How We Made ‘The Kick Inside’ Paul Becker

I began a kind of doodling whereby I was gathering together guitar leads,

speaker cables and various inexplicable wires and repurposing them,

sometimes winding them up into objects or, as I had with the string,

stretching them out around the room into a kind of network.

I would strip off conduit and rip out the copper wires from all the leads.

I began to disembowel the mixing desk, pulling out its entrails: green,

white, red, brown leads. I fixed all the wrong type of wiring to the wrong

type of power and then I would turn the whole system on again to see

what happened.

The book, ‘voiced’ by Kate Bush, is a fictional inhabiting

(via the Guardian’s ‘How We Made…’ feature) of the production of her

remarkable first album. A meditation on the idiosyncrasies of the creative

process and what constitutes an artist’s sensibility, and then an unravelling

towards a manifestation of that process and the strangeness, the rapture

that can follow.

‘The first part of this short book is the most alive and profound, intensely

specific and supernaturally communicative sequence of insights into the

process of making art I have ever read. And then. I don’t actually have the

words to describe what comes next. My mouth fell open. My mind fell open.

I think you’ll just have to read it.’

– Kate Briggs

‘I used to think that Anthony Burgess had a rubber stamp with which he printed

the words ‘His best book yet’ for every publication he was sent to review.

I have never read anything by Paul before and don’t get asked for my opinion

much, so I would rather not waste this opportunity with disingenuousness.

This is a fascinating book with a brilliant conceit as its impetus.

I never knew Kate Bush was so interesting and then again, maybe she still isn’t.’

– Stephen Sutcliffe

‘This is writing as dance, an extraordinary choreography of crystalline images

and rare tableaux. It moves in (im)perfectly controlled ara- besques toward a

crescendo as exciting as anything in contemporary writing. It’s a summa,

a guide, a Fellini-esque sleight of hand, and it represents a powerful condensation

of what Bush/Becker describe as ‘instinct, grounded, earned and achieved through

knowledge.’ It’s art, in other words. Rare and beguiling art.’

– John Douglas Millar

'Becker has found a way to hide an hallucinatory description of the artistic process

inside a Kate Bush documentary. (It may not even need the Kate Bush part—she can

look after herself.) The result is a rapturous, peculiar fantasy, a confessional about the

psychological experience of making things.'

– Dan Fox

68 pages
182 mm x 128 mm
90 mm cover flaps
Format: Paperback
ISBN 978-1-9993276-7-5
£12 (£2 p&p) available HERE

A TABLE MADE AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME: (on Kate Briggs' This Little Art)

Language / Idioma:
English

Editors / Editores:
Paul Becker and Francesco Pedraglio

Contributors / Participan:
Paul Becker, Kate Briggs, Daniela Cascella, Sophie Collins, Renee Gladman,

Nadia Hebson, Rubén Martín Giráldez, Arno Renken, Alejandro Zambra

Translator of Rubén Martín Giráldez's text /
Diego Gerard

Design / Diseño:
Carla Valdivia at Studio Katsu

First edition:
2021

Print run:
500 copies

A Table Made Again for the First Time is an anthology that gathers essays

by many authors –translators, artists, editors, and poets– who relate to translation

as a task that demands it's own specificity. After a round table with Kate Briggs

–Bureau des Réalités, Brusels, 2018– we commissioned, translated and edited

texts by 9 authors of different origins who consider questions such as the tension

between author and translator, the relation between personal experience and

literary research, or the ethical implications that cultural and gender studies

have accounted on this type of work.

This edition, our first completely in English, will represent an important contribution

to the international debate around translation studies, which have gathered artistic

and literary interest in recent years after the publication of This Little Art, by Kate Briggs

(Fitzcarraldo Editions 2017).

Available here

Intertitles

£15.00

ed. Jess Chandler, Aimee Selby, Hana Noorali & Lynton Talbot

Intertitles is an anthology of work situated at the intersection of writing and the visual arts.

The anthology aims to explore their confluence and is conceived in response to a twofold

observation: the increased presence of written, spoken and performed language in the work

of visual artists and the simultaneous increase in visibility and circulation of the work and

voices of writers in the visual arts arena.

with Fatema Abdoolcarim, Victoria Adukwei-Bulley, Bebe Ashley, Anna Barham, Paul Becker,

Elaine Cameron-Weir, Adam Christensen, Sophie Collins, CAConrad, Rory Cook, Jesse Darling,

Anaïs Duplan, Inua Ellams, Olamiju Fajemisin, Caspar Heinemann, Johanna Hedva, Sophie Jung,

Sharon Kivland, Tarek Lakhrissi, Ghislaine Leung, Quinn Latimer, Jordan Lord, Dasha Loyko,

Charlotte Prodger, Laure Prouvost, Flo Ray, P. Staff, Alice Theobald, Jesper List Thomsen

foreword by Isabel Waidner
afterword by Vahni Capildeo

designed by Traven T. Croves

Buy Intertitles here

LEGSICON

Playful, serious, absurd, seductive and bodily, Legsicon is a major new publication by Laure Prouvost, published

to accompany her current exhibition at M HKA, AM-BIG-YOU-US LEGSICON, from 8 Feb - 19 May 2019.

Legsicon delves into the philosophical depths of the artist’s practice, through the familiar, if transformed, format

of a lexicon, to portray the work of an artist developing complex thought through artistic languages.

Deviating from a typical monograph, Legsicon functions as a sort of dictionary, exploring and expanding on

thirty-six notions in Prouvost’s work, with each incorporating a commissioned text, new drawings created by the

artist and selected documentation of her related works.

Words such as Artist, Boobs, Dream, Grandad, Octopus, Woman, and thirty other key words, have triggered

contributions from Celidor Aikvost, Nuar Alsadir, Paul Becker, Dodie Bellamy, Paul Buck, Sophie Collins,

Marie Darrieussecq, Bart De Baere, Melissa Gronlund, Nicoline van Harskamp, Nav Haq, Alistair Hudson,

Elisa Kay, Martha Kirszenbaum, Brian Kuan Wood, Peter Kubelka, John Latham, Huw Lemmey, Kathy Noble,

Elizabeth Price, Bernard Prouvost, Laure Prouvost, Natasha Soobramanien, Jonas Staal, Barbara Steveni,

Abdellah Taïa, Maija Timonen, Murtaza Vali, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Agnès Varda, Timothy Vermeulen,

Emily Wardill, Marina Warner, Mark Webber, and Lawrence Weiner.

ISBN 978 1 906012 99 1 – Price £26.00

Available HERE

MY LIFE by Anton Lesseman

Essays on Sculpture 68

Paul Becker, one of the Henry Moore Institute’s 2011 Research Fellows,

tells the story of the sculptor Anton Lesseman, an unknown, and

entirely fictional, contemporary of Henry Moore.

Featuring extracts from Lesseman’s autobiography, illustrated by

sketches, paintings, letters and sculptures, and an interview between

Paul Becker and Jon Wood (Research Curator at the Henry Moore Institute),

This publication is an exploration of the imaginary artist and the role of fiction in art making.

Part of the Henry Moore Institute’s Essays on Sculpture series.

Available HERE

Choreography / Coreografía

Choreography is a novella playing with ideas of staging, spectatorship,

duplication and mirroring as both conceptual and formal narrative devices.

Commissioned by Juan de la Cosa and appearing for the first time also in

Spanish, the book is set within a series of scenes from the 1976 RW

Fassbinder film Chinese Roulette.

Far from being a straightforward recounting, the novella is an attempt to

repurpose the emotional, psychosexual atmospheres contained within the

images as a new, hybrid, ekphrastic fiction.

Editors/Editores: Tania Pérez Córdova, Francesco Pedraglio

Co-editor of Spanish text/Co-editor en Español: Diego Gerard

Translation/Traductor: Aurelia Cortés Peyron

Design/Diseño: Leonel Salguero, Studio Katsu

Edition/Edición: Español/Inglés

Available HERE

EN LAS AMERICAS, COMPRA AQUÍ

CADAVERE QUOTIDIANO

Thirty writers address the dead body

Conceived and organised by Paul Becker, Francesco Pedraglio & Alex Cecchetti

A Project X Project Paperback

Cadavere Quotidiano is structured as an anthology of writers and artists preoccupied with the lumbering nature of the object and its relation to the written word.

With: Ed Atkins, Becky Beasley, Paul Becker, Matthieu Bulte, Alex Cecchetti, Arunja Cecchetti, Simone Ciclitira, M Dean, Tim Etchells, Johannes Fa, Melissa Gordon, Alex Graves, Bruce Hainley, Nadia Hebson, Fiona Jardine, Allison Katz, Valentinas Klimasauskas, Jesper List Thomsen, Shana Lutker, Nicholas Matranga, Katrina Palmer, Sion Parkinson, Francesco Pedraglio, Heather Phillipson, Kit Poulson, Chris Sharp, David Steans, Joanne Tatham, Luke Williams & Jonas Zakaitis

Paperback
184 pgs
4.25 x 7 inches
ISBN: 978-0-9886694-3-7

BUY CADAVERE QUOTIDIANO HERE

THE MEAN OF MEN

Adam Phillips & Paul Becker (2016)

The Mean of Men is a collection of 64 short scenes/stories written half by Paul Becker and half by Adam Phillips,

amassed over an email exchange between 2012-2016.

Each text was written in response to an arbitrary, single-word, title suggested

by the other writer. Rather than an assertion of masculinity, the title of this

collection comes from an idea of male averageness or normativity:

an interestingly redundant notion. Something of what that redundancy

could imply kept cropping up in parts of the writing, that and the reality of

being male and located somewhere towards the middle of life.

A glossary in the back of the book denotes the definition of each title, inviting as well as obfuscating

interpretation of each text’s meaning or intent.

The Mean of Men was designed with Sam Watson (OPEN-AIR).

To request a swap of The Mean of Men email: info@foundationpress.org

How We Made ‘The Kick Inside’ Paul BeckerI began a kind of doodling whereby I was gathering together guitar leads,

speaker cables and various inexplicable wires and repurposing them,

sometimes winding them up into objects or, as I had with the string,

stretching them out around the room into a kind of network.

I would strip off conduit and rip out the copper wires from all the leads.

I began to disembowel the mixing desk, pulling out its entrails: green,

white, red, brown leads. I fixed all the wrong type of wiring to the wrong

type of power and then I would turn the whole system on again to see

what happened.The book, ‘voiced’ by Kate Bush, is a fictional inhabiting

(via the Guardian’s ‘How We Made…’ feature) of the production of her

remarkable first album. A meditation on the idiosyncrasies of the creative

process and what constitutes an artist’s sensibility, and then an unravelling

towards a manifestation of that process and the strangeness, the rapture

that can follow.‘The first part of this short book is the most alive and profound, intensely

specific and supernaturally communicative sequence of insights into the

process of making art I have ever read. And then. I don’t actually have the

words to describe what comes next. My mouth fell open. My mind fell open.

I think you’ll just have to read it.’– Kate Briggs

‘I used to think that Anthony Burgess had a rubber stamp with which he printed

the words ‘His best book yet’ for every publication he was sent to review.

I have never read anything by Paul before and don’t get asked for my opinion

much, so I would rather not waste this opportunity with disingenuousness.

This is a fascinating book with a brilliant conceit as its impetus.

I never knew Kate Bush was so interesting and then again, maybe she still isn’t.’– Stephen Sutcliffe‘This is writing as dance, an extraordinary choreography of crystalline images

and rare tableaux. It moves in (im)perfectly controlled ara- besques toward a

crescendo as exciting as anything in contemporary writing. It’s a summa,

a guide, a Fellini-esque sleight of hand, and it represents a powerful condensation

of what Bush/Becker describe as ‘instinct, grounded, earned and achieved through

knowledge.’ It’s art, in other words. Rare and beguiling art.’– John Douglas Millar'Becker has found a way to hide an hallucinatory description of the artistic process

inside a Kate Bush documentary. (It may not even need the Kate Bush part—she can

look after herself.) The result is a rapturous, peculiar fantasy, a confessional about the

psychological experience of making things.'– Dan Fox

A TABLE MADE AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME: (on Kate Briggs' This Little Art)

Intertitles

MY LIFE by Anton Lesseman

Choreography / Coreografía

How We Made ‘The Kick Inside’ Paul BeckerI began a kind of doodling whereby I was gathering together guitar leads,

speaker cables and various inexplicable wires and repurposing them,

sometimes winding them up into objects or, as I had with the string,

stretching them out around the room into a kind of network.

I would strip off conduit and rip out the copper wires from all the leads.

I began to disembowel the mixing desk, pulling out its entrails: green,

white, red, brown leads. I fixed all the wrong type of wiring to the wrong

type of power and then I would turn the whole system on again to see

what happened.The book, ‘voiced’ by Kate Bush, is a fictional inhabiting

(via the Guardian’s ‘How We Made…’ feature) of the production of her

remarkable first album. A meditation on the idiosyncrasies of the creative

process and what constitutes an artist’s sensibility, and then an unravelling

towards a manifestation of that process and the strangeness, the rapture

that can follow.‘The first part of this short book is the most alive and profound, intensely

specific and supernaturally communicative sequence of insights into the

process of making art I have ever read. And then. I don’t actually have the

words to describe what comes next. My mouth fell open. My mind fell open.

I think you’ll just have to read it.’– Kate Briggs

‘I used to think that Anthony Burgess had a rubber stamp with which he printed

the words ‘His best book yet’ for every publication he was sent to review.

I have never read anything by Paul before and don’t get asked for my opinion

much, so I would rather not waste this opportunity with disingenuousness.

This is a fascinating book with a brilliant conceit as its impetus.

I never knew Kate Bush was so interesting and then again, maybe she still isn’t.’– Stephen Sutcliffe‘This is writing as dance, an extraordinary choreography of crystalline images

and rare tableaux. It moves in (im)perfectly controlled ara- besques toward a

crescendo as exciting as anything in contemporary writing. It’s a summa,

a guide, a Fellini-esque sleight of hand, and it represents a powerful condensation

of what Bush/Becker describe as ‘instinct, grounded, earned and achieved through

knowledge.’ It’s art, in other words. Rare and beguiling art.’– John Douglas Millar'Becker has found a way to hide an hallucinatory description of the artistic process

inside a Kate Bush documentary. (It may not even need the Kate Bush part—she can

look after herself.) The result is a rapturous, peculiar fantasy, a confessional about the

psychological experience of making things.'– Dan Fox

A TABLE MADE AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME: (on Kate Briggs' This Little Art)

Intertitles

MY LIFE by Anton Lesseman

Choreography / Coreografía

How We Made ‘The Kick Inside’ Paul Becker

I began a kind of doodling whereby I was gathering together guitar leads,

what happened.

The book, ‘voiced’ by Kate Bush, is a fictional inhabiting

that can follow.

‘The first part of this short book is the most alive and profound, intensely

I think you’ll just have to read it.’

– Kate Briggs

I never knew Kate Bush was so interesting and then again, maybe she still isn’t.’

– Stephen Sutcliffe

‘This is writing as dance, an extraordinary choreography of crystalline images

knowledge.’ It’s art, in other words. Rare and beguiling art.’

– John Douglas Millar

'Becker has found a way to hide an hallucinatory description of the artistic process

psychological experience of making things.'

– Dan Fox

How We Made ‘The Kick Inside’ Paul Becker

I began a kind of doodling whereby I was gathering together guitar leads,

what happened.

The book, ‘voiced’ by Kate Bush, is a fictional inhabiting

that can follow.

‘The first part of this short book is the most alive and profound, intensely

I think you’ll just have to read it.’

– Kate Briggs

I never knew Kate Bush was so interesting and then again, maybe she still isn’t.’

– Stephen Sutcliffe

‘This is writing as dance, an extraordinary choreography of crystalline images

knowledge.’ It’s art, in other words. Rare and beguiling art.’

– John Douglas Millar

'Becker has found a way to hide an hallucinatory description of the artistic process

psychological experience of making things.'

– Dan Fox