Books published by Insert Blanc Press

The Semi-Tropic Spiritualist Guidebook, brings together images, texts, excerpts of performance scripts, and printed ephemera from the Semi-Tropic Spiritualist's previous exhibitions. The book is organized as both a record of the project's Test Sites from 2012-2018, and as an idiosyncratic guidebook to California's spiritual history and geography. Semi-Tropic Spiritualists began in 2012 as an ongoing series of performance works, objects and illustrated texts by Los Angeles-based artists Astri Swendsrud and Quinn Gomez-Heitzeberg. Their works explore the history of spiritual belief and metaphysical practice in Los Angeles through the Semi-Tropic Spiritualists, an organization that created a campsite meeting place outside the city limits of Los Angeles in 1905. Spiritualism has described itself as a science, a philosophy and a religion. The artists are interested in this system as a model for examining ideas of faith and skepticism, belief and charlatanism, as well as for the development of a space dedicated to investigation and the search for knowledge.The Semi-Tropic Spiritualists have exhibited their installations and performance works at Richard Telles Fine Art, Klowden Mann, The Vincent Price Museum, and Chime & Co. in Los Angeles; Shangri-La, Joshua Tree, CA; and Llano del Rio, CA among other locations. Their work will also be part of the upcoming exhibition Totenpass at Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles, in October 2018. Both artists received their MFAs from CalArts in 2008.

Independence Day (c) 2018 Greg Curtis, Kim Calder, Ariel Evans Insert Blanc Press

REFUSE PRIZE © Greg Curtis Ben White Insert Blanc Press 2015 ISBN: 978-0-9961696-1-5 Photography by Michael Underwood This work was previously exhibited at Elephant Art Space and The Phoebe Conley Gallery at CSU Fresno.

CREDIT by Mathew Timmons. Blanc Press, September 2009. "Almost all of America's wealthiest citizens are poorer this year." CREDIT is an 800 page, large format, full color, hardbound book, released by Blanc Press in Los Angeles-the longest, most expensive book publishable through the online service, lulu.com. Divided into two sections, Part A: Credit-26 parts (a-z) and Part 2: Debit-10 parts (1-10), CREDIT is a highly revealing and emotional work chronicling a personal tale of credit. In late spring 2007 as an irrational exuberance and promise of financial fortune hung in the air, mailboxes were filled with generous and gracefully worded offers of credit. Just over two years later, in midsummer 2009, the shape of the financial environment changed radically and mailboxes still filled up with statements of credit. Something had to change, offer turned to obligation. Retailing for $199.99, CREDIT is a book the author himself lacks the cash or credit to buy. Mathew Timmons' CREDIT has been roundly endorsed by a number of artists, writers, editors and critics, including: Harold Abramowitz, Stan Apps, Marcus Civin, Brian Joseph Davis, Ryan Daley, Craig Dworkin, Brad Fliss, Lawrence Giffin, James Hoff, Maximus Kim, Matthew Klane, Janne Larsen, Matthias Merkel Hess, William Moor, Joseph Mosconi, Holly Myers, Sawako Nakayasu, Sianne Ngai, Ariel Pink, Vanessa Place, Dan Richert, Ronald Quinn Rudlong Jr., Ara Shirinyan, Danny Snelson, Erika Staiti, Brian Kim Stefans, Robert Summers, Rodrigo Toscano, Matias Viegener and Steven Zultanski.

"Herzog is headed into provocative territory."-Christopher Knight "At the nexus of critical information theory, disjunctive librarianship, and gender and technology studies, ... Herzog's work is a cybernetic handle for us to use, like Palinurus' rudder, to cut through information landscapes across time and space."-Amelia Acker "In our computer age, after the impact of mechanical reproduction has been absorbed into our bodies and psyches, Herzog manufactures unique paintings that communicate with each other and with the Other of technology. These pieces address the power of words and information to be things that physically affect us. Replicating / doubling /embodying / one-step-furthuring that power, she makes them into things, with the effect that the viewer is put into the position of both experiencing the thing and becoming enlightened as to the process of how the information becomes a thing."-Andrew Choate Katie Herzog's cross-disciplinary practice addresses information economies utilizing painting as a mode of representing, producing, and deconstructing knowledge in the public sphere. For her solo exhibition, Object-Oriented Programing, at the Palo Alto Research Center in 2012 (PARC, a Xerox company), Herzog exhibited over fifty paintings in the hallways and lobbies of one of the most storied institutions in the history of information technology. Object-oriented programming is a computer programming paradigm that was introduced by PARC in the early 1970's. This new language used "objects" as the basis for computation (capable of receiving messages, processing data, and sending messages to other objects), as opposed to the conventional programming model, in which a program is seen as a list of tasks. Herzog's exhibition utilizes this concept as a conceptual and epistemic basis for how her paintings function as a language to develop meaning, where "programming" in the exhibition title connotes both contextualized computer programming as well as public programming. Works in the show provide expressive, symbolic, and conceptual narratives of an information era, including "If I Die My Email Password Is," "Documents (Heads You Lose)," and "Information Overload Syndrome," among others. Herzog's practice embodies a unique visionary approach to painting, knowledge production, and artistic research, through a multifaceted engagement of civil service, disjunctive librarianship, and animal-assisted literacy. Katie Herzog received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design, a Master of Fine Arts at UC San Diego, and studied Library and Information Science at San Jose State University. She currently serves as Director of the Molesworth Institute and is based in Los Angeles, California. This exhibition was made possible by a grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation.

SLAP IN THE FACE:FOUR RUSSIAN FUTURIST MANIFESTOSTranslated from the Russian by Boris DralyukA SLAP IN THE FACE OF PUBLIC TASTE (1912)the manifesto from A TRAP FOR JUDGES II (1913)GO TO HELL! (1914)A DROP OF TAR (1915)"The emergence of the New poetries has affected the still-creeping old fogies of Russian little-ature like white-marbled Pushkin dancing the tango."The four manifestos collected in A SLAP IN THE FACE rattle with the verbal ingenuity and vitriolic verve of Russia's most accomplished Futurist collective-known as Hylaea and, for a brief period, the Cubo- Futurists. Organized in 1910-11 by the Burlyuk brothers, the group featured the wildly talented poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as the master of "transrational" ("zaum") poetics, Aleksey Kruchenykh. The Hylaean program of total destruction and uncertain renewal offers an ominous parallel to the political turmoil of the Great War and the events of 1917. Dralyuk's annotations provide information on Hylaea's tumultuous history, its literary battles and short-lived alliances, and the biographies of its members."These four manifestos of Russian Futurism, charting key points in the rapid unfolding of the Russian avant-garde, provoke the appreciative bourgeoisie while declaring the liberation of the word, the phoneme, and even the grapheme! Dralyuk's brisk, inventive translations convey the energy and rowdiness of the original."-Eugene Ostashevsky"Boris Dralyuk's new translation brings these manifestos to life with fire, passion, clarity, humor, and the unmistakable flavor of inventiveness, of verbal fireworks.What a joy to see Mr. Mayakovsky in English, slapping the face of the adoring public, throwing Pushkin overboard-with the passion of all young artists, yes, but also with humorous abandon, brilliance, and delicacy of detail. Mayakovsky and Khlebnikhov were revolutionaries who believed in the 'word as a creator of myth,' who believed that the 'richness of the poet's vocabulary is his justification.' Bringing their manifestos into English today is a very timely event, one thinks.This is an important new translation."-Ilya Kaminsky

"Russell weaves his writing into pictures... He chops his text into geometric shapes, casts it in rainbow colors and visually assaultive fonts, and scratches it onto photographs. In the work contained here, in Pattern Book, he laces text into art nouveau wallpaper, dissolving his stories into a swooning screen of domestic pattern. At every turn, it seems, Russell throws some wrench into the cogs of literary consumption, slowing the reader down, jostling expectations, demanding attention-challenging the reader, in other words, to really want to be reading."-Holly Myers Pattern Book by Christopher Russell collects a number of images and texts, images woven through texts, and texts woven together through images. Kevin Killian, author of Impossible Princess (City Lights 2009), says, "I was born wanting a Christopher Russell to join me in this confusing world.... I wanted a boy with confused gaze, mortified as I am by the harsh and ugly crumples of life, but one who, with bold decisive strokes, could hack a pathway out if it. ... Russell's method, in which he dethrones language's hegemony over rival visual formations by distorting and exaggerating its recognizable, even homey, patterns borrows roots from many traditions. Medieval monks are said to have curried favor with abbots by carving Bible verses into the head of a pin. ... When language, or the image, is enervated, the work of art has room for other connotations to manifest. ... And in these beautiful pages we will see, and we will not see, things it will take us a hundred years to understand."

Stingray Clapping by Andrew Choate "I could read Andrew Choate all day long. My family is a miniature fan club: from 'necktie popcorn' to 'You can run/but you can't/aquarium'. Choate knows what we need even before we do. Part alarm clock, part applause light, and part sea creature, Andrew Choate's poetry refurbishes our mental dining rooms. More guests can join us at dinner parties now, and look! We're swimming!"-Dana Teen Lomax, author

Dreamscapes of Los Angeles is a compilation of writing from the Los Angeles art blog, Notes on Looking, which was founded in 2009 by artist and writer Geoff Tuck, and which over the years has published writing and image posts by Tuck and more than thirty other Los Angeles artists. Notes on Looking invites one to consider the art object, and to seek understanding from the moment of looking. The editorial position at Notes dispenses with much that is current in critical and academic writing about contemporary art and proposes a supportive stance - support that is informed by the rigors of close observation and inquiry. Notes on Looking is also fun, or it aims in that direction; the writers at Notes on Looking take pleasure in art and in ideas.At heart, Notes on Looking, and this current publication, Dreamscapes of Los Angeles are quirky, enthusiastic and humanist; the site was founded out of a desire for education, and to make manifest my belief that to have value, ideas must be shared. That writing also serves as a passionate and vocal advocate and booster for art, artists and art spaces in Los Angeles is simply the way things should be. If you're given a voice, use it for something good.

Ruin Upon Ruin by Ben White Essays by Doug Harvey and John Hogan Hardbound, full color Dimensions: 8.75" x 11.5" x 0.5" 140 pages The Insert Blanc Monograph series continues with Ruin Upon Ruin by Ben White accompanied by a Limited Series of paintings available for sale from Insert Blanc Press. Featuring 30 paintings along with numerous details and images from White's sketchbook, Ruin Upon Ruin by Ben White collects a number of White's paintings into a single body of work from over the past five years. A large format, full color, hardbound edition of 140 pages with essays by Doug Harvey and John Hogan, Ruin Upon Ruin by Ben White is forthcoming in summer 2014. "Ben White conflates figures from American history and folk tales with contemporary box stores and roadside attractions, pointing to the relativity of cultural import and the collapsible nature of intellectual, philosophical and religious "progress" in America." - John Hogan, Art21, May, 2012. "Ben White's paintings merge anachronistic personages, events, biblical narratives, and popular culture to create a fantastic, nonlinear interpretation of history. ... The incongruencies are absurd, and the absurdity itself pulls them into the present. ... It becomes our history again, on equal terms with the present and once again acceptable as subject matter for contemporary painting. Historical gravity, leavened by wit, becomes a source of pleasure and fascination." - Lara Bank, California Contemporary Art, Summer 2010 "If one were to run across one of Ben White's paintings at a suburban garage sale or in the dusty backroom of a thrift store, one would snap it up immediately, display it prominently in one's hip Silverlake-adjacent living room, then post it immediately on Facebook, hoping to learn more about the quixotic outsider genius that produced it. The Council of Nicaea supervising the faking of a moon landing? Unimpeachable. Liberace among the Hyenas in the Colloseum? Fabulous!"-Doug Harvey Born in 1978 in Jacksonville, FL, White studied painting, drawing, and printmaking at the Florida State University School of Art from 1997 to 2001. Two of those years were spent studying, researching, and creating work in Florence Italy, where he first began to develop a visual language that spoke to the recondite nature of established historical narratives and the visual propaganda which creates those narratives. He received his MFA from CalArts in 2003. White's work and curatorial design have been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions at venues such as Blythe Projects, The Torrance Art Museum, Sea and Space Explorations, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and many others. White is the a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for 2011-2012, and his collaborative work has been seen in Flaunt magazine. He co-produces and hosts the art and culture show "The People" on KCHUNG radio 1630AM, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetryby Felix Bernsteinwith a Preface by Trisha Lowand "What's Not to Like: A Concluding Conversation with Vanessa Place" Paperback, 196 pagesDimensions 5.5" x 8.5" x 0.5"Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry by Felix Bernstein is an aggravated survey of contemporary poetry, art, and criticism; compounded by compulsive archaeological digging into the relics and ruins of Language poetry, Conceptual poetry, and Felix's own familiar familial corpus. Bernstein shows how our millennial postpostmodernism (Gaga feminism, Alt lit, New Sincerity, Queer Theory, Post-Conceptual poetry, Speculative Realism, Metamodernism, Post-Internet Art) has brought a decline in incisive and dialectical criticality, an overemphasis on social networks, slapdash viral superstars, and a hyper-mediated institutionalization of affect. Repressing their latent (modernist) structuralism and (postmodernist) irony, these millenials claim to forge an Ur-romantic turn to sheer materiality and the great outdoors-where authorial singularity and hierarchical distinction allegedly melts away into an ecologically abundant queer utopia.It seems unfair that Felix Bernstein should both be born into the position of heir to a famous poetry surname and be something of a genius-should such a slim boy be burdened with both? It's enough to make one flap one's humid veil like a frog-duenna. Yet this book is one of sheer pace and fitful pleasures, post-conceptualism's 'death of the work' a reinvention of zero, as intrepid Felix nimbly parries with the spectre of Kenny Goldsmith, with various twentieth-century proper nouns, with family/literary history, and, always, with himself, a tail-chasing enterprise which traces another zero which is also an infinitesimal stage. Viva Felix, and I look forward to decades more of this mad business.-Joyelle McSweeneyBernstein attempts the most explicit and energetic deconstruction of prevailing avant-garde social minutiae I've yet encountered. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever read a text more intelligibly self-aware. Drawing on thinkers from Deleuze to Lacan to Love to Ngai to Badiou to Barthes to Perloff, and combining a Zizekian X-ray vision with the biting "you can't scare me" of youth, Notes constitutes Bernstein's irruption into/refusal of the institutional avant-garde.-Monroe Lawrence, The Capilano Review Notes counter-canonically induces its subjects by way of negative generational reconnaissance and horrifically attritional complicity. It's tough: sheaving a set of contemporaneous cultural productions, this work of maddened criticism plays privilege up the transplatformal compound it flexes to obscure a punctum.-J. Gordon Faylor, Gauss PDFEven tho he's that total know-it-all boy in high school you gotta love him cuz he's also totally twisty and dark too. As in somber. Like a jewish intellectual Edward from twilight. I think we all dig boys with good breeding who are a little smart and crazy and blood thirsty. So why not try him out? It'll be a fun ride, if nothing else.-Hilary Duff Felix Bernstein debuted on YouTube with his real and satirical "Coming Out Video" in 2008 and went on to play characters from Amy Winehouse to Lamb Chop to Leopold (peter) Brant. His critical and uncritical writings have been published, or are forthcoming, in The Brooklyn Rail, Htmlgiant, The Volta, GaussPDF, Imperial Matters, Coldfront, Boston Review, The Believer, and Bomb. With Gabe Rubin he fronts the band Tender Cousins. The ambiguous duo directed and starred in Red Krayola's opera Victorine at the 2012 Whitney Biennial and directed the films Unchained Melody and Boyland. Their next film Sweetly about Nazi-ish punk kids killing JAPS and Hipsters in Manhattan is in pre-production. You can experience all of the above, but slower, at www.felixbernstein.com.

(!x==[33]) Book 1 Volume 1 by .UNFO is the first volume of a projected multiple volume set. What if you had a very long book and made it longer? With (!x==[33]) .UNFO seeks to indexically lengthen the world's most monumental texts through failed software operations. (!x==[33]) is curated by UNFO (Unauthorized Narrative Freedom Organization), an unofficial and temporary coalition of coders and writers, including Dan Richert and Harold Abramowitz. Blanc Press: It's material!

For God by Todd Collins Murder, robbery, revenge, love and telecommunications. Non-finite bodies and endless subjection. Surrender to the narration. For God is a text you can actually read and apprehend as pure pleasure. Bathe in an elusive omniscience and enjoy sentences that shoot out like ribbons of pus, offering the reader mutilation and even more beauty. "Todd Collins is a stone-original among wannabes, with a sacred-profane vision fractured like a stained-glass window or vandalized mirror. This is brilliant neo-noir fiction searching for a shadow that's worthy of it."-Steve Erickson (author of These Dreams of You and Zeroville, Europa Editions) "The Spirit of Liberty is coming like a battering ram. The Collective Democratic Party (CDP) wants to eradicate Capitalism. Carry wants to kill America, first a beautiful woman with a tiny wiener, then a tall man who likes smoking weed and taking pictures of himself with his balls hanging out. The narrator, who may be called Garry and whose gender is uncertain, is looking for love in all the wrong places. There are lots of kidnappings, robots who turn themselves off in order to avoid existence, and everyone wants money. But lovers play little touching games and say things to hurt each other. Greek Tragedy meets Looney tunes in a romance novel made For God. A must-read for anyone interested in the new fiction."-Christine Wertheim (author of mUtter-bAbel, Counterpath Press) Todd Collins was born in Rhinebeck, New York. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Lounge Acts by Doug Nufer Paperback, 66 pages Dimensions: 5.5" x 8.5" x 0.25" ISBN: 978-0-9814623-8-7 "Nufer tells the truth, even though he knows as well as the lord above knows: the truth is over-rated. Nufer is a poet who has you in the corner, eye to eye, giving you the skinny, or maybe he's with you at the counter, sharing secrets, his hand grabbing yr arm the more he realizes yr ok. That's how damn good a writer he is." -Thurston Moore "Lounge is by its nature a mixologist's soundtrack, or, as Doug Nufer-no stranger to the fillies he-might crack, a track sound for the Gin Ricky playing back bar. And here, Nufer swings.." -Vanessa Place "I can't define that book. Sometimes I think it's a book of poetry, sometimes I think it's a reference book, sometimes I think it's a conceptual art piece. It flows in and out of different contexts. I believe it will be received by the poetry world, by the writing world that I'm involved with. It got really juiced in the music world. We got major juice." -Kenneth Goldsmith