are random digital coding and the 1823 quote from John Quincy Adams:

  "'There are laws of political as well as physical gravitation; and if an apple severed by its native tree cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union which by the same law of nature, cannot cast her off its bosom.' - US Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, April 1823

  "Over printed on the reverse cover paper is an image of the 50 black flags installed in front of the US Interest Section in 2006 protested the Bush administration and an image of the US Embassy taken from where the flag poles were installed and removed in 2020."

  United States Interests Section in Havana, Wikipedia, 7/24/20: "The United States Interests Section of the Embassy of Switzerland in Havana, Cuba or USINT Havana … represented United States interests in Cuba from September 1, 1977, to July 20, 2015. It was staffed by United States Foreign Service personnel and local staff employed by the US Department of State, and located in a multi-story office building on the Malecón across from the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana. The mission resumed its role as the Embassy of the United States in Cuba on July 20, 2015, following the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

  "In January 2006, USINT Havana began displaying messages on a scrolling 'electronic billboard' in the windows of their top floor, including the George Burns quotation, 'How sad that all the people who would know how to run this country are driving taxis or cutting hair.' Following a protest march, the Cuban government erected a large number of poles, carrying black flags with single white stars, obscuring the messages. In June 2006, Granma International referred to the billboard as 'the systematic launching of the crudest insults of our people via the electronic billboard, which, in violation of the most elemental regulations of international law, they think they can maintain with impunity on the facade of that imperial lair.'

  "In June 2009, the electronic billboard was turned off, because according to the US State Department, the billboard was not effective in delivering information to the Cuban people."

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  Giant: a deity with leaves (Deluxe Edition)

  Rebecca Chamlee

  "A towering native oak has stood in a nearby wildland park for over 400 years. This is the story of how the ancient tree became a cherished presence in the life of the artist; a source of wonder, mystery and connection to the natural world. The letterpress printing was done on the Vandercook Universal III power press using Centaur and Arrighi type, cast by M & H Type Foundry and Swamp Press, wood French Clarendon and photopolymer plates on Zerkall Book Wove, handmade Kitakata and Korean Hanji papers. The botanical pages are contact prints on Strathmore Aquarius II watercolor paper. The long stitch binding, sewn with hand-dyed Kinglet Cottage linen thread through a white oak spine, has a cover of contact printed and dyed handmade Indigo watercolor paper. The deluxe edition includes the book housed in a hinged box, lined with Cave handmade paper, a Quercuslobata acorn and Quercus, a suite of prints concealed in a drawer. The acorn included in the deluxe box has been frozen for 12 months, baked for 8 hours and sealed." — Pie in the Sky Press

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  Paintworks

  Jonas George Christensen and Peter Olsen

  Paintworks (2010-18) is a series of photographic works by the artists Jonas Georg Christensen and Peter Olsen. The series shows their subtle paintings made directly on late modern industrial and public buildings in Denmark during the period 2010–18. Their intervention in the facades of the buildings is discreet and minimalist, and thus differs radically from the graffiti and the art works we are used to seeing in the public space.

  These big paintings are done in serial and as simple forms, in different variations of grey, white or black colour tones. They seem to be part of the building’s architecture, as they do not try to go against the lines of the walls or disturb the architecture in any other way. On the contrary, the paintings underline the aesthetic qualities of the walls, as well as of the surrounding space, and can be perceived as re-activating the surfaces of the building.

  The book Paintworks from 2019 is also exhibited in Mellanrummet. This book is a joint edition between Dokument Press and the publishing company Forlaget Emancipa(t/ss)ionsfrugten and contains a longer theoretical text by Carsten Madsen, associate professor at Aarhus University, as well as an introduction by Claus Peder Pedersen, who heads the research school at the School of Architecture in Aarhus.

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  This Is a Test

  Elsi Vassdal Ellis

  "This book is part of the ongoing WASTE NOT, WANT NOT series that begin with a stack of paper, the selection of possible art mounted type high, and inks on the shelves.

  "…A narrative was going to be included with the art, tucked into the negative spaces or onto the art. When the art printing was finished, I decided I didn't want to add the narrative. (Two different themes were developed and will be used for future WASTE NOT, WANT NOTS.) This was, after all, a test of the mounted art and the inks, adn to use up paper that had been sitting on my shelves since the early 1980s. The semi-random compositions, though not perfectly balanced, stand mostly on their own." — Elsi Vassdal Ellis

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  Leaves of Grass

  Lauren Emeritz

  Leaves of Grass, Abstract Orange Edition was published on May 31, 2019 in celebration of Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday.

  “The book explores ideas central to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass including transcendentalism, or the inherent goodness of nature, and realism, depicting familiar things as they are. It captures both the complexity and simplicity of nature by juxtaposing dimensional paper grass texture and a quote about nature and wonder. The book is not a reprinting of all of Whitman's words but an art object that encapsulates the feeling of Whitman." — Lauren Emeritz

  Although the box opens like a traditional book it becomes a triptych. The focus is the center which is a “shadow box” with several rows of cut green paper of various shades to resemble blades of grass. The box of grass is sided with a portrait of Whitman on the left with quote “All seems beautiful to me.” On the right is a quote from “Song of Myself” with a large 200 printed in the bottom right corner.

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  Old Tjikko

  Nicolai Howalt

  Containing 97 unique images made from the same photographic negative, the artist’s book Old Tjikko by Danish visual artist Nicolai Howalt is like no other. It’s a book about the oldest living organism known to man and a book about the instability of the photographic image and the enigmatic intertwinement of time, reality and perception.

  The tree, Old Tjikko, stands in a deserted landscape on a mountainside in Dalarna, Sweden, and is considered to be the oldest tree in the world with its impressive age of 9,600 years. A single photographic negative of this exceptional spruce has become the many different photographs in this book. By exposing the same image onto 97 different types of aged analogue light-sensitive photo papers – some dating back as far as the 1940’s – Nicolai Howalt has in Old Tjikko created a book, where the unpredictability of the long expired photographic papers has become an integral and dynamic part of each image.

  The result is an almost organic diversity of perception and expression: 97 different variations of the same motif ranging from gloomy black to ethereal white. Images where the uncontrollable silver halides in the papers create sudden appearances of meteor showers or landscapes seemingly shrouded in dense fog. Questioning the constancy of the photographic image and pointing to the subtle and often overlooked effects of its materiality on our perception, it is as if these imperfections of ageing in the papers reveal glimpses of a distant and different time. Dormant traces brought forth into the present by Howalt and the frozen millisecond of a recently captured photographic negative depicting a tree, which in itself stands as a living image of an almost incomprehensible timeline – the passing of millennia.

  Mycologist Henning Knudsen, philosopher Søren Gosvig Olesen and art historian Lars Kiel Bertelsen contributes to the publication with three essays placing the work in the context of natural sciences and biology, the philosophy of perception and the history of photography.