Sonnet(s)

Ulises Carrión

Ulises Carrión left Mexico City for Europe in 1970 and eventually settled in Amsterdam, where, in 1975, he wrote his manifesto, “The New Art of Making Books” and founded the legendary bookshop-gallery, Other Books and So, a hub for mail art activity and one of the first venues dedicated to artists’ publications.

In 1972, Carrión took a single poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and churned it through 44 typographic and procedural permutations. The publication of Sonnet(s), one of the first of his influential “bookworks,” signaled a departure from Carrión’s earlier writing practice.

A pioneer in conceptualizing the artists book, mail art, and what today might be called social practice, Carrión, who died in 1989, has only recently been recognized with a retrospective exhibit at Reina Sofia (Madrid) and Museo Jumex (Mexico City).

The present republication of Sonnet(s) is supplemented by new essays on Carrión’s bookworks by contemporary artists, writers, and scholars from Mexico, Europe, and the US: Felipe Becerra, Mónica de la Torre, Verónica Gerber Bicecci (tr. Christina MacSweeney), Annette Gilbert (tr. Shane Anderson), India Johnson, Michalis Pichler, Heriberto Yépez.

'The late Ulises Carrión (1941–1989) is perhaps Mexico’s most important conceptual artist. Although he eventually became involved in mail, video, and performance art—in addition to making books and running the bookshop and exhibition space for artists’ books and multiples Other Books and So in Amsterdam—his early body of work was situated precisely at the intersection of conceptual art and poetry. [...] Arguing that if in the “old art the writer writes texts [ … ] in the new art the writer makes books,” Carrión urged writers and artists to take advantage of the possibilities that new printing technologies such as the mimeograph had to offer, to bypass the market, and to form alternate distribution networks by fostering communities of likeminded practitioners.' – Monica de la Torre