Mimi Cabell

Pink Jacket is a publishing imprint that publishes artists’ books, with a focus on artists and designers for whom working in book form would forge a new avenue in their practice. To us, writing seems to be the under-acknowledged tool of a maker, a thinking, communicating and dealing-with-stuff device common to all. Lists, notes, titles, notes for titles, descriptions of work, instructions for completing work, all take on poetic significance when given space. Pink Jacket is a space for the work that isn’t quite artwork, and yet is completely integral to artwork; more and more we think this material lives as writing.

In collaboration with Phoebe Stubbs.

Please direct inquiries to pinkjacketpublishing - at - gmail - dot - com.

Contributors Inc. is a collective that works with the contents lists in art and culture magazines as our material. We established the collective to highlight the gender imbalance in the contributors to magazines of art criticism, because redressing imbalance is too often talked about in terms of visible artists and less in reference to those who create the discourse around art. From working with this material, however, our aims have broadened as we have come to see art magazines as both archives of the art world—they constitute a large part of its critical history—and sites in which shifting trends based on commercial and political concerns are visible.

We research, create interventions, publishing projects and artwork. We design proposals and pose questions of editorial design in its most expansive sense. We talk about the project at events and host workshops around the issues we uncover. 

Seen here is our intervention of Cabinet magazine published in the magazine itself; our essay written following the allegations of sexual misconduct made against Knight Landesman, one of the publishers of Artforum magazine, published on Temporary Art Review; and the first few pages of our publication Artfrom, completed following our research on the contributors to Artforum magazine.

Contact us on contributorsinc - at - gmail - dot - com for more information.

Morbid Symptoms: Interregnum and Loops of Authority in the Muqata’a’s

The book was published in August 2017 on the occasion of Shifting Ground, Ramallah, an offsite project commissioned by Sharjah Biennial 13, and curated by Lara Khaldi.

Morbid Symptoms investigates the history of the Muqata’a’s - military forts built by the British as part of their counterinsurgency program during the British Mandate in Israel/Palestine. After the end of the British Mandate and the creation of Israel, the forts faced different destinies. Many are still in operation today as Israeli prisons, administrative offices, and national heritage sites; the Muqata’a in Ramallah, Palestine houses Yasser Arafat’s tomb, serves as the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, and acts as the official West Bank office of Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the State of Palestine. The project is an archeology of these different historical trajectories, an attempt to understand what keeps together their heterogeneity.

This work was conceived and executed in collaboration with Samir Harb and Nicola Perugini.

Published in January 2014 in the first issue of The Enemy, a tri-annual online micro journal edited by Charlie White. Other contributing artists include: Roe Etheridge, Hedi El Kholti, Mike Kelley, Michael Smith, and David Robbins.

Google reads our emails, garners information from our personal messages and uses that profiling strategy to select “relevant” ads. It then displays those ads on the screen next to the very emails from which the information was initially taken.

American Psycho was created by sending the entirety of Bret Easton Ellis’ violent, masochistic and gratuitous novel American Psycho through GMail, one page at a time. We collected the ads that appeared next to each email and used them to annotate the original text, page by page. In printing it as a perfect bound book, we erased the body of Ellis’ text and left only chapter titles and constellations of our added footnotes. What remains is American Psycho, told through its chapter titles and annotated relational Google ads.

We were most curious how Google would handle the violence, racism and graphic language in American Psycho. In some instances the ads related to the content of the email, in others they were completely irrelevant, either out of time or out of place. In one scene, where first a dog and then a man are brutally murdered with a knife, Google supplied ample ads regarding knives and knife sharpeners. In another scene the ads disappeared altogether when the narrator makes a racial slur. Google's choice and use of standard ads unrelated to the content next to which they appeared offered an alternate window into how Google ads function — the ad for Crest Whitestrips Coupons appeared the highest number of times, next to both the most graphic and the most mundane sections of the book, leaving no clear logic as to how it was selected to appear. This "misreading" ultimately echoes the hollowness at the center of advertising and consumer culture, a theme explored in excess in American Psycho.

In collaboration with Jason Huff.