MAYDAY ROOMS
Pamphlet Series

MayDay Rooms, London, UK, is an archive and social space set up as a repository and resource for the documentation of post ’68 libertarian social movements and cultural formations, predominantly those pertaining to employment and labour issues, involving largely autonomous, non-unionised groups.

SecMoCo were more than pleased to be invited to establish the identity, series style, and design for MayDay Rooms Pamphlets- a series bringing together reproductions of documents from their archive and beyond, along with critical reflections on their contemporary relevance. The first issue in the series focuses on histories of activist film and photography in the 1970s.

First edition published in 2121 by MayDay Rooms; distributed by PM Press Ltd; 184pp; 210×148 mm; approx 92 B&W images; 1-colour soft cover.

More on MayDayRooms:
It is an active repository: existing not to close off the information it stores, or merely preserve historical documentation for posterity, but to connect it with contemporary political struggles, aiming to use this historical material to have effects in todays lived social context. Any visitor with any interest is given a chance to study the material held there at first hand, with complete open access. Perhaps uniquely, the material held is not catalogued by name or even date– you find you way through it via specific movements or publication titles (if these titles exist).

It is also a social space: regular workshops are held on selected aspects of the material in the collection. There is a reading room and a screening room, which are also made available for political organising, hosting talks, lectures, screenings, music events, book launches, or to promote radical self-education to unfunded groups. Office space is provided within the building to like-minded projects, and they also host Mayday Radio from the premises.

Beyond the stored material at MayDay itself, there exists the ‘Leftovers’ project. This strand of their activism (made in collaboration with 2620 in Berlin) seeks to provide a digital resource platform and educational resource facilitating the spread of archived ephemera from many resistance campaigns, radical movements and cultural struggles. Described as a ‘non-hierarchical searchable database’, it is an attempt to open up and disseminate many and various archives of dissent under a creative commons licence, and attempts to scrutinise and make connections between materials often hard to find or suppressed, and work towards creating distributed archives.
See: https://leftove.rs/

THAO NGUYEN PHAN
Tate St Ives

For the first large scale museum exhibition in the UK of the work of Thao Nguyen Phan, SecMoCo were approached by Giles Jackson at Tate St Ives, UK, to design the accompanying publication, bringing together documentation of existing bodies of work in painting, sculpture, moving image and sound.

First edition published by Tate St Ives, UK, 2022, on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Thao Nguyen Phan’, Tate St Ives, 5 February – 2 May 2022.
Curated by Anne Barlow (Director Tate St Ives), and Giles Jackson (Assistant Curator). Editor: Giles Jackson; 64pp; 210x148mm; 36 2-colour and 4 black & white images; single colour softcover with open binding plus 2-colour dustjacket. Texts by Anne Barlow, Joan Joanas, Thao Nguyen Phan, Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran and Pen Sereypagna.

JOAN PUBLISHING
Identity & series design

SecMoCo were invited by the artist editors Rachael Cattle and John Hughes to devise the identity and series design for JOAN, a new publishing project focusing on contemporary interdisciplinary writing supporting feminist, queer, and idiosyncratic voices, and innovative fictions. The design has expanded and adapted to include a collaborations imprint JOAN X (image no.10 above).

To date JOAN has published the work of Jenna Collins, Karoline Lange, Lucie McLaughlin, Sam Cottington, Zara Joan Miller, Volker Eichelmann, Paul Becker and Joanna Walsh

Published by JOAN, London, UK; series 1 launched 2021. 182 mm x 128 mm + 90 mm flaps; black & white/colour images; paperback. Printed digitally by P2D Westoning, UK.

Stockists include Donlon Books, ICA Bookshop, Cafe OTO, Broadway Books and TACO!, London; Desperate Literature, Madrid; Good Press, Glasgow.

joanpublishing.org
joanpublishing@gmail.com

I AIN’T THE NOING UV IT…
Bergen Kunsthall, Norway

I AIN’T THE NOING UV IT I’M JUS ONLE THE SHOWING UV IT

First edition published by Bergen Kunsthall, Norway, 2017, on the occasion of the exhibitions ‘The Noing Uv It’, Bergen Kunsthall, 9 January – 15 February 2015 and ‘The Showing Uv It’, Simon Ling, Bergen Kunsthall, 27 February – 5 April 2015. Curated by Martin Clark and Steven Claydon. Editors: Martin Clark, Steven Claydon; 230pp; 230x236mm; 148 images; 2-colour soft cover with embossing. Texts by Martin Clark, Steven Claydon, Timothy Morton, Martin Herbert, Russell Hoban and Martin Westwood.

This was a treat; SecMoCo had the opportunity to work with Martin Clark and Steven Claydon again on the documentation for an exhibition, the themes and implications of which both had been formulating and discussing for a number of years.The design itself saw many changes, with on-going conceptual and formal reappraisal, ending up with a rigorous, thorough-going, appropriate solution.

From the gallery:
‘The Noing Uv It’ is an exhibition about objects and their image, matter and its memory, and the revealed and concealed nature of “things.” Addressing the possibility of a latent primitive consciousness in materials, it includes work by over 30 international artists, as well as a number of other objects, technologies and artefacts.

Curated by Martin Clark and Steven Claydon.
Artists: Michael Dean, Trisha Donnelly, Alex Dordoy, Michaela Eichwald, European Space Agency, Cerith Wyn Evans, Florian Hecker, Roger Hiorns, Russell Hoban, Yngve Holen, Jenny Holzer, Richard Hughes, IBM, Edward Ihnatowicz, Mark Leckey, Simon Ling, Sarah Lucas, Allan McCollum, Robert Morris, Jean-Luc Moulène, Matt Mullican, David Musgrave, Seth Price, Magali Reus, Hannah Sawtell, Paul Sietsema, Michael E. Smith, Haim Steinbach, Rudolf Stingel, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel, James Welling, Martin Westwood, Bill Woodrow.

ARTWORDS
Identity: print and digital

Working closely with the informed and discriminating Ben Hillwood-Harris, SecMoCo has developed a lasting identity for Artwords, perhaps THE go-to outlet in London for all print pertaining to contemporary visual culture. The work carried out includes brand application across various media including shop signage, advertisements, stationery, bags, publicity material, giftwrap and also book designs for Artwords Press (Documenta 11 by Matthew Arnatt and Matthew Collings; A Prague Night by Pavel Pepperstein).

The brand was further extended with the design of the Artwords website incorporating full e-commerce (www.artwords.co.uk).

Shopfront photograph: Coleen C. [ @yelpColleenC ]

HILARY LLOYD
Kunstmuseum, Basel

This publication represents the first monograph on the work of the Turner Prize nominated British artist. Designed to accompany her solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum, Basel and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.

First published by Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland, 2012; edited, and with a foreword by, Nikola Dietrich; texts by Kirsty Bell, Sabeth Buchmann and Pablo Lafuente; 260 x 200 mm; 216 pp; 138 color images; softcover with open binding, front flap incorporating a dual language booklet for texts (German and English).

After many discussions with the artist around how work such as hers may be adequately represented on the printed page, the opportunity arose to carry this out through the kind auspices of Nikola Dietrich at the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel.

The publication was to accompany the exhibition, but from the outset the motivation was to create a stand alone publication. Although any desire to provide an ‘equivalent’ to the work via the book would be clearly misguided, through the structuring and division of aesthetic content, distribution of the combination of differing papers, semi-wayward cropping of the images, concealing/intrusion of the captions, and finally the nearly-fragile collating, binding and finishing, the finished object might hopefully go some way to reflecting the spirit of the artist’s lightness of touch, conceptual rigour and approach to image making (or rather, lived experience and its representation through images).

Exhibition context (from the gallery press release): “The furtive eye of Lloyd’s camera records scenes of urban life, among other objects, illuminating the modern city as a site of voyeurism, fetishism, and sexual ambivalence. People engaged in everyday rituals and routine gestures of self-projection draw the artist’s interest, as do architecture, advertising, and the play of lighting effects on different surfaces. […]The selective gaze paints a picture of urban fascination permeated by a dynamic choreography of static and moving sequences. Such effects of perception fused in pictorial montages are most obviously achieved by virtue of mirror reflections, split screens, and rotation […]. In some instances, the viewer cannot infer the material reality of the surfaces. […] They are reduced to pure surface and materiality. Yet Lloyd’s practice is not limited to the filmed image; the installation, with monitors, flat screens, and projectors elegantly and meticulously set out in the room, also acquires a strong presence. The visitor is inevitably confronted not only with the pictures, but also with their manifestation”.

PIERRE MOLINIER
Cabinet

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A boxed edition containing a selection of reproductions of, and writings about, the work of Pierre Molinier.

First published in a limited edition, in 1993, by Cabinet, UK. Edited by Martin McGowan and Andrew Wheatley; texts by various contributors; blind embossed cloth bound box containing: A3 poster/broadsheet, B&W, double-sidedand; A6 postcard– B&W, double-sided; A4 text pages– various coloured stock.

Design by SecMoCo, produced along with the founders of Cabinet.

CABINET
Edition, publicity material

SecMoCo worked on various design elements for the aesthetic and intellectual powerhouse that is Cabinet on many of their early projects and exhibitions. Here is a selection of publicity material for various artists, and an edition (Pierre Molinier), from that period.

For more on this site on orphan drift and Pierre Molinier go to:
http://www.secmoco.com/index.php/orphan-drift/
http://www.secmoco.com/index.php/pierre-molinier/

O[RPHAN] D[RIFT>]:Cyberpositive
Cabinet

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First edition published in 1995 by O[rphan] D[rift>]/Cabinet Editions (with support from Nick Land), on the occasion of the exhibition/installation at Cabinet, Brixton, London, in 1995.

Edited by Maggie Roberts; 448pp; 130×200 mm; 1x B&W image; 2-colour soft cover;
ISBN 0-952-58240-6; Anti copyright.

Design: O[rphan] D[rift>]/Secondary Modern (SecMoCo as was).

Contributors:
. Asked– Alec Dippie, Fred Evans, Simon Josebury, Suzanne Karakashian, Tom Louichon, Nick Land, Suhail Malik, Rob Maze, Ranu Mukherjee, Dan O’Hara, Sadie Plant, Maggie Roberts, Kurt Vildgren.
. Unasked– J.G Ballard, Georges Bataille, Greg Bear, Hakim Bey, Kathryn Bigelow, William Burroughs, Pat Cadigan, Mike Davies, Manual DeLanda, Maya Deren, Giles Deleuze, Marguerite Duras, Philip K. Dick, Mark Downham, William Gibson, Felix Guattari, Stanislau Lem, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Mike McGuire (juno reactor), Mute Magazine, Thomas Pynchon, Anne Rice, Serge (total eclipse), Stelarc, Neil Stephenson, Tsuyoshi Suzuki (prana), Unnatural Publications.

Having worked on the design for many of the Cabinet projects since its early formation, SecMoCo was pleased to have the opportunity to design, layout and produce– along with with Maggie Roberts, Suzanne Karakashian and Ranu Mukherjee– what has proven to be a highly prescient publication. Published in the same year as the hyper-stimulation of the second Virtual Futures conference (May 25–28, University of Warwick) it can be seen as an indicative marker of the creative and intellectual work going on in that particular historical moment – to theorise the political and cultural implications of the very dawning of a highly networked global information system and the human–digital relationship within it.

The publication has been subsequently reprinted by Cabinet. Here, below, is the information on this from the Cabinet website, where you can buy copies of the reprint and you can also find images of the exhibition/installation in 1995.

‘0(rphan)d(rift>) cyberpositive is an experimental sci fi novel, collectively authored by a group of asked and unasked contributors and edited by OD’s Maggie Roberts. It was published in 1995 with support from Nick Land and Cabinet Editions, serving as our manifesto and as the catalogue for the debut exhibition of the same name. It came together in the spirit of much of our visual work, bringing together processes of sampling and looping as well as the Burroughs cut up technique, referring to a breakdown and reordering of language from a post apocalyptic POV.’
http://www.orphandriftarchive.com

0(rphan)d(rift>) cyberpositive
1995
448pp. 13 x 20 cm
Published by Cabinet Editions / Openmute
Reissue 2012 and 2015
ISBN 13: 9781906496807
£15.00 (2019 reissue)
For orders please email art@cabinetltd.demon.co.uk

GLAM: THE PERFORMANCE OF STYLE. TATE Liverpool

SecMoCo were delighted to be approached by the judicious Darren Pih (Curator, Tate Liverpool) with the offer of a dream job – to design the catalogue to accompany the exhibition GLAM: The Performance Of Style (at Tate Liverpool, UK and later Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany). Through an ambitious collection of works and artefacts, it’s drive was to conceptually locate the early 1970’s glam pop style phenomenon in the context of the high /low cultural interchange within the artistic milieu of the time.

The design of the catalogue was an attempt to convey this shrewd engagement with the period whilst resisting the (admittedly very tempting) urge to indulge in the use of glitter, kitsch and overtly ‘bad-taste’ fonts. To revert to such a swift design short-hand would have been to do a disservice both to the the complexity of the creative activity of the time, and this contemporary re-appraisal of it. The design also included a detailed illustrated timeline of the art, culture and politics of the time.

First Published September 2013 by Tate Publishing, UK. Edited by Darren Pih; 215 x 255 mm; 192pp, thread sewn; 4-colour images throughout; 4-colour, 8 page soft cover (inc flaps)

Context from the Tate website:
GLAM: The Performance Of Style is the first book to fully examine the serious cultural influence of one of the twentieth century’s most excessive and exciting pop movements. ‘Glam’ emerged in the early 1970s and remains one of the most instantly recognisable but critically derided stylistic phenomena of twentieth century art and cultural history. Known mostly through the music of the era… the style was also evident in other art forms through its acquaintance with theatrics, artifice, myth and androgyny.

Covering a range of subjects including fashion, music, film, gender in performance and postmodernism, the book moves beyond a nostalgic reception and will reveal the under-acknowledged exchange between avant-garde art and the extravagant style, tracing the glam sensibility to performance and installation art, and to painting and sculpture’.

Context from Noddy Holder (Slade), reviewing the exhibition for The Guardian 20.02.13:
‘You can see Marc Bolan’s leather hat in a glass case. I couldn’t believe how small it was: I knew he was a small man, but this hat is really tiny’.