BRIDEWEALTH (DOT) is the second bookwork in a series of longform concrete poems (see also: BUFFALO, THEE WHOLE (EARTH CATALOG[UE])) .

Books ships in a padded envelope within a week of purchase. For questions or international shipping, please email benduvall10@gmail.com.

Ben DuVall
BRIDEWEALTH (DOT), 2024
6 panel accordion fold book with die cut cover
One side Risograph printed, pamphlet bound
15 x 10" closed, 60" long when open
Edition of 40, stamped and numbered
Printed at Shandaken: Catskill, 2024
$50 USD + shipping

CONTENTS is a collection of details from recent graphite and colored pencil drawings; the result of an ongoing research project into the graphic vocabulary of 20th century protest and mutual aid movements, with a specific focus on print ephemera, publications, and journalistic accounts. This 15 foot long accordion fold artists' book is the first to collect and reproduce these drawings at full scale, mainly highlighting material from the UK and North America from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Books ships in a padded envelope within a week of purchase. For questions or international shipping, please email benduvall10@gmail.com.

Ben DuVall
CONTENTS: drawings 2018–2023 of newspapers, bulletins, & pamphlets 1963–1990, 2024
30 panel accordion fold book with separate jacket
One side Risograph printed
9.5 x 6" closed, 180" long when open
Edition of 50
Printed at Shandaken: Catskill, 2024
$50 USD + shipping

For questions, and international shipping, please email benduvall10@gmail.com.

Esperanto and Keep Honkin', 2024
2.75 x 8.5″ screen printed bumper stickers
Edition of 500

The Institute for the Study of the Urtext is pleased to announce the inaugural three publications of their Urditions imprint, Everything I know about...so far #1–3. The Everything I know about...so far series is a library of fragmentary knowledge in zine form. Each publication is printed in small batches as an open edition, and revised and reprinted as new information comes to light.

#1 B. DuVall - Buecker & Harpsichords and the SoHo Baroque Opera Co., 2023
Research into Robert Buecker and his SoHo gallery-cum-harpsichord factory Buecker & Harpsichords (1972–83?), which showed early work by Richard Tuttle, Carmen Herrera, Rosemary Mayer and others; as well as the early-and-new music ensemble he ran from 1977–98, the SoHo Baroque Opera Co.
20 pp. b&w

#2 Adam Buffington - Nýlókórinn (The Nýló Choir), 2023
The first ever English account of the legendary Icelandic artist Magnús Pálsson’s Nýlókórinn (The Nýló Choir), a sound poetry ensemble he formed in 2003, which has continued to perform new compositions from a variety of artists and composers. An essential look into the artist and educator whose Fluxus-adjacent artistic practice has shaped Icelandic contemporary art today.
20 pp. b&w + color

#3 C.C. - the flowers in May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, 2024
A deeply personal exploration of the botanical May Sarton, through Sarton's papers in the NYPL and her published personal diary Journal of a Solitude. Biographical research and meditations on solitude are punctuated by botanical information about the type and number of flowers Sarton mentions growing in her beloved garden.
16 pp. b&w

For questions, and international shipping, please email benduvall10@gmail.com.

Everything I know about...so far series, 2023–24
5.5 x 8.5″ digitally printed zines
Open and constantly revised editions

I have reflected that the principal passions or affections of our mind are three, namely, anger, moderation, and humility or supplication… The art of music also points clearly to these three in its terms “agitated,” “soft,” and “moderate” (concitato, molle, and temperato). In all the works of former composers I have indeed found examples of the “soft” and the “moderate,” but never of the “agitated.”

—C. Monteverdi
from Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi
1609

...
saw violin or part of it
drill violin
drive a nail into violin
hammer violin with hammer
bite violin
step over violin and crush it
rip violin appart
drop violin over floor
throw violin or parts of it to the audience

—G. Maciunas
from Solo for Violin
1962

Due to an ongoing fascination with Fluxus founder George Maciunas's love of Italian baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi, I relayed the following three event scores to Red Door Letter Press in Des Moines, Iowa in June of 2023 to perform on their press:

stile molle
whisper to the paper. caress it. leave as little trace as possible.

stile temperato
find the line between harmony and boredom. rhythm and meter (or lack thereof) are important!

stile concitato
go on the attack. repeat, skew, trill. cause discomfort.

Prints are available for purchase on a pay-what-you-can sliding scale from $60 to $100, and ship in a flat envelope within a week of purchase. For other offers, questions, and international shipping, please email benduvall10@gmail.com.

Ben DuVall
three event scores for printing press (after george & claudio), 2023
Letter press prints in hand-stamped portfolio
Prints: Three 9 x 12″ prints
Printed by Red Door Press, Des Moines, IA
Portfolio: 9.5 x 12.5″, stamped with scores on interior
Hand numbered and signed, edition of 50

In his Pensées, Blaise Pascal wrote "Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death." Taking some liberty, Paul Virilio (channeling the 19th century French fortifications strategist, Colonel Delair) would rephrase this thought succinctly in his book Speed and Politics—"Stasis is death." What is true for the individual creature, is true of the military force, or indeed, of the capitalist economic machine: it must ever be consuming to survive.

To keep ourselves from stasis, we invent games—jeux de guerre, Kriegsspiel, Glass Bead Games, Duchampian chess matches, dérives—movement for movement's sake. That these have ossified into institutions that fetishize acceleration is what Virilio called dromocracy, rule by the necessity of speed qua speed. What then is the solution? To resist institutionalized dromocracy by stubbornly remaining homo ludens? Stasis is the state of having mapped out of all options, apathetic and rationalized existence; but when we play, it is an unproductive and undirected act, with no concern for efficiency. It is a way of drawing contrasts between the fast and the slow, showing that acceleration is not always the best defined opposite of stasis. Rather it is feints, dead ends, non-sequiturs, and absurdities, all of which generate an excess of paths that must be explored as nomad, not machine.

Flags are available for purchase on a pay-what-you-can sliding scale from $300 to $600. Artwork trades will be considered on a case by case basis. If you have access to a flagpole, I am happy to loan you the AP copy for a temporary exhibition free of charge.

For other offers, questions, and international shipping, please email benduvall10@gmail.com

Ben DuVall
STASIS = DEATH, 2023
Single sided nylon appliqué flag with grommets.
36 x 60″
Edition of 3 + 1 AP
Signed certificate of authenticity included

On their 1988 7″ single “Man Should Surrender”, the short-lived post-hardcore band, Pailhead (the unlikely collaboration between Ministry's Al Jourgensen and Minor Threat/Fugazi's Ian MacKaye) proclaimed:

“You engineer the stratosphere
You commandeer this hemisphere
But water will still come.
Man should surrender.”

As I write this, the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine has just been destroyed, unleashing the widespread flooding of the lowlands. Elsewhere, the names of dams themselves are instruments of propaganda, as in the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a nationalist project to cut neighbors off at the source. Meanwhile, in the American Southwest, California, Arizona and Nevada scramble to negotiate the future of the Colorado River, how it will be divvied up and restricted, as if water was so many poker chips swept in by the shrewdest player. And lest we forget, everywhere the ocean continues its inexorable rise, imperceptible until it isn't.

We’ve been hearing for some time now that the wars of the future will be over water. When God said to Job “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? … Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters?” his meaning was clear: Man Should Surrender.

Flags are available for purchase on a pay-what-you-can sliding scale from $300 to $600. Artwork trades will be considered on a case by case basis. If you have access to a flagpole, I am happy to loan you the AP copy for a temporary exhibition free of charge.

For other offers, questions, and international shipping, please email benduvall10@gmail.com

Ben DuVall
MAN SHOULD SURRENDER, 2023
Single sided nylon appliqué flag with grommets.
36 x 60″
Edition of 3 + 1 AP
Signed certificate of authenticity included

Somewhere between a minimalist mantra and a dire warning, "radical material simplification" is a phrase coined by historian Chris Wickham in his book The Inheritance of Rome to describe the declining standards of living after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. It is an eloquent euphemism for collapse, which necessitates a gaunt turning inward, a taking stock of what can be salvaged and what can be done without. Wickham notes that not all parts of the Empire felt its disintegration at the same time or to the same degree—one generation may have been educated in Latin or experienced the imported bounty of the North African provinces, while the next was never taught the language or rarely tasted Numidian olive oil.

In our own time, the past decade has roughly marked its beginning with the popularity of the KonMari Method and “you-will-own-nothing-and-you-will-be-happy” tech utopianism, and its end with runaway inflation, a housing affordability crisis, and supply chain failure. The privilege of minimalism in the first part may presage its necessity in the next, and while any comparison to classical antiquity may be trite, Wickham’s phrase echoes in our ears with fresh relevance.

Flags are available for purchase on a pay-what-you-can sliding scale from $300 to $600. Artwork trades will be considered on a case by case basis. If you have access to a flagpole, I am happy to loan you the AP copy for a temporary exhibition free of charge.

For other offers, questions, and international shipping, please email benduvall10@gmail.com

Ben DuVall
RADICAL MATERIAL SIMPLIFICATION, 2022
Single sided nylon appliqué flag with grommets.
36 x 60″
Edition of 3 + 1 AP
Signed certificate of authenticity included

Beginning in the 1950s, Aldermaston, Berkshire, England was home to two heirs of the Hermetic alchemical tradition—the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE), and Alan Caiger-Smith's Aldermaston Pottery studio. While AWRE dealt in the sinister objectives of the imagined Philosopher's Stone, mass annihilation and military supremacy, Caiger-Smith was researching one of the more esoteric byproducts of the ancient alchemists: lustre glaze ceramics. Caiger-Smith charted alchemy and lustreware's own violent history (lest we forget the magus John Dee coined the term ‟British Empire”), as lustre glazes and firing techniques were technologies stolen from the Islamic world by the crusaders of the Middle Ages. With their oxidized, gold-like surfaces, they were perhaps the closest attempt at transmutation achieved in the alchemical laboratories of old. After much trial and error in his Aldermaston kilns, Caiger-Smith finally resurrected a technique of lustreware which had been lost since medieval times, and adorned his vessels with elegant, calligraphic brushwork. In response to AWRE's presence, Aldermaston also became an important site for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marches, beginning in the 1950s. Though I have found no indication that Caiger-Smith participated in these demonstrations, several of his studio assistants have given accounts of their engagement in the CND.

Alan Caiger-Smith passed away in February, 2020. As a memorial to his life and legacy, this is a print edition of a series of drawings I worked on from 2017–2019, based on his lustreware plate designs, as well as slogans and symbols of the CND London-Aldermaston marches. The portfolio includes six Risographed prints, using black, yellow, scarlet, and metallic gold (the alchemical color change sequence) Riso inks, and one print of a drawing of Caiger-Smith with caption, edition info, and signature on verso. The plate prints are 10 x 10″ each and have hand-deckled edges. All prints come in a specially designed, hand-stamped portfolio.

Prints are available for purchase on a pay-what-you-can sliding scale from $60 to $120, and ship in a flat envelope within a week of purchase. For other offers, questions, and international shipping, please email benduvall10@gmail.com.

Ben DuVall
Six Plates for Alan Caiger-Smith, 2021
Risograph prints in hand-stamped portfolio
Prints: Six 10 x 10″ prints + one 5 x 7″
Printed at TXTbooks, Brooklyn
Portfolio: 10.5 x 10.5″
Hand numbered and signed, edition of 50

All texts in this book originally appeared on my personal website, www.bduvall.com, between January 1 and December 31, 2017. During that period the site functioned as an “anti-archive,” all content was deleted every day and new content was uploaded according to a self-imposed list of rules. Previous content was available by specific email request only. During this time, I acted as the anti-archival “custodian,” uploading, maintaining, dusting, deleting, fielding requests and organizing the output generated by and for the site.

Some of these texts were long term projects that reached their conclusion during that period, others were developed more quickly—in days, hours or sometimes minutes. Here, each is given equal weight, regardless of the amount of time or effort expended. They are gathered here in the order in which they appeared on the site (but not necessarily the order in which they were written). The texts are by no means uniform in format, content, or quality—they include (but are not limited to) free-writes, responses to films, pseudo-poetry, typographic drawings, art historical studies, false-flag operations, dead-end projects, rejected proposals, and self-analysis of the site itself. This book presents the texts as closely as possible to their original web format, and only minimal edits have been made where deemed appropriate.

The title of this book, Maximum Peace, was a guiding mantra throughout the project, and the phrase appeared on several days in one form or another. For me it meant an acceptance of non-permanence and a steady devotion to an extended task—something akin to a monk’s Hours or On Kawara’s Date Paintings. While the individual texts are hardly ever satisfying in themselves, I hope their roughness together approximates a more living thing.

Ben DuVall
MAXIMUM PEACE: Texts from the Anti-Archive
136 pp.
Edition of 100
$20 USD + shipping

THEE WHOLE (EARTH CATALOG[UE]) is a large scale concrete poem I started in December of 2017 during a residency at the Studios at MASS MoCA. The composition grew out of writings, notes, photos and drawings from my time in winter-beset North Adams, and merged with concrete settings of subjects ranging from Sly and the Family Stone to Lord Byron; Ruy López chess openings to Hildegard von Bingen herbal remedies. My first attempt to print it ended in failure—trying to stitch together 18 smaller screens to achieve the original 40 x 50″ two-color composition. It was replete with misregistration and missing detail in the fine text layer, and the prints, though completed, have never left my studio. Since that time, I’ve been periodically returning to THEE WHOLE (EARTH CATALOG[UE]), continuing to alter and add to the composition, until November, 2019 when I had the opportunity to print an edition with the master printers at Modern Multiples in Los Angeles.

Prints are available for purchase on a pay-what-you-can sliding scale from $400 to $1000, and ship rolled in a mailer tube within a week of purchase. For other offers, questions, and international shipping, please email benduvall10@gmail.com.

THEE WHOLE (EARTH CATLOG[UE]), 2017/19
Two color screen print on Coventry Rag 320gsm paper
35 x 44″
Hand numbered and signed, edition of 10 + 1 AP

Pay-what-you-can

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