Continued contradiction

Melanie Ohnemus and Benedict Reichenbach: John Miller. Contradictory statements. Walther and Franz König bookstore, Cologne 2026

A book on the video work “Contradicting Statements” (1977) by the US conceptual artist John Miller has been published by the bookstore Walther and Franz König. His groundbreaking work is inspired by John Baldessari's Post-Studio Art seminar at the California Institute of the Arts in 1975, which Miller attended as a student. There was no painting there, but rather speaking to artists who worked with video. A technology that was brand new at the time and was considered revolutionary.

The curator Melanie Ohnemus and the graphic artist Benedict Reichenbach have now brilliantly translated Miller's nine-minute work into the book medium. The cover is brown – the color Miller has repeatedly used to symbolize the equation of feces and money. The font is Calibri, a standard font in every Excel file in the offices of our world. Anyone who doesn't care about these intellectual quibbles may enjoy the clarity of the design, which is reminiscent of the Suhrkamp design by Willy Fleckhaus.

Still images of the video work, a performance by six actors who are instructed to contradict the previous speaker, are shown in the upper half of the book's pages; the text, usually just a sentence, runs across the bottom of the page. The design focuses on the synchronous interplay of image and word, which creates the fleeting nature of (speech) movement. The book uses the experimental setup of video work to explore the relationship between parole (speech act) and langue (abstract system). Together with an introduction and an essay, cleverly hidden as a leporello in the cover, this ostensibly trivial work is a playful reflection on the objectivity and social construction of language. Semiotics as an anti-coffee table book at its best.

Melanie Ohnemus and Benedict Reichenbach: John Miller. Contradictory statements. Bookstore Walther and Franz König, Cologne 2026, 164 pages, 18 euros