Primary Information is a publisher of artists’ books and artists’ writings. Based in New York City since 2006, it facilitates intergenerational dialogue by publishing new and archival books, making out-of-print works available to new and expanded audiences. Primary Information is a longstanding contributor to the A.R.T. Library Program.

Primary Information’s Executive Editor James Hoff and Executive Director Matthew Walker joined A.R.T. staff Ricky Ruihong Li in a conversation about artists’ books, digital publication, and the ways books reach people, among other topics.

A.rt R.esources T.ransfer: How did Primary Information form as a publishing practice?

James Hoff: Primary Information was founded in 2006. My experience working at Printed Matter—from 2001 to 2009, on and off—was very formative. Printed Matter’s history is intertwined with the legacy of art activism in publishing and the formulation of the artist book in the 1960s. Following on the heels of the paperback revolution in the 1950s, which had made poetry and fiction accessible, the idea of the artists’ book as a democratic multiple of the art object emerged. The artists’ book had to do with a political desire to get around the gatekeepers of art and culture: museums, exhibition spaces, galleries, things like that.

Primary Information was deeply informed by this history when Miriam Katzeff, who also worked at Printed Matter at the time, and I co-founded the press.

A.R.T.: What was the conversation like around artists’ book at that time?

JH: How artists’ books function in the world and their political potential—both as art and as publications—have changed since our founding. We were well aware that a lot of the original publications by the thinkers and practitioners from the 1960s, who were considered the backbone of the artists’ books tradition, had become collector's items, cordoned off by institutions and inaccessible to most. We're talking about books by Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Weiner, Sol LeWitt, and so on. As young artists, we wanted to have access to these materials that have become rarified by a market of fetishized commodities. We were lucky that we were able to access a lot of it through Printed Matter, but we wanted to make them accessible to more people.

A.R.T.: How does Primary Information address the failed promise of this supposedly democratic medium?

JH: One of Primary Information’s original ideas was producing facsimile editions of out-of-print publications that were still very much a part of a conversation, something like the Avalanche magazine framework in the 1960s and 70s. But to get an Avalanche, you'd have to pay $200 or $250 an issue and it was rare to come by. Avalanche is an example of what we were interested in making facsimile versions of because it was something that was very much part of the conversation but was inaccessible to most people.

Given this reality, where artists’ books had become commodified objects, it made sense for us to publish facsimile versions for a significantly larger audience. As an educational organization, we seek to make sure relevant historical materials can still be in the hands of students. That’s how we view the artist book and why we view our production as having radical potential politically and creatively.

A.R.T.: In Primary Information’s mission statement, you emphasize that artists and art workers are agents for changes. How do you address this commitment with your publishing work?

JH: It's odd that we even have to say that. Most changes in the art world do not come from museums, despite what a museum might say or claim credit for, but from artists and art workers. Particularly in our times, changes always come from the bottom and artists are almost always at the bottom. We are in alignment with the art workers who not only helped create artists’ books in the 1960s, but also started calling for systemic change within the art world, particularly advocacy for inclusivity along the lines of gender, race, and class in the museum space. These were ideas put forth by the Art Workers’ Coalition, an open coalition of artists, filmmakers, writers, critics, and museum staff formed in New York in 1969. An early publication we published was a facsimile of one of the Art Workers’ Coalition documents, "Open Hearing." If you look closely at this document, you can find radical proposals for how art should be distributed into the world and how museums should be responsible to the communities. Primary Information’s mission is to defend artists’ books and their radical potential against systems of inequalities.

A.R.T.: What is the process behind Primary Information’s re-publication of out-of-print artists’ books?

JH: We are cautious about using the term re-publication because we want to emphasize that the historical publications that we publish are facsimile editions produced to the specs of the original. This means matching the paper, printing, binding, and overall feel of the original, which can be difficult. We take great care to make sure that they match the original, which we see as a work of art in book form. It's a process that is both technical and aesthetic and something that took us a long time to perfect. In addition to matching the book’s material form, we also make an effort to clean up every image and page that we scan before it goes to press. For example, we would never leave the aging of the paper tone and we would never inset pages to have a border around them because it is like putting a filter in front of the original work. Ideally the book looks exactly like it did when it was first published.

Matthew Walker: This is to honor the original work and artist (as James points out), but it’s also about the audience. We want these works to be experienced by new generations of audiences as closely as possible to the way the original audiences would have experienced the works.

A.R.T.: I want to switch gears to talk further about access, particularly in today’s media environment. Both Primary Information and A.R.T. are founded on questions about art’s inaccessibility, although we address it differently. How do you think this problem has changed since the 2000s, when Primary information was founded, if at all? Do we access art differently now?

JH: There’s a paradigm shift in the way we access information, but our access to actual artwork has not changed much even in this networked age. It's important to make the distinction that, for the most part, we publish books as works of art and these works are very hard to truly experience online.

Today, artists’ books have been mediatized to a degree that wasn't quite possible in the 1980s and ’90s. It gave rise to their renaissance in the early 2000s with an expanding network of discerning audiences and practitioners. We have institutions like Printed Matter, Art Metropole, A.R.T. and others to thank because they have devoted decades to making artists’ books visible. We've seen the number of people creating artists’ books grow, and I don't think that's going to plateau anytime soon.

A.R.T.: Primary Information makes available many pioneering documents from the heyday of Anglo-American conceptual art as PDF files. What does reproducing these materials in this digital format mean for the politics of access?

JH: When we first approached Seth Siegelaub, the genre-defying art dealer who defined the term “primary information” in his late 1960s curatorial practice, we wanted to publish facsimiles of his early catalogs and publications. He rejected the idea and said that he did not believe in books anymore. In 2008-09, we turned to him again because we were doing a project at PS1 as part of an exhibition called That Was Then, This Is Now, which was about the cultural and political legacy of New York in the 1960s and ’70s. We asked if we could publish his The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer And Sale Agreement—which is a contract template he developed in 1971 with lawyer Bob Projansky to, as he wrote, “remedy some generally acknowledged inequalities in the art world, particularly artists’ lack of control over the use of their work and participation in its economics after they no longer own it”—as PDFs. He agreed and was later blown away by the fact that these PDFs were downloaded around 15,000 times within a month.

As you might know, he was all in for the dematerialization of the art object. When he saw those results, he was deeply impressed and gave us permission to publish his books as PDFs and to distribute them for free. Even though it might not work with all of our publications, he was a big supporter of us publishing more PDFs when possible.

Seth was very forward thinking in terms of how he viewed exhibitions and books when he set out to produce those publication-based exhibitions in the 1960s. He was also one of the very few from his generation who wasn’t wedded to this idea that it had to be in book form and still understood the newest mediatic sites where artistic information could be directed for progressive changes.

A.R.T.: What is the process for Primary Information to decide on taking on a book project?

MW: We try to be flexible in our programming. We often program a year or a year and a half out, but we also don't want to get too far ahead because we want to be able to respond in as close to real-time as possible to what is happening in the art world and to the greater political world at large.

JH: We are interested in responding to conversations that are already in place, while we also attempt to read the room, for lack of a better term, for what’s next, so we can help start or catalyze a conversation in the art world, or in culture more broadly.

Publications such as Black Art Notes or Black Phoenix, published in 2021 and 2022 respectively, are very easily connected to the cultural and political environment at the time when they were published—but those books were in the works for a couple years before they were released. These two titles were a response to a particular political current in the making before they gained traction in a later moment.

A.R.T.: We have been distributing Primary Information books to public libraries, schools, and incarcerated readers for many years now. Some are facsimiles of art-historically significant documents, such as Michael Asher: Writings 1973–1983 on Works 1969–1979, Dan Graham: Theater, and The New Woman’s Survival Catalog. There are newly conceived book projects by contemporary artists and writers, such as Assembling a Black Counter Culture by DeForrest Brown, Jr. How do you reconcile the two needs: to undertake contemporary projects and to recontextualize historical materials? And how does Primary Information structure its distribution?

JH: We see them as part of the same question. We are interested in how facsimiles can facilitate intergenerational conversations.

MW: The art historical credentials built through our program of facsimile production enable us to create a platform to feature contemporary voices that might not have the same reach otherwise. Our subscription program delivers our publications in yearly sets. So facsimile editions alongside new books by contemporary artists will go into the hands of our individual or institutional subscribers. We also consider A.R.T. to be a central part of how we think about our distribution. It's one of the key components that's built into how each title gets put into the world instead of a charitable afterthought.

JH: A.R.T. is an incredible service for us to have a reach that we just couldn't have ourselves. It’s invaluable that our books get distributed through A.R.T., which plays an important part in helping us fulfill our mission.

A.R.T.: Outreach comprises a large part of our work. We’ve been recently working on connecting our services not only to more public libraries and schools but also to independent, para-public sites of literacy that the Public systems in place fail to accommodate.

MW: We need to have this conversation at some point. Like, how do we reach community centers and other unofficial sites of knowledge production?

JH: It's an important but difficult question because there's no registered list anywhere to reach out to. It becomes an issue of trying to figure out how to reach them through grassroots means, which takes time and is fraught with inefficiencies. It's a matter of trying to figure out where these spaces are on a case-by-case basis. For us, those are the places we would donate books to. Although it’s hard, we want to be present at every level.

Internationally, we work with distributors throughout the world, particularly in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. But we're currently trying to figure out how to distribute in Africa and South America—though we are not suggesting that these two are comparable geographies in any sense. It would involve not only having distribution networks in both places, but also reaching out to bookstores and other local places that could accommodate our publications.

Sometimes our books reach bookstores in India or Egypt but we don’t know how. We want to figure out how we can make it more consistent. We are always willing to come up with new means to make our books accessible to the largest possible audiences even if that means taking a hit on sales prices, engaging with other forms of economy, and so on.

A.R.T.: Primary Information is such an important ally for us to envision other economies or means through which art and literature could reach people.

JH: If we put our heads together, maybe brought a few other folks in, we could probably come up with some solutions to some of the barriers. We'd love to continue this conversation.