Faux Pas. Selected Writings and Drawings (Expanded Edition)
Amy Sillman
Published by After 8 Books, Paris, 2022, 300 pp. (b/w ill.), 12 × 18.5 cm, English
Price: €20

A key figure in the New York art scene, Amy Sillman is renowned for her singular approach to painting and drawing. Her writings extend a practice that challenges traditions and theoretical frameworks with criticality and humor, and advocates subjectivity: she reevaluates Abstract Expressionism with a queer eye, explores the meanings of color and shape, and discusses in depth the work of other artists—from Delacroix (and Cézanne!) to Maria Lassnig to Carolee Schneemann to Laura Owens. In Faux Pas, a collection of her most recent essays, alongside her cartoons and original drawings, art—as personal as it is political—is a practice that responds to today’s struggles.

#2022 #after8books #amysillman #artistswritings
Eraser
Angharad Williams
Published by After 8 Books, Paris & Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2023, 80 pages (b/w ill.), 11 × 18 cm, English
Price: €10

Angharad Williams’ book Eraser, concludes a two-year process of writing and has existed in the form of an exhibition, a performance, and now a book. Eraser is as much about the categorical boundaries of our consensual reality—between self and other, human and non-human, waking and dreaming consciousness—as it is about an urge to overcome them. The book’s main protagonist undergoes multiple transformations via psychic and physical transferences with elementary forces—involving a trout and a magpie, among other things—that unsettle the idea of the “stable” self. Eraser proposes a perspective in which the categorical distinctions between individual self, others, and non-human life slowly begin to dissolve. Other worlds of consciousness—of animals, plants, and organic matter—here embody a form of social organization free from the hierarchies of tradition and liberal progress.

Designed by Dan Solbach.

#2023 #after8books #angharadwilliams #dansolbach
Pisti 80, Rue De Belleville
Estelle Hoy
Published by After 8 Books, Paris, 2020, 120 pages (b/w ill.), 11 × 18 cm, English
Price: €13 (Out of stock)

Estelle Hoy offers a wry exploration of the seductive allure of tropes and cliché in the art world and politics in this novella, which documents the story of Pisti, a leftist Hungarian activist and her anarchist collective based in Paris. In the course of one night in a Belleville apartment, old friends and new lovers converse about contemporary politics, activism and art, violence, and queer issues. The book is also an experiment in writing, teasing the reader with namedropping and appropriation. Whole phrases are lifted from other texts and woven seamlessly into the narrative. Based in Berlin and Paris, Hoy is a feminist writer, socially engaged artist, political activist, and academic.

#2020 #after8books #estellehoy #fiction