Books published by Siglio Press

"Known best for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works that celebrate the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination, and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual and a performance--a process connecting life to art. This unconventional, illuminated biography, told in the first person in Saint Phalle's voice and her own hand, dilates large and small moments in Saint Phalle's remarkable life as an artist who pointedly challenged taboos. In a kind of collaboration with the artist, Nicole Rudick has assembled a gorgeous and detailed mosaic of Saint Phalle's visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches, and writings, many rare or previously unpublished. These confessions, declarations, meditations, and musings trace the most intimate contours of Saint Phalle's life. In some works, Saint Phalle articulates herself with startling candor and self-examination; in others, she carefully and slowly unwinds her secrets as she herself wrestles with them. Throughout, her agency in telling her own story is paramount."--

"Dubbed Ray Johnson's Boswell, writer and logophile William S. Wilson was one of legendary artist Ray Johnson's closest friends and biggest champions. He was also perhaps Johnson's most trusted poetic muse and synthesizer of referents and references. The influence was mutual: throughout their lifelong friendship, begun when both men were in their twenties, writer and artist challenged and enriched one another's work. Published on the occasion of the exhibition of Ray Johnson works from Wilson's archive at the Art Institute of Chicago, Frog Pond Splash embodies the energy, expansiveness and motion of their work and their friendship. Editor Elizabeth Zuba has selected short, perspicacious texts by Wilson (from both published and unpublished writings) and collage works by Johnson to create juxtapositions that do not explicate or illustrate; rather, they form a loose collage-like letter of works and writings that are less bound than assembled, allowing the reader to put the pieces together, to respond, to add to and return to the way Johnson required of his correspondents and fellow travelers. Taking its title from Wilson's haiku equivalence of Johnson's process, Frog Pond Splash is a small book but many things: a collage-like homage to their friendship, a treasure chest of prismatic correspondances, as well as an unusual portrait of the disappearing, fractured Johnson through Wilson's words. Zuba's nuanced selection and arrangement of images and texts in this sumptuous little volume honors Johnson's open system (which rejected closed and consistent meanings, codes and symbols) in its open, associative, and intimate playfulness."--Provided by publisher.

A revelatory anthology of poems, experimental prose and previously unpublished work by Madeline Gins, the transdisciplinary writer-artist-thinker famed for her "Reversible Destiny" architecturePoet, philosopher, speculative architect and transdisciplinary artist, Madeline Gins is well known for her collaborations with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on the experimental architectural project Reversible Destiny, in which they sought to arrest mortality by transforming the built environment. Yet, her own writings--in the form of poetry, essays, experimental prose and philosophical inquiries--represent her most visionary and transformative work. Like Gertrude Stein before her, Gins transfigures grammar and liberates words. Like her contemporaries in conceptual art, her writing is attuned to the energized, collaborative space between reader and page. The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader is a revelatory anthology, edited and with an introduction by the writer and critic Lucy Ives. It brings never-before-published poems and essays together with a complete facsimile reproduction of Gins' 1969 masterpiece, WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G, R, E, T, A, G, A, R, B, O, It Says), along with substantial excerpts from her two later books What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984) and Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). Long out of print or unpublished, Gins' poems and prose form a powerful corpus of experimental literature, one which is sure to upend existing narratives of American poetics at the close of the 20th century. Born in the Bronx and long a resident of New York City, Madeline Gins (1941-2014) participated in experimental artistic and literary movements of the 1960s and '70s before developing a collaborative practice as a philosopher and architect. Alongside her own writing, Gins collaborated with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on a theory of "procedural architecture," an endeavor to create buildings and environments that would prevent human death.

"Grief emphatic, grief redeeming, grief protacted, grief abraded all intertwine in this funny, prickly memoir." -David Denby, The New YorkerWith fearlessness and grace, Bough Down reports from deep inside the maelstrom of grief. In this profoundly beautiful and intensely moving lament, artist and writer Karen Green conjures the inscrutable space of love and loss, clarity and contradiction, sense and madness. She summons memory and the machination of the interior mind with the emotional acuity of music as she charts her passage through the devastation of her husband's suicide. In crystalline fragments of text, Green's voice is paradoxically confessional and non-confessional: moments in her journey are devastating but also luminous, exacting in sensation but also ambiguous and layered in meaning. Her world is haunted by the unnameable, and yet she renders that world with poetic precision in her struggle to make sense of not only of death but of living. In counterpoint, tiny visual collages punctuate the text, each made of salvaged language and scraps of the material world--pages torn from books, bits of paper refuse, drawings and photographs, old postage stamps and the albums which classify them. Each collage--and the creative act of making it--evinces the reassembling of life. A breathtaking lyric elegy, Bough Down uses music and silence, color and its absence, authority of experience and the doubt that trembles at its center to fulfill a humane artistic vision. This is a lapidary, keenly observed work, awash with the honesty of an open heart.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition held at the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, March 16-June 18, 2017, co-curated by Andrea Andersson and Julia Bryan-Wilson.

Now available in an expanded paperback edition, "Diary" registers Cage's assessment of the times in which he lived as well as his often uncanny portents about the world we live in now. With a great sense of play as well as purpose, Cage traverses vast territory, from the domestic minutiae of everyday life to ideas about how to feed the world. He used chance operations to determine not only the word count and the application of various typefaces but also the number of letters per line, the patterns of indentation, and--in the case of Part Three, originally published by Something Else Press--color. The unusual visual variances on the page become almost musical as language takes on a physical and aural presence ... This expanded paperback edition reproduces the 2015 hardback edition, with a new essay by mycologist and Cage aficionado David Rose and, most important, an addendum that includes many facsimile pages of Cage's handwritten notebook of a ninth part in progress.

"Hinge pictures: Eight women artists occupy the third dimension" runs March 14-June 16, 2019 at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans."--Page 5

The Stampographer' traverses the fantastic, anarchic imagination of Parisian artist Vincent Sardon (born 1970), whose dark, combative sense of humor is infused with Dadaist subversion and Pataphysical play. Using rubber stamps he designs and manufactures himself, Sardon commandeers a medium often associated with petty and idiotic displays of bureaucratic power, then uses those stamps not to assert authority, but to refuse it. He scours the Parisian landscape as well as the world at large, skewering the power-hungry and the pretentious, reveling in the vulgar and profane. In 'The Stampographer', there are insults in multiple languages, sadomasochistic Christmas ornaments, and a miniature Kamasutra with an auto-erotic Jesus. Sardon also wields the stamp as satirical device, deconstructing Warhol portraits into primary colors, turning ink blots into Pollock paint drips, and clarifying just what Yves Klein did with women's bodies. Yet Sardon's razor-sharp wit is tinged with the irony of his exquisite sense of beauty. The stamps are rarely static, they have an animating magic, whether boxers are punching faces out of place or dragonflies seemingly hover over the page.

In the murky waters of the Mediterranean lie the ruins of Alexandria's fabled lighthouse, a wonder of the ancient world destroyed by earthquakes in the Middle Ages. While mapped by archaeologists, most of these 2,000 stone remnants will never be retrieved and reconstructed: the Pharos Lighthouse can only be inferred. But above the surface, the lighthouse is ubiquitous in the modern city, its image wholly imagined, with little resemblance to the stones at the bottom of the sea. In a richly braided, intimately told narrative of text and image, New York-born artist and writer Ellie Ga (born 1976) takes the reader with her on dive boats and into the water, behind the walls of hidden museums, through city streets pasted with political graffiti, into the offices of archaeologists and the homes of Alexandrians - just as Egypt is on the cusp of its first post-revolution election. Ga's investigations into the lighthouse chart the charged spaces between the historical and mythological, between the translated and untranslatable, between the unearthing of memory, the circumscription of the past and the potential of the present. Ga's subject is ostensibly the Pharos Lighthouse, but her own palimpsests reveal a multitude of possible truths.

Recounts the friendship between propaganda photographers Refik Veseli and Mosha Mandil and how their lives intersected with the foreign relations efforts between Albania and China. Consists primarily of archival photographs from the 1970s with captions in which the author assumes the voice Veseli.

Art. LGBT Studies. From 1963 through 1978, Joe Brainard created more than one hundred works of art that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into an astonishing variety of spaces, all electrified by the incongruity of her presence. THE NANCY BOOK is the first collection of Brainard's Nancy texts, drawings, collages and paintings, with full page reproductions of over fifty works, several of which have never been exhibited or published before. In THE NANCY BOOK, Joe Brainard's Nancy traverses high art and low, the poetic and pornographic, the surreal and the absurd. Whether inserted into hypothetical situations, dispatched on erotic adventures, or seemingly rendered by the hands of artists as varied as Leonardo da Vinci, R. Crumb, Larry Rivers, and Willem de Kooning, Brainard's Nancy revels in as well as transcends her two-dimensionality.