Adult Contemporary

A selection of publications on writing currently for sale:

1️⃣ Amina Cain: A Horse at Night—$22.99 (inc. GST)—Essayistic inquiries come together into a sustained meditation on writers and their works, on the spaces of reading and writing fiction, and how these spaces take shape inside a life. In ‘A Horse at Night’, Amina Cain contemplates how to be honest, open and free, as a person and a writer, even (and perhaps especially) during a time of great change. She moves elegantly through a personal canon of authors—including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante and Annie Ernaux—and topics as timely and various as female friendships, neighbourhood coyotes, landscape painting and the politics of excess, to profound and joyous effect.

2️⃣ Brian Dillon: Essayism—$24.99 (inc. GST)—‘Essayism’ is a personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and contemporary possibilities. It’s an example of what it describes: an essay that is curious and digressive, exacting yet evasive, a form that would instruct, seduce and mystify in equal measure. Among the essayists to whom he pays tribute—from Virginia Woolf to Georges Perec, Joan Didion to Sir Thomas Browne—Brian Dillon discovers a path back into his own life as a reader, and out of melancholia to a new sense of writing as adventure.

3️⃣ Ursula K. Le Guin: Steering the Craft—$35.00 (inc. GST)—‘Steering the Craft’ is Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier bag of the tools of a writer’s craft: how—and why—to write. From the sound of language to tenses to point of view, Le Guin offers a comprehensive and generous guide to the fundamental components of narrative, illustrating her incisive analysis with examples from some of her favourite writers. Revised and updated for the twenty-first century, this handbook includes exercises that the writer can do alone or in a group.

Available to purchase (while stocks last) in person, or via direct message and email. 🛍

On the occasion of PrideFEST 2024, a selection of facsimile editions currently for sale:

1️⃣ Pippa Garner: Better Living Catalog—$44.00 (inc. GST)—Pippa Garner’s ‘Better Living Catalog’, originally published in 1982, takes the form of a mail order catalog featuring clever and whimsical inventions that parody consumer goods while simultaneously critiquing America’s obsession with ingenuity, efficiency, leisure, and comfort. These works, which were made as prototypes and photographed for the publication, take the form of improbable accessories, clothing, footwear, home appliances, and office gadgets.

2️⃣ Greer Lankton: Sketchbook, September 1977—$44.00 (inc. GST)—‘Sketchbook, September 1977’ is an early journal by Greer Lankton written during her time as an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It offers key insights into the artist’s mind before her move to New York in 1978, where she would go on to have a prolific career making lifelike dolls, theatrical sets, photographs, drawings, and paintings.

3️⃣ Eileen Myles: Bread and Water—$33.00 (inc. GST)—First published by Hanuman Books in 1986, ‘Bread and Water’ is the debut short story collection by the renowned poet Eileen Myles, assembling six stories with an autobiographical flavor, of being a q***r, working-class poet with a penchant for mischief. Stories include: ‘Light Warrior’, ‘21, 22, 23…’, ‘Merry Christmas Mr. Title’, ‘Bath, Maine’, ‘Bread and Water’, and ‘Everybody Would Go Play Cards at Eddie and Nonie’s’.

Available to purchase (while stocks last) from AC’s shop in PICA’s foyer, or via direct message and email. 🛍

On the occasion of PrideFEST 2024, a selection of (auto/)biographical texts portraying artists/authors living with HIV/AIDS currently for sale:

1️⃣ Gregg Bordowitz: Some Styles of Masculinity—$39.95 (inc. GST)—‘Some Styles of Masculinity’ is an intimate, urgent, and rollicking account of thinking and enduring through upheaval and plague. Prompted by the surge of white nationalism in the United States, Gregg Bordowitz reflects on his experience of assimilation and marginalization as a Yinglish-speaking child of outer-borough Jews and a q***r person who has been living with AIDS since his twenties. He tells his own story by considering three totems of masculinity that were formative to him as he came of age in New York City in the 1970s and ’80s: the rock star, the rabbi, and the comedian. These figures taught Bordowitz how to balance reinvention and tradition, and how to be different even as difference is under assault.

2️⃣ The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Volume 1—$32.99 (inc. GST)—This volume collects a suite of three wildly entertaining and trailblazing short novels by the legendary French anti-assimilationist LGBTQ+ writer Guillaume Dustan. Published sequentially in France between 1996 and 1998, the three novels are exuberant and deliberately affectless accounts of the narrator’s sexual odyssey through a Parisian club and bath scene still haunted by AIDS.

3️⃣ Chloé Griffin: Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller—$62.95 (inc. GST)—Cookie Mueller (1949–1989) was a firecracker, a cult figure, a wild child, a writer, a go-go dancer, a mother and a q***r icon. A child of suburban 1950s Maryland, she made her name first as an actress in the films of John Waters, and then as an art critic and columnist, a writer of hilarious stories and a maven of New York’s downtown art world. ‘Edgewise’ tells the story of Cookie’s life through an oral history composed of more than 80 interviews with the people who knew her, including John Waters, Mink Stole, Gary Indiana, Sharon Niesp, Max Mueller, Linda Yablonsky, Richard Hell, Amos Poe and Raymond Foye.

Available to purchase (while stocks last) from AC’s shop in PICA’s foyer, or via direct message and email. 🛍

Following our one-week takeover of the PICA Shop at the end of June, Adult Contemporary is now back in PICA’s foyer for an extended time with an ever-evolving collection of publications, art editions, and objects.

You can find our setup through the western façade entrance, located amongst Agatha Gothe-Snape’s recently commissioned installation ‘IT IS THE COLOUR OF AN IDEA THAT WILL NOT COMPLETE ITSELF IN OUR LIFETIME’.

PICA
Perth Cultural Centre
51 James Street Boorloo/Perth
TUE – SUN, 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM

Thanks to PICA for having us. 💖

AC acknowledges the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation, the traditional and rightful custodians of the land on which we operate. We recognise their strength and resilience and pay respect to their Elders, past and present.

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Andrea Fraser, ‘Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk’, 1989. Single-channel video (Betacam SP NTSC), colour, sound, 30:00 min.

Ahead of ACRG’s meeting for Carla Lonzi’s ‘Self-portrait’ this Sunday afternoon, we’ll be making coffee and selling books in the internal courtyard at 50 Pier Street Boorloo/Perth from 12:00 to 3:30 PM. Please come by, say hello, and have a browse.

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The internal courtyard can be accessed from the rear car park via the laneway running from Dada Records on Pier Street to OMG Coffee & Toastie on Murray Street.

Please note that the rear car park is for tenants only. Free 3-hour weekend parking is available nearby in the CPP Pier Street car park.

Regrettably, accessibility to the (1899) building is limited for wheelchair users and others who need step-free access due to the presence of steps at both entrances.

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Joseph Beuys, ‘The Orwell Leg: Trousers for the 21st Century’, 1984. Denim jeans with holes cut in the knees, 41 × 15.75 in (104 × 40 cm). Edition of 35 unique variations.