F.R. David is a biannual journal published by De Appel Arts Center in Amsterdam featuring a wide array of artists and writers and a different loose theme for each issue.
Each issue is Softcover, perfect-bound, ~200-300 pages, 4.75 inches x 7.5 inches (12 x 19 cm) English.
Spring 2023, Zeros and Ones: Riffing off the title, this volume includes Catherine Damman interviewing Carolyn Lazard – an artist whose conceptual and often spare videos, sculptures, installations, and performances explore the full amplitude of relation, in addition a feature on contemporary artist Tishan Hsu, whose practice examines the “embodiment of technology”, plus contributions by time-based media artist Silvia Kolbowski, for whom political resistance, the unconscious, and structures of spectatorship are a central concern of all her projects; choreographer and dancer Yvonne Rainer; and science fiction author Octavia Butler. Edited with Kathrin Bentele, Anna Gritz, and Ghislaine Leung.
Spring 2022, Take, Eat: This 21st issue of ‘F.R. David’ is edited by Will Holder with Andrea di Serego Alighieri. Seemingly more fragmented than usual, it includes contributions, quotes, found materials, and excerpts from Maggie Nelson, Charles Mingus, Octavia Butler, John Keats, Alice Notley, Paul Abbott, Bernadette Mayer, Fred Dewey, John Cage, Marion Keiner, Anne Carson, and others. An afterword by Nicolas Schoffer entitled “Microtime” concludes this wandering, inscrutable journey.
Autumn 2020, Correctional Facility Edited by Will Holder, the constellation of material in this issue collectively philosophises on topics that deal with difference and the transformative processes between things. It essentially puts forth the notion of the intellectual as a transitional identity. Contributions from various contemporary, historical, and even ancient authors and sources include George Orwell, Simone Weil, Apuleius, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alan Stanbridge, John Cage, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Carson, Barbara Guest, Jenn Ashworth, Lewis Hyde, and many others. The volume begins with an introduction by Charles Bernstein and concludes with an afterword by Robert Duncan.
Spring 2020, Very Good The nineteenth issue of ‘F.R.DAVID’ is edited by Will Holder and Paula Abbott, and will serve as a reader for “We can still see the horizon (and it’s curved)”, a summer residency in Scotland led by the editors. It includes a surprising array of contributions from writer Jorge Luis Borges, journalist and writer Italo Calvino, composer Hugo Cole, literary critic and theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith, percussionist Milford Graves, philosopher Michel Serres, novelist and essayist Wilson Harris, poet Bernadette Mayer, composer and music theorist Harry Partch, pianist and poet Cecil Taylor, and several others.
Summer 2019, Recto Verso The eighteenth issue of ‘F.R. DAVID’ is edited by Will Holder and had its beginnings in prosody, the measure of language, geometry, and a notion of imagist transcription. A two-dimensional exercise, it turns out, on paper. Words were tuned out in favour of the volume of values our bodies exchanged. This issue’s diverse contents centre around the non-verbal, the insinuated, the reverse-side of the image, the backside, and perhaps even the next page. With contributions by Simone Weil, Marcel Proust, Will Holder, Anna Daučíková, Yvonne Rainer, Jesse Birch, Paola Grassi, David Lang, Péter Dobai, John Yau, Clare Noonan, and others.
Spring 2019, Black Sun is edited in conversation with Krist Gruijthuijsen, currently the director of KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, to accompany the exhibitions ‘David Wojnarowicz Photography & Film 1978–1992’, ‘Reza Abdoh’, and ‘TIES, TALES AND TRACES: Dedicated to Frank Wagner, Independent Curator (1958–2016)’. The issue departs from Wojnarowicz’s grief at the loss of loved ones during the 1980s AIDS crisis and anger at the US government for its wilful neglect. It assembles a selection of various gendered and sexual positions, all seeking support, love, and intimacy in linguistic, architectural, and bodily structures while under threat of collapse.
Autumn 2018, What I Mean is... examines the impartation of meaning through visible language, whether informative, instructive, transformative, narrative, or other. Contributions include Peter Culley’s restructuring of a botanical text as lyrical poetry, a vignette by Octavia E. Butler, a preface to ‘The Art of Science Writing’ by Worsley and Mayer, Daniel Victor’s report on an Oxford comma dispute, a wall text for ‘High Speed Geology’ at Museum für Naturkunde, ‘In the Shadow of the American Dream’ by David Wojnarowicz, ‘26 Theses on Craft’ by Sharon H. Poggenpohl, a report Charles and Ray Eames drew up for the Indian government to promote quality in small industries, and much more.
Spring 2018, Flurry is the fifteenth release. According to editor Will Holder, ‘Flurry’ came about after being asked to propose ten books for acquisition by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie library in Amsterdam. He gave a talk about that selection, for which he preferred reproducing original material over commentary, and wanted to allow others to speak. The outcome was a reading back and forth between the ten books. It soon became clear that this reading would readily lend itself to an issue of ‘F.R. David’. Associated material came up in the process of transcription. Included are writings by Emmie McLuskey, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Bitsy Knox, Maurin Dietri.
Autumn 2017, Recognition is the fourteenth release. It features “The Labor of the Inhuman” by Reza Negarestani, “Vaster than Empires and More Slow” by Ursula K. Le Guin, poems by Ralph Hotere, and “The Companion Species Manifesto” by Donna Haraway. Further, Zoe Todd investigates indigenous relationships to fish in Canada, while Ayesha Siddiqi writes about the growth of online communities for marginalized groups, plus contributions by Aurelia Armstrong, Kosen Ohtsubo, Ian White, Eileen Myles, Marcel Broodthaers, Witold Gombrowicz, Ian McCammon, Noam Chomsky, Gilles Deleuze, and more!
Spring 2017, Inverted Commas:
F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, edited by Will Holder, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. This 13th issue of F.R.DAVID is edited with Riet Wijnen, and has its origins in her Registry of Pseudonyms, an online database which accounts for who is who and why who is who. ‘Inverted Commas’ follows ‘pseudonym’ through names, naming, bodies, brains, self, author, other, reader, labour.
