Imperativo! femina e canino a new artist book

Since yesterday’s blog (October 6th 2015) was so full of imperatives (commanding readers to draw was one of them), it is time to tell you more about inspirational imperatives and the book I made with West The Hague, inspired by the nature of imperatives. The title (Imperativo!) says it loud and clearly. It states the content with no delay. The second title (Femina e Canino) addresses two partners in crime ruling the waves of this paper (by)product generated during the process of developing the Come-Go-Stay project. To the Dutch who associate the word canino with rabbit since it sounds like the Dutch word ‘konijn’, I like to point out that canine means doglike, derived from the Greek word κυνη. But maybe I am just being plain ignorant about the knowledge of others, thus by implying the absence of some (knowledge) I am the one being, well, stupid. Or, just, ignorant.

The Dutch would say: “You can’t know everything,” (“Je kunt niet alles weten.”) and shrug their shoulders under a blank face that easily could be misinterpreted as plain innocence or strangely proud.

‘Imperativo! Femina e canino’ is dedicated to one special work of Gertrude Stein, Sacred Emily, and contains a mixture of anecdotes, miniatures, instructions, essayettes and method meditations. Maybe a short fragment grants an insight into the content of a book that is meant to be delt as an equal part of the exhibition and read. Since the content is deliberately hap hardish by nature, it is not necessary to read the whole thing at once. Leaf through the pages and linger is a manner of exploring more suitable and light by nature.

From the book here are two fragments:

Essayette à trois (#06)

(Céci n’est pas une chose aphoristique)

An extremely short homage to Jerome Bel’s notion discursive dance could be rephrased as the somewhat cornish sounding ‘All you wanted to know about discursive dance (but were afraid to ask).’
Dancing like a cat on a hot tin roof.
Het is de miskenning door de ander van de in-potentie en niet de im-po-tentie van het wezen dat zijn procreatieve aanleg schaamteloos onbe-nut laat. Gezien worden is niet meer genoeg.

And:

Method meditation #01

The whipping

The amount of endurable femina canino imperatives can never exceed the number of commands an average intelligent female raised in the Netherlands (or another Western European country with an equivalent validating system of gender gazing) can achieve within the timeframe of the average time span of the adult art viewer. This, of course, is measured in seconds while the imperatives compare in endurance quota.
Compared to whippings, maybe.
Jumping rope my max is eighty-one jumps.

Imperativo! Femina e canino
Emily Kocken
88 pages
ISBN 978-90-79917-52-5
Published & designed by West Den Haag
€ 25,00
Available at the desk of West from 10 October 2015